The Late Bloomer

If anything tempers Blake's contentment and sense of accomplishment, it's the supremacy of Federer--a player Blake has never beaten in six matches. The incomparable Swiss star has transformed the rest of the field into a racket-wielding version of the Jordan-era Utah Jazz--that is to say, sensationally talented athletes cursed to have been contemporaries of the most gifted practitioner in their sport's history. "I wasn't there when Pete [Sampras] dominated, but even then he wasn't consistently winning three Slams the way Roger is," says Blake. "People outside the sport say, 'Only a few ranking spots divide you,' and I think, Yeah, but you don't understand the guy in front of me."

Can anyone take down the Mighty Fed? Blake sighs a sigh of resignation. "Look at Borg and McEnroe, who were so dominant and faltered so quickly. Maybe [Federer] loses some confidence and comes back to the pack. But it's not as if the rest of us can make a few adjustments and we're right there. This is tough to say as a competitor, but honestly, he's head and shoulders above [the field] right now."

In any other line of work this kind of candor and thoughtfulness would be considered an asset. In the fun-house mirror of tennis it can be perceived as a weakness. If there's a knock on Blake, it's that he's too rational and too, well, nice for his own good. When he played Federer in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open last summer, he applauded his opponent's winners and uttered compliments on the order of "Too good, Roger," even at the most critical junctures of the match. To more than a few observers, this smudged the line between grace and obsequiousness.

"You can think he's too good, but it's a bit of a cop-out to say it," says Courier. "Roger deserves admiration, but imagine if this were the era of Connors and Nastase--they'd be in his face, playing mental games. I'd like to see someone try and put a ball through his chest, not in a disrespectful way but just to send the message I have the resolve to take you out."

Blake rejects the criticism. "There's a ton of nice guys on tour, and I still want to beat the crap out of them," he says. Still, he concedes that one of his biggest professional adjustments was to become more selfish. "I won't lie," he says. "On the court you have to be arrogant and think you're better than the other guy. Off the court you try to be the complete opposite and have respect for people, a curiosity about people. It's not always so easy to pull off."

He does it well. As Roddick once put it, "Everyone on tour has a mutual friend in James." Currently vice president of the ATP Player Council, Blake is an obvious candidate to assume a leadership role in tennis one day, cutting through the relentless in-fighting and competing fiefdoms that stunt the sport's growth. The Williams sisters recently went so far as to suggest that Blake was presidential timber. (Told of this, he smiled sheepishly and then said, "I know I would never enter into a preemptive war.") When the ride finally ends, he will return to Harvard to finish his degree in economics. As safety nets go, you could do worse. "People think we're all nerds who don't leave the library, but there is a social scene," Blake says. "There are some fun guys and a few cute girls. I'm not going to say it's like an SEC school, but you'd be surprised."

Given his slow developmental clock, Blake is, even at 27, squarely in his tennis prime. As he sees it, he still has plenty of fruitful years of playing. "It's probably like this in most jobs," he says, "but I get motivation from knowing there's still a lot of room to get better at what I do."

Three years ago Blake bought a tasteful Cape Cod--style house in Fairfield a few miles from his boyhood home, where his mother, Betty, still lives. It's a long forehand from the tracks of the Metro North commuter trains that transport lawyers and hedge-fund managers to Manhattan. By all rights Blake should be on board, another well-educated suburbanite making his fortune in the Big City.

But on an unseasonably warm morning last week, he couldn't even hear the trains whipping by the house. Metallica screeching from his iPod, Blake was spending rush hour on his treadmill, irrigated in sweat. The fourth-ranked tennis player in the world was doing some last-minute fitness work before heading to the first Grand Slam event of the season. You could say he was preparing for a business trip.