After Rafael Nadal lost his second-round match at Wimbledon, shockingly, against Lukas Rosol, I hopped up and walked over to share the news with another tennis fan. More specifically, another Roger Federer fan. I smiled. He smiled. We turned to the draw and considered what else stood in our man’s way. The problem: Novak Djokovic. The solution: “Let’s hope he gets hurt.”
Is it wrong to root for an opponent to lose, choke, get hurt? Morally? Ethically? Maybe. I was raised not to cheer the other guy’s missed free throws, his double faults, his errors. Just be thankful they happen and get on with your business. On a competitive level, should Yankees fans root for the Red Sox to be ground into the dirt, early, or for their mutual success to lead both teams to the A.L.C.S., where they would then have the chance to ground the other into the dirt themselves? A victory there would be more satisfying. A loss more devastating.
Rooting for an individual’s failure, or injury, seems more insidious—more personal, more cutting—than rooting against a team. In this case, expecting Nadal to lose would have been unreasonable: he hadn’t lost in the second round at a Grand Slam since 2005, when he was nineteen. (Federer, I feel the need to point out, hasn’t lost before the quarter-finals of a major in eight years.) There was little reason to expect he would lose here, and even if Federer fans the world over had sat in front of their televisions holding voodoo dolls with long hair and longer shorts—I’m not saying I know anyone who did—they couldn’t have reasonably expected success.
Unfortunately, that may be what the Federer fan is left with, now that our man has turned thirty, and missed out on eight of the last nine Grand Slam finals. He’s been passed by Djokovic and Nadal, there’s no doubt, but has remained close enough to leave open the possibility of one more win. Nadal’s half of the draw—Djokovic and Federer are on the other side—is now wide open and has left room for an unexpected finalist: Andy Murray, the hometown boy, or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, or Andy Roddick, who has blitzed through his first two matches. (O.K., maybe not Roddick.) This, followed by the U.S. Open, may be Federer’s last best chances to push his career Grand Slam record to seventeen titles. How are your knees, Novak?
Photograph by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images.
