Wawrinka Savors Advance to Australian Open Final Stanislas Wawrinka, in his victory over Tomas Berdych on Thursday, will play in his first-ever Grand Slam final on Sunday, against Rafael Nadal. MELBOURNE, Australia - On Friday, the day after Stanislas Wawrinka advanced to his first-ever Grand Slam final, he visited a museum here. He sought out one exhibit: Designing 007, Fifty Years of Bond Style. Wawrinka described himself as a "big fan of James Bond; " his favorite Bond actor, Pierce Brosnan; his favorite Bond film, well, he loved them all. The Melbourne Museum hosted the exhibit, which started last November and ends next month, and is billed as "a multi-sensory journey," which includes the golden gun from "The Man with the Golden Gun" and the Aston Martin DB5 from "GoldenEye." This is relevant to the Australian Open because Wawrinka has taken the latest step in his career evolution - from top 10 flashes to top 20 resident to able to not simply compete but to beat the best men's singles players in the world. His latest five-set duel with Novak Djokovic, in the quarterfinals, played out like a Bond action scene, and Stanislas Wawrinka, emerged victorious against Djokovic for the first time. He was asked if he felt like Bond out there at Rod Laver Arena, the stands packed, the stakes high. I wish. We all dream about that. Wawrinka dreamed about this kind of run, too, this kind of career advancement. He will play Rafael Nadal on Sunday in the final. A final! For so many years, Wawrinka was considered a good player, the Swiss pro not named Roger Federer, but he never quite reached the level of the most elite players. Few do. On Saturday, Wawrinka sat inside the player's cafeteria, where he spoke with two reporters. He ordered, fittingly, a drink called "Sportsman in You," a mix of passion fruit, pineapple and apple. He suggested everyone at the table try one. He glanced at the tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. He got the tattoo last March, before the quarterfinal run at the French Open, before the semifinal run at the United States Open in New York, before he settled back inside the top 10. The tattoo is from Samuel Beckett, the late Irish poet whose work Wawrinka is not familiar with, other than his favorite quote. It reads: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Talk about timing. That quote neatly summarizes Wawrinka's tennis life. He ran Saturday through his career path: top 10 at 22, top 20 for four years after that, injured in 2007, overshadowed by Federer always. What Wawrinka said most surprised him was that he had been able to crack the top level here. He did not necessarily expect that. In 2013, Wawrinka played Djokovic here, too. He lost the match in five epic sets, but it still felt like a turning point. They played a similar match at the U.S. Open. Djokovic took that, too. "That match showed me I was with the top guys," Wawrinka said. That inside of me I have the level to play with the best player in a Grand Slam, in an important match. In many ways, Wawrinka and others are unlucky to have grown up in this generation of men's tennis players, with the Federers and the Nadals and the Djokovics and the Andy Murrays. It used to be that a player like Boris Becker could reach the men's singles final at 17. That was before the men's game became more about suffering, about standing behind the baseline and obliterating groundstroke after groundstroke, about rallies so long that only the most physical players could survive. You could no longer be 18 and physical enough to stand in with Nadal and trade heavy shots for two hours or five. Players traveled with full teams around them, with trainers and nutritionists and more than one coach. Their primes, then, seem to arrive later, around age 26, until about age 32. Wawrinka is 28. His development, peaking at this age and not earlier, could seem slow. But it actually is more typical than it used to be. He needed to reach that fitness level. He already had the strength. "If you look at the top 50, it's between 26 and 32," Wawrinka said, and he was right for the most part. It's the same generation since almost 10 years ago. We have the same players keep the same ranking, more or less. The game is more physical. To that end, in Sunday's final, Wawrinka will face the most physical player in modern men's tennis, perhaps ever. Nadal is 12-0 against Wawrinka, 2-0 in Grand Slam meetings, but as Nadal noted after he dispatched Federer on Friday night, Wawrinka is "playing his best tennis." Of his life, Nadal could have added. The kind that even James Bond could appreciate, 00-Stan, more of a threat than ever before.