Join us for the men’s Australian Open final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday morning, January 27, at 12:30am (PST)/3:30am (EST)/9:30am (CET). We’ll stay up if you’ll stay up.
Roger Federer will not be in his eleventh consecutive slam final thanks to Novak Djokovic. What effect will this loss have on Federer’s legacy?
Novak Djokovic had his own booster club in Rod Laver Arena during his semifinal match against Roger Federer. His parents and two younger brothers each had one letter of Djokovic’s nickname spelled out on the front of their black and white Adidas outfits and when they stood up you could read it: N O L E.
They stood up a lot. Nole knocked Fed out of the semifinals at the Australian Open and for the first time in 10 slams, we will not be asking ourselves if so and so can beat Federer in the final. He’ll be on his way home. The king of tennis has been deposed.
He will not win the grand slam this year and he will not win the golden slam – all four slams plus the Olympic Gold medal. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that it’s very unlikely that he’ll win a grand slam in the future and that means something very, very important.
Fed can move ahead of Pete Sampras in the Greatest of All Time conversation with three more slams, but Sampras has always had to share that title with Rod Laver. Laver won two grand slams and Sampras never got close. Laver might be the Greatest of All Time 1a, but the conversation will always have to include him and that makes Fed’s loss to Nole huge. Federer got close to a grand slam, very close, and he still could win the French Open, but he will not stand alone as the best tennis player ever to play the game.
I am eternally thankful that I live in an era where I’ve been able watch Roger Federer do his magic. I liked nothing better than to sit down to a slam semi or final and know, absolutely know, that Fed would come alive at some point and take over the match. He’d hang around and poke and prod his opponent until he turned the switch on and cruised to the finish. And in every match there’d be at least one shot that would make me freeze then turn to the person next to me and ask, “Did I really just see that?”
The truth is that what a champion loses over time is the ability to raise his level on command. There’s no pill for that. None that are legal, anyway. Nole was cracking the ball and Fed couldn’t respond.
There were signs. There were those consecutive losses to Guillermo Canas, a Wimbledon final that Fed won by attrition more than anything, consecutive losses to David Nalbandian, and then the five set squeaker over Janko Tipsarevic, of all people.
The reign is over and now that it is, well, I’m sad. But I also have to say that these last two days have been as exciting as any I can remember in my long love affair with tennis. I can literally feel the body of tennis jump up out of its chair and throw its arms to the sky. The world is watching tennis again.
Everyone is talking about Nole Djokovic and the perfect match unseeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga played to knock Rafael Nadal out of the semifinals. Wimbledon is now up for grabs and people want to know how long it’ll take Nadal to overtake Fed for the number one ranking or will Djokovic be the one to do it and is Tsonga really that good?
Most of the tennis season lays ahead of us and right about now, it looks like it’s gonna be a whole lot of fun.