Wimbledon Final

The Wimbledon final that took place this past Sunday between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal was an amazing event, and thrilling to watch. Indeed, the New York Times devoted an entire editorial to the match, saying:

This week, tennis players around the world are standing on the singles court — 78 feet long and 27 feet wide — and thinking one thought: Can this possibly be the same size as the court in Sunday’s Wimbledon match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal?

It’s a reasonable question. That men’s singles final, which Nadal won deep in the dusk in five tortuous sets, seemed to give tennis a new topography. The level of the court never changed in those nearly five hours of playing time, nor did its dimensions, yet the brilliance of the tennis being played seemed to warp it, point by point.

Partly it was the gusts of wind, which deformed a few points, as did the chewed-up turf at the baselines. And partly it was the exaggerated vertical dimension of the game — Nadal’s swooping, spinning shots — and the unnerving crosscourt vectors that both men found again and again. But this was also a match that could have been written by John Bunyan, a moral battle in which the sides — good versus evil — changed with every change of serve. Was that sheepishness on Nadal’s face when he double-faulted? How many times did Federer rescue himself from despondency? One minute Nadal was lost in the weeds. The next minute it was Federer’s turn. This wasn’t a tennis court. It was an ecosystem.

The mystery of a match like this is hard to fathom. Shot by shot it progresses, game by game. The level of play is high at first, but not higher than expected. Federer goes down two sets, and then, suddenly, we find ourselves entering new terrain.

You get to a point — the end of the fourth set, when Federer finds the will to carry us all into a final set with him — and you can’t quite make out how you got here. The light slips away, and though everyone feels the cumulative weight of what has come before, the players are still having to play in the present, still having to set aside the past in order to return another serve, while everyone in the crowd wonders how they do it — not just the imagination of the ball-striking, but the ability not to imagine, not to leap forward in their minds to winning or losing. Their desire is concealed in the play itself. But ours has gotten loose and is making it hard to breathe — hard even to watch.