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Volume #0003 by Zach Bigalke

25 March 2009

This column originally appeared at FanNation from February to September 2008. You can find Bigalke riffing about a range of stories from sports around the globe weekly here at Informative Sports.  

Inevitability... it’s a word bandied about often in sports. It was inevitable that this or that player would find success, or that this guy would fail, or that this team would dominate. Oftentimes we find that inevitability is fleeting. A team on top of the world one minute can quickly tumble down the mountainside the next. As they say, it’s not the ascent but the descent back to safety that defines the quality of mountaineer. We are bound to turn the pages on the calendar with regularity; the earth will keep on rotating and revolving and doing all that cosmic voodoo that it is cosmically compelled to do. That’s about all we can say with any certainty on any given day...

 But every so often there does come along that sublime talent, that one-in-a-billion genius that dominates his or her realm of athletic competition. These rarified wunderkinds exhibit the ability to succeed even when the circumstances would assume otherwise. So this week, let’s have a salute to some of these athletes who uniquely cause jaws to drop and eyes to remain glued to endless replay loops...  

For a long time in tennis, it appeared that the sport had found its male breadwinner for years to come when Roger Federer burst onto the scene. The natural successor to Pete Sampras, the all-time Grand Slam singles champion, Federer’s revelatory moment came in his fourth-round defeat of Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001. But just like Sampras, there was always that hitch in Federer’s game that just wouldn’t allow either to taste true success on clay.  

Clay had never been Rafael Nadal’s problem. The kid from Mallorca thrives on the stuff. From the first time he faced Federer, he had the upper hand. In the third round of the NASDAQ-100 Open (Miami Masters) down in Key Biscayne in 2004, the two squared off for the first time. Nadal upset the Swiss dynamo -- fresh off his first Australian Open victory over Marat Safin -- in straight sets, needing only seventy minutes to thrash Federer.  

Federer would even the career series at one apiece when the two met again the next year in Miami, this time in the final. It wouldn’t look nearly as easy for Federer in 2005 as it had for Nadal in 2004. The Spaniard took the first set 6-2 and held on to win the second set in a tiebreak. Federer held off two match points in the third set, taking the final three sets to wrest the title from his young challenger in just under four hours. It would be his last taste of success for over a season. The two would meet five times over the next year, beginning with the 2005 French Open final and finishing with the 2006 edition. All five times Nadal won; over sixteen hours of tennis between the two titans of the sport and the best Federer could do is scratch out a set here and there.  

Grass would prove Nadal’s Kryptonite. The 2006 Wimbledon final, where Federer finally broke his losing streak with a four-set, three-hour masterstroke of methodical grass-court tennis, would only buy the man borne of Basel a temporary reprieve. He would not lose to Nadal again in 2006, winning again in the semifinal of the Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai to close out the season. They traded punches to begin the clay-court season -- Nadal took the final at Monte Carlo; Federer ended Nadal’s 81-match clay-court winning streak with a come-from-behind finals victory in Hamburg; and Nadal took his third straight French Open title in Paris with a four-set knockout of Federer. They would meet again at Wimbledon... and again grass got the better of Nadal. Shanghai proved another stumbling block, and the career record between the two was tightened to 8-6 Nadal.  

The clay set Nadal back on course. He notched Monte Carlo, Hamburg and his fourth French Open -- all over Federer, all but Hamburg in straight sets. But it was what he did in their past two encounters which has seen Nadal turn the corner from clay-court specialist to all-around champion. No longer the guy tabbed to dominate Roland Garros in an otherwise Federer-swept season, Rafael is on a collision course with history.  

First, in a nearly five-hour match for the ages, Nadal conquered the grass once and for all with a five-set survival of Federer in a passing of the torch. The combatants, snatching forth momentum for himself only to watch it dissipate and return once again, traded punches. Nadal took the first set, then the second. Federer survived first one tiebreak, then another, en route to the fifth set. Neither wanted to cede his service; fate did not yet want to witness the end of this spectacle. But finally, on the sixteenth game of the final set, the match and the title belonged to Nadal.

 It would not have seemed right had his hardcourt Grand Slam jinx been broken against anyone other than his clean-cut Swiss doppelganger. Another four-plus-hour affair, the two traded barbs back and forth. As is so often the case when these two play, Nadal took the first set 7-5 . Federer answered 6-3 in the second set; Nadal would regain the advantage with a tiebreak winner in the third. Federer responded with yet another 6-3 set, but would not save enough gas for the finish. Nadal closed out 6-2 to sweep to victory in Melbourne, the first player in men’s history to be the reigning Grand Slam champion on three surfaces.  

If his form this year is any indication, Nadal’s star is ascendant while Federer wanes. He recently cruised to victory over Andy Murray, the world’s fourth-ranked player, in only eighty minutes at Indian Wells. Dropping only three games in victory, Nadal is playing like a man possessed. Federer, on the other hand, was the guy who Murray felled to reach this final. With six Grand Slam titles to his name at such a young age, it looks more and more every day as though it was Rafael and not Roger who was destined to displace Sampras from the pinnacle of the record books...

It’s things like this that keep me up thinking at night -- the questions that to the unaccustomed eye seem trivial, but to the trained and vigilant fanatic are the golden fleece of our passions. Sports, if anything, are about finding the resplendent glory that is attainable in the human condition. We bask in the reflected glory when one of our favorite teams emerges the champion of this or that league. We exalt when the horses we just plunked down a $2 trifecta on come up in order. We all -- yes, even a non-traditional sports fan participates from time to time in the more traditional of pastimes -- fill out our NCAA Tournament brackets in hopes of besting our friends and colleagues in this or that pool. A fan can ride the tornado of emotions from one end of the line to the other.

 We pick out those for whom we intend to cheer, and then we do it to our heart’s content. Sometimes we latch on to the superstar, the guy who can do no wrong. Sometimes we fall for the damaged goods. But, objective as we can try to be, we are going to fall sooner or later deep into fanhood. Those athletes which we adopt as our standard-bearers define a facet of our lives.

 That is why I was so overjoyed to see my standard-bearer take this year’s edition of Milano-Sanremo in his first start. Mark Cavendish, only 23 years down in an already-illustrious life, fulfilled my most earnest attempts at playing Bigalkedamus by taking the first of the season’s one-day classics in an instant classic of a photo finish. He’s already taken six grand-tour stages (all last season: two at the Giro d’Italia and four at the Tour de France), two world championships on the track, and now one of cycling’s monuments in a still-blooming career.

 The best of the best exude a confidence which resonates and precedes their appearance at an event. For Cavendish, the thought which first comes to most people’s -- and which first pops up through the magic of Google as well -- is “brash”... “cocky”... “arrogant”... and with the morsels he dishes up to the press, it is hard to counter such superlatives.

 “The fact is, you look at the replays of my wins at the Tour, and I'm the fastest sprinter. I'm stating a fact. It's not just me saying 'I'm the fastest sprinter' without backing it up -- I'm stating a fact, you know? I don't see how that can be seen as arrogance when it's just telling the truth. But people can take me as they want? I don't give a shit really.”

 But Cavendish is no diva in a cyclist’s body. He won seventeen races in 2008, and is already on pace to eclipse that number -- which would be a good career for many a rider. With the final days of March trickling away, the season is still barely budding out of its winter dormancy. Cavendish, though, has been hard at work solidifying his claims. The proof really is in the replay... as Heinrich Haussler found out in this year’s centenary edition of Milano-Sanremo. He and teammate Thor Hushovd, riding for the Cervelo TestTeam, seemed to have set the race up to perfection to bring victory to the team.

 Haussler, starting the lead-out for Hushovd, ended up ratcheting up the pace too high. The Norwegian sprinter lost his teammate’s wheel, and Haussler gained ground on the peloton. In a race that has become the coming-of-age breakthrough for many a rider in recent years, it appeared that the 25-year-old German would follow in the footsteps of Filippo Pozzato (24 at the time of his 2006 victory), Fabian Cancellara (27 in 2008), and Gabriele Colombo (23 in 1996) as young riders who conquered La Primavera. But as much as Cavendish can boast, he can back it up even better. Just like Oscar Freire pipping Erik Zabel at the line in 2004, Cavendish caught Haussler at the line. It was the 23-year-old besting the rider two years older, making the theory even more skewed toward a youth movement on the roads of northern Italy.

 Milano-Sanremo was his sixth victory of an already-successful season. But don’t look for Cavendish to rest on his laurels. He’s still got more to prove in Italy, where the Giro d’Italia is less than two months away. After that, July is just around the corner... and you know Cavendish has to fancy his chances in at least four or five of the stages this year. Cocky? Arrogant? No... Cavendish is already warranting his confidence despite his youth, one finish line at a time...

And in this grand spirit of youth, I’ve been sitting here pondering the best young goalscorer in Europe this season. There are certainly the usual names out there, but if I had to pick a guy I saw landing a fat contract in the next couple of years from one of the Italian or Spanish or English giants, it’d be Karim Benzema. Who, you ask? Why, the six-foot forward who plays for Lyon and the French national team. He’s scored eighteen goals for his club this season -- twelve in the French Ligue 1, five in the UEFA Champions League as Lyon advanced to the first knockout stage before exiting at the hands of Barcelona (a future suitor for Benzema?), and one final goal in the quest for the Couple de France.

 He had 26 goals at the end of last season, and has already amassed 53 goals for his club and five for his country at an age when most Americans would be taking their first legal drinks. Hell, he was born a day AFTER my younger sister! But already he, too, looks like the surest thing to come out of Gaul since Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry. His nose for the goal is preternatural, a sixth sense that only the world’s most ethereal strikers possess. He poaches the net with metronomic regularity. It is only a matter of time before he’s doing it on an even bigger stage than the pitch at the Stade Gerland...

Keep your eyes alert and focused the next time you tune into a game, whether it’s the NCAA Tournament as it reaches Sweet Sixteen time or, for us non-traditional fans, a tennis match or a cycling race or a good scrum or a game of well-played soccer. You might just be watching the breakout performance for another rising star... it is inevitable that you’re bound to witness it sooner or later...

Submitted 3/26/2009

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