Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
I have a confession to make. We haven't even hit mid-December yet, and I'm already bested out. Everywhere I turn, people are churning out their annual year-in-review lists: "10 Best ATP Matches of 2008!", "The Best New Tennis Prospects for 2009!", "Five Most Memorable Moments of the Year!", "Nine Best WTA Matches of 2008!" (What can I say, the women's game lacks depth).
And so it goes on, a dreary parade of Bests and Most Memorables and Most Significants that will stretch from now until Jan. 2, a veritable orgy of nauseating excellence. It's open season on the mediocre, the humdrum, the forgettable. But I am here to speak for those too undistinguished to be celebrated, too forgettable to make anybody's list of bests.
So let's get to work:
Worst Big Match of the Year: The French Open men's final, in which Rafael Nadal allowed Roger Federer all of four games in a clock-cleaning the likes of which we haven't seen on red dirt since Guillermo Vilas massacred Brian Gottfried, giving up just three games, in 1977.
Least Improved Male Player: Richard Gasquet, despite a spirited late-season charge by Marcos Baghdatis. Gasquet started out the year at No. 8 and ended at No. 25. Along the way, he pulled out of a Davis Cup match against Andy Roddick with an excuse as inventive as it was honest: He didn't think he could beat Andy, anyway.
Greatest Humiliation: Heavily favored Argentina, at home in the Davis Cup final on a fast surface ideally suited to its big dogs, David Nalbandian and Juan Martin del Potro, faced a ragtag group of Spanish players led by badly slumping David Ferrer and missing Rafael Nadal. The Spanish team delivered an upset for the ages, with a guy called F-Lo (Feliciano Lopez) and Fernando Verdasco leading the charge.
Least Significant Historic Moment: After three decades of broadcasting the U.S. Open most weekdays and nights, the USA Network telecast its last match -- a much-anticipated quarterfinal between Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic. After Djokovic won, he took a few verbal shots at Roddick, the crowed booed, and John McEnroe got so bummed out that, at a loss for words, he just removed his headset, mumbling, "What a weird way to end our final broadcast."
Greatest Buzzkill of 2008: In 2007, Justine Henin won two of the three majors she played and was runner-up in the other one. She won 10 of 14 events, and shattered the single-season prize-money mark, bagging more than $5 million. It looked like the WTA had finally found a player who was willing and able to dominate the game in the manner of a Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova. A couple of months into 2008 (May, specifically), she up and quit, in effect saying, who needs this crap?
I could go on, but there were so many banal, disappointing, shocking, dispiriting, and just plain weak moments, matches, events and people in 2008 I couldn't possibly do justice to them all. Besides, someone e-mailed me the link to a Web site that rated the 10 Most Memorable Wimbledon Rain Delays of 2008, and I want to see if either of the ones during the Nadal-Federer final made the cut.
Peter Bodo
