By Thomas Swick
swickt@bellsouth.net
Saturday it looked as if this was going to be the Wimbledon for lefties, but Sunday it turned out to be the Wimbledon for Slavs. And a new order.
I am talking, of course, about the singles finals. The Bryan brothers won the men’s doubles championship, earning their 11th Grand Slam team title and the right to be mentioned, as they almost never are, in all the discussions about the sad state of American men’s tennis.
Their performance was overshadowed, unsurprisingly, by the women’s singles championship match, which featured the Czech slugger Petra Kvitova and the former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova. Watching this contest I couldn’t help but think of the great tennis sage Yogi Berra, who famously said: “It ain’t ova till it’s ova.”
The quiet ova dominated, sending the screamer scrambling from side to side until finally putting her out of her misery with an ace – Kvitova’s first of the match – on championship point. There was immediate talk of a new contender for No. 1, and for the sake of the women’s game I hope it’s true. Too much parity can be interpreted as too little greatness.
There is no such problem among the men. The two most people expected – and wanted – to see in the final walked onto Centre Court on Sunday: Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Coming in, Djokovic had won every match but one this year, including four against his opponent, which under any other circumstances would have given him a considerable edge.
But his opponent was a man whose talent is matched only by his tenacity. In the semifinal, against Andy Murray, Nadal was customarily indefatigable, determinedly running down erstwhile winners, and infallible, making three unforced errors in the last two sets. Seeing someone like that on the other side of the net must make a player about as hopeful as Samuel Beckett. (The famous playwright actually watched a lot of televised tennis, though there is no truth to the rumor that Waiting for Godot is about the British public’s endlessly thwarted desire for a Wimbledon champion.)
Nadal is at that point in his career when, as the commentators say, “he is chasing history.” So to come face-to-face in a major final with his grit, brilliance, and desire for tennis immortality is to know the meaning of a challenge.
Djokovic blinked once, in the third set, but for the rest of the match he pushed Nadal around the way he had at tournaments that don’t peddle strawberries. He broke him down physically as well as mentally (two unforced errors in the final game, almost as many as he had made in two sets against Murray).
Nadal was a good sport in the on-court interview, but in the clubhouse, speaking with John McEnroe, his disappointment with himself was obvious. He mentioned making “a few more mistakes than usual” – it would have been hard for him to have made fewer – “especially with the forehand.”
He came up as if out of nowhere to topple Federer from the throne and now, after having had much less time to enjoy the view, he has been replaced by Djokovic.
The match seemed to usher in, officially, the post-Federer era. It is not so much the power – which Federer has always had (though now it’s more interspersed with errors) – but the speed and agility to defend against it that make it difficult for a 29-year-old to keep up. Tellingly, it was on clay – the slowest surface – that Federer was able to hand Djokovic his sole defeat of the year.
Now the proud Serb is on a new roll. Signing off on his interview with John McEnroe, he said: “Can’t wait to come to New York.”
Nor can we.