Rule, Britcanada. G’day, mate.
Someone you’ve never heard of is going to take the American tennis title away with them, up or over there, wherever Greg Rusedski calls home these days, or down under where slick and shaggy Patrick Rafter dwells, as true an Australian as Rusedski is a phony Englishman.
This sort of thing happens from time to time, but not lately in the Age of Sampras, and what it means is tennis, men’s tennis, will come out of the U.S. Open much less vital than when it went in.
“I am much better known in Europe,” Rusedski explained. “It is not abnormal for people not to know me over here.”
Since it is here that really matters, the point is not only beyond moot but way past relevant. It is the same position taken by track and field and by soccer, as if America is obligated to care.
Tennis will not find the renewal it wants by coughing up two unknown players, one unseeded, the other barely, in the Open final.
If tennis is looking for its own Tiger Woods, one of these two guys will have to move over to see who it is.
And it may very well just be Venus Williams standing there.
Sunday’s women’s final between Williams and Martina Hingis will be the main event not only of this tournament but the most intriguing occasion of the entire tennis season, and reason enough to have picture-in-picture on an NFL Sunday.
Michael Chang butchered the best chance he may have to win his country’s championship, falling short (no pun intended) once again, the sixth such failure in a Grand Slam semi or final, this time as the second seed.
“They all hurt,” Chang said, “this one maybe more than the others because this was a good opportunity.
“You go through stages, you know, and you work to get stronger and you run into that word `perseverance’ again, and one day you just hope it pays off.
“It’s tough. I mean, who am I kidding? You have your chances and you have to keep working at it and . . . am I rambling?”
Only a little. Chang is entitled.
He might have rambled a bit more into the state of men’s tennis, where everyone after Pete Sampras needs to show up with a name tag and a sigh.
“We lost Stefan Edberg last year,” said Jonas Bjorkman, loser to and as obscure as Rusedski, “and now (Michael) Stich and maybe Boris (Becker). It is time for change. The opportunity is here for the new guys.”
And Bjorkman did not even include Andre Agassi, though he is less and less includable.
To his credit, Rusedski refused any comparison between his reaching the greatest moment in his career and the sad and somber events back in his borrowed homeland, even though British princesses are a lot more common than Grand Slam finalists.
Could anything done by a transplanted Canadian matter at this time in English history?
“It’s the least important thing I can think of,” Rusedski said.
Rusedski could very well become the first male Briton in more than 60 years to win a major tennis title.
If he were born in Leeds instead of Montreal, had grown up on scones and clotted cream instead of burgers and cole slaw, if he didn’t sound so absolutely foreign using words like “telly” and phrases like “nil-nil,” inquiries into his patriotic pain would not seem as out of place as his answers.
What did he think, you know, of the funeral?
“It was nice how the nation paid tribute to Di, how much the nation cared for her,” Rusedski said. “It was a lovely service and such a tragedy.”
The absurd suggestion that anyone in England might get some relief from Rusedski’s five-set survival of Bjorkman is beyond impudence.
Not that it isn’t typically tennis.
