Pushing the boundaries

Another round of masterpieces by Annie Leibovitz for the Hollywood Portfolio; equally mesmerising are the films these pictorial subjects have created.

Golden oldie

The music motif was unintended – the Grammy Awards is simultaneously showing, so I’m just goin’ with it.

Like the Black Eyed Peas foresaw – it was a good, good night. Indeed my most feeble lead-in to a Grand Slam experience, but when a song is being replayed consistently in your head, you cannot merely disregard it and hope another will eventually take its place.

The same can be said about Roger Federer. When he repeatedly produces performances of great éclat, they must be acknowledged; when he shows no signs of diminishing, the cynics should be silent. He is the upbeat in the melody, who, upon appearance, signals a good, good day. 22 Grand Slam finals, 16 titles – they are the echoes that buttress the rock star.

The final was far from “easy come, easy go”. Physical strength and mental conviction in abundance, Andy Murray was an intimidating foe. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, he only brought out the best in Federer and was unceremoniously outclassed and swept aside. The tempo may have soured with age, but the Maestro is still a litany of tennis beauty and prowess.

It seems wrong – and downright greedy – to demand a Calendar Slam from a player who has already achieved so much, but my fervent belief and optimism say that it is well within his reach. There’s no harm in dreaming bigger, right? “Go out and smash it”!

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.

Finesse

Inspired by Joachim (it happens more often than I care to admit)…

All evoke emotion and ambition – senses so strong that they might very well outweigh my abilities. This isn’t false modesty – little else is worse than falling short of expectations.

Vertigo

Put simply, there is no satisfactory way to describe the Roddick-Federer Wimbledon final.

I usually am very stingy about including other players in a Roger Federer post, but I would be remissed if I did not mention Andy Roddick’s glorious display of an arsenal of skills throughout the tournament, which stunned even the most staunch of naysayers. As predicted, Roddick made Federer work for it. Their final match was a far cry from the one in 2004, when Roddick’s kitchen sink was unceremoniously rebounded by Federer’s bathtub – this time, Roddick brought along other household utilities. He swept aside Tomas Berdych, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Murray – not easy feats by any means – and despite the popular pre-match opinion, it was a near-possible task for Roddick to scale and conquer the Swiss Alp, almost too close for comfort in the first and fourth sets. As devoted as I am to ‘Rog’, it is such a pity to see Roddick lose after an agonising 30-game fifth set, which he really didn’t deserve.

Perhaps the poem by Rudyard Kipling, emblazoned in the Wimbledon clubhouse, best surmises Roddick’s comeback, as well as Federer’s reascent to greatness (old married dudes have still got it!). I must admit that I am ‘ye of little faith’ – never in my time spent in wishful thought did I believe that 2009 would be the year Federer reclaimed his Wimbledon and World Number 1 titles, the latter being an unprecedented achievement. His victory at Roland Garros compensated for the Australian Open heartbreak and it buoyed my self-assurance of a Federer win, but that soon plummeted after the first set and brought back the nightmare of last year’s epic match. To see how visibly subdued I was, you wouldn’t know the havoc that was going through my mind until Roddick served the forehand that sent the ball into oblivion.

My head still throbs; my eyes are bloodshot from weeping; my backside aches from six hours of sitting; my heart is threatening an aneurism; and my body has yet to recover from two weeks of sleep-deprived nights. When it comes to Federer, it is ‘no holds barred’ – nothing is too long, too outlandish, too emotional, too stark raving mad… Many people cannot take me seriously, but there are reasons why he is worthy of the fanfare – 20 Grand Slam finals, 15 Grand Slams, Career Slam, World Number 1.