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by Pete Bodo
It figures. Just as I'm getting ready to take a vacation with my family, things get interesting. Vera Zvonareva wins Pattaya City - again. What is she, the new Balazs Taroczy (he won Hilversum, aka the Dutch Open, a startling six times). Maybe they're going to re-name the place Ciudad Zvonareva. Well, I'm happy for Vera and her coach Antonio van Grinchen.
Then there's Melanie Oudin jump-starting her game with Fed Cup and rolling all the way to the semifinals in the Paris Indoors. And how about Andy Roddick? Maybe winning two tiebreakers to Sam Querrey eases the painful memory of the way he lost the first- and fifth-set tiebreakers at the last U.S. Open in his third-round match with John Isner. But I doubt it.
Then, we have Robin Soderling coming up big in Rotterdam, just when it seemed like building on his momentum of late 2009 in the new year might be a bit too much to ask. . . And today we have a Roddick vs. Fernando Verdasco final in San Jose.
But I can't find that danged box containing my bonefish flies. My favorite is an artful little creation that mimics a pair of shrimp, mating (I kid you not). Bonefish are suckers for shrimp and two is a bigger mouthful than one. Quite an elegant thing, that fly. And not a bad way to go, if you're shrimp, destined the be gobbled up by a beautiful silver bonefish.
Well, I'll catch up when i get home.
Meanwhile, I had a particularly earnest request from CL (although her "plea" was suspiciously deferential; I smell "gotcha") regarding the Federer-Nadal/French Open issue that has been so thoroughly discussed this week. I feel a need to point out that posting a comment at TW or anywhere else is not obligatory. It can be relaxing sometimes to just read a post or story and think about it (or not) instead of feeling like you have to fight the Battle of Stalingrad over it. Happens to me all the time in my online reading.
Anyway, let's throw out that red herring about whether or not Federer's win at Roland Garros "counts" (CL's word, not mine). Of course it counts. Is it really that hard to give Federer credit for a Grand Slam, and the resultant career Grand Slam, while acknowledging that it involved an utterly unexpected and noteworthy twist? That there was a remarkable measure of serendipity in the way he finally was able to win the French Open after the man who had a stranglehold on the event unexpectedly came up lame? Anyone who doesn't acknowledge the role of luck, or fate, in sports is simply looking it at through empirically-colored glasses. The world is a funny, tricky, unpredictable place, and sports is no less so. It diminishes nothing. And who can forget baseball pitcher Lefty Gomez's quip: I'd rather be lucky than good? or its corollary, Luck favors the good?
Or let's put it this way: Can you think about Federer's triumph in Paris for more than a nanosecond without thinking about Nadal? How far into the conversation about the epic win do you get before Nadal's name comes up?
Let me throw this out there: when you talk about Pete Sampras winning his 13th major, do you think: Wow, he caught a break because he didn't have to face Agassi . . .
Of course not. And if you go back and look at the players Sampras beat in 2000 to take break Roy Emerson's record, you might find yourself underwhelmed. Jan-Michael Gambill in the quarters? The only guy Pete played who had previously been in a Grand Slam final was Pat Rafter - and that was in the final. Nobody makes a big deal out of that; it's secondary. And nobody discredits Pete's achievement. We accept it as, well, just the way sports works.
But the 2009 French Open was a very different case; it takes an effort not to mull over how it all played out. To write Nadal out of the story of Federer's triumph in Paris takes an act of will; that's not the case with writing Vladimir Voltchkov (Sampras' semifinal victim in 2000) out of the story of Pete's 13th major.
To me, you have to keep Nadal's role right up at the top of the narrative (as if could go anywhere else) for another reason: to fully appreciate the incredible job Federer did going on to win the title. I've never seen a guy under as much pressure as was Federer at Roland Garros in 2009 the moment Nadal lost. The poise and nerve he showed in going on to win the event eludes statistical or production-based analysis, yet it was, to me, the most significant and praiseworthy aspect of Federer's performance. Once you peel back the skin of the asterisk, you have what might be Federer's ultimate performance.
So, yes, there's an asterisk attached to that tournament, and it calls our attention to a very rich subtext that ultimately makes Federer's win different from most of his other Grand Slam triumphs. To deny that seems to me to be an act of willful ignorance.
Well, that's it for me. I really am out of here, tomorrow early in the morning. Ed McGrogan has promised to keep things updated, so you can still gather here until I return, a week from Tuesday. Wonder if I can get "mating shrimp jalapeno poppers" on Viques? Two for the price of one is a good thing. Happy week, everyone.