INDIAN WELLS – Was it really only a few weeks ago that young Italian Luca Nardi lost early in a challenger tournament in Bengaluru, India to Ramkumar Ramanathan, a local wild card ranked 462d in the world?
Yes, it was.
And yet the tennis gods are crazy enough that there was the same Nardi on Monday night in Indian Wells, on one of the game’s biggest stages, coolly smacking winners on the move to defeat No. 1 Novak Djokovic, the great champion whose poster is still on the 20-year-old Nardi’s bedroom wall.
“Every night I go to bed I see Novak,” Nardi said.
“I couldn’t even imagine to play a match against him, and now I also beat him,” Nardi added after his genuinely stunning 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 victory in the round-of-32. “So it’s such a dream come true for me.”
Lucky loser indeed, but then lucky losers have been winning quite a bit of late.