Nuno Borges beat Tomás Etcheverry 6-3, 7-6 (7-4) in Barcelona on Tuesday to reach the quarterfinals of the ATP 500, then set off a wave of boos when he closed the match with an underarm serve on match point.
The 52nd-ranked Borges, facing the 29th-ranked Argentine, finished the contest with a shot that is legal in tennis but still rankles plenty of crowds. He later said he went to the underarm serve because he was dealing with cramps, a blunt explanation for a finish that was as effective as it was unpopular.
For the Portuguese player, the result carried more than one kind of weight. Borges became only the third Portuguese man to reach the quarterfinals of an ATP 500 tournament since the series was created in 2009, joining João Sousa and Jaime Faria, who had each done it twice before him. Barcelona has already shown how far Borges can push at this level; in Monte-Carlo, he had run into Andrey Rublev in a match shaped by the Russian’s shoulder pain, but this time Borges found the margin himself and used it.
The underarm serve has long lived in the sport’s gray emotional zone: permitted, but often treated as a provocation. It became widely known after Michael Chang pulled it out against Ivan Lendl at the 1989 French Open, and it still tends to draw a reaction when a player reaches for it in a big moment. Borges did it on match point, with the crowd watching from a packed stand and Etcheverry stranded deep behind the baseline, where the serve was meant to land out of his reach.
What comes next is bigger than the argument over style. Borges was set to face Serbia’s Hamad Medjedovic, ranked 88th in the world, for a place in the semifinals. If he gets through that, the talk in Barcelona will be about the draw, not the serve.