A Change of Pace, and Other Things

I actually watched the Wimbledon men's final the other day. Not because I was forced to, like when I watched the UEFA final because I was hanging out with friends and they all wanted to, but because it was possibly one of the most compelling contests I have ever seen. I don't really like tennis. I haven't watched an entire match since I was about 14. I will occasionally pause on a channel with tennis going on while channel surfing if Maria Sharapova is playing but rarely otherwise. However, for whatever reason I decided to watch the the Wimbledon final and I'm sure glad I did.

For lack of a better word it was epic. I tuned in after the first 2 sets that Nadal won and where, by the looks of it, the match really began. It was sublime. It was gut-wrenchingly tense. No quarter was given and none was taken. There were several "I don't believe he just did that!" moments. And this was over the course of a minute of the match, which lasted 4 hours.

I will also admit that while Rafael Nadal won the match and is now (although the rankings don't yet reflect it) the best player in the world, Roger Federer is perhaps the most aesthetic player I have seen in a long time. Nadal is a beast. There's very little finesse to his game. There's power, endurance and more power. And a heck of a lot of top-spin. Federer however was making the ball sing. Drop shots, volleys, forehand winners with impeccable placement, aces. Everything. And he made it seem effortless. To my untrained eye it seemed like Nadal was the one struggling to deal with Federer, but I guess he just outlasted Federer, and in the process, with a Wimbledon (Federer's bread and butter) victory to go with his utter demolition of Federer in the French Open final, apparently brought an end to Federer's stranglehold on men's tennis and perhaps even ended his era. And in a weird way I'm kind of glad he did.

For the last 3 or 4 years, Federer has been touted as possibly the greatest tennis player of all time and with 12 grand slam titles is within sniffing distance of Pete Sampras' record of 14, and of cementing his legacy as the best. And deep down inside I don't want that to happen. The '90s that I grew up in were a great era for sports. We had Jordan, Sampras, Mike Tyson, Michael Schumacher and later, Tiger Woods who individually dominated their sports and staked very, very legitimate claims as the G.O.A.Ts (No offense to Jerry Rice, but I didn't watch much American Football when I was growing up). I was a huge Jordan and Tyson fan (back when he was just a ridiculously good boxer and not a crackpot), a fairly big Sampras fan and grudgingly respected Schumacher. My coming of age coincided with them establishing their legacies so my childhood memories are firmly intertwined with their athletic exploits.

Thus when I see a young upstart like Lebron James (c'mon now, you know 'Bron is gonna be better than Kobe once he moves to Brooklyn) or Federer make a legitimate run at my childhood heroes legacies I can't help but automatically hope they fail. I'm not sure why. I suspect it's because I feel they are in some way violating the sanctity of my utopian childhood memories.

But, records are made to be broken and athletes are meant to exceed. And after watching the sublime beauty of Federer's game I realised that perhaps I needed to stop living in the past so much and enjoy the athletic excellence that is going on around me. So now, I'm hoping that Federer catches up with Sampras in the titles department. He's only 27, and it could happen. I'm still not sure how I feel about him breaking the record though.