Instead of following my natural instincts of sloth and selfishness, and settling down to watch on telly what was obviously going to be a great tennis confrontation, I followed the advice of Sunday Times guru Simon Jenkins, and 'did live' with my youngest son, in a damp field in Kent, watching the great Neil Young.
But live or 'dead' the Beeb commentators had no business declaiming it 'the best tennis ever played', any more than Fed or Rafa can be described as 'the greatest'. Why is it that pundits have to label everything in extremis ?
The technique of the game has advanced, and we can probably guess that Connors never employed a 'nutritionist'; racquet and ball technology has taken a quantum leap in 20 years, and the scoring system, one of the most perfect creations of man, has only taken a small, and helpful augmentation, in the shape of the time shrinking, set ending tie break.
The question has been posited; is tennis an art or a science?
It seems to me to be neither, but a sport; but that is not to say that there are not practitioners who are artists (Santoro), or those who, primarily, use technology to advance their cause, and seek to batter their opponents into submission with power and little finesse (Roddick).
Laver, at the age of Rafa (22), equipped with a modern bat, and a left arm such as he possessed, could well (in the dream-world I inhabit) have been too strong for Rafa, with too much guile.
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