I just stayed up to watch the depressingly short semifinal match between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick. I was of course rooting for Andy, but Roger put on another one of his seemingly routine show-for-the-ages routines, with a particularly amazing second set in which he blanked the hard-serving American 6-0. The rest of the match seemed to be on autopilot for Federer, who didn’t seem to even break a sweat.<\/p>\n
Although Federer still has a few records to break (which I am convinced he will break), I am pretty sure that a tennis player of his dominance is unprecedented. Sure, he’s not perfect yet — he is weak on clay (thank goodness for Roland Garros), and he had a bad game in which Roddick broke him in the first set, but for much of the match it looked like a convincing reason that we don’t have college teams play in the NBA finals. One game might be fun, but after that it just wouldn’t be entertaining.<\/p>\n
However, it is not in my nature to begrudge someone just for being good at what they do. I am in favor of great competition, but I prefer that competition to come from player’s rising to a higher level during competition rather than the better player having a bad day. So I want Andy to beat Federer — the sooner the better — but I want him to win by outplaying Federer at his best, and not because Federer has a bad day.<\/p>\n
Until then, I guess we just have to wait for the French Open, when Nadal to call up his clay magic once again and restore a little bit of balance to the Tennis universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just stayed up to watch the depressingly short semifinal match between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick. I was of course rooting for Andy, but Roger put on another one of his seemingly routine show-for-the-ages routines, with a particularly amazing second set in which he blanked the hard-serving American 6-0. The rest of the match […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}