Wimbledone

Wimbledon came and Wimbledon went. My interest in Tennis waned quite a bit after my teen idols Sampras and Graf retired. I found that the blokes who came afterwards didn't exactly play the same brand of tennis that the players of the '90s played. Gone were long rallies, fast volleys and Boris Becker style diving returns. In came a sort of "wham-bham-Thank you ma'am" brand of tennis where big servers and bigger ground strokes spelt the death of interesting matches.

The way games are played changes and I'm all for change, but more than anything, what caused me to lose interest was a combination of quick buck stars who had short careers, made a quick exit. There were no more idols to look forward to. I also sorely missed long standing rivalries a la Sampras-Agassi, Graf-Seles. In a world of short careers, there was no time for outstanding duels.

When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal started vying with one another for top marks, it rekindled my interest, but again the brand of tennis played didn't quite appeal to me. All that changed on 5 July 2009. Watching the kind of game Federer and Rodick played in the final made me wonder as to how many other gems I missed in the past 5-6 years. Blow for blow, shot for shot, these two players matched each other. It was like watching two gladiators fighting it out in a Roman amphitheatre, each one looking for that moment of weakness that would give them the break they needed. That moment did not come for 4 hours and 14 minutes. Sure, they was the one instance in the second set tie-break when Federer won 5 points in a row to come up from 5-2 down to take the set. In a match which had upwards of 75 games, Federer broke Roddick's serve in only 1 game and that game won him the Championship - that's what I call the mother-of-all-breaks!

Rekindling of desires aside, there were a few things that bugged me to no end:

Commentators. In the era gone by, commentators used to say something relevant, something intelligent, some interesting information and gave us, well, commentary - what was wrong in the shot played, better ways of doing it, strategies going through the players minds etc. Not any more. I have high regard for the likes of Boris Becker and, in my opinion, he's right up there with the likes of Pete Sampras, but he just doesn't cut it as a commentator! The blokes these days say stuff for the sake of saying stuff. No more match analysis, no more strategies, no more opinions. Here's a typical example. Federer hits a cross court winner. Commentator: "Federer going for the forehand cross court shot, getting it in. The score is now 40-0". I can see that you knuckleheads! This is the type of commentary you'd expect to hear on the radio, not on TV! Oh, and this would be followed by 6 million replays of the shot from every angle perceivable and as if that wasn't enough, you'll have a graphical representation of the same shot, just to spice things up. This observation, many would agree, is not restricted to tennis. Sports in general seems to have gone to the dogs where commentary is concerned. Most of us would remember the havoc Mandira Bedi created in the world of Cricket a few years ago when she "showed" (wink, wink!) up on TV and had nothing intelligent to say, well, this is something similar, only instead of looking at noodle straps and hearing dumb talk, you get to hear stuff of the same IQ level from a suited and booted Boris Becker or Tim Henman! The prevailing logic seems to be that commentary is the retired players' club with automatic right of entry.

Andy Murray. I know I'm being cruel to Andy here. Bless him, he's extremely talented and young and is definitely going to make it big and have a 'Murray Hill' in the not too distant future. That said, when he was denied entry to the finals by a stellar performance from Roddick, I heaved a sigh of relief. I couldn't have handled another day of Murray Mania that took over the British Press over the past month and half (ever since he won the Queens or whatever). He was portrayed as some kind of demi-god who wields a magic wand disguised as a tennis racket and at one stage, some papers even seemed to hint that he is the solution to the economic climate by providing the junta with something to look forward in these bleak times. If this was India, there would be temples at ever cross road (in the middle of the junction, no doubt) in Murray's name, such was the idol worship. One may argue that coming from India, I have no right to say anything about idol worship. One may get a fat lip for saying so. In India, we need idols. In a land of a billion plus people, there is such a dearth of talent that we need blokes to look upto and talk about endlessly. Leave alone talent per-capita, talent in its entirety is conspicuous by its absence. Take Cricket. We have 15 people who are on the national team. 4 of them sit out each game secretly hoping someone from the remaining 11 fall and break their legs so that they get a chance. Of the remaining 11, 6 misfire at any given point in time. So we have 5 people with talent representing 1.3 (?) billion people. You do the math - I can't handle such large decimal numbers. Britain is not like that, they have talent overflowing from every nook and cranny in every sport. Footie (hell yeah!), Rugby, Cricket (they've got a team that misfires most of the time, so I'll discount that one), Tennis, Swimming, Cycling and God knows what else. But you've got to give it to the press here in the UK. They build temples for every sportsman whose sports happen to be in the news at the time. I only follow the Tennis news and was a bit claustrophobic with all the coverage of Murray that vied for my elusive attention.

Speaking of attention, I'm now looking forward to watching matches which Federer plays and hope Nadal gets alright soon, for they have now captured said attention.