Cognitive dissonance

It took me a day to figure out my bearings between Zen and devastation, but I am miraculously still alive after the US Open men’s final. You just learn not to sweat the small stuff – marriage (boo hoo!), Roland Garros, Wimbledon, Grand Slams record, Career Slam, World Number 1, fatherhood; everything else is icing on an already sweet cake. It helps that I have gained impenetrable armour over the past year and if I can survive those setbacks…

What can I say? Composing this will either serve as much-needed therapy, or plunge me into severe melancholia (skyrocket or nosedive, remember?). I read match analyses and reactions; I do not write them. I am neither a commentator, nor a journalist (yet) – I am a die-hard fan. Just as how the wind kept shifting during the match, both literally and figuratively, so did my emotions. By the end of it, when Juan Martin Del Potro (his name appears first in this post, because his win was deserved) collapsed on the court, I reached a new spiritual plane… That, or I must have taken a chill pill some time between the fourth and fifth sets.

Roger Federer remains superhuman, so there’s no reason for my fandom to take a turn for the half-ass. Even so, waking up at 5 am to make a trip to the casino counts as one of the crazier things I have done in the name of ‘Fedophilia’. Do I regret putting in such effort only to see him lose? Not in the slightest! Will Federer make it 16 Grand Slams? You’d better believe it, baby! Allez!

Getting sidetracked

[…] and if you are not a tennis person, I suspect this may be somewhat hard to fathom – the idea that watching two men spend that many hours hitting a ball could actually make your heart pound so hard that you have to keep jumping up and yelling and grabbing your own head.

I live and die with Roger Federer’s matches. When you factor in the year-long tennis season, multiplied by the number of years I’ve supported this player, I have long surpassed that clichéd expression about a cat’s nine lives. Little good comes out of being so emotionally invested in tennis. My once-upon-a-time harmless support for Federer has morphed into full-blown love for the sport. If I thought my level of fandom at the Australian Open was dangerous, then what I feel now is bordering on lunacy. Federer’s performance at Flushing Meadows will either send me skyrocketing to new stratospheres, or nosediving into a reality where Federer loses in Grand Slams.

I suppose I cannot bring up a major loss without following it up with the next natural thought: Federer’s ‘unanswered question’, Rafael Nadal. My pendulum-like relationship with Nadal swings from fire-breathing hate to jaw-dropping admiration – I hold him responsible for all of my tennis-related mental breakdowns, but his tenacity is why he is another exception to my ‘exclusively Federer’ posts.

However, loyalties do not fade quickly, so that is all I will say about the Spaniard.

And this post for that matter. Every time I start something that is beyond match narration, I meander and end up stopping – why else do you think I can spew play-by-play Tweets, but hardly anything about the aftermath? It’s hard to shut me up when it comes to the analysis, but to encapsulate the awesomeness (whoa, that’s a legit word) of Federer… Words fail me.