THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 D3
Notre Dame and last year at
Oklahoma. Next season,
Oklahoma will come to Michie
Stadium.
Army will get $1.5 million to
play at Michigan and has games
on future schedules at
Wisconsin, at Tennessee and at
LSU — all for big guarantees.
“I think we should play one of
these every year,” Monken said.
“It’s good for recruiting, it’s
good financially, and the kids
want to take on this kind of
challenge. But one is enough.
We don’t need to play a
murderer’s row schedule.”
Michigan does play a
murderer’s row schedule but
recruits players who expect to
wear NFL uniforms, not Army
uniforms. Both coaches
understand that difference.
“I think all of us understand
who these guys are,” Harbaugh
said. “ They’re as tough or
tougher mentally than anyone
we’re going to play.”
All that said, Michigan will be
expected to win going away.
Monken knows that if the
Wolverines are at their best, his
team could be in for a very long
afternoon. But Harbaugh knows
if his team is at less than its best,
it could be in for a difficult day.
And when it’s over, regardless
of outcome, the two coaches will
shake hands, wish each other
luck and hope to see one
another soon. Just not from
opposite sidelines.
[email protected]Fo r more by John Feinstein, visit
wa shingtonpost.com/feinstein.coached a game) but hasn’t
reached those goals — or beaten
Ohio State.
Monken arrived at Army
before the 2014 season with a
simpler goal: return Army to
respectability. T he Black
Knights had been consistently
terrible throughout this
century: one winning season
since 1996 and 12 straight losses
to Navy starting in 2002. It took
Monken two years to turn it
around — the Navy string
reached 14 — but Army is 30-10
since the start of the 2016
season, has beaten Navy three
years in a row, has won three
straight bowl games and has
won the Commander-in-Chief’s
Trophy (which it hadn’t
previously won since 1996) the
past two seasons.
“I don’t want to say that
mental toughness was the thing
we had to work on most when
we got here because you can’t
survive at West Point if you
aren’t mentally tough,” Monken
said. “Our guys expected to
compete hard, but I don’t think
they necessarily expected to
win. That’s what we had to
change. Now we have guys in
the program who have been part
of winning for the last three
years. They know how to win
and what it takes to win. And
when we don’t win, they wonder
why we didn’t win.”
For the past several years,
Army has played one power
school every fall: home-and-
home with Stanford; a game at
Penn State; a game at Ohio
State; a game in Te xas against“But since the spring we’ve had
to carve out extra time for Army.
Their offense isn’t just different.
It’s so much about ball control.
That doesn’t just affect your
defense. It affects your offense.
You make any kind of mistake
it’s magnified because you
probably aren’t going to see the
ball that often over the course of
the game.”
Michigan comes into the
game ranked seventh nationally,
and its goals are the same as
they have been since Harbaugh
took over at his alma mater in
December 2014: Win the Big Te n
title and reach the CFP.
Harbaugh is 39-14 since his
much-ballyhooed return (the
first book on his Michigan
tenure was published before hefor more than 44 minutes and
running 87 offensive plays to
Oklahoma’s 40.
“We’ve looked at the film of
that game repeatedly, and we’ll
look at it some more before
Saturday,” Harbaugh said. “I
don’t have to tell the players
how tough these guys can be. It’s
self-evident.”
Army is one of seven teams on
Michigan’s schedule that
finished last season ranked in
the top 25. The Black Knights
didn’t lose again after the
Oklahoma game, winning nine
straight to finish 11-2, and were
ranked 22nd in the final
Associated Press poll.
“We’re playing seven teams
that were ranked and nine that
went to bowls,” Harbaugh said.that Monken has brought to his
program. Monken’s reasoning is
more direct: “If they play their
best football, there’s almost no
way we can beat them,” he said.
“They’re bigger than we are,
faster — just more talented. They
have guys who are going to play
in the NFL. We don’t have one
guy on our roster who was
recruited by Eastern Michigan,
much less Michigan.”
This isn’t your typical coach-
speak about an opponent. It’s all
true. And then there’s the rest of
Monken’s thought: “A ll that
said, there’s no one on our
schedule our guys don’t expect
to beat. We know our execution
has to be perfect; we can’t make
mistakes — turnovers, penalties
— and we have to stick to every
assignment. I know Jim will
make his guys understand what
they need to do to beat us. But
we believe we’re going to win.”
For evidence that this isn’t
coach-speak either, you only
need to look at Army’s game a
year ago at Oklahoma. The
Black Knights almost pulled off
what would have been one of the
season’s most stunning upsets,
taking the Sooners — who
would go on to make the College
Football Playoff — into overtime
before losing, 28-21.
Army actually drove the ball
to the Oklahoma 30-yard line
with two minutes to play in
regulation and the score tied
before being stopped. T he Black
Knights kept the ball out of the
hands of Heisman Trophy
winner Kyler Murray most of
the game, controlling the ballJim Harbaugh
and Jeff Monken
have a lot in
common. Both are
coach’s sons who
grew up eating,
drinking and
thinking about
football.
Harbaugh has a brother,
Baltimore Ravens Coach John
Harbaugh, and a brother-in-law,
Georgia men’s basketball coach
To m Crean, who are arguably as
driven as he is to win games.
Monken would undoubtedly say
the same about his cousin To dd,
the offensive coordinator for the
Cleveland Browns.
They both have football
printed on their DNA.
“I have no idea what my life
would be like without football,”
Monken said this week. “It’s all
I’ve ever really known. I don’t
like it; I love it. I live it.”
There’s one other similarity
between Harbaugh, in his fifth
season as Michigan’s coach, and
Monken, who is in his sixth
season at Army: When their
teams play Saturday for the first
time since 1962, both will be
hoping it won’t happen again any
time soon.
“Not exactly chomping at the
bit,” Harbaugh said when asked
whether he would like to see a
rematch with the Black Knights.”
“Ditto,” Monken said to the
same question.
The reasons the coaches aren’t
eager for a rematch, however, are
very different: Harbaugh gets a
headache thinking about facing
Army’s offense and the discipline
tussle saw the delightful Berretti-
ni double-fault on one of his four
squandered match points, then
laugh at himself.
The whole 3-hour 57-minute
thing had such high caliber of
suspense, if not necessarily air-
tight quality, that even the guy
who didn’t quite win said, “I like
it, to be honest. I’m not a sore
loser. I give it all today. I served
bad, but I gave my heart. You
know, the crowd was amazing.
They p ushed me. They h elped me.
It was fun. It was exactly why I
play for.”
And it saw Berrettini behold
Monfils’s final sailing forehand
return, study it carefully, watch it
go o ut, then topple to the court. “I
mean, it’s my first semis,” he said.
“I never won a match here in U.S.
Open, so it’s m y second year in the
main draw, I didn’t e xpect that.”
Now the draw w ill feed him to a
guy with 269 Grand Slam match
wins and 62 U.S. Open wins.
Shuddering is permitted.
[email protected]Schwartzman error up the line
toward an open court did stand
out.
Nadal managed to hold and
deigned to yell, “Vamos!” — and
then broke Schwartzman in a
10th-game slugfest with rallies of
17, 10 and 10 shots. Two Schwartz-
man errors, on an open backhand
volley and a simple backhand on
set point, proved more than a
person can afford against Nadal.
A 57-minute set ended, and it
seemed to take some starch out of
Schwartzman as it would for most
humans. The rest of it moves
along as life seems to do most of
the time in matters involving Na-
dal, except for that bit in the
second set where Nadal’s 5-1 lead
withered to 5-5 with some mar-
vels from Schwartzman.
Had there been room, he would
have made an outstanding semifi-
nalist among those who dare to be
not yet 30, a distinction that went
to Berrettini after his 3-6, 6-3, 6-3,
3-6, 7-6 (7-5) win over 13th-
ranked, 33-year-old Monfils. Thatwin against that titan for the
second night running, following
upon Dimitrov’s toppling of
Federer?
No.
It b egan as life tends to do, with
Nadal rampaging to a 4-0 lead by
gobbling up the first four points
(and first game), breaking
Schwartzman in a five-deuce slog
for 2-0, holding at 15 and then
breaking at 30. Then all life as
understood in the universe went
awry, and Nadal’s game sprang
leaks, and Schwartzman became
Schwartzman.
When he helped himself to 16
of the next 20 points, the score
stood 4-4, and a thought unlikely
to enter the head did enter: Could
all three of the big three topple
within 72 hours? When Nadal
sent a helpless dribbler into the
net in the 4-4 g ame, Schwartzman
had two break points. A struggle
followed, Schwartzman barely
missed a forehand pass, Nadal
found deuce with a service win-
ner up the middle, and soon aknows this partly because his first
memory of Nadal comes from
2005 and a final in Rome that
seemed to stretch across the civi-
lizations.
An 18-year-old Nadal beat
Guillermo Coria then, 7-6 (8-6) in
the fifth, as a 9-year-old Roman
named Berrettini harrumphed
while waiting for the match to
end so that cartoons could re-
sume.
He has no personal history
with Nadal, always preferable
when seeking a pretty record, un-
like Schwartzman, who at 27
came to his second U.S. Open
quarterfinal with an 0-7 lifetime
record against Nadal, including a
2018 French Open quarterfinal in
which Schwartzman took a set in
Nadal’s kingdom, for should have
resulted in a match stoppage and
a brief presentation of a little
trophy.
Could a player standing 0-7
against a Big Three titan get a first
US OPEN FROM D1
BY HOWARD FENDRICHnew york — Matteo Berrettini
describes his mental coach as a
big help and a best friend. They
have been speaking on the
phone before and after every
match during Berrettini’s run to
his first Grand Slam semifinal.
They had plenty to chat about
when it came to this latest
victory.
Berrettini, a 23-year-old from
Rome, gave Italy a spot in the
final four at the U.S. Open for
the first time since 1977 in
dramatic fashion, double-fault-
ing away his initial match point
and then needing four more to
finally put away 13th-seeded
Gael Monfils of France, 3-6, 6-3,
6-2, 3-6, 7-6 (7-5), after nearly
four hours in Arthur Ashe Sta-
dium on Wednesday.
“He told me, ‘I need to thank
you because I thought that ev-
eryone is born once and dies
once. But during that match, I
was born and died 15 or
16 times,’ ” Berrettini said about
his conversation with the men-
tal coach he has worked with for
several years. “I collapsed and
got back up. I collapsed and got
back up. That match point.
Those other chances. I was
down then I came back. It’s a
great source of pride for me.”
In truth, the denouement was
hardly a thing of beauty, with
both men, clearly spent, fighting
themselves and the tension of
the moment as much as
the guy on the other side of the
net.
Monfils finished with 17 dou-
ble-faults but managed to avoid
any throughout the entire, ex-
hausting fifth set until h e served
at 6-5 — and then he had three
in that game, plus another two
in the deciding tiebreaker, often
doubling over between points to
rest and catch his breath.
“A very bad day for me, serv-
ing,” Monfils said.
Berrettini acknowledged the
obvious afterward, too, saying
he felt “a little bit tight.”
Yo u think?
It all was a bit of a whir.
“Right now, I don’t remember
any points, just the [last] match
point, you know?” he said. “I
remember also the double-fault;
I have to be honest.”
Berrettini, who is seeded
24 th, will get a day to recuper-
ate: He will face No. 2 Rafael
Nadal in the semifinals Friday.
The other men’s semifinal that
day is No. 5 Daniil Medvedev
against unseeded Grigor
Dimitrov, who beat an injured
Roger Federer in five sets Tues-
day night to become, at No. 78,
the lowest-ranked semifinalist
at the U.S. Open since 1991.
Nadal, the last member of theBig Three standing because
Federer and Novak Djokovic are
out of the draw, beat Diego
Schwartzman to advance. That
followed the last women’s quar-
te rfinal, in which No. 15 Bianca
Andreescu reached her first ma-
jor semifinal by defeating No. 25
Elise Mertens, 3-6, 6-2, 6-3.
Andreescu, a 19-year-old Ca-
nadian, improved to 31-4 this
season, including 13-3 in three-
setters. She takes on No. 13
Belinda Bencic on Thursday,
when the other semifinal is
No. 8 Serena Williams against
No. 5 Elina Svitolina.
Bencic also reached her first
Grand Slam semifinal, following
up her upset of defending cham-
pion and No. 1 seed Naomi
Osaka by taking the last four
games of a 7-6 (7-5), 6-3 victory
over No. 23 Donna Vekic.
“I felt like I couldn’t get three
good points together,” Vekic
said. “I was, like, playing one
point good, then bad.”
Berrettini-Monfils began on a
muggy a fternoon and concluded
with Ashe’s r etractable roof shut
after rain came during the third
set.
Monfils, who is 10 years older,
fell to 2-7 in major quarterfinals
and could be forgiven for won-
dering how many more chances
he will get.
Berrettini, meanwhile, is on
top of the world at the moment.
With Corrado Barazzutti — Ita-
ly’s only other male semifinalist
at the U.S. Open, back in 1977 —
in the stands Wednesday, Ber-
rettini used his big forehand to
produce 24 winners. He has
found an Italian restaurant he
loves on Manhattan’s Lower
East Side, so he has been eating
there throughout the tourna-
ment and even had the owner in
his guest box, wearing a shirt
festooned with the word “Car-
bonara.” ( For the record, Berret-
tini’s dish of choice has been a
simple pasta with olive oil and
Parmesan.)
The first match point came
while Berrettini served for the
win at 5-3 in the fifth. Two more
came and went when Monfils
served at 6-5. A fourth was
erased by an ace by the French-
man in the tiebreaker. But on
the fifth, Berrettini’s serve was
returned long by Monfils.
Berrettini stared at the ball as
it descended, making sure it did,
indeed, land out, so that he
would, in fact, be moving on. He
dropped to his back, spreading
his limbs, then ripped off his
hat as he rose to pound his
chest.
He then proceeded to say
“Grazie!” over and over during
his postmatch interview, thank-
ing “my family at home, my
mental coach — they care about
me a lot.”
And then, perhaps also as a
reminder to himself, he told the
fans who were pulling for him in
the stadium: “The tournament
is not finished yet, so be ready
for the next match, guys.”
— Associated PressU.S. OPENBerrettini tops Monfils
to reach the semifinals
Italian, 23, survives
four-hour match
to make the final fourIt is not easy, but Nadal advances in straight sets
JOHANNES EISELE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESRafael Nadal was challenged by Argentina’s Diego Schwartzman before winning, 6-4, 7-5, 6-2. He is in his 33rd Grand Slam semifinal.
Michigan’s Harbaugh and Army’s Monken both glad this matchup is a one-off
John
Feinstein
PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jim Harbaugh’s Wolverines will have a huge physical edge on Army
on Saturday, but the Black Knights’ option offense concerns him.