A cracking game of tennis!!

The love of tennis grew slowly in me.

In my earliest childhood, the Wimbledon fortnight was an obscure torture - banishing my favourite TV programmes from their accustomed slots, and seducing my parents' attention (especially my mother's) away from me. The scoring was unfathomable. The action was repetitive. And the matches seemed to last all day. Sometimes, indeed, they really did last all day - or at least, far, far beyond the range of a 4-year-old's temporal imagination.

But somehow I got sucked in. Maybe it was the relentless, hypnotic rhythm of the thwop-thwop-thwop of the balls. Maybe it was a desperate wish to find some form of communion with my parents. Maybe (a few years later) it was the very short white dresses (although all the pretty girls crashed out in the opening rounds; amongst the serious contenders only Chrissie Evert and Gabriela Sabatini exercised any hold over my pre-pubescent libido). Within the space of a couple of years in the early '70s I went from being a tennis-hater to being a tennis nut.

I became enraptured by the compelling geometry of the court. I finally started to appreciate the logic of the scoring structure, and the very protractedness of the game, the fact that a drama - of many shifting scenes - could play out over 2, 3, 4 hours or more. I loved the gladiatorial aspect of it, players locked in desperate combat before the eyes of the crowd. Above all, I was fascinated by the psychological dimension of the encounters - the way that you could so often see the shifting balance of power between two players not in the quality of shots they were making but in their facial expressions, their body language, their aura.

[This is something of an aside here, but I think one of the most startling, most revealing sporting spectacles I've ever seen was the Borg/Connors match-up at Wimbledon near the end of their careers. I believe it was the quarter-final or the semi in 1981, probably the last time they played each other. Connors came out like a man possessed - realising that this might be his last chance to defeat his nemesis, and determined to do something about it. I don't think I've ever seen someone playing with such furious, sustained emotion for so long. I don't think I've ever seen somebody hitting the ball so goddamned hard. And he was seeing the ball beautifully, striking it so well every time. Borg couldn't live with it. He lost the first set to love. He hardly won a point. In the second set he started to be able to hold his own service game, with difficulty - but he was still basically getting blown off the court. He could hardly get his racket on the ball most of the time. The great 5-time champion was not just being beaten, he was being outclassed, humiliated. But (like my great hero and role model, Cool Hand Luke) he just would not give up. And you could see that it was starting to get to Connors. It looked like the match was over and done with. He'd hammered Borg into the ground for an hour or more. I think, if memory serves me, that he even got an early break - perhaps two - in the third set. But Borg would not give up. He just kept hanging in there, kept coming back for more. And Connors wilted - more mentally than physically, as if he had burned himself out with the emotional intensity of his initial onslaught. His self-belief wavered, and then crumbled. Borg somehow clawed his way back into the third set; and then won the next two fairly comfortably. It was an awe-inspiring, heart-rending piece of sporting theatre, utterly unforgettable - and a powerful lesson. And maybe Borg burnt himself out in that tremendous struggle, too... That was the year he finally lost his crown to McEnroe.]

I haven't been able to watch much tennis since I came to China. There's not that much on, it's always at crazy hours of the night, and it is strangely hard to follow without the familar English-language commentary accompanying it. And, much as I admire Roger Federer's ability, his dominance of Wimbledon does seem to have become a bit of a bore in recent years; there aren't that many people around who can give him a really good scrap - at least, not on grass.

Not until last night, anyway. I had practically forgotten that Wimbledon was going on; I hadn't seen or heard anything about the Championships this year. But I happened to get home last night just as the Men's Final was starting, and stayed up watching it on local TV - mesmerised, ecstatic - until the denouement at 1.30am (local time in Beijing). It's been quite a while since we had a 5-set final, hasn't it? I don't think anyone took 2 sets off Pistol Pete in the last round..... Did Pat Rafter take Goran Ivanisevic to a fifth set? I think maybe he did; can't really remember now. But before that, you're probably looking back to the Becker/Edberg days for such a close-fought contest.

And what a 5-setter last night's match was! That has to be some of the best tennis I've ever seen, and the match was on a knife-edge most of the way through. I thought Nadal was playing the better tennis for most of it, but he just couldn't make it stick; apart from the 4th set, when Federer lost his focus badly for a while, he rarely looked like breaking his opponent's serve (managing to do so only once, as far as I can recall - I confess that, dazzling as the match was, I was very weary, and did doze off briefly a few times). It's often said of the great champions (it was certainly said a lot of Borg back in the '70s) that they play the big points better (ah, the beauty of that scoring system!). That certainly seemed to be true of Federer yesterday. He was a little inconsistent, making too many unforced errors; kept getting himself into trouble, kept getting himself out of it (apart from in the 4th, when he had a bit of a suppressed tantrum). He only really showed his dominance in the tie-breaks, and in the final set, when his game went up a gear-and-a-half.

Nadal, though, is an extraordinary player. I wonder if he can go one better next year. I'll be watching.