Exhausted
First of all, congratulations to Roger Federer on reclaiming his Wimbledon champion-osity.
Secondly, Roger, couldn't you have done me a favor and put Roddick away much sooner? I stayed up until almost 3am watching you guys serve at each other. Jesus, I'm tired. I might even have gotten a bit sick in the process.
For those of you who don't know what happened, you probably don't care, but it went something like this.
Roddick broke Federer's serve (that's Tennis Speak for winning a game when you're not serving) 2 times in the first 4 sets, but Federer won 2 tie-breakers. The 5th set doesn't do tiebreakers... somebody HAS to go two-games-up to take the match (and, in last night's case, the championship). Their serves went unbroken for 27 games in a row. That is significantly more than 2 sets worth of games. (The "normal" sets top out at 12 games + the tiebreaker.) It's strange to watch the best tennis player in the world (by current rankings, and by a fairly wide swath of veteran super-champions) get tired and start to fuck up shots. It's also strange to watch Roddick serving under 100mph. But these are things that happen when emotionally intense matches (at the end of a relatively strenuous week of tennis) stretch past 4 hours.
Now, I'm going to hell to sleep. I hope I'm less tired tomorrow.
[Edit: Good lord... I got it wrong, it was in the -30th- game, not the 28th. There were 29 unbroken service games in the final set.]
Secondly, Roger, couldn't you have done me a favor and put Roddick away much sooner? I stayed up until almost 3am watching you guys serve at each other. Jesus, I'm tired. I might even have gotten a bit sick in the process.
For those of you who don't know what happened, you probably don't care, but it went something like this.
Roddick broke Federer's serve (that's Tennis Speak for winning a game when you're not serving) 2 times in the first 4 sets, but Federer won 2 tie-breakers. The 5th set doesn't do tiebreakers... somebody HAS to go two-games-up to take the match (and, in last night's case, the championship). Their serves went unbroken for 27 games in a row. That is significantly more than 2 sets worth of games. (The "normal" sets top out at 12 games + the tiebreaker.) It's strange to watch the best tennis player in the world (by current rankings, and by a fairly wide swath of veteran super-champions) get tired and start to fuck up shots. It's also strange to watch Roddick serving under 100mph. But these are things that happen when emotionally intense matches (at the end of a relatively strenuous week of tennis) stretch past 4 hours.
Now, I'm going to hell to sleep. I hope I'm less tired tomorrow.
[Edit: Good lord... I got it wrong, it was in the -30th- game, not the 28th. There were 29 unbroken service games in the final set.]