By now, all (or almost all) of you know that Roger Federer lost to Andy Murray in Dubai today, or tomorrow, or yesterday, or whatever time it is over that way. In any event, at 6-all in the first set, Tomahawk Perrotta called me into his office to "watch" some of the match on his computer. You know, the image was actually of fairly high quality - it was light years better, in any event, than sitting there watching the numbers change in a live-scoring set-up. In case this streaming video will be available for matches later on, here's the link.
From the bits I saw and the comments left at the previous post by some of you, the most "disturbing" aspect of this loss by Federer to Murray is the apparent lack of enthusiasm and/or sharpness by Federer. Let's not forget that this was not just Dubai, the tournament that has wholeheartedly embraced the "pay to play" scheme of the ATP and WTA (and boy, do those Dubai folks pay!), it's also Federer's "home" tournament.
Federer may not feel as much affection for the United Arab Emirates as he does for his native Switzerland (although I don't recall him ever making a point of it, either way), but he has extolled the virtues of Dubai on numerous occasions, and happily described why it is such a wonderful place for him to train, and spend his down time. I imagine The Mighty Fed has cordial relations with the local bigs, too, so the loss must sting a little more than it would if this were merely Buenos Aires, Paris, or Tokyo. But this is Dubai, and that's like Lindsay losing in southern California, or Venus or Serena losing in Miami.
Of course, that won't count extra in the rankings, and that's a good thing for TMF. With his lead over Rafael Nadal right around 400 points, the gap is fairly small. But then, Nadal has an awful lot to defend in the immediate future - even before he gets to the clay-court season (remember, he's defending winner's points at Indian Wells, on hard courts). So I wouldn't make any assumptions. In fact, my gut feeling is that the rankings race will be extremely tight going into the second major of the year at Roland Garros, which could make things really interesting at the third major - and beyond - this year.
I filed a post for ESPN earlier today, on the extraordinary results kicked up by the ATP this weekend, when two of the three main tour events were won by Steve Darcis and Sergiy Stakhovsky. This is just too delicious not to speculate: what might a betting man have won if he had wagered on a Darcis/Stakhovsky "Daily Double?"
Actually, the results made me go back over some of the more unexpected results of the past few years, looking for other relative unknowns who had performed similar feats. What struck me is that if you scroll through the annual results, it's remarkable how few of the tournaments - in an era awash in events, with no off-season to speak of - are actually won by off-the-radar players. I was expecting names to trip me up far more often than they did - hail, even though Wayne Arthurs won just one tournament in his career (a surprise, to me), he just seemed to be around, seemed to be a presence, in a way that Stakhovsky is not.
Of course, Darcis last year was in the same boat Stakhovsky now occupies, when he won Amersfoort (only his second ATP event). But after his performance in Memphis, it's safe to say that Darcis has become a household name (at least in TennisWorld households), at least in the sense that Almagro, Massu or Robredo are such.
All that got me thinking of a truly rare category of player - the One Non-Slam Wonder, a character who certainly deserves a place in the TW pantheon, if not the International Tennis Hall of Fame. I went through the ATP list of retired players, and came up with 110 ONSWs (which may be off a bit either way, as I'm notorious for being a lousy counter) - but that's in the entire history of the Open era.
