There's no escaping the reality that Federer remains constant
NEW YORK -- He has drained our computer keyboards of just about every metaphor. There are few phrases left to turn, few original ways to describe Roger Federer, the United States Open tennis champion for the fourth consecutive year.
In Sunday's final, he beat a bright and popular young Serb named Novak Djokovic, who had five set points in the first set and seven total. In that first set, his five set points were on his serve, and he still ended up losing the set in a tiebreaker.
Someday, Djokovic will realize he was playing Houdini, not Federer.
On the third set point, Federer nipped the baseline twice. On the fifth, he returned a 123-mph first serve deep to Djokovic's backhand corner and all the Serb could do was lunge and hit it long.
In that same first set, Federer, who seldom calls on the electronic challenge machine, almost as if doing so is beneath him, used it twice and was right both times.
In the second set, with Federer serving at 5-6, Djokovic reached his seventh set point of the match and promptly hit a forehand that was called out on the baseline. He challenged it and Hawkeye, perhaps also in awe of Federer, showed the ball a silly millimeter long. It was so close that Djokovic squatted for a while and bowed his head.
Poor Djokovic, who is just a fun-loving 20-year-old who jumped onto the radar screen of sport fans everywhere with his late-night impersonations of other players Thursday, will feel better once he starts to understand that he lost to a higher being.
Or, as tennis commentator Mary Carillo is fond of asking, rhetorically: "Does Roger have a belly button like the rest of us?"
Sadly, for the sport, Federer will now take his belly button home to Switzerland, and with it, the prominence his presence gives, and has given, his sport for so long. The pro tennis traveling road show will scatter players all over the globe, and what was competing daily for the front page of sports sections the last two weeks will quickly slip to the back pages again. That is the nature of the beast, the way the sport runs. Hundreds of tournaments and only a handful matter.
This one mattered. If you measure success by numbers, the 2007 U.S. Open was like Federer. It was No. 1.
Two weeks of glorious weather led to record crowds. The 25,230 Sunday, which included about 1,500 people who bought tickets just to be on the grounds, sit next to the fountains and watch on the big screen outside of Ashe Stadium, brought the two-week attendance total to 721,087. The USTA proudly called this year's tournament "the largest annually attended sports event in the world."
