The Australian Open finals were held on the weekend before the Super Bowl, opening up the possibility that Sports Illustrated would come out with a cover that wasn’t about football. (Especially since their Super Bowl preview had appeared the week before.) The victors in Melbourne were two 35-year-olds, one – Serena Williams – who made history, and one – Roger Federer – who, in beating his arch rival Rafael Nadal, conclusively made his case for Greatest of All Time.
I waited all week for my issue to arrive in the mail. And waited. I went to Bob’s News and found the Super Bowl preview issue still on the rack. “That’s the last one we received,” I was told. I went to the library and found the same issue. Finally, I called Sports Illustrated and learned that no issue had been published after the Super Bowl preview. The premier sports magazine in America decided to take a week off rather than put a tennis player on its cover.
Tennis is a cruel sport. Every tournament dozens of players show up and all but two - a man and a woman - go home losers. Then they all head off to the next tournament where - unless they're part of the elite (lately, Djokovic, Murray, S. Williams) - they become losers all over again. Even those who once upon a time were winners.
Roger Federer, the man with the most Grand Slam titles in history, has of late been in this group. Young fans who never saw him in his prime - 10, 12 years ago - have known him. fundamentally, as a loser, or - more charitably - an also-ran. He's usually been there toward the end, still in the mix, but he's had to settle for, at best, second place. Possibly the greatest player the game has ever known has, over the last few years, left most of the tournaments he's played in with his head down. The winningest player in the sport - because of his deep (and richly requited) love for the sport, and his seemingly outdated confidence in himself - became the guy who sooner or later loses.
So his victory at the Australian Open was more than just the addition of one more Grand Slam trophy to his collection; it was the transformation of a legendary athlete from loser to winner. It was the stunning spectacle of a 35-year-old man regaining the greatness of his youth.
Like most people, I sleep at night. This means that, as a tennis fan, I turn on the Australian Open as soon as it comes on at 7 in the evening and watch the early matches from Melbourne - first on the Tennis Channel, then on ESPN2 - until 11 or 12. While I dream, loads of afternoon and evening matches are played.
When I wake up in the morning, I turn on the Tennis Channel and find replays of the matches I watched the previous evening. This morning it was the unexciting Venus Williams victory. My beloved channel will eventually get to the matches I missed and, because I work at home, I will sometimes watch bits of them. I break for Federer. But what of the thousands of American tennis fans who have 9 to 5 jobs? They are stuck in a kind of Grand Slam Groundhog's Day, watching - or probably skipping - the matches they've already seen, and missing out on the matches that happened while they slept.
Hania doesn't like it when I surf, but how else would I have found last night, on the MLB Network, Johnny Bench, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays sitting at a round table and talking baseball? Bob Costas, who led the conversation, called the gathering "baseball's Mount Rushmore." And, among the living, it probably was.
I'm not a Cubs fan but I'm rooting for the Cubs, for the same reason I rooted for the Red Sox in 2004. It's time. Also, their manager, Joe Maddon, attended the same college as my father, Lafayette, in the town of my birth, Easton, PA. They also have on their roster a player who starred at Villanova, my alma mater, in football as well as baseball: Matt Szczur. His name means "rat" in Polish and is pronounced a bit like the word "chore" if you put a "sh" in front of it, though the announcers cheat and call him Caesar. They've had to do that quite a lot because one of the starters, Anthony Rizzo, has emerged from his slump by using Szczur's bats. In fact, Szczur was interviewed from the dugout during last night's game - making him one of a very small group of non-starters ever interviewed during a championship game - and he mentioned that another player was wearing his leggings. But then Szczur is used to sharing what he has: While at Villanova, he donated bone marrow to a young Ukrainian girl.
Perhaps now - after the dirge-like playing of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Dee Gordon's first-pitch homage from the right-handed batter's box (followed by his surreal, Ruthian home run), the circling of the mound following the 7 to 3 win, the caps left behind in loving tribute - the Marlins will win back South Florida's sports fans. God knows they deserve them.