It's funny, just the other day as I saw a report on the US Open on Sportscenter, I thought about the fact that I never watch tennis anymore. When I was a kid, we would always spend the 4th of July at our cottage and we had a tradition of watching Wimbledon on Sunday morning. This was in the days of the Borg/McEnroe rivalry, so it was really something to watch. I became a fan then and stayed one for a long time, through the Ivan Lendl era, Stephan Edberg and Boris Becker, then Courier, Agassi and the greatest of all, Pete Sampras. On the women's side, I watched first Martina Navratilova then Steffi Graf dominate the game through the 80s and 90s.
Then at some point, I just stopped watching, and so did a lot of other people apparently, especially men's tennis. For the last few years, men's tennis in the US has been on a real down slide and I just lost all interest in the game. But last night I watched a match that blew me away, Andre Agassi against James Blake in the US Open quarterfinals. I watched it on replay from the night before, actually, but I didn't know how it ended. What an incredible match. Agassi is now the old man of the game at 36, certainly in the twilight of his career. But he put on a match for the ages this time.
Agassi lost the first two sets 6-3 and 6-3 and it looked like he was out of gas. Then he came back and won the next two sets by the same score and it went to a 5th set. Blake got a break early in the 5th set and served for the match. Down 5-4 and 30-Love, Agassi blistered a return winner that Blake couldn't come close to touching, then somehow managed to break serve to stay in the match. At the beginning of the tie breaker, the audience gave them a standing ovation, then Andre quickly went down 3-0 in the tie breaker. He fought back with a variety of shots, including a beautiful drop shot that Blake got to, but Agassi put a passing shot past him for the point. Blake again served for the match at 5-4 in the tie breaker, then Agassi served for the match at 6-5. Agassi finally won it 8-6.
It brought to mind the incredible Borg-McEnroe match from 1980, when they didn't have tie breakers and you had to win the set and match by two games. They went to 18-16 in the fourth set and 8-6 in the fifth set before Borg won his 5th consecutive Wimbledon title. It was just an epic battle and it may well make me watch tennis again. James Blake is an easy guy to root for, a Harvard grad who has spent the better part of the last two years too injured to play, first with a broken neck and then with a serious infection. He bought tickets for over 200 of his friends from college to watch this match and is by all accounts the nicest guy on the tour. If you missed it, try and find the replay. It was as compelling a sporting event as I've ever watched.
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I find women's to be difficult to watch due to the more athletically gifted players just sitting back and out-powering their opponents. I have been watched Sharapova's match today and she never approaches the net, no matter how off balance she has her opponent. It looks like she's going to lose as a result; she's playing a classical defensive player who you can't beat by simply out-swinging them. But it's still frustrating to watch as a player/fan myself.
The Lleyton Hewitt/Roger Federer match should be tops though. Uusually I would say that Federer has this one locked up, but Hewitt has been a possessed man this tournament.
Amazing match, right up there with the Sampras/Agassi quarterfinal a few years ago. I'm still annoyed because I had PVRed the match, but they switched networks at 11PM ET in the middle of the 5th set.