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Tennis has got your G.O.A.T.

April 14, 2015

Ah, spring: Time for the Monte Carlo Open, the clay-court season and the game within the game:

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest of them all?

Nothing men’s tennis loves better than a discussion of who’s the Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.). This usually involves the Federinas squaring off against the Nadalistas. You know, Roger Federer has the most slam titles with 17, but Rafael Nadal is right behind him with 14. Although lately, Rafa, the king of clay, has been in a bit of a slump, while Novak Djokovic has passed him to move up to No. 6 on the list of most weeks as No. 1. (Nole now has 142.)

So what is the measure of greatness – the most slams and weeks at No. 1 (that would be Feddy) or the person who owns the person with the most slams and weeks at No. 1 (that would be Rafa) or the person who beat them both, often back-to-back, to become No. 1 (that would be Nole)? ...

Andy Murray’s big, fat celeb-less wedding

April 8, 2015

You got to hand it to the press when it comes to making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Andy Murray’s getting married Saturday, April 11 – congrats again to him and Kim Sears – and there will be no Feddy, Rafa or Nole. (Thank God for Andy’s lack of famous guests. For a while there, I thought we were going to have to live with Nole’s Miami meltdown until the start of the Monte Carlo Open.)

So Andy didn’t invite the rest of the so-called “Big Four.” What a surprise. Well, it is to the press. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have been “banned,” “shunned” and “uninvited.” (Let us pause for a vocabulary lesson, here, shall we? In order to be uninvited, you would have to be invited to begin with.)

Look, when you play for the kind of stakes these guys play for, you’re not going to pal around. It messes with your head and your game. That’s precisely why I made the tennis players and swimmers in my debut novel “Water Music” rivals, friends and lovers: It’s delicious conflict, which is the meat of fiction. In my follow-up, “The Penalty for Holding,” the football players, too, find their personal relationships tangling their professional rivalries, although there it’s somewhat different, because football is a team sport.

Can rivals be friends in the real world? ...

For Nole, love means having to say you’re sorry

April 6, 2015

Tennis, Andre Agassi once observed, is a lonely sport. A singles player is out there by his or her self, and has no one to blamed but his or her self when the match heads south. It can be particularly frustrating.

I was reminded of this after reading about Novak Djokovic’s triumph over Andy Murray 7-6 (3), 4-6, 6-0 at the Miami Open Easter Sunday. It was the third time that Nole’s pulled off the difficult double of wins at Indian Wells and Miami. He’s 25-2, a start that echoes the fantastic beginning to 2011, when he first became No. 1.

But what some will remember about the April 5 final in Miami is the way Nole shouted at his entourage after losing the second set to Andy and grabbed a towel from the startled ball boy. This was uncharacteristic of Nole, who’s tender with children. He knew it and he apologized. ...

In sports, R-E-S-P-E-C-T is limited

March 10, 2015

An unsettling, if not upsetting, sports days with trade rumors swirling about the San Francisco 49ers sending quarterback Colin Kaepernick to the Philadelphia Eagles or the Chicago Bears or the Martians. General Manager Trent Baalke was quick to deny it, so you know it must have some validity.

More about this in a minute but first, What would The New York Times do without Roger Federer? Last year, The Times couldn’t bother writing about World Tennis Day at Madison Square Garden, which was too bad, because Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray put on quite a show. This year, however, Feddy Bear and Grigor “Baby Fed” Dimitrov are slated to square off March 10, and I predicted there would be a huge article in The Times to advance it. Christopher Clarey didn’t disappoint with the kind of piece that could’ve been written by Mirka, Feddy’s wife. The article was long on how the Feds travel the world with two sets of twins and – surprise, surprise – several nannies. But not even the cleverest of journalists can turn a subject into something he is not. One of the great pleasures of any Fed article is his blithe unawareness of his own self-centeredness. (Though it would seem counterintuitive, self-centered people never understand how others see them, or they wouldn’t be self-centered. It’s what makes pseudofedblog.com so funny.)

Anyway, here’s Fed on traveling the world en famille:

“The girls enjoy it, and I love being with my family, and so does Mirka. She loves being with me….”

I’m sure she does. ...

For self and country

March 8, 2015

Well, thank goodness Davis Cup is back. Sports have been in a bit of a doldrums since the Super Duper Bowl and the Aussie Open. But the Cup – the men’s team competition, pitting nation against nation – has returned for another season, although as usual, the cast keeps changing.

Fed’s out this year, having added the Cup – the one trophy missing from his case – last year. On the other hand Nole’s back. And Andy, bless ’im, keeps rolling with it. Say what you want about Andy, but he’s one of the more consistent Cup players among the top 10.

The New York Times has written that the effect of this revolving door is that fans rarely get to see the marquee names in action against one another in Cup competition. That may be true, but I would argue that it doesn’t necessarily deprive the Cup of drama. Just when it looked like the Brits would walk along over us Yanks, the Bryans (Bob and Mike) took the doubles to keep American hopes alive for Sunday, March 8. And Novak Djokovic made a surprise doubles appearance for Serbia Saturday after winning his singles match a day earlier against Croatia. In the reverse-singles Sunday, he’s slated to face off against the player experts consider to be Baby Nole, “teen starlet” (that’s what CNN calls him) Borna Coric. Indeed, Nole teammate Viktor Troicki was supposed to be in the doubles match instead of Nole, but he was so drained from his five-set victory over Borna on Friday, that coach Bogdan Obradovic decided to go with Nole. ...

Tom Brady, the Roger Federer of football (in more ways than one)

March 2, 2015

It’s football’s off-season. Let the games begin.

First, it was something called “Aaron Rodgers Week” on the NFL Network. (Is that like “Rita Hayworth Week” on Movies.com?). So this engendered an article on whether Tom Brady or Andrew Luck is a better quarterback than Rodgers.

Really, I’m no fan of Brady, but you have to give it to him for leading the New England Patriots to four Super Bowl titles. He’s the greatest quarterback in the game today, just as Roger Federer’s 17 Grand Slam titles make him the greatest tennis player today. Yes, there are other measures of an athlete, and anyone can beat the best on any given day. But it’s hard to argue with the Super Bowl and the Slams as the measures of the players in football and tennis respectively. ...

Fed, Davis Cup and ‘Just Say No’

February 25, 2015

Well, Feddy Bear has spoken and it’s ‘no’ to the Davis Cup this year.

Is it me, or does Roger Federer have a way of sounding self-centered even when he’s probably just trying to be logical?

"It wasn't a difficult decision," he was quoted as saying in Bleacher Report. "I have played for so long, and I think by winning it, I can finally do whatever I please, to be quite honest."

He also called the Davis Cup “a big burden” that lays on the guilt.

Reaction was predictable: “It’s ‘Me first’ again for Roger,” Mary Haw posted on the Bleacher Report report.

To be fair, Fed Ex does have a 50-17 record in Davis Cup. And he’s going to have to play it again to qualify for the Rio Olympics in 2016. Then, too, you have to pace yourself, particularly as you age. Sometimes you just have to say ‘no’ if you’re going to be fresh for tourneys, which are the main focus of a tennis player’s career.

That means ‘no’ to the guilt as well. In my novel “Water Music” and the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – both part of The Games Men Play series – the tennis players/swimmers and football players respectively are sometimes weighed down by the expectations of family and country. Tennis player Alí Iskandar – whose father is fond of quoting the biblical “To him to whom much has been given, much will be required” – wonders if there’s a statute of limitations on gratitude. Sometimes you have to put yourself first – something Feddy has no trouble doing.

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