WIMBLEDON, England -- Computers, both the lifeblood and the bane of human existence, have begun lying again.
These lying computers would not be the same lying computers who had their little sniveling get-together in 2003 to keep USC out of the Sugar Bowl, but they're surely distant cousins of those other lying computers.
These would be the tennis rankings computers, and while they basically do an upstanding job keeping track of all the Russians and Serbs and Russians and Spaniards and Russians on the men's and women's lists, they've frozen their cursors and lost their minds at the top of both.
This nascent week, they continue to have Roger Federer at No. 1 in the world for a 232nd consecutive week and Rafael Nadal at No. 2 for a 155th consecutive week. That's their 12-month judgment and all -- and they're soooo judgmental as they think they're always right -- but this Wimbledon dispensed a tectonic shift.
Men's tennis pivoted this momentous Wimbledon, as the top player in the world for the most recent eternity, Federer, yielded to the top player in the world at the moment, Nadal.
He yielded ever so narrowly, by a few points here and a few shots there, by 9-7 in the fifth set in one of the most riveting and doubly ennobling matches anybody ever saw, but he yielded. His elegantly despotic five-year reign at Wimbledon had remained one of his most secure compounds, free from the hounds forever yapping meekly upward at him, until the one from Spain with the biceps and the backhand worthy of an aria got through.
With those walls penetrated, Federer is the second-most prominent player in the world, and what a strange sound that carries, seeing as how he's been ensconced as a joy-to-watch No. 1 for so long it seems he's built a mansion there.
So elongated had been his Wimbledon reign that it looked positively surreal seeing him walk around in the dark Sunday night, in his white cardigan with the "RF" logo, with that plate they give to the thanks-for-coming guy in the Wimbledon final.
It felt befuddling just seeing him at the interview dais, unable to conceal a crestfallen state that seemed to leak out into view through his pores. "Probably my hardest loss, by far," he said, thereby using the word "loss" -- at Wimbledon! -- after all this time.
His countenance bore the unmistakable suggestion of -- dare we say -- No. 2. Just to observe it made the computers seem daft, even as they arrogantly assume they're so fail safe.
