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PARIS—Roger Federer annexed yet another tennis feat for his
voluminous list Sunday.
He
actually won a set against Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros
in 2007.
He lost
the other three, but really now, if you pooh-pooh the
one, then you just didn’t see Nadal here these last two
weeks running around, grunting and gobbling up 21 of 22
sets.
You
couldn’t have seen the set Federer did win and the
outlandish rigor it demanded, how it bulged with a
12-point game and a Hundred Years War of an 18-point
game, how it took five grinding set points for Nadal to
yield even that morsel.
The
second set of the 6-3, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 final demonstrated
how beating Nadal in a French Open might require the
construction of so many grinding or spectacular points
that it would seem humanly impossible.
It’s
humanly impossible at the moment. Since debuting at the
clay-court major at age 19 in 2005, Nadal has won all 21
of his matches to stand halfway to Bjorn Borg with three
titles. He’s the first man since Borg to win three in a
row. Nobody has taken Nadal to five sets, and only seven
of his matches have required four sets, including one in
each year against Federer.
As
Federer at 25 begins to exhaust chances to claim the
lone major he lacks, Nadal continues to play each French
Open better than the last. “My best Roland Garros,
maybe,” he said Sunday. “I think that.”
The
French Open would be that anomaly where you can hear one
of the best players ever, Federer, stick up for himself
thusly: “I’m the only one who managed to win one set
against him.”
It would
be the place where a 10-time Grand Slam champion who
snuffs the living suspense out of many a tournament
somehow ends up with fans chanting his name partly
because, well, he’s the underdog against this one
player.
It’s
where the women’s champion, Justine Henin, said on
Saturday she’d like to see Federer win so he could own
all four major titles, but then added in ominous
prediction, “But what I saw from Nadal is pretty
strong.”
Unlike
Pete Sampras, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker or Jimmy
Connors, who all finished a French Open shy of the full
Grand Slam dinner set, Federer has reached two French
finals and one semifinal, and Federer owes his
shortcoming to a single nemesis.
“After
playing three very good French Opens, you know, the last
three years, Rafa came along and took them all,” Federer
said. “But, you know, I did the same thing to Roddick in
Wimbledon, and that’s just how it goes. Sometimes you
collide and that’s what happens.”
His
French misfortune concerns not single shots or agonizing
turning points or even the 16 break points out of 17 he
failed to convert on Sunday. It revolves around
Sebastian and Ana Maria Nadal of the Spanish island of
Mallorca deciding to start a family in the mid-1980s.
So even
as Federer might’ve felt gutted Sunday after 190
fruitless minutes of tennis, he kept offering one
explanation: Nadal.
What
about all those break points? Nadal. Disappointment over
not becoming the first player to hold all four titles
simultaneously since Rod Laver in 1969? Nadal. His
inability to play his best tennis? Mr. Muscles over
there with his liquid court coverage and his pounded
shots that dive down just inside lines. Which stroke
failed Federer most amid the 59 unforced errors?
“My
opponent was tough, made it hard for me,” Federer
answered.
“He’s
such a different type of player, you know, and he kind
of wears you out or wears you down, you know,” Federer
said. “He’s the type of guy that’s going to make you
miss, you know. So you can never really say you played
great against him, for some reason, you know.”
He
leaves Federer pining to play “against a righty, you
know, where the game is played in a normal manner.”
“With
Rafa being a lefty, the whole thing gets kind of screwed
up, you know,” Federer said. “So that’s the tough part.
That’s why I can never really say I played fantastic or
bad against him, because it’s just awkward.”
Only at
the French Open and only against Nadal might you hear a
grunt and a little wail on consecutive points from
Federer, as in the second game of the fourth set, his
last chance at a service break. Only here and only
against Nadal does Federer’s body language start to look
fluent in distress, especially if Nadal serves 86
percent in the fourth set and hogs 18 of his last 20
service points.
Even
just three weeks after Federer beat Nadal in Hamburg to
improve to 1-5 head to head on clay—now, 1-6—Nadal plus
Roland Garros red winds up equaling certainty, even in
the match of the year. So as Federer walked out to field
the last of Nadal’s 19 service games and the 18th Nadal
would win, doubt had left the premises.
Red clay
smeared on the socks, body crouched to return, Federer
looked sort of frail and haggard, weird for the first
man since 1938 to reach eight consecutive Grand Slam
finals. Match point hurried along as fast as it could,
and Federer’s screaming forehand long at 40-love sent
Nadal toppling to the clay and dirtying up his shirt for
yet another second Sunday in June.
“So
first year was very emotional because it was the first,”
said a winner who just turned 21. “Second year was very
emotional because I come back from injury. And this
year, I am very happy because I play my best tennis
here.”
After he
clambered into the stands and hugged his uncle and
coach, Toni Nadal, plus two parents and one horde of
others, he stood with trophy presenter Gustavo Kuerten,
a couple of three-time champions there on the platform.
The king
of the sport stood in the background with another one of
those rectangular runner-up plates.
Later
on, Federer would give thanks he’s not an Olympian so he
doesn’t have to wait four years for another shot. He’d
call it a positive tournament. He’d hug his parents
goodbye in the players’ lounge without looking
particularly dejected. He’d say he doesn’t expect Nadal—or
himself—to turn up in the next 10 straight finals, even
if everybody expects to see Nadal.
But just
after Federer stepped down from the platform with his
plate, there came another odd sight from the Nadal age
in Paris. A tournament official came over to usher
Federer to an on-court TV interview. In a rare stop shy
of utmost graciousness, plus a hint at the frustration,
Federer declined. While Nadal posed for photographs, the
only guy to win even a set from him wheeled around and
walked out waving and holding his goofy plate.
Anyway,
if asked for an explanation, he’d have just said Nadal.
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