I think it's a shame he (Djoker) didn't pull it off. It probably would have gone down as the greatest achievement in tennis history. I know a few Fedal fans will be rubbing their hands in glee, but it would have been immense if you look beyond fandom.
Ya kidding me, bro. You wrote this to smoke me out.
I agree with some of it but not the main point. If Novak won yesterday, it would have been like a nuclear bomb dropped on mens tennis that would render any achievement of the next twenty or thirty years to be virtually worthless. The Big 3 have been so serial in their achievements, and the field so promiscuous in letting them have their way, that their gargantuan records will be spoken of in the same way as Apollo’s lyre, or Poseidens trident. They’ll become mythology rather than fact. People lose all perspective around such feats, so imagine if the tennis Holy Grail fell to them as well?
As it stands, it’s possible that some genius might arrive and scoop the CYGS, retire on ten slams and be compared easily with the greatest of all tennis names. We should hope for this, instead of yet another rolling of the drunks by the Big 3.
But also, Novak’s inability to get the job done provides a fillip for the likes of Medvedev, who may build a worthwhile CV now as the damager of the Big 3, the death knell, and give space for further great achievements by players not yet even heard of.
Also, it leaves men’s tennis with at least one great mountain still unscaled, which might waken the unappreciative to ponder just what an achievement it is. When records are so easy broken, we tend not appreciate the person who previously held the record, and often we tend to denigrate them a little, smirking at their old black and white television crewcuts. But not only was Novak trying to become the first since 1969 to win the CYGS, he was the first since then to wash up on the shores of New York with the first 3 in the bag. In fact, only Borg (78-80), Courier (92) and Novak (16, 21) have reached the midway point. Not Jimmy, Mac, Ivan, Pete, Roger, or Rafa. That’s how high a mountain it is to scale.
Novak now joins Lew Hoad in the venerable subset of greats who won 3 but fell in New York, Hoad losing to Ken Rosewall in 1956. I’m not certain there aren’t others, and we may think they’re insignificant but they’re not – they’re a testament to how tough it is to achieve this.
I’m giving Novak props for taking it this far, but I’m glad he lost because I think these things should be far more difficult to achieve than they’ve become over the last 20 years, and I’m hoping for tennis to become far more competitive over the next 20 years, so that records will actually indicate something of the difficulty inherent in them, when they’re broken…
