CDoes one thing feel completely impossible and completely unavoidable at the same time? This, perhaps, was the paradox of the most recent Great Comeback In Tennis History: once it started you could already see how it ended. We’ve all been doing this for 15 years. The muscle memory is too strong, the emotional liturgy is too ingrained. That is why, from the moment Rafael Nadal started to recover his Australian Open final against Daniil Medvedev from two sets down, it never crossed my mind that he would lose.
At the moment of victory, the crowd roared and the commentator hailed the “miracle of Melbourne” and Medvedev paid tribute to an “incredible champion” and this too felt comforting, hypnotic, pleasantly familiar. It had been another great game, probably the biggest, definitely the biggest. Nadal, with his 21st Grand Slam title, was now definitely the greatest, along with the other two who were also the greatest. Upstairs in the press box, the world’s best sportswriters flexed their fingers to write and once again turned to the pointless but highly lucrative matter of legacy.
None of which are meant to be a slight on the players themselves, or the level of skill required. Nadal said his career should be remembered for moments and not for mathematics, but out there in the afterlife, the world quickly proved him wrong. This was, after all, a seismic development in the “goat debate.” A decisive move in the “goat race”. Nadal’s victory, we were told, had pushed him to the forefront of the “goat talk.”
With only a modicum of distance, it is possible to observe what a strange and declining state of affairs this is: the male half of an entire sport reduced to the level of a pub debate, endless swirling noise that seems to have sucked all the oxygen and lots of fun outside the bedroom.
Smart and knowledgeable people now go on TV and discuss head-to-head records and winning percentages. Increasingly hostile online fandoms hurl memes and insults at each other like Top Trumps.
At what point does it stop seeming relevant, constructive or even remotely interesting and becomes an industrial waste of everyone’s time? This is not Nadal’s fault, any more than it is Roger Federer’s or Novak Djokovic’s. Rather, the problem is with men’s tennis itself, the people who cover it, the people who follow it, and the people who market it: a panoply of well-meaning characters who in recent years have begun to pander to the creation of sport myths. to a vaguely unhinged degree. In a way, it’s a form of real-time nostalgia, this fetishization of statistics and superlatives and numbers and records (some of which, we’re breathlessly informed, never break!).
After all, if this was just a fun debate, then we could probably leave it at that. But tennis’s consecration of its self-proclaimed golden era has real-world consequences, especially for the players who follow in its wake: the spiky Medvedev, the exciting Jannik Sinner, the brilliant Carlos Alcaraz. Attention, time, energy, media coverage, sponsorships, prime time TV slots: none of this is an infinite resource. You give it to someone and by extension you take it from someone else. What if a fraction of the marketing budget and columns spent on the Big Three had been dedicated to women’s tennis, which is quietly serving up a new era of gripping rivalries, compelling storylines and new characters?
The same goes for power. Despite their excellence on the pitch, there has been a self-perpetuating element in the Big Three, a dynasty that has been enabled and encouraged, often by the very organizations responsible for expanding opportunities.
Last week, Denis Shapovalov, the world number 12, claimed that the Big Three receive favorable treatment from referees. “They’re already so hard to beat, but if you give them more advantages, it gets a lot harder,” he said, which raised a few eyebrows but is really just an extension of what has been a largely unspoken convention in the game. sport for years.
Court schedules and assignments are routinely built around them. Rules are relaxed, surveys are taken, medical exemptions are provided. Nadal has admitted asking that certain referees not take charge of his matches. At last year’s Australian Open, Nadal and Djokovic (Federer was injured) were allowed to train at a luxurious Adelaide resort, while most of their rivals were forced to quarantine in a hotel. Yes, they have also been better than everyone else in tennis. But there is something vaguely unsettling about the way the authorities have paved the way for them.
The real question is what comes next, once the Goat talk has finally died down, once men’s tennis has finally drawn its last drops of value from the Big Three era, once its great champions have gone and taken their banality of miracles with them. “They’ve only really traded three players over the last decade and now he’s caught up with them,” Nick Kyrgios said last week.
While Nadal’s triumph will fuel the promise of eternal empire, that day will come, and probably sooner than we think. After all, if the Big Three have taught us anything, it’s that something can seem completely impossible and completely unavoidable at the same time.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism