Tennis Travesty Tries US Fans’ Patience

ROME
– The monkey on Roger Federer’s back – Rafael ”Raffa" Nadal –
has grown into a gorilla.

You expected the playful kid, 19-year-old Nadal, to finish the day swinging
through the trees of the Borghese Gardens. And why not. This is his town,
even if he comes from the Spanish isle of Mallorca: championships on both
visits. He was so bouncy after Kong-ing Federer – for the fourth straight
time — that 5 hours 6 minutes of heavy hitting and incessant running seemed
a twinkling as he retained his Rome Masters title yesterday.

by Bud Collins in the Boston Globe

Although we
will be surprised if Collins doesn’t take some heat for his unfortunate
simian simile, we have to agree with the
basic idea behind his analogy. Nadal is an absolute animal on
the court. In 40 years of playing and watching tennis we have never
seen
another player hit each and every shot with as much pure exuberant viciousness
as Rafael Nadal.

Of course, as a writer we would prefer to note his feline
reflexes and lion-like killer instincts as he sprang after and pounced
upon his bouncing yellow prey. The gorilla analogy, and that swinging
through trees stuff, smacks of, well, racism. Imagine if Collins had
said the same thing about James Blake or Serena Williams! We guess our
Simian relatives are a bit too close to us on the evolutionary family
tree for sportswriters to freely bandy such images about.

But the on-court savagery of the teenaged Spaniard seems
to be the only antidote to the 4-year dominance of the world #1, Roger
Federer of Switzerland. Federer, widely acknowledged as the best player
of the current generation, is something sick like 183-8 over the last
three years. The only player on the planet he can’t beat is Nadal, on
clay, responsible for four of those 8 losses.

The travesty was not on the court – it was in our inability
to view the match, either live or on tape. This had to be one of the
most exciting and closely contested sporting events
of
the
season,
world #1 vs. world #2, in the finals of a national tournament, and
yet
it was not
to
be found
on any of the 111 channels of our sports-skewed cable service or
on any of the 47 sports-exclusive high-definition screens at our local,
award-winning
sports bar.

Is this evidence of the short-sighted neglect of a popular
and upscale sport by the network programmers, or of the tragic US-centric
scope of public popularity, at least as far as those same network programmers
perceive it. A match between a Swiss and a Spaniard for the Championship
of Italy, just doesn’t make the grade.

Or is it more insidious still, a psychic slap directly
at the Dowbrigade, devaluing the only sporting activity at which he does
not abjectly suck. Dark, paranoid thoughts on a dismal gray rain-soaked
Sunday. No tennis for weeks, it seems, either in real life or on television.
Indoor season finally ended, and they’ve deflated the MIT bubble. Yellow-ball withdrawal.

Oh, cursed dregs of the New England cavalcade of atmospheric
conditions! We feel the siren call of Southern California, or sun-struck
South America, where tennis is respected, and playable year-round.

This week Federer and Nadal are both playing a tournament
in Hamburg. No one is willing to bet they won’t again end up in the finals,
next Sunday. Any chance we could get this one on the tube, guys?