Berdych beats ticking career clock

— -- Rafael Nadal could not have come up with a better candidate to help him realize the curious, self-fulfilling prophecy that he would not win the 2015 Australian Open this year than Tomas Berdych.

That's the same Tomas Berdych who entered Tuesday's Grand Slam quarterfinal clash with Nadal as the odds-on favorite to shatter the record (17 matches) for most consecutive losses to the same opponent. The same Berdych who has a reputation as one of the game's leading head cases and a dangerous ball-striker with a turbo-charged, 16-cylinder engine but a gearbox stuck in third.

Yes, that would be the Tomas Berdych who, in a seemingly desperate effort to abolish his reputation as a Grand Slam also-ran, tried to hire supercoach Ivan Lendl. Despite their shared Czech roots, Berdych was spurned. He eventually hired Dani Vallverdu, who was known to many mostly as Andy Murray's wingman and hitting partner.

But history is often written by unexpected authors, so it should come as no shock that Berdych -- or his sallow-complexioned, sunken-eyed, grim evil twin -- knocked Nadal out of the tournament. Or that suddenly Dani Vallverdu is looking like a pretty fine coach.

The score of this 2-hour, 13-minute monument to retribution was 6-2, 6-0, 7-6 (5), and it was as sure-handed and expert a performance by Berdych as anyone has put on thus far this year. So here we are at the semifinal stage of the Australian and both No. 2 seed Roger Federer and No. 3 Nadal are eliminated -- further proof, perhaps, that the log jam at the top of the game is slowly breaking up.

"I set up a good plan, that's the best start you can have with a new coach," Berdych said after the win. "Then I was also able to execute."

Berdych's decision to swap out his entire support team at the end of last year signaled that, at age 29, he had become acutely aware of the clock ticking away his career. It was actually beginning to sound like time bomb destined to destroy his lifelong ambition to win a major tournament. When Lendl, who helped transform Andy Murray into a Grand Slam champion, turned down Berdych and steered him toward Vallverdu, some thought the Hall of Fame former champion was either trying to let down Berdych gently or drum up work for Vallverdu.

But it's become clear that Vallverdu has noteworthy coaching abilities. The game-plan team Berdych designed rested on the idea (growing in popularity) that the best way to beat Nadal is to attack his strength: that monstrous forehand. For Nadal is never more comfortable than when he's backed into his backhand corner and free to mine acute angles with the inside-out forehand or reverse the flow and hit the same shot inside-out, down the near line.

But as former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson once observed, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." It was critical for Berdych to establish the threat as early as possible, and in that he was successful. He had Nadal back on his heels from the get-to, and Berdych's control of the match was so tight and unequivocal that Nadal was unable to mount significant opposition until he'd lost first two sets. Berdych hit nearly twice as many winners as Nadal (48 to 24) in the match, and he made fewer unforced errors (21 to 26).

The outstanding feature of Berdych's plan was neither the strategy nor the tactics that called upon him to hit hard, flat and clean. It was Berdych's ability, as a 17-time loser to Nadal, to pursue his plan with the requisite degree of determination and confidence. As he said, "It was physical and mental. This is basically our sport right now, to be there in both of those ways."

This has not been the worst of times to challenge Nadal. Emerging from another year in which his best-laid plans were derailed by upset and injury (Nadal's record since he won at Roland Garros in 2014: 11-6), Nadal has become something of an enigma. He seems increasingly eager to downgrade expectations, cloaking the effort in the raiment of modesty.

Nadal also has taken to using his once-cheery realism as an agent to teach us to join him in doubting -- never a particularly useful exercise for a competitive athlete. Turning that durable Mark Twain quote upside down, Nadal has been telling us, "The reports of my resurrection have been greatly exaggerated." While he never did seem besotted with the "ecstasy victory," he was always in thrall to the ecstasy of effort. Now it sometimes seems he isn't even so sure about the value of suffering -- something that he was very good at for a long time, and which was the foundation on which he built some of his greatest performances.

After his narrow second-round escape from Tim Smyczek almost a week ago, Nadal lamented: "I suffered too much on court for three hours and a half. I was suffering a lot. Too much. You know, was not funny today the way that the match was. Obviously, is a very positive thing that finally have the chance to win, but, yeah, I hope to recover myself."

To some, this seemed dangerously close to Nadal asking himself if all the effort and pain is worth it -- not merely on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in Melbourne, against an American kid whom he'd never previously heard of and whose name he couldn't pronounce, but in the long term.

Following his fourth-round win, Nadal mused, "For me, quarterfinals is a great result, talking seriously. Arriving here [after] losing in the first round of Qatar, not playing matches for the last seven months, to have the chance in the quarterfinals again here is a very positive thing for me. I'm very happy for that. I am sure that is going to help me for the next events."

If you've followed Nadal long enough, you know that he's much more comfortable in the role of the hunter than that of the hunted. And that's why some of the things he's been saying strike such a dissonant note. Strictly speaking, Nadal has less to lose than ever before, and that's what it makes it so odd that he was acting as if he's carried the weight of the world on his shoulders -- toting around his own problems in an additional backpack.

Could this be his way of saying he's had enough?

We don't know about that. But we do know that Tomas Berdych, while almost 30 years old, is feeling like he's just getting started. His match against Nadal was a riveting study in the contrast between two men going in opposite directions. We'll see how long each of them remains on his chosen track.