There is always the potential for magic on the lawns of Wimbledon. Or to be more precise, the dirt of Wimbledon, since the Tennis Unicorns usually only come out to frolic once the grass is nothing but a distant opening-day memory.
It’s not always so, of course. Sometimes there is just a dude crying into his towel because he has a blister, which is about as magical as a trip to the dentist. But generally there’s something about the All-England Club that makes the tennis feel a little more special.
Sure. This year’s men’s final was…well…it was less than compelling. For two sets, Novak Djokovic was basically playing against the Tin Man prior to his oil can treatment. You could almost hear Kevin Anderson’s joints squeaking in protest as he stretched into his service motion. And it’s not like you can blame him: he spent like 720 hours on court between the Roger Federer and John Isner matches. Still, one always holds out hope that we will get a match that rivals the 2008 final, not a match that rivals a first-round showdown in Marrakech.
The good news for tennis fans is everything that was missing in the Wimbledon final was present and accounted for in the Djokovic-Rafael semifinal. That match built to an exciting crescendo over two days and five sets. By the fifth set, the tennis was exquisite: the two men played increasingly risky tennis with increasingly impressive results. They pasted lines with forehands, feathered volleys and drop shots, ran like they could keep running forever.
That Djokovic nearly always seems to come out on top in these thriller matches against Nadal is not lost on me. Something about the Spaniard (to his obvious detriment) brings out Djokovic’s best tennis. The Serb had a rough 18 months, no doubt about it. His form was such that each time he stepped onto the court, one got the feeling that he could lose to anybody on the right (or wrong) day. On the other hand, he also carried with him the potential to re-find his form and to decimate the field once again. In short, he possesses an aura of greatness that dims and brightens, but never fades completely. And boy, did it shine at Wimbledon.
That Nadal nearly always seems to make up one half of the “greatest” matches is also not lost on me. The world No. 1 has something; a special quality that exists in other elite members of our sport, but Nadal…well, he seems to have more of it. He has all the “normal” ingredients: talent, mental toughness, a near-ridiculous work ethic, the drive for constant improvement, his obvious physical giftedness. But he also has something that is slightly harder to pinpoint. Tennis pundits like to call them intangibles. I recognize them as Nadal’s rather bizarre (for lack of a better word) predilection for gritty, almost single-minded optimism combined with his willingness to suffer on court. It makes him (arguably) one of the greatest five-set players of all time.
I have little doubt that Djokovic will continue to give Nadal difficulty. I have little doubt that Nadal will continue to look for solutions. And in the meantime, the tennis world will sit back and enjoy, while we still can, the most prolific rivalry in the Open Era.
On a tangentially related topic, it bears noting that the ATP’s Next Gen players were a hair’s breadth from impotent at the All-England Club. All four semifinalists were in their thirties. Of the eight quarterfinalists, only Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori were in their twenties, and they’re hardly fresh faces at ages 27 and 28. To put into perspective exactly what is happening in the men’s game, consider that in 2008, the Greatest Match of All Time was played by Federer, age 26, and Nadal age 22…and that was their third consecutive year facing each other in the finals.
It would be easy to lay the blame at the feet of the youngsters, to castigate them for their collectively poor slam performances. And that’s a part of it, no doubt about it. But we are also experiencing an era of dominance by a select few players that we have never seen before. Three of the four players with the most Grand Slam titles in the Open Era are from the same generation. Alexander Zverev, Nick Kyrgios, and company are essentially fighting over the slam scraps. Still…it makes one wonder if we will ever see another Nadal-like wunderkind.
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