As the players make the long, rushed journey from the Olympics to the U.S. Open this week, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on the first player to win those two events in the same year. This was Steffi Graf, of course, the owner of the most remorselessly successful career the modern game has seen. Nearly 10 years after her sudden retirement, however, that career has begun to seem just the slightest bit neglected—not forgotten, exactly, but less remarked upon than an historian of the game might expect.

Twenty years ago, Graf pulled off, if not the greatest, then certainly the most unique achievement in tennis history. In 1988 she won all four Grand Slams and topped them with a gold medal at the Seoul Olympics. At the time, her Golden Slam was a unique example of dominance on every important stage in the game. That’s still true—let’s face it, no one is going to do that again in our lifetime. But what feels equally unique in 2008, a year when Yannick Noah’s 1983 French Open win was widely memorialized, is the fact that the anniversary of Graf’s far greater accomplishment hasn’t, as far as I’ve seen, merited any attention at all.

In a sense, that’s only fair. Tennis fans and media hold Graf at a distance because she always held them the same way. Chris Evert was a beloved girl next door to everyone in America by the time she was 16. Martina Navratilova has wished and worked for acceptance from the people of her adopted country for most of her life. Monica Seles became an instant figure of sympathy when she was, you know, stabbed. Today these women are well-loved WTA icons. Graf? She was the Blonde Bomber, Fräulein Forehand. She stomped all over girls-next-door for a living, never wished for the acceptance of anyone outside of her family, and wouldn’t have had the faintest idea of what to do with your sympathy if you offered it.

I loved to watch Graf play, particularly in her early years, when she marched—that’s what it looked like she was doing between points, marching—straight to the top of the game when she was 18. We’re the same age, and along with her now-husband Andre Agassi, Graf was the first champion whom I could identify with as a generational peer, as one of my own. In the mid-80s, I relished seeing Graf stand up to Navratilova’s overweening sense of entitlement (and eventually surpass her career singles achievements) the same way I enjoyed seeing the “punk” Agassi toy with the “legend” Connors at the U.S. Open.

I heard Graf’s name before I ever saw her play. At the 1985 French Open, Chris Evert was interviewed after winning her semifinal. She had just defeated a much-hyped 15-year-old named Gabriela Sabatini, but it was a girl named Steffi Graf, whom she had played earlier in the tournament, that she seemed most pleased about beating. Evert knew who the real threat was, but I doubt she realized the extent of that threat. The next spring, in the final at Hilton Head, Graf beat Evert for the first time. She would go on to win their last seven meetings, six of them in straight sets. The year after that, in Miami, Graf didn’t just beat Evert, she blitzed her 6-1, 6-2 and showed the legend once and for all that there was no path left back to the top. The future was here. It hit hard. It ran fast. It showed no mercy.

I was shocked by how badly Graf beat Evert that day. Frankly, it was a thrill. In the past, the German, even when she was winning big events, hadn’t had a fully developed game. For every roundhouse forehand she rifled into the corner, there was a tentative slice backhand that she dumped in the net. Now, at 18, Graf’s choppy backhand didn’t seem to hurt her anymore. She may not have been flawless, or even technically all that sound, but it was clear that that wasn’t going to matter. She was going to be too fast and too powerful for everyone else. Beginning with that rout of Evert, Graf played the next two years like a whirlwind, running rings around her opponents and sweeping them off the court before they knew what had happened.

These were golden years for Graf. She had vanquished Navratilova for the moment, and her personal troubles, as well as the rise of Seles, remained on the horizon. In 1988 Graf won the Grand Slam, then added three more majors in ’89. How did she become so dominant in so short a time? At first glance, you would have thought she was too raw to win so consistently. Her service toss was too high, she took her forehand too late, she hacked her backhand and couldn’t come over it when she got nervous. Everything looked rushed, as if she had too much energy for the court and was on the verge of overrunning each ball.

But Graf did dominate, and it was her athletic energy that overcame any flaws. She did it with a flying, flopping mane of blonde hair and the best legs—in form and function—the game has seen. She did it by moving as if her feet were bouncing on hot coals. She did it by throwing her body into the ball as if she needed to end each point now. She did it by overwhelming her opponents with her relentless tempo—the term “playing like she’s double-parked” was invented for Graf, and she was the last top player to keep a ball in her off-hand during points.

Most of all, she did it with her forehand. To call this shot—with its late preparation, high take-back, and explosive contact—a “stroke” is too tame. To say that, like Ivan Lendl before her, she changed the sport with it, is too boring. The only way I can describe Graf’s forehand is to say that she wielded it like a weapon. Not in the metaphorical sense, the way we say a certain player has “a lot of weapons,” but in a very real sense. She looked like she was trying to hurt the ball with it.

Why was Graf so exciting to watch in the late ’80s? She was attractive, even sexy, but it was the way she moved on court that mattered. More than any other player, Graf played with total abandon during points, then closed herself off and went into a hard shell of concentration between them. Graf didn’t come from wealth—her father Peter, a tennis freak who began training her in the family rec room when she was 3—was a salesman. Still, her on-court presence— total excellence mixed with a reticence that bordered on the haughty—made me think of her as tennis’ version of an aristocrat. A friend of mine’s mom called her “Starchy Steffi,” but I thought this was a sign of class. She had too much of it to worry about what anyone thought of her.

That detached style, which I eventually realized was a product of a highly circumscribed early social life as much as it was a sign of class, would come back to haunt Graf in the second half of her career. After Seles was stabbed by a crazed Graf fan, Steffi was widely scolded for not reaching out to her rival. It seemed chilly indeed, though I’m guessing Graf didn’t know what to say, that she thought the situation was too emotionally fraught for any token gesture to make a difference. (I don’t remember what Graf’s public explanation was, if she had any.) Still, I lost just a little of my initial fan’s love for her as she went on to rack up many more major titles—more, most likely, than she would have if Seles hadn’t been stabbed. By the mid-90s, her dominance almost seemed too easy. Two players, Jana Novotna at Wimbledon and Martina Hingis at the French Open, handed Graf majors on silver platters. More important, Graf didn’t seem to take much outward joy from the game or the tour aside from winning. A step removed from her peers, she ruled the WTA but wasn’t fully of it.

Does Steffi deserve the lack of retrospective attention for her accomplishments, because she didn’t give the sport enough of herself in the first place? Was her success the result of a single-minded drive to grind her opponents into the dust, to hurt the ball? I was ambivalent for a while. Graf had tried to console Novotna at Wimbledon, but she had seemed to particularly revel in beating Hingis after her tear-stained meltdown at Roland Garros.

It was Graf’s induction into the Hall of Fame in Newport that helped make up my mind. Agassi, another another tennis prodigy with a love-hate relationship with the sport, inducted his wife with a classic, over-the-top tribute that was widely replayed. But it was Graf’s opening lines from a few moments later that I remember. She said that her entire tennis career had been worthwhile only because it had led her to Agassi. Strong words, but it wasn’t the sentiment as much as the way she expressed it and how much she was moved that made me think that I’d missed the real reason for Graf’s greatness.

Tennis is a sport of heart and emotion, we always say, a test of our emotional reserves. So it makes sense that, somewhere down there, the very best tennis player would have the deepest well of emotion from which to draw. Graf had it all along. How else could she have gotten those feet to bounce like that for all those years? How else could she have turned such a strange-looking forehand into the most lethal shot in history? What we think of as raw athletic ability doesn’t just come from the body; it comes from something inside as well. Twenty years ago, Graf dug down deep enough to produce the best season in tennis history—in an interview that TENNIS Magazine just did with her, she said that when she won the final point of the U.S. Open in 1988 to complete the Slam, she was so drained that she doubted she could have played another point. Would you have ever guessed that from Steffi Graf?

In this season of non-dominance on the women’s side, it’s worth remembering exactly what it takes to be a champion, to be the undisputed best, to win all the time. That’s worth a tribute, isn’t it?

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Think your kid may be a tennis prodigy? Can she do what this future 22-time Grand Slam champion was doing at 4 years old? Click the clip below to see.

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U.S. Open draw breakdown later today.

What will I do when the Olympics end? I got into them pretty deeply this weekend when I traveled, by glamorous commuter train and Nike sneaker, to the Marriott hotel in Stamford, the financial-services capital of southeastern Connecticut. My task Friday and Saturday was to write the commentary for the medal rounds being streamed live from Beijing at nbcolympics.com. This involved receiving a 3:00 A.M. wake-up call—you know you’re doomed when the woman at the front desk laughs when you tell her the time—stumbling through the shower, sleepwalking past a P.F. Chang’s, a Kona Grill, a Capital Grille, and an H & M to the local offices of NBC, staring into a computer screen while chewing on a stack of Cheese-Its, and typing. It seemed to go well until Sunday afternoon, when I received two messages from colleagues that my comments on the gold medal match between Rafael Nadal and Fernando Gonzalez weren’t showing up on the site.

Does that sound horrible? It wasn’t. We may be hard-wired to stick to our daily routines, but maybe we’re also hard-wired to break them, as long as we don’t begin our adventures with much in the way of expectations. Is there any other explanation for why I could thoroughly enjoy two sunny summer weekend afternoons spent in a hotel room sleeping and watching TV with the blinds drawn, after working all night? Like I said, part of this was that I was offered a good dose of the novelty and wide-eyed energy of the Olympics on the web and on the tube. Who knew that happiness was an HDTV, a king-size bed, and a badminton match between doubles teams from Indonesia and China? The thought of a Yankees game right now seems hopelessly mundane, hopelessly professional.

It’s been a galvanizing and surprisingly unifying Games. They’re known as the athletic event for non-sports fans—i.e., women—but that doesn’t mean us sports fans shun them. I watched Michael Phelps break his last two records in a bar where every last person, man or woman, stopped what they were doing and raised their voices and fists in triumph. The Olympics have been open to professionals for almost two decades—the crucial shift came with the admission of the NBA’s Dream Team in 1992—but they retain an amateur enthusiasm that has come as a breath of fresh air this summer. The spirit has even conquered the NBA’s current generation, who have countered their images as spoiled tycoons by dedicating themselves to team basketball and even making their way to the water-cube to pay tribute to Phelps as regular old fans.

Before this year, I’d been skeptical of tennis’ place in the Games. Along with the Dream Teamers, the sport had helped break the Olympics’ amateur tradition by sending its pros to Seoul in 1988. Over the next 16 years, the best players on the men’s side rarely won or seemed sure of how much they should care; tennis already had its gold medals, known as the Grand Slams. I felt like that might change in Beijing, as a new generation led by Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic were obviously dedicated to the event in a way that, say, Pete Sampras never was. Federer had caught the bug in the Olympic village in Sydney in 2000, well before he became a superstar, and never lost it. Nadal and Djokovic followed his lead and made the Games a priority.

The sparse crowds through the early rounds in Beijing seemed to confirm my old skepticism, but that changed during the Nadal-Djokovic semifinal. Here you could feel how the particular once-every-four-years pressure heightened the intensity of an already intense match-up. From an historical point of view, tennis was returning to its roots. The sport and its amateur code were developed in Victorian England’s public schools; the modern Olympics took their inspiration and ethos from the same place. Tennis was included in the Games of the early 20th century, and the Grand Slams, like the Olympics, were strictly amateur until 1968.

Over the weekend, I felt lucky to be calling the matches and seeing what tennis looks like when it’s removed from the tour’s week-by-week, city-by-city, money-and-ranking-point grind, when the players are called by their countries’ names rather than their own. Watching the Russians sweep the women’s singles and Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer walk away smiling with medals made me think that tennis has stepped back a bit from the aggressive individualism that has characterized the game for the last 35 years. At the very least, this is a more public-spirited ruling class on the men’s side than we’re used to seeing. It’s hardly a coincidence that, for the first time, the top three ATP players are now involved in the tour’s governing structure.

My first match call involved Federer, who played for the doubles gold medal with Stanislas Wawrinka. Two things were notable about Federer in their win over Swedes Thomas Johansson and Simon Aspelin. First, more than in the past, Federer was able to transfer a lot of his unique creativity from the singles to the doubles court. He hit more acute angles than the other guys; he improvised with return of serve lobs; he found the open spaces between and around his opponents; and most of all he served lights-out for two sets. Second, Federer was more animated, emotional, and riled up than I’ve ever seen him. After a winning point, he’d let out a long, drawn-out, almost comical “Yeahhhh!” that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Beastie Boys' License to Ill. After a losing point, he’d kick the hard court in total exasperation.

Playing the Olympics meant playing for a team, which for Federer and the other top guys meant getting to play doubles without worrying about how it would affect their singles results—it was part of the deal. This had a liberating effect on Federer, and he enjoyed himself and asserted himself more than he has in months. Here’s hoping he enters the doubles at a Slam someday. He could single-handedly resurrect that version of the sport, and it might inject some badly needed swagger into his singles game. For now, seeing him celebrate with a strange ritual with Wawrinka was a lovely moment in its own right, and some justice for the guy who made Olympic tennis seem cool again in the first place.

Unlike the men, the top women have traditionally had success going for the gold. Past winners include Graf, Davenport, Venus Williams, and Henin. This year the WTA’s power vacuum allowed for a surprise champion: Elena Dementieva of Russia beat her countrywoman Dinara Safina in the gold medal match. Safina won the first set and was on the verge of forcing a tiebreaker in the second when her serve, and then her game, deserted her. She took out her frustration on her racquet in the third—like bro, like sis—and couldn’t match Dementieva’s mix of pace and consistency from the ground. I wondered whether Safina was hurt by the fact that she was playing a veteran from her own country, one who has been to two major finals. Safina must have looked up to her at some point in her career and had trouble going for the kill against her in this setting.

As for Dementieva, she suffered only a few hiccups on her serve at the end, took advantage of a draw that didn’t include Ana Ivanovic or Maria Sharapova, and made sure she won’t be remembered primarily for her disappointing final-round performances at the French and U.S. Opens a few years ago. Her gold, alongside Safina’s silver and Vera Zvonareva’s bronze, was an Olympic blast from the past. In my mind, no other country is as closely associated with the Games as Russia, and the spirit lives on its tennis players. The Russians have won the Davis Cup and Fed Cup in recent years, and both the men and women are more focused when they play in a team setting than when they’re going for individual glory.

Finally it was time for the men’s gold medal round. Nadal versus Fernando Gonzalez—the result was never in doubt. On the first rally, Nadal drilled a forehand straight into Gonzalez’s forehand and won the point. That was the start of the Spaniard’s relentless breaking down of the Chilean’s strength. By the end of the first set, all Gonzo had from that side was a scrambling, stumbling, desperation slice; gone were the vicious, screaming winners we’re used to seeing.

Nadal played this match two days before taking over the No. 1 ranking, which was fitting. He showed off every side of his many-sided game. There was the tactical initiative (breaking down the other guy’s weapon); there was the variety of service locations (no one has more targets and no one is more accurate in hitting to them); there were the mid-game adjustments; there was the dogged fighting from behind when all seemed lost (Gonzalez had two set points on Nadal’s serve in the second set); and at the end there was the trouncing of his own nerves on the way to victory. Unlike Federer, who always looks in control of himself, Nadal’s nerves can get to him, just like the rest of us. Up 4-2 in the third, two games from gold, he suddenly double-faulted twice and went down a break point. This time he made no mistake with his serve, forcing an error from Gonzo with it.

This is a big part of what makes Nadal so much more compelling than a guy like the stone-faced Gonzalez and so many of his fellow pros. If Federer makes an art form out of hitting a tennis ball, Nadal makes an art form out of winning a tennis match. Every step, both during points and between them, has a positive purpose—that relentless positive energy, more than anything, is what separates him from his opponents, and why he triumphs over his nerves when so many of the rest of us cave into them. Nadal makes the process of winning into a drama, he makes it visible.

Isn’t that what the Olympics are supposed to be about? Competition as an art rather than a profession; desire made visible and dramatic. The iconic image from these Games will be Michael Phelps with his arms in the air, screaming after winning another gold. Who did that remind you of? It reminded me of Djokovic pounding his heart and then walking away in tears against Nadal. It reminded me of Dementieva making wild, involuntary little shrieks after winning gold. It reminded me of Federer and Wawrinka doing their voodoo ceremony after the doubles final. It reminded me of Nadal, the most passionately amateur-esque (not –ish) of tennis professionals, lying flat on his back when it was all over, as overjoyed and out of his mind as he was when he won Wimbledon. From the winners—Federer, Dementieva, Nadal, the Williams sisters—to the valiantly defeated—Safina, James Blake, Djokovic—the pros last week gave us a taste of othat old Olympian cliché: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Who said tennis doesn't belong in the Games?

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I can't load the video player on my laptop, but you can see the medal matches and my commentary on them over at nbcolympics.com. Click on "tennis" on the side of the home page and hit "rewind" once you find the match.

I finally had a chance to catch an extended amount of tennis from Beijing today, and just in time. After a largely fanless week, the men’s semis gave us spectators in the stands, passion on the court, and two moments that will live in tennis infamy.

Let’s start with the more infamous of the two. When I turned on MSNBC—or was it CNBC? USA? Univision? NBCOlympics.com?—this morning, Fernando Gonzalez and James Blake were tied at 7-all in the third set. The tennis was what you would expect from these two: lots big cuts, lots of winners, lots of errors. According to the announcers, Jimmy Arias and Barry MacKay, Blake had had three match points earlier, but I didn’t see those.

I also had trouble seeing what happened on the first point on Gonzalez’s serve at 8-9. Blake flicked a backhand pass that appeared to hit something as it went by Gonzalez at the net and landed just long. Blake raised his hand in apology as if he had won the point. But the ball was called out and chair umpire Carlos Bernardes awarded the point to Gonzalez. Blake argued that the ball had touched Gonzalez’s racquet, but Bernardes hadn’t noticed that. The TV cameras stuck with Blake during this argument, never panning to Gonzalez even as Blake looked at him to see if he was going to admit anything. I don’t know what Gonzo was doing, or if he saw Blake’s glance, but he was clearly keeping his mouth shut. Arias said he was “nowhere to be found.”

Even worse, there was no replay of the moment in question, so at this point I can’t say whether the ball touched Gonzalez’s racquet or not. Arias said it was “definite” and MacKay agreed. Here’s how an AP report put it: “On the first point, Blake hit a backhand passing shot long but contended the ball ticked Gonzalez's racket before landing, as TV replays confirmed.”

For now, these testaments are enough to make me believe that the ball did hit Gonzalez’s racquet. Afterward, Blake called out the Chilean, saying he had “lost a little faith” in him and that the incident was contrary to the Olympic spirit he had been enjoying this week. For his part, here's how Gonzalez responded to questions about the incident:

Can you please talk us through the incident that James was very upset about where he claimed that the ball had touched your racket?

If I'm hundred percent sure about it, I mean, I will give it. But I'm not sure, you know. I'm just moving, that's all.”

I’d like to believe Gonzalez, and when he says, “If I’m 100 percent sure about it, I will give it,” he almost has me. But I can’t imagine a scenario, even when you’re in motion—when are you not moving in tennis?—where you wouldn’t know that a ball, particularly one struck by a pro, has hit your racquet. If he did feel it hit his frame (and I suppose we'll never know for sure), Gonzalez, by any reasonable code of sportsmanship, should have told the chair umpire. Otherwise his victory is diminished, even if, as he says, it was only one point.

Whatever Gonzalez felt, it didn’t seem to include guilt about winning that point or the match. If anything, he hit the ball with more ferocity in the closing two games, and when it was over he cried tears of joy. Blake said after the match that Gonzalez engages in gamesmanship on a regular basis. I’ve never enjoyed watching Gonzo—his manner is too stone-faced, his game too vicious—but I haven’t heard him accused of gamesmanship in the past. He obviously cherishes the Olympics, and they’ve made him a national hero in Chile. Is it possible that Gonzalez would have given the point to Blake if this had happened in a normal tournament? If so, it would be a total inversion of the spirit in which the Games are supposed to be played.

On to our second moment of infamy, which came in the form of the most unfortunate botched overhead in tennis history. In the second semi, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal dispelled some of the bad taste that was left over from the first. They did it by giving us another in their series of classic battles of athleticism, shotmaking, and full-throated emotion. For the first time this week, I could see that the Olympics had upped the passions of both players. Finally, the sport seemed to belong at the Games—seeing Nadal and Djokovic referred to as Serbia and Spain on the scoreboard made tennis, at least temporarily, about more than individual glory. The knowledge that this was the last chance either would have to win a gold medal for four years made the stakes that much higher and the points that much more nerve-wracking.

In the end, each guy flirted with collapse until Djokovic finally did, in a spectacular way. The final set felt like a tug of war; the sideline-to-sideline rallies were that visceral. Djokovic had the better of most of them. Nadal’s shots were bouncing up into his strike zone, and he was using his backhand to change directions with the ball relentlessly. But, as is so often the case, just when Nadal seemed about to be run off the court, he pushed back and changed the terms on which the points were played. He fought from 0-30 down at 3-3. On the ad side, he was saved all afternoon by his serve, which he swung out wide and then into Djokovic’s forehand hip. He used both to bail himself out in the third and keep his nose ahead. Even though he had been in survival mode for the better part of two sets, at 4-4, with an Olympic medal hanging between the two players—you could practically see the thing around their necks—Nadal found a way to step forward, take the initiative with his forehand, and play one of his best games of the match.

When Djokovic lost the first point of the next game, I said, “It’s over.” The Serb has become a confounding figure mentally, especially when he plays Nadal and Andy Murray. Djokovic has too much self-confidence to choke in the conventional sense of the term, but he has begun to have trouble facing the moment with equanimity. Rather than getting tentative, when Djokovic feels the pressure he either bombs away indiscriminately or flips up an all-or-nothing drop shot that will end the point right away. He did both at 4-5, losing a point after hitting an excellent drop and then belting a perfect forehand onto the sideline to save a match point.

On the next one, as Djokovic stared up at a short, sitting-duck lob that Nadal had tossed his way, I was almost sure, against all reason, that he was going to miss it. He did. Credit, one more time, the cussedness of Nadal, who looked capable of tracking down anything. His defense must seem oppressive—there’s so much energy coming from his side of the sourt—to someone trying to time an overhead, no matter how easy it looks. Also credit, one more time, Nadal’s ability to find a way around his nerves without simply going for broke or ending points as quickly as possible. It was the only thing that separated him from Djokovic today.

Finally, credit both Djokovic, who hugged his conqueror at the net and walked away in tears, and Nadal, whose victory celebration was, if anything, more spontaneously joyous than the one he showed off at Wimbledon, for giving us a reason to believe that the Olympic spirit—its fervor and its sportsmanship—can be found even among the world’s richest and most famous athletes.

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As you may know, Ed McGrogan has been doing the online text commentary for the matches being shown this week at NBCOlympics.com. I'm heading to Connecticut this weekend to take over for him. If you happen to be up at 4:00 A.M. either day, and your TV is broken, pay me a visit.

In the two years that he’s been making the main-draw scene, I’ve found it hard to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Juan Martin Del Potro. At first glance, there seemed to be nothing but upside. Literally—the Argentine prodigy is 6-foot-5 and strikes the ball as cleanly from the ground as any player of any height. Throw that in with the fact that two years ago, at 18, he was the youngest player to finish in the Top 100, and last year was the youngest in the Top 50, and we seemed to have the makings of the ATP’s next juggernaut.

But there were questions. The service toss was high and the motion had a hitch that robbed him of some of the power that rightfully belongs to a man his size. The forehand backswing was loopy, and the stroke lacked the precision that’s at the core of all the world’s best shots from that wing. The guy looked a little too long—ungainly—to hit with both power and consistency. Finally, there was his youthful lack of tactical focus. Del Potro hit the ball well to every part of the court, but that’s all he did—he seemed more reactive than constructive in the way he approached points, and a little generic stylewise. It wasn’t clear whether he was good at winning, or at least beating quality opponents. Coming into Sunday’s final at the Countrywide Classic in Los Angeles, he was 1-13 against Top 10 players.

In L.A., some of those questions began to be answered. Del Potro came away with a prize scalp when he beat former No. 1 Andy Roddick in the final. More impressive was how routine he made it look; from first point to last, Del Potro was the more poised player. He dictated the action with both his serve and his return. His long arms enabled him to stab back more of Roddick’s wide deliveries than most guys can, and when the American hammered his serve into his strike zone, Del Potro had no trouble timing it, taking it early, and even getting his share of full swings at it. In the second set, he ripped one of those full swings for a crosscourt return winner. Roddick, who was testy from the start, shook his head in disbelief. How could this guy could take a “114 [mph] into the body” and treat it with such disdain?

Kids these days, huh? They’re just getting better and better. You can add Del Potro to the list of young guns making their moves this summer. This was his third straight title, after wins on clay in Stuttgart and Kitzbuhel. Del Potro obviously has a South American’s comfort on dirt, but he says his favorite surface is hard court. Part of that may be the bounce. As smooth as he is from the ground, timing is always an issue with a guy as tall as he is. Hard courts allow him not to worry about his contact point.

He couldn’t have looked any more assured in dismantling Roddick. Del Potro set the tone in the rallies without taking any chances or getting out of his comfort zone. A typical point saw him start a backhand-to-backhand rally, push Roddick deeper into that corner and force a weak slice, then run around and punish a forehand—inside-out, inside-in, he had plenty of time to decide where he wanted to drill the ball. But even when he did, there was a healthy margin for error built into those shots. His easy balance and anticipation made it look like he was playing a practice set.

Del Potro’s service toss is still too high, but he used that shot well Sunday. Rather than go for bombs, he emphasized first-serve percentage (72 percent, with just one double fault) and placement, swinging Roddick wide in the deuce court to expose his backhand on the next shot. The commentators for ESPN kept looking for a sign of nerves, but Del Potro didn’t give them any. As the second set wore on, he started to let loose more with his forehand and send the ball closer to the lines, but rarely out. Roddick never broke him, and just when Del Potro needed a big serve, at 2-2 in the second-set tiebreaker, he came up with his first ace of the match.

As for Roddick, there wasn’t much to like about this performance; he helped Del Potro in any way he could. He rarely put himself in a position where he could force the action. Instead, he spent most of his time pinned in his backhand corner chopping back uninspired slices. It’s odd to say for a guy with a game as big as Roddick’s, but he had no way to hurt Del Potro. He made no inroads with his return, where he often looped balls back from behind the baseline even on second serves. The same was true in the rallies. Roddick, even when he was given a ball to crack, couldn’t make his opponent pay a price when it counted. And on his serve, the Argentine’s got back half a dozen balls that would normally have been winners for Roddick. The American couldn’t rely on the freebies he’s always manufactured with his serve. You could see the difference.

Can we see a change in the men’s game from watching this match? I would say yes—toward size, toward backhand power, toward baseline versatility, toward all-surface skills, toward the return as a weapon of almost equal value as the serve. Roddick, of course, is the dinosaur in that formulation. It doesn’t mean the U.S.’ best player is going straight downhill, or that his serve is soon to be useless. But it does mean that a 19-year-old South American just beat him in straight sets on a hard court in a small American tournament that seemed tailor-made to give him a boost of confidence. If that’s not exactly a revolutionary event—Roddick is no longer No. 1, or even No. 5—it seems at least evolutionary. You could see it not only in the way Del Potro hit the ball, but in the way he carried himself. Nothing phased him: After a dubious injury timeout by his opponent in the first set, the Argentine came back out with the same calm focus he'd shown from the beginning and got right back to work. He still a little ungainly, and his forehand a little imprecise—I'm not prepared to put him in the Top 10 just yet—but maybe he’s going to be better at winning than I thought.

No, this column is not about Marat Safin in L.A. this weekend. Nor is it about the Olympics, which I am now suddenly excited about after viewing this slideshow of the Opening Ceremonies and photos over at Getty Images of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Fernando Gonzalez eating them up. Starting this weekend, our friend Ed McGrogan will be live-blogging the matches over the feed at NBC.com; I’ll be taking over next weekend (no, we’re not in Beijing; we’ll be doing our work from someplace slightly less hazy: Stamford, Conn.).

For now, I leave you with a humble, and perhaps somewhat disturbing, recreational piece about one man's struggle to keep it together on court.

I attended a Philadephia 76ers playoff game this past spring. Surrounding me was a staple of the city’s sports scene: Young men with loud, raspy voices who provide running commentary on the action for anyone within earshot. It’s not as bad or gross as it may sound; these guys are often knowledgeable and funny. They say what you’re thinking, for better and for worse.

The Sixers led the Detroit Pistons early but were losing that lead in a hurry. Our only hope seemed to come in the form of Philadelphia native son and all-time head case Rasheed Wallace. Each time the Pistons threatened to run away with it, Sheed would go on one of his painfully desperate arguing sprees after being called for a foul. Early in the fourth quarter he was whistled for another one. That crazed look came into his eyes again, but his teammates gently bodied him away from the referee and formed a wall between them. Still, Sheed continued to stare him down. From two rows behind me came the taunting voice of a young man who spoke for all of us: “I smell a meltdown!” For a second, there was hope that Wallace, who had been killing the Sixers with his outside shot, might get himself ejected. Alas, the Pistons coach took him out and sat him at the far end of the bench, where he couldn’t do any immediate harm.

This summer I’ve heard those four words—“I smell a meltdown!”—in my head more than once on the tennis court. I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about how the best players are the ones who can control their emotions, and for the most part I practice what I preach. I don’t spend a lot of time muttering under my breath, berating myself, or bouncing my racquet off the clay at my club. As I’ve read more about the history of the sport over the years, I’ve also taken its sporting credo more seriously than I once did. Seeing someone show serious anger on court makes me cringe now—it seems like a violation of tennis’ gentleman’s code. I’ve even gotten into the mental habit of blocking out negative thoughts and psyching myself up—I tap the court with my racquet and say a quick “come on” to myself (yes, I really do that)—whenever I’m down 30-0 on my opponent's serve. I can’t be that positive, or that ridiculous, all the time, so I give special attention to that one situation. The difference between 40-0 and 30-15 is too big to let that point go by like any other.

Then there are my less-than-positive moments. These tend to occur against one opponent of mine. We get along well, play competitive matches, and have never come close to having an argument on court—we’d both be embarrassed if we did. But there’s something about the familiarity of his game that breeds, not contempt, but annoyance. Competitive annoyance. He’s a scrambler and a good defender—he’s got too many shots to be labeled a pusher—whose anticipation allows him to run down virtually anything, even if I’m hitting from inside the service line. I can’t count the number of times he’s floated back a serve that I was sure was an ace. Even worse is his confounded, uncanny ability to race all the way across the baseline to track down a well-hit forehand of mine, stab at it just as it’s about to bounce a second time, and send it soaring into the air, after which it lands with a smack on my baseline. Just as I've begun to relax, thinking the point was mine, I’m starting it all over. This is annoying—OK, infuriating—beyond all words. Rather than play a normal shot back, I want to blast the ball over the fence and claim the point on principle. What principle, exactly, I wouldn't be able to say.

Having played my opponent so often, I obviously know that he’s going to do this. And I know that my best chance of winning is to face reality and ignore my anger. I stop and remind myself of this periodically, and I play more controlled and rational tennis for a while. But the fact that I know he’s going to make these impossible shots doesn’t help my mindset. It only makes it worse. If it happened once a match, I might say, “Wow, nice get.” As it is now, I never say that. When it happens over and over, when my best shots float back and land on my baseline time after time, it just seems, for lack of a more grown-up word, unfair.

Every once in a while it gets to be too much, and, well, I begin to smell a meltdown. I typically pick up the scent at the beginning of one of my service games, immediately after a game in which I’ve had chances to break. If I’ve blown a makeable shot on one of those points, I’ll have trouble getting it out of my head before I start serving the next game. This is one of the burdens of playing sports, and tennis in particular: The past stays with you. I know there’s no way to replay a point that I’ve lost, but my mind doesn’t accept it. The time in between points isn’t long enough for my brain to process my error as history, as something that can’t be changed. Often, in the middle of a point sometime late in a set, I’ll find myself thinking—daydreaming, really—about a crucial earlier ball that I’ve missed. I’ll even go so far as to imagine myself hitting it for a winner. This may be one clue as to why I never became a pro.

Even worse is blowing a point in a characteristic way. I’ve lost innumerable break chances over the years by floating my slice backhand return long. When I do it now, I don’t react immediately, but the frustration—with the mistake, with my nervous reaction to a key point, with my inability to improve that shot, with everything about me—begins to build.

It happened again this past weekend. Playing my usual opponent, I sailed a backhand long on a break point and eventually lost the game. On the first point of my service game, I sent two serves long; obviously, the frustration was there, even if I wasn’t conscious of it. When I bounced the ball before my next serve, it took a bad hop off the clay. This was too much for me to handle. I sighed, threw my palms in the air, and stared at the bumps in the clay surface below me, silently blaming them for this inconvenience. It was meltdown time. I was powerless to stop it.

I managed to get my serve in and we started to rally. I hit a good forehand into the corner, and, like clockwork, he got just enough of his racquet on it to send up a towering lob that barely cleared the net. I jogged forward, savoring the chance to take out some of my frustration on the ball. I let the ball bounce, took a huge—too huge—swing, and sent an overhead 10 feet long. I stood and stared across the net, not sure whether to chuck my racquet over the fence or try to beat the net to pieces with it. Instead, I walked over to pick up another ball and said, under my breath, “Sick of this baby tennis!” On one rational level, I didn’t want my opponent to hear this; but on another irrational and competitive level, I did. I wanted him to know that, unlike him, I was playing real tennis, whether I’d won that point or not. I lost the next point and sent my racquet flying toward my sideline chair with a hard, sidearm toss. Meltdown complete.

By the time we changed sides, I’d gathered myself enough to be thoroughly embarrassed. My opponent is a friend of mine and now I could only hope that he hadn’t heard what I said—of course his shots weren't unfair. I realized again that the line about “the heat of battle” is a cliché for a reason. The feelings you have when you’re in it, the things you’ll say, are mortifying just a few minutes later. This is the challenge that tennis’ gentleman’s code lays down for you: To remain civilized while you’re in the heat of the moment. Living up to it is not easy, but I’m glad it’s there, if only to make me appropriately embarrassed when I don’t.

My opponent won that set. He mixed in forehand winners and excellent serving alongside his irritating defense—like I said, he’s no pusher. I took it like a man, if not a perfect gentleman. But seeing his winners touch down in the corners was only marginally easier to take than missing my own easy shots had been. When I lose, I’m never consoled by the idea that “the other guy was just too good.” Unless I’m playing someone who's utterly out of my league, or unless my opponent aces me on every point, I always have a hand in my defeats—we all do. In an individual sport, no one can perform well unless you let them. Playing fields don’t get any more level—any fairer—than a tennis court: You’ve got the opportunity to make whatever you can out of virtually every point. That may be the most satisfying thing of all about the sport. And the most infuriating.