Mornin'. This operating on three, four hours sleep a night isn't as bad as some of you might think. The trick is to get a coffee IV hook-up (I prefer Kenyan), although dragging that danged aluminum tower and all those tubes around sure is cumbersome and noisy.
My gut feeling is that I did indeed witness something extraordinary last night, simply because I woke up thinking about the Federer-Soderling match. And that doesn't happen to me very often. Even great tennis matches, if you've seen enough of them, tend to run together, and get moved from the in portal to the out chute in a couple of hours. That's as it should be. Nothing in tennis is permanent, and if more people remembered that there would be less weeping and gnashing of teeth. The history of the moment in tennis is, on the whole, far more compelling than the history of the game in general.
I was a little surprised by the number of people who chose to single out (in the comments) that line about Rafa calibrating the size of the runner-up check. I don't wish to patronize you, but sheesh - do you really want everything spelled and expressed in away that even the most literal-minded can't possibly misconstrue? That line about Nadal was a throwaway; I didn't write it to provoke, but to emphasize, and can see writing the same thing, with the names of the two stars switched around, in Paris, or Melbourne, or London next year. This was Federer's turn; appreciate him.
Additionally: I've never seen anyone master difficult conditions as effectively as Federer did last night. Some of this is subjective, but I noted only three or four occassions when Federer was made to pay a visible price (emphasis on the qualifier) by the conditions. Someone snidely asked if Federer also walked on water last night, and I must admit he did not. But only because it wasn't raining.
But wind and chill aside, I was struck by Federer's general anticipation. For a bit, I just watched him, ignoring Soderling across the net. And the extent to which Federer read the coming shot from Robin was striking. He was like a baseball player stealing the signals from a coach or the catcher on the other team. That had nothing to do with the wind, and also underscores an advantage Federer has here (as if this guy needs any more than he already benefits from, most of the time) - the speed and low bounce of the court. But lest we forget, Nadal took pains in an interview with ESPN yesterday to declare, with emphasis, that Wimbledon is still "faster."
Just in case those of you who have invested too much in that long-lasting and heavily emphasized narrative about the slowing of the grass at Wimbledon.
As the NFL opens its season tonight with the Minnesota Vikings going up against the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, let me reach (with apologies to readers on foreign shores) for a football analogy. Imagine that a team with an exceptionally gifted, quick, finess runner has to play a major rival and defensive powerhouse on a field that's been turned into a swamp by a deluge. And this cut-and-dart runner ends up running for 215 yards. That's what Federer did last night.
But today is, as ever, a new day. I'll be back with y'all later, enjoy the tennis.
- Pete