Federer is Still the Earth's Greatest Tennis Player

Great for Novak Djokovic last night. That was a really convincing straight set win.

In sports, it seems like you have to either be invincible or you suck. So any loss for Fed is a bigger story than it should be.

Federer made a great point in his press conference afterward:

ROGER FEDERER: Of course, I've created a monster, so I know I need to always win every tournament. But semis is still, you know, pretty good. But, yeah, I'll analyze and see if I have to make changes for next year. But, honestly, I think I did play pretty good. I didn't play my best throughout the championships, but it was pretty solid, so it was okay.

Q. You don't really feel like you've created a monster, do you?
ROGER FEDERER: Well, some sort of, yeah.

Q. Can you elaborate on that?
ROGER FEDERER: Well, winning every other week, you know, lose a set and people say I'm playing bad. So it's my own mistake, I guess.

Q. Do you need to be able to shut that out more?
ROGER FEDERER: Not at all, no. I got used to it by now.

Last year he loses two matches to Canas, a match to Nalbandian, and at one point in the year I think he loses two matches in a row. These loses yield so much controversy among sportswriters and fans that it's as if the wheels came of his career. But don't forget that this happens during the same year that he wins three slams, a fifth Wimbledon in a row and a fourth US Open in a row. I mean, come on. He's still the best out there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Food Spending Survey Results

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my readers to share what percent of their disposable income they spent on food. My intent was to double-check the shocking government data on food costs that we recently wrote about here at CK. You'll recall that the data showed that food costs have fallen dramatically since the 1930s as a percent of disposable income. This data is compelling evidence that despite all the concerns bandied about in the media in recent years about rice shortages, corn shortages and other drivers of food price inflation, in reality our food has never been cheaper. But I wanted to see what the results were for regular people, and that's why I asked readers to weight in on their spending. So what were the results? How do CK's measure up compared to the overall US population? Well, we spend more on food. By at least five percentage points. You'll recall that the median spend on all food was 9.6% according to the government data. CK readers averaged 14.7% ...
Read more

The Obliteration of Roger Federer

How is it possible that a player with Roger Federer's sublime talent can look like such an amateur in the French Open Final? How can Rafael Nadal beat him so badly? There's some encouragement here for all of us club players out there. Roger is forcing it. He doesn't have a lot of chances in any given game to take control of a point. Rafa is such a quick player, such a natural retreiver, and he can go from defense to offense in a point so quickly that Roger knows that any potentially neutral ball Rafa hits to him might be the last he sees. That extra mental pressure is what causes Roger to force shots-- just as regular players like you and I force shots when we are playing an opponent with just a slightly better baseline game. And if you know you might only get one or two chances in a GAME to put away a point, you'll go for a little bit too much on any given shot. Some of those shots might go in, but on the margin most of those shots become unforced errors. T...
Read more