Sunday, May 31, 2009, will be remembered for one thing and one thing only in the history of tennis. The date has become etched into eternity as the day Rafael Nadal lost his first match at Roland Garros, to Sweden’s Robin Soderling. Anything else that happened in Paris on 5/31/09 will be forgotten by casual tennis fans and sports observers. A decade from now, only friends and family members of other professionals will be able to remember what happened outside of Nadal-Soderling, on an afternoon when the 2009 French Open turned into a science-fiction novel.

In the meantime, however, it is true that life goes on, the planet Earth still rotates on its axis, and human beings carry on with their daily challenges. One person who is particularly content to quietly toil in the shadows is a Russian man who enjoys the spotlight as much as his countrywoman, Maria Sharapova, hates being away from it: Nikolay Davydenko.

The No. 10 seed in Paris, the low-key Davydenko merely minded his own business on Sunday, subduing eighth-seeded Fernando Verdasco of Spain in a fourth-round match overshadowed by the Nadal-Soderling upset. The 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 win, attained in a tidy 2 hours and 2 minutes, sends Davydenko into the quarterfinals against Soderling, the man who changed the history of tennis on the final day of May.

Davydenko won’t care about the absence of Nadal from his half of the draw. The Russian won’t mind that another match played on another court will receive far more attention than his own impressive display against Verdasco, a semifinalist in Australia and a relatively new member of the top 10. Being under the radar is just how Davydenko likes to live, and that’s surely a part of why this soft-spoken individual has clawed his way into the round of 8 in Paris.

Davydenko lacks high-end endorsement deals or the box-office drawing power of the more famous players on the men’s and women’s tours. Moreover, the man nicknamed “Kolya” received more international headlines for off-the-court controversy than for anything he’s achieved between the painted lines. In 2007, Davydenko was identified as the center of a match-fixing controversy that panicked the tennis community and led to an exhaustive one-year investigation that ultimately cleared Kolya of any wrongdoing. Out of the limelight for almost all of his career, Davydenko had to relish the public proclamation of his innocence, which allowed him to not only move on with his life, but to move around in relative obscurity once again.

It’s strange, though, that a player as credentialed as Davydenko should grab so little publicity for his on-court exploits. The 27-year-old (who will turn 28 on June 2) has reached four Grand Slam semifinals, and has finished each of the past four seasons (2005-2008) in the top 5 of the ATP rankings. A left heel injury forced him to miss this year’s Australian Open, but after reaching a pair of semifinals during the spring claycourt season, Davydenko had established a crucial added measure of match toughness heading into Roland Garros. The extra seasoning definitely paid off in a straight-set demolition of a very talented Spaniard with a name other than Nadal. Davydenko is not a spectacular shotmaker, but the Russian is a ruthlessly consistent machine of a man when playing at his very best, and that’s the incarnation of Kolya that appeared on Court Suzanne Lenglen.

Davydenko committed just 6 unforced errors in three sets and 122 minutes against a left-handed opponent who began 2009 as the hottest rising star on tour. Verdasco might have come within two points of knocking off Nadal in the Australian Open semis, but Davydenko made him look like a player in the back end of the top 100 on Sunday. During his rapid ascendancy in January, Verdasco rightly earned ample acclaim for his hard work under Andre Agassi’s former trainer Gil Reyes, but now, in the wake of this comprehensive thrashing, the shine has certainly worn off Verdasco’s overall profile. It’s the unassuming and anonymous-looking Davydenko who has once again made himself a factor at a Grand Slam event… without any fuss or hype.

That’s exactly how Kolya would prefer to march through the rest of the French Open. Only then–with the championship trophy firmly in hand–would Nikolay Davydenko welcome a tidal wave of fresh attention from the world’s tennis journalists.

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