(Originally posted on my Facebook page prior to the 2017 Australian Open final)
Federer vs. Nadal.
Forgive me for not discussing forehands and backhands. Excuse me if I won’t mention first serve percentages and taking advantage of break point opportunities. Don’t expect me to write about the players’ head to head records.
Federer vs. Nadal. Two tennis players. A tennis match. It’s just a tennis match. Sometimes I tell myself that. Keep things in proportion. Two strangers playing with a racket and a ball. Neither of them is about to share their earnings with you. Your name won’t appear beside theirs in history books. Fame is theirs alone. Hello there, calm down, take a seat and drink something. What do you care about them? What do you care about him?
But most of the time I don’t bother. Some things are bigger than me. Not everything in this world makes sense. Federer vs. Nadal is not “just a tennis game”. They are not just “two strangers playing with a racket and a ball”. Federer vs. Nadal is a moment that has been stamped deep within my conscience. Hundreds of millions or billions of neurons that went wild in my brain at a certain point and left their mark in the temporal lobe (Wikipedia tells me that’s where memories are stored). Federer vs. Nadal is that moment when I jumped up and down at home and cried of joy. Federer vs. Nadal is that moment when I fell into a deep depression. Federer vs. Nadal is an ongoing saga, in which every chapter is closely interconnected with the previous chapter. One cannot escape the past, not a single one of the previous Federer vs. Nadal showdowns. Even ones from over a decade ago.
Truly devout fans might liken Federer vs. Nadal to a debate on the meaning of life. Are you an aesthete or a fighter? Which is more important, the journey or the destination? I don’t know if that’s true. And it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Federer vs. Nadal feels much bigger and much more important than any debate on the meaning of life. Nothing ever comes out of a debate on the meaning of life. But Federer vs. Nadal is a Pandora’s box. You never know what will emerge from the Pandora’s box before you. It could bring either infinite joy or deep depression. What kind of debate on the meaning of life ever elicited such strong emotion?
Federer vs. Nadal embodies both my darkest nightmares and my brightest fantasies. In my darkest nightmares the ball is spinning wildly to the left, in the direction of Federer’s backhand. Heavy topspin to the backhand. Heavy topspin to the backhand. And another. And another. Dozens of heavy topspins to the backhand. Until the backhand finally surrenders. Until it can’t take it anymore. And how could it? The fox has managed to blow the straw house down. Nadal’s topspin is much stronger than a fox’s breath. And against Nadal, Federer’s backhand can be even flimsier than a house of straw.
In my fantasy there is catharsis. Finally, after years of struggle. The eternal Hollywood legend is that in the end things always work out. Even after the French Open 2008 final. And the Wimbledon final of that same year. And the terrible Australian Open final that came after that. And after further defeats in Paris and London, Rome and Melbourne, on hard courts and clay courts, in good periods and bad periods, both for Federer and for you in your own life. Federer vs. Nadal is the realization that the Hollywood legend is a lie. Things don’t always work out. Heavy topspin to the backhand prevails over kitsch.
As you may recall, there is always hope at the bottom of a Pandora’s box. At the end of the storm, the end of yet another chapter in the Federer vs. Nadal saga, when the judge calls game, set, match and Nadal falls on his back in tears of joy, hope is always there. Hope that next time, for some reason, things will be different. Hope that perhaps there’s a grain of truth in the Hollywood legend. Hope that this time, when the judge calls game, set, match, Nadal will remain on his feet, remove the Nike headband, shake the sweat out of his hair and proceed to the net to congratulate Federer on his fabulous victory.
That hope may be the worst thing that ever happened to me as a tennis fan. But it will make me watch Federer vs. Nadal, chapter 35, while sitting on the edge of my sofa, short of breath, eyes wide open, reliving all the most wonderful and horrific moments, as if time stood still and everything that happened since the last Federer vs. Nadal was nothing more than a mirage, a mistake, an error. Nothing important has happened in the world since the last Federer vs. Nadal. And if this is the last Federer vs. Nadal, perhaps nothing important will ever happen in the world again from Sunday until eternity.
