{"id":799,"date":"2008-02-25T13:04:38","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T21:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=799"},"modified":"2008-02-25T13:04:38","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T21:04:38","slug":"quick-hit-federer-vs-woods-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/quick-hit-federer-vs-woods-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Hit: Federer vs. Woods Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After my Oscars party last night (did you see the Wii tennis game break out in the middle of the Oscars broadcast by the way?) I was pretty exhausted so I sat bleary eyed flipping back and forth between ESPN News and ESPN SportsCenter. Pathetic I know but I\u2019m a sports junkie. Anyway, ESPN was using bracketology<\/a> to determine the most dominant athlete during ESPN\u2019s era (1979 to the present) and they\u2019d whittled the field down to Michael Jordan<\/b> and Tiger Woods<\/b>. At that point, one of the sportscasters dismissed Roger Federer<\/b> because Woods has to play the entire field.<\/p>\n

This always pisses me off. It\u2019s clearly not as important as the Serbia-Kosovo question but I get mad that non-tennis educated sportscasters bring up this tired and unsupportable argument for dismissing Roger.<\/p>\n

Most golf tournaments use medal play which means that the lowest score wins and those who survive the cut are still standing on the last day of the tournament. Therefore, the argument goes, Tiger is playing against the entire field. Tennis tournaments are single elimination so only two players are left standing on the last day and the champion only has to win his way through his part of the draw.<\/p>\n

In response to the argument, I offer you the following question:<\/p>\n

If the four golf majors were match play (single elimination) instead of medal play, would Tiger have reached the final day in ten straight majors?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how many consecutive slam finals Federer reached and I\u2019m pretty confident the answer is no, Tiger would not have reached the final day in ten straight majors. One day of bad putts and errant drives and he\u2019d be done.<\/p>\n

Both of these unbelievable athletes will likely surpass the record holder in their sport for major wins by the time their careers have ended. I\u2019ll give Woods the slight edge because he\u2019s won all four majors and Roger has yet to win the French Open though Tiger doesn\u2019t have to skate around on clay and he doesn\u2019t have 150mph (240kmh) serves whizzing past his ear. And if Tiger wins all four majors in the same year, he clearly gets the \u201cmost dominant\u201d designation because it doesn\u2019t look like Federer will pull that off.<\/p>\n

Just don’t give me this \u201cWoods has to play the entire field\u201d crap, okay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After my Oscars party last night (did you see the Wii tennis game break out in the middle of the Oscars broadcast by the way?) I was pretty exhausted so I sat bleary eyed flipping back and forth between ESPN News and ESPN SportsCenter. Pathetic I know but I\u2019m a sports junkie. Anyway, ESPN was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}