Very insigthful article. Thanks for the sharing, I enjoyed the reading.
Yes. It's a beautiful article. It's one of my favorites on Nadal. I mean we just take F.O titles granted for Nadal, but it's beyond incredible what he is doing there at a slam which is historically been the hardest to dominate as players age.
Another one that I loved was on Wimb 2008 final by Bodo of all people:
The Death of Wanting
www.tennis.com
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"Somehow, in the back of your mind, you knew it was destined to come down to something like this - 9-7 in the fifth, with the champion Rafael Nadal prone on his back in the tawny dirt, looking like he'd been shot to death, which in a way he had been: because ultimate joy is, in the end, not very different from ultimate obliteration.
And if Nadal's exquisite moment of death - the death of wanting, the death of struggling, the death of so much longing and chasing and hoping in a match so full of winning and losing and squandering and earning that by the end all -
all - of it was mixed up all jangly and tangled and equally meaningful - and equally meaningless. . . if that moment of utterly still, flat-on-your-back perfected nothingness seemed a scant and perhaps odd reward for what he had achieved, consider the plight of the man he had beaten, Roger Federer."
"As Nadal lay there, bathed in the obscene blue light of that crepuscular galaxy he momentarily owned, swaddled in the arms of an absence more pure than feeling (oh, the joy would come, don't you worry about that, it would come flooding and rushing in soon enough), his beaten opponent was suffering a fate far worse than obliteration "
So why did it have to come down to this? Why 9-7 in the fifth, in the twilight, at Wimbledon?
Only a fool could have expected (rather than merely hoped for) a win by Nadal in the fifth set. Serving the odd game, Federer was always in the lead. Execution-wise, both me were playing at a high level. But there was the lingering memory of that fourth-set tiebreaker, and the knowledge that Federer was the five-time defending champion. It seemed impossible that Nadal could win, but at the same time an undercurrent of inevitability - the same tug that had so many pundits brazenly forecasting a Nadal win in recent days - exerted a nearly equal gravitational pull. The tension became nearly unbearable, but it also imbued everyone watching with a sense of wonder; we all knew we were witnesses to something extraordinary.
Somehow, we all knew it was destined to come down to this: Rafael Nadal over Roger Federer, in the Wimbledon final, 6-4,6-4,6-7,6-7,9-7."
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