My favorite sport is baseball, I think if for no other reason that whenever I turn on a game or watch one in person, I feel a lot closer to the action than in any other sport. Football players intimidate with their massive, almost freak-show dimensions. Basketball players are too smooth (and freakishly athletic in their own right). But baseball? Even a guy like
David Ortiz, or
Jonathon "Fat Elvis" Broxton can find a place in baseball. It's a very democratic sport. Even as the game is awash in the dirty stain of the steroids era, I still watch and feel the urge to get out there, that classic "Put me in coach, I'm ready to play" feel we get when we charged out of the Little League dugout. Baseball also serves up the most important lesson of all, the one that I appreciate the most out of sports, the thing that makes me love sports: they remind us how life's not fair.
That sounds like (and I admit, is) a very strange reason to like something.
What, you want to be reminded how painful and cruel and unrelenting primal forces of nature beyond your comprehension can be? What are you, some kind of sadist? Maybe this is the wrong reason to like something, but sports has a refreshing, no-bulls&*t quality that is so frequently lacking in other arenas. Either you make contact with the ball or you don't. Either the putt drops...or it doesn't. You catch the pass, or not; you cross the finish line first, second, third, and so forth; you get the idea. So I wouldn't say it's that I enjoy seeing the gut-wrenching emptiness that goes with a valiant effort coming just short, reminding us that there is always a winner and by default a loser; rather, I simply like the black & white nature of the outcomes sport delivers. It isn't about what's the most deserving, least worthy, most compelling, hardest fought - it's the embodiment of the Biblical parable that was so simple and so direct that no less a sports legend than Vince Lombardi made it the crux of his coaching philosophy:
Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. (First Corinthians, 9:24)
Loose translation: we're all out there trying to win. But
There Can Only Be One. One crown, no more and no less, and we are all to be defined by the effort we put forth to get it. That's the only guarantee sports offer: we all love the game, but it's not always going to love us back. In other words: life's not fair. Or, to be a little more hep to the
Herm Edwards jive: "I don't care if you've got no wins. You always play...to WIN...THE GAME!! PLAY TO WIN!" But it's not always fair.
If it were, Andy Roddick wouldn't have lost yesterday. If life were fair, Phil Mickelson would have at least one U.S. Open trophy to his name; likewise Sam Snead. Greg Norman might well be the all-time majors winner if life were fair. If life were fair, Mary Decker wouldn't have fallen in the '84 Olympics, Rocco Mediate would've sank that putt on 18 at Torrey Pines, the Browns would've just
once gotten to avoid John Elway in the playoffs, Mitch Williams would've pitched a boring 9th inning and given Philly a chance in Game 7, and a thousand other stories just like those, from stages big and small, would've had different, happier endings.
That's the cruel side of sports, the lesson this year's grand Wimbledon final taught us, the one we'd all be well served (no pun intended) to learn: there's only one winner, and that title goes to the player who proves to be the best. They arrive at that distinction by a million and one different variants of travel - no two paths to the champion's circle are precisely the same. Sports in that sense are the purest example of chaos theory at work, showing how the slightest twist and turns in the wind of some far-off place manage to come back around (or, to zero it in for Federer, how a set of worn-out knees that do not belong to him can dramatically alter the landscape for the two biggest tournaments of his career). The win goes not necessarily to the man who deserved it the most, or desired it the most, or even to the one who fought the hardest for it, but the man who somehow found a way to be standing at the end as the best. 15 times now, that's been Roger Federer at the end of a Grand Slam tennis tournament. He's taken on and cut down
nearly everybody who's risen to challenge him along the way, the one exception a big one, posing a question that we won't be able to answer until sometime a decade or two from now, when he and Rafael Nadal have finally "played out the string" between themselves. Until that time though, there can be little doubt Federer has played the best tennis this summer despite being pushed and stretched beyond his means on several occasions - twice needing to rescue himself in a fifth set on the way to that elusive French Open, and then seeming to do nothing other than "find...a...way" to outlast Andy Roddick. Sport cliche has taught us that this is called "the mark of a champion", an appropriately vague term. After all, it's not a developed skill, gleaned from a "how-to" booklet or hours of private coaching; instead, it's a special, intangible gift that emerges out of a once-in-a-generation talent.
That there could be such a force of pre-determination, such an iron-clad will inside Federer tested over two dozen times leading up to Sunday's masterpiece...it's the only plausible explanation for how Andy Roddick could manage to win more games in the longest Grand Slam final ever played (77 in total, well past the mark set in 1927, with a final tally of 39 games Roddick, 38 Federer) and still somehow come up on the losing end. Even then, to just watch those figures ignores a career-high 50 aces from Federer, or the clutch backhand winners from Roddick, who not so long ago could hit a backhand at a key moment about as well as Mickelson could hit a driver on the 72nd hole of a U.S. Open. That's yet another dimension where sports reminds us that life's not fair. If it were, we'd play the NCAA Tourament by simulator every year and hand the title to the arbitrary math formula's chosen top team (we still do this, more or less, in NCAA Football - but that's neither here nor there). So we have to say that in
almost all sports, maybe the numbers don't lie, but they also don't tell the whole story and they have no say in the final outcome. Yet another marvelous quirk which makes the fields of play a blessed release from a world that too often gets cold and calculative, driven by stats and polls. The irony comes when we reflect on how sports usually serves as a great example of the power of numbers. We obsess over them - batting averages, free-throw attempts, head-to-head records, first-serve percentages, goal differential, wins against an opponent with a certain seed - and often times maniacally so. That is, until things reach the tipping point; then the greatest moments of sport are, without fail, the ones that allow us to revel in how the numbers and the records get gloriously kicked to the curb and produce a moment, a match, a memory which "going by the numbers" should not be allowed to exist.
What's that you say - Roddick's a 9-to-1 underdog and has lost to Federer 18 times in 20 matches, usually by comically lopsided scores? Didn't matter at all on this day, except for afterward when the stats crew needed to update the raw data so the media guide would show Federer making it 19 out of 21. To just read that line in a book would be to miss all the drama that had to go on in order to get to that point. No, in sports, numbers do not tell the whole story, even if the BCS would prefer that they do.
Something else sports do for us, something we ought to be quite capable of remembering on our own but somehow can't seem to grasp except in the context of a heartbreaking triple-overtime defeat at the buzzer: we are more than just the one-line entry of "W" or "L". After all, it's just a baseball game, just a tennis match, just a sporting event. To use the words of Brett Favre (who seems capable these days only of stirring in thousands the emotions that would be better spent on meaningful issues): "It's not life or death". Profound insight out of a man from Mississippi, where most of the population would of course say that a simple thing like football is not life or death - it's
far more important than that. Yet it's not, and we know this. That's why we often gain in our admiration for a player or a team by how they handle the crushing and undeserving blows dealt to them by fate. Observe the two men who slugged out yesterday's championship. First there is Federer, who nearly broke down after losing "The Greatest Match Ever" in the 2008 Wimbledon Final (to Nadal), and then did precisely that seven months later, having to be hugged by Nadal during the trophy ceremony at the '09 Australian Open. The way he handled defeat - not only the fact that he did it the way most of would, as an aching and distraught human being, but that he redoubled his efforts to capture the next two titles - earned him as many plaudits as each of the 15 Grand Slams.
So it will have to be for Roddick, who now holds the dubious distinction of having more losses to Federer in championship finals than any other player. Nobody save for Nadal has had to go through it more than once, and Nadal at least has the warm comfort of five wins against his two losses, to say nothing of the constant whispers that he may yet eclipse the great Federer when all is said and played. Roddick, on the other hand, has to carry the burden of being simply good, but not blessed with the greatness that comes along only once (and just maybe twice) in a generation. Again, if life (and sports) were fair, he would not have to shoulder that weight. If life were fair, in this case, at some point late in the fifth set (say when it was tied 8-8, or maybe 11-11) Federer would have nobly laid down his weapon and conceded, if only so Roddick could enjoy just one taste of the glory that the Swiss has now experienced six times. But that's not the way it goes. It just can't. We
have to go on until somebody wins. If life were fair, "poor Roger" would just have to wait until the U.S. Open to get his inevitable 15th slam, and Roddick would have the one trophy he covets the most.
You could say that is Roddick's curse, that he should steel himself so mightily, reinvigorate his game so thoroughly, and yet be dealt the dead man's hand over and over again. The '09 final was quite literally a reenactment of what it's like to volley against a brick wall - it will continue only so long as
you don't make a mistake. The wall isn't going to make one. So it came to pass that Roddick lost on his serve for the first, last, and only time, in the
39th game...and therefore lost the championship. Life is just not fair. We need sports to teach us that, because in the midst of that hard lesson we find so many things to admire and respect about ourselves and our opponents. We come to find that we love the struggle, the purpose, the heroics and the theatrics that are all necesitated by the bottom-line world of sports. We are all running the race, but only one receives the prize. We wouldn't want it any other way.
That's probably why we identify so well with our sports heroes, and also why every so often the face of "the other side" sticks with us. After all, the matches are remembered in pairs, an acknowledgement that one left triupmhant but it damn well took two to tango. That's why we remember Roddick's pained face at the end just as much as Federer's unrestrained joy. For not only are we observing something totally unique that none of us will ever experience, but we simultaneously identify a tiny bit of ourselves in Roddick's plight. There's not much of a communion with the icon as there is with the ones he had to step on to reach that status, even if he did it with exceeding politeness as Federer has done. Fitting then, to see how Roger's BFF is Tiger Woods, as the two of them have found in each other perhaps the only person on the planet who knows what it's like to be them. You can imagine how the AIM sessions go:
-- How'd it go today Rog?
-- Oh, you know. Saved four set points against a guy playing out of his mind. Won the longest Grand Slam final ever. Earned a 6th gold cup. You?
-- Eh, about the same. Drilled a 20-footer on 16 for the win. Runner-up shot a course record 62 but still couldn't touch me.
We stand in awe of such greatness, and rightly so. Yet we observe men like Woods and Federer almost at a distance, as if they are far above the rules, and the failings, that color our experience as mere mortals. That's why the admiration of Federer seemed to grow over the past year, why Nadal has been a welcome addition to his legacy, because the swashbuckler from Mallorca reminded us that yes, indeed, Roger Federer is human and will cry just like all of us after seeing a dream crushed. It's proof that
everybody, even the immortal Federer, knows what it's like to be Andy Roddick on Sunday. That Federer could take such defeat and return to the summit didn't make it less comical (in an epic, Greek tragedy kind of way) to listen to him try to console Roddick in the post-match interview. "Don't be too sad, I went through a tough one last year", and it was at that point A-Rod, rather tersely I might add, reminded him that he probably knew enough about the happy times (five) to outlast one haunting defeat. Roddick was left do what we've all been made to do in the area of sport and life: to have to accept you gave everything that was possibly left to give and then some, only to find it somehow wasn't enough. To accept that life's not fair.
As an interesting coda, the running storyline on this final for weeks to come will be about the inherent drama of Federer's quest and Roddick's rebirth, how if either man had cracked just slightly at different points it could've been a very different outcome. We'll hear a lot about how Roddick will surely come to wake up with nightmares at that missed volley in the second set tie-break, at least as often as we'll hear about how he stared down death 10 straight times when Federer was looking to close out the match before finally succumbing. There will be a lot of "had Roddick played anybody except Federer like that, he'd have won", and a few "if he could just take that one shot back..." analyses. But all those are again missing the mark. Roddick knew it afterwards, dismissing the hypotheticals about if Federer was the only man who could've beat him Sunday as "irrelevant". Both before, during, and after the match he very much played the part of Rocky Balboa, even if as a former Grand Slam winner and top-ranked player he was hardly a no-name palooka (and on that note, leave it to Bill Simmons to introduce some cold-hearted levity on the situation: "You're not making me feel sorry for Andy Roddick. He's worth $50 million & married a swimsuit model. Good try though." And yes, that was from his
Twitter). Roddick's sole purpose was to push on to the end and not relent until every last ounce of effort had been given. How does a man know he's done all he can? When there's absolutley nothing left to do. At that point something much more lasting than the final result (a simple tally of Win Federer, Loss Roddick) is acheived. Sports are cruel and unfair, telling us in the clearest ways that, yes, first place is reserved for winners - but that doesn't render everyone else a loser. Even if he was more playboy than punching bag, Roddick was in the middle of a great Rocky moment - which by definition comes in defeat (I'm talking about
Rocky, not any element in the parade of sequels featuring Hulk Hogan and Mr. T).
The Balboa imagery was alive and well at the end of the match too, the crowd chanting as much if not more for the vanquished, and when the combatants laid down their armor (literally in Roddick's case, tossing his racket toward the bench as he walked to the net) to embrace in an almost-full hug before parting. You could see Federer, very much playing the Apollo Creed role as the impecabbly (if somewhat foolishly) dressed champion, worn out like never before, somehow still upright and still the champ despite being battered-and-bruised beyond his or anybody else's expectations. He leaned to whisper something into Roddick's ear, and vice versa. I'm more than a little tempted to think it went just like it did in 1976: Federer, like Creed in a weak but almost awe-struck tone, "Ain't gonna be no rematch." And Roddick, for reasons more pointed than Balboa but just as heroic: "Don't want one."
