Nishikori, who must have felt he was being machine-gunned, offered this in reply: in four matches, a total of 18 aces. He's not familiar with the cheap point, the easy point, and it's why he's heroic because everything he does is the hard point, the earned point.
There is a suffering he has to wear through rallies, a frustration he has to swallow, and it takes character. He'd plot his way to a break point against Cilic, only to see it removed with a single serve. In one game, as if paying brutal homage to his big-serving coach Goran Ivanisevic, Cilic did this: Ace: 129 mph. Ace 121 mph. Ace 122 mph. Ace 129 mph.
It was almost unseemly and yet it wasn't the only bullying Nishikori faced. Raonic's first serve against him averaged 127 mph. Wawrinka's averaged 117 mph. Nishikori's was just 108 mph in the final. His serve was like a friendly conversation opener, whereupon he bounded around like a "giddy grasshopper", as a Japanese poet once put it.
Japan has many world champions in boxing's light weights and Nishikori is their kin - his footwork fast, his ideas agile, his intent agressive, his racket spread like a right hook.
...He will remind himself that in the last 103 Grand Slams, stretching back to 1989, only two players under 180 cm have won a men's singles title. Just two.
Two seems hardly convincing. Yet two is also proof it can be done. Two tells him it's not impossible. Two informs him that with the right draw, the right body, the right attitude, this history-maker from Japan, this believer from Asia, can be the third.
And if he needs further assurance, he can ask the man next to him. Because one of those two small men to win a slam is his 175 cm coach. All his life, tall men bullied Michael Chang. Yet a religious player kept his faith and he'll know what it takes for his Japanese student to turn into a champion. Or in other words, a saint of the shorties.
- Rohit Brijnath, "Saint of the shorties faces a lifetime of Goliaths" (The Straits Times, 10 Sept 2014)
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