On Swiss tennis star Roger Federer, everyone from past greats such as John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Pete Sampras to the players who actually face him on the courts now, seems to be in agreement. He is, or may well be, the most preternaturally gifted tennis player of all time. At just 24, he has already won seven Grand Slam titles, including the last three Wimbledons, and on Sunday will try to make that four in a row when he plays the 20 year-old Mallorcan phenom, Rafael Nadal in the final. The sporting calendar is so busy that if there's a rain delay, always a possibility at Wimbledon, or if the match runs longer than 3 1/2 hours, then the World Cup Final will begin while the two men are still duking it out. For a contest this tantalizing, that doesn't seem right. What if Andy Murray had made the finals of Wimbledon and England had gotten to the final of the World Cup? Wouldn't the Brits have changed the schedule?
In my last post, I wrote about soccer nemeses: the way France has Brazil's number, for instance, or how the Germans have always had France's. But being a team sport, soccer spreads the pain of continuously losing to the same opponent through an entire squad. In tennis, it's personal, and it hurts. Federer has lost only four matches this year, and they have all been to Nadal, against whom he has an embarassing 1-6 record. Last month he lost to Nadal in four sets at the French Open on Nadal's favorite surface, the red clay of Paris, having also lost to him on clay in the final of the Rome Open shortly before that. (Federer held match points in that one, but got tight and was unable to convert.) After winning the first set in Paris, Federer gradually seemed to sink into a morass of lethargy and despair against an opponent who not only beats him on the court, but in his mind as well. Nadal may not be quite so talented a shot-maker as Federer, but his will to win is extraordinary and his style of play (he's a leftie, to begin with) seems to have been designed to foil Federer's. While the Swiss is all smooth Mozartian motion, a classic tennis player playing in a refined classic style, Nadal hits huge, high-bouncing top-spin shots and stalks the court like a trained assassin. Federer wants to win in style, but Nadal has only one goal: to win. And win he does, even against Federer, over and over again with a daunting single-mindedness. Over the last two years, Federer has been as dominant in tennis as Tiger Woods in golf, except against Nadal -- his nemesis. And so we now have the very peculiar situation -- it may even be an unprecedented one -- in which the world's number one player (Federer is far, far ahead of Nadal on points in the ATP ranking system) consistently loses to the number two, while breezing past everyone else.
What makes Sunday's final so pivotal is that, having lost his last four finals against Nadal -- once on hard courts and three times on clay (his least favorite surface) -- Federer finally has a chance to play him on the one surface on which he has been untouchable: the grass of Wimbledon. Should Nadal vanquish him again, it will not only throw the rankings into confusion -- technically, Federer will remain number one, but in every other sense he will seem like the second-best player in the world -- it may also do lasting damage to Federer's potentially delicate psyche. He himself has so utterly outclassed other players -- Roddick and Hewitt come to mind -- as to virtually ruin their careers, leaving them pale, shell-shocked versions of their former selves. Now he is in danger of suffering a similar fate. On paper, his grass-court brilliance should be too much even for Nadal to handle, but that's on paper. The actual match will be played on grass, and in the mind. Men's tennis desperately needs a top-flight rivalry, and if Federer loses to Nadal for the seventh time running it won't be much of a rivalry. Which may be why a lot of tennis fans are hoping that he will reassert his supremacy and finally make his ongoing duel with the young Spaniard into a truly competitive one. Win or lose, everyone knows Nadal isn't going to go away. He is young and utterly fearless. But there is a worry that, should he lose to Nadal on his favorite surface as well as every other kind, the Swiss genius may crumple inwardly and surrender, just as he seemed to do on the red clay of Roland Garros last month. It would be a tragedy for tennis if that were to happen.
-- Brendan Bernhard
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