Nadal was forced to withdrew from Wimbledon because of tendinitis in his knee. But this huge profile from the New York Times magazine is still interesting nonetheless.
Federer is elegant and fluid and cerebral, so that his best tennis looks effortless even when he is making shots that ought to be physically impossible. Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will. His victories and his taped-up knees and his years as a very good No. 2 in the world all resonate together, as though the rewards and the wages of individual effort had been animated in a single human being: if you hurl yourself at a particular goal furiously enough and long enough you may tear your body up in the process, but maybe you can get there after all. People have loved watching Nadal create trouble inside Federer’s head. This is how they characterize it in tennis, that Nadal makes Federer crazy, that Nadal’s refusal over and over to be beaten by Federer in Paris was the one problem that Federer — who usually has uncanny on-court telepathy about what his opponent plans for three shots hence and exactly how to wreck it — was unable to figure out.It is impossible to separate Nadal from Federer; it's Ali-Frazier if no one were even near the same athletic level as Ali or Frazier for a huge chunk of their careers.
In all of hte tennis history books (and I assume there are many and will be many more), the past few years will be referred to as the Nadal/Federer era.
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