by Chris Marshall:
I’m an unabashed Roger Federer die-hard. I’ve never made any
efforts to hide that fact. But it’s been a hard couple of years for Fed Fans.
Since winning the 2010 Australian Open, he’s appeared in only one Grand Slam
final, when he was handily beaten by Rafael Nadal in Paris last year. Once he
turned 30, it was easy to believe he’d never win another major.
Although I was never totally
convinced, I fell into that pattern of thinking more and more often over the
past few months. Every time he would do something really promising, something
else would happen to make me question whether or not he still had it. Just a
couple of weeks ago, he lost to Tommy Haas in the final of Halle. Yes, he lost on
grass to the 34-year-old Haas, who needed a wild card just to get into the Wimbledon
main draw.
That was a bad sign, but Federer has a way of making me
start to believe again. Wishful thinking most of the time, but he’s won so much
in the past that it doesn’t take much to get my hopes up. Then he fell down two
sets to Julien Benneteau in the 3rd round, and I was absolutely
convinced he was done. Kaput. It not only would have knocked him out of
Wimbledon. It would have ruined his streak of seven million (estimated)
consecutive quarterfinals reached.
