It's 3:30 a.m. here in London. I'm back in Islington after my last long commute from Wimbledon. My friends and my wife, who flew in on Friday for a short holiday, are asleep. I have one desire: to watch that match again.
I know there's a large appetite for technical analysis among the readers of our site, and usually I'm game for that. Not tonight. Forehands, backhands, chips, slices, volleys, wide serves, kick serves--all those shots, and all the choices associated with hitting them (when, where, how often, how hard) played their customary roles in this match. I'm not interested in any of it, though. All I want to know--and sadly, I'll never know it--is how two athletes as superb as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal performed at this level despite the expectations (the match had been billed as the blockbuster to beat all blockbusters for three weeks), the pressure (Federer seeking his record-breaking sixth consecutive title, Nadal a major that would confirm his greatness, rather than his clay-court greatness), and the many disturbances (rain delays, wind, cold air, darkness, and an odd blue-red flickering light inside the scoreboard in the final game that didn’t stop Federer from hitting a backhand service return winner on match point). We've all come to expect great things from Federer and Nadal, but this? No, this was too much to ask. We tennis fans are now spoiled for good, because our sport cannot, I'm convinced, get any better than this.
The last two years at Wimbledon, I've thought back to the day before the first Federer-Nadal final here, back in 2006. A few of us visited Nadal at the flat he had rented (with his family) a short walk from the grounds. Nadal invited us upstairs; in his bare living room (couch, television, video game console and not much else) he sat on the floor in the corner, a shy boy who perhaps regretted allowing a small pack of reporters into his home. One remark Nadal that day has stuck with me since. "How will you deal with playing Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final?" the question went, or something close to that. "Do you possibly think you can win?"
"I'm gonna play the final of Wimbledon," Nadal said. He paused. "The final of Wimbledon. I don't want to lose."
Nadal was a believer then, and as of yesterday, what few doubters remained in this world came to believe in him, too. No tennis player since Bjorn Borg has been so certain of himself, so unflappable under pressure, so concentrated on the task at hand that nothing--from large worries like the inspired and clutch performing of his opponent, to trivial annoyances like a warning for a time violation--disturbs him. Nadal had a 5-2 lead in the fourth set tiebreaker yesterday and let it slip. How many other players would have started the fifth set with such confidence, with such determination after being one remarkable Federer backhand from the Wimbledon title? None, I say. He may have the best forehand in the world, he may have two of the fastest feet and two of the strongest biceps, but conviction is Nadal's chief talent.
I've tossed stats and analysis aside in this post; I don't want to delve into rankings, either. But I think we can all agree on this. No matter what the rankings say--and they continue to say "Federer"--at this moment in time, Nadal is the best tennis player on the planet. He hasn't lost a match since suffering an injury in Rome. He won in Hamburg. He won the French Open. He beat Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic at Queen's Club. At Wimbledon, he punished six different men and then, to top it all, beat the best grass court player since Pete Sampras--a man in the running for best player of all time--in one of the most intense, enthralling matches in the sport's history (Mr. Bodo, whose thoughts on the match are here, told me somewhere near the end of the fifth set, as we looked on in awe, that this was "the best match of the Open Era"; Bodo, I'm sure you know, doth not speaketh lightly).
Federer played some of the best tennis I've ever seen him play. From late in the third set until early in the fifth set, he missed at most two or three forehands. He drilled ball after ball, but Nadal kept returning the favor, kept running, kept thinking his time would come. It did. It has. It doesn't matter if the point system agrees, or if he fades in the summer hard court season. There can only be one No. 1, and right now, it's Nadal.
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