To an athlete getting old

This year’s Wimbledon championships were shaping up to provide a final that would be a kind of twilight clash of the gods between two of the three greatest players of all time, reprising their epic 2019 meeting (the last time the tournament took place, as COVID cancelled it last year). But it didn’t work out that way.

Here’s a little passage from a forthcoming book of mine on the psychology, politics, economics etc. of fandom:

One of the charms of competitive sports has always been that its dramas are unscripted. Fans rarely get Hollywood-style endings, which makes such endings, when they do occur, much more powerful than they are in a Hollywood movie. Reality TV, like any good capitalist enterprise, tries to eliminate the problem that real competition doesn’t usually provide the most satisfying – and therefore profitable – story arcs. It gives us a fake version of reality, that leaves out the many unsatisfactory elements of all true stories.

Federer’s loss today illustrates that. The way things were going, he was supposed to reach the final and either pull off an all-time epic upset, or at least leave the stage the way Jimmy Connors did, sort of, in 1991 with his great US Open run at the same decrepit age (39, although to be accurate Connors turned 39 during the tournament while Fed turns 40 next month), or for that matter the way Ken Rosewall did when Connors blew him off the court in the Wimby and the USO finals 17 years earlier, when the great Australian was also 39.

But instead Federer got bageled in the third by a Polish guy even most hardcore tennis fans barely know yet, although who knows, maybe this is the start of something big for Hurkacz (He’s still only 24, which in elite tennis these days counts as young).

It was a melancholy sight, but it was also an illustration of how in elite sports in particular time waits for no one, not even the greatest of the great.

I’ve always assumed that Fed would quit when he really didn’t believe that he had any actual chance of winning another major. I think today may be the day that convinces him of that — almost 20 years to the day when he first came to broader sports public’s consciousness with his famous upset of Pete Sampras in the round of 16 on the same court, when he was still a teenager.

“Even as are the generations of leaves, such are those also of men.”

Oh let me be mawkish for the nonce. I am so tired of being cynical.