Always Another (Big) Tennis Tournament
So many sports fans are swept up into the excitement of watching the Olympics and end up following all sorts of sports that they only watch every four years, e.g. swimming, track and field, gymnastics, volleyball, etc. It’s exciting, but also often painful, to see athletes, many of whom have trained for over 10 years for their “Olympic moment”, suffer an injury or produce a horrible performance when it matters most in an Olympic
competition. For these athletes, there may not be another Olympic moment and years of training and sacrifice will result in no medals and no glory… On the other hand, there are many inspirational moments during the Olympics which lift the spirits of both athletes and fans alike. However, after watching James Blake lose match points in his Olympic tennis semifinal match and Novak Djokovic miss a sitter overhead to lose his semifinal to Rafael Nadal, one could pause and realize that in less than two weeks both Blake and Djokovic would be competing at the 2008 U.S. Open with a chance to win a Grand Slam title. Unlike many of the so-called “Olympic sports”, i.e. swimming, gymnastics, etc. in which the real focus is the Olympic Games every four years, in professional tennis, there are four chances to win major titles every year, as well as Davis Cup and Federation Cup. There are world and national championships every year in swimming, gymnastics, etc., but 10 years from now, people remember Olympic medalists and Grand Slam champions, but probably not who won the 2007 world championships. In tennis, there is always another tournament… another big match to play… another chance for glory is only a few months, not years, away…
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