Nadal-Federer

Some say the Rafael Nadal-Roger Federer championship match Sunday was the greatest in Wimbledon history.

It sure was the longest.

I could have gotten up at dawn Sunday, flown to London, taken the subway to the court and still gotten there in plenty of time for the last couple of sets.

Instead, after Mass Sunday, I headed to the Willowvale Diner with my usual breakfast crew. As I sipped my coffee - black, no sugar - packed away homefries and tried to sneak bacon off my friends' plates, I'd glance up at the TV now and then. Nadal and Federer were on. Federer was leading 4-1 or 4-2 in the second set. Nadal had won the first. It was 10:30 a.m. or so.

I got home about 40 minutes later. I puttered around, did a couple of chores, took a nap. I flipped on the TV. No tennis. About 4 p.m. I got a call from work. They needed me to straighten out a problem. So it was a problem that I had unwittingly created, but so what? So I drove down to the office. Wimbledon is on again. It's the fourth set. It's like, 5 p.m.! Weren't these guys in the second set about six hours ago? I went home, but I forgot to turn on the television. I didn't find out who won until the next morning.

Listen, I like tennis. I go back to Pancho Gonzalez! I watched Rod Laver many times. Arthur Ashe. Margaret Court. Yvonne Goolagong. Bjorn Borg. John McEnroe. Jimmy Connors. Chris Evert. (Weren't they engaged once? Now she's married to Greg Norman, her third husband. What?). I watched Billie Jean King when she was still Billie Jean Moffitt. Ilie Nastase. Martina Navratilova. Boris Becker. Pete Sampras. Andre Agassi. Stefi Graf. Monica Seles. Lots of other people. I watched them all. A lot of great matches. But I'll tell you, I can't sit down and watch tennis for seven or eight hours. I just can't. I watched the Phillies take a doubleheader from the Pirates at Veterans Stadium once. It started at 5 p.m. and ended at 1:30 a.m. - there were five rain delays - about the same length of time those two guys took to decide the championship Sunday. Of course, on that occasion, my brother-in-law and I had a enormous bag of sandwiches and a liberal beer budget to get us through the night. Plus, they were two really good games, although the only things I really remember about them is a triple to right center by Pete Rose and the guy next to me unwrapping his submarine sandwich and getting oil all over me. The Phillies went on to win the World Series that year.

My advice to Nadal and Federer when they meet in the U.S. Open final in September, which is likely - pack it into three hours.