RelatedMore Rogers Cup:Which players to watchBy Mike Cormack
SPORTSNET.CA
When it was announced the 2008 Rogers Cup would be pushed up two weeks and held the same week as the RBC Canadian Open, some wondered how the event would fare up against Canada’s national golf championship.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have taken care of that.
Without question, the eyes of the tennis world will be on Toronto this week as the world’s two best tennis players take to the court for the first time since their epic Wimbledon final earlier this month.
It’s impossible to underestimate how significant Nadal’s 6-4,6-4, 6-7,6-7, 9-7 win over Federer was for tennis, and how high the anticipation is for the next chapter of what has quickly become the greatest individual rivalry in sports today.
As great as Nadal and Federer have been for the past few years, and despite having met in seven Grand Slam finals since 2005, their collective exploits had failed to register among the casual sports fan and around the water cooler until a few weeks ago.
The history books will say Nadal won his first Wimbledon title by ending Federer’s streak of five straight championships, but they won’t mention that the final on NBC earned a 4.6 overnight rating, a 44 per cent increase over last year’s final won by Federer and the highest since Pete Sampras won eight years ago.
The books also won’t mention that the Nadal-Federer final landed tennis on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the title "The Greatest Match Ever."
For the first time since John McEnroe sported headbands and a perm, tennis had captivated not just the hardcore net-heads, but the casual sports fan as well.
The question now is, can it build upon it this week?
South of the border, that might be hard to achieve between now and the start of the U.S. Open in late August, but here in Canada, the Rogers Cup is taking place at time when there’s plenty of good news surrounding tennis in this country.
On Sunday, 20-year-old, Blainville, Que. native Alexsandra Wozniak gave Canadian sports editors another tennis item to place on their front pages by capturing the Bank of the West Classic in Stanford, Calif., for her first WTA Tour title.
Wozniak, who defeated sixth-seeded Marion Bartoli 7-5, 6-3 in the final, had to win three matches in qualifying and five in the main draw.
It was the first WTA tournament win for a Canadian woman in 20 years (Helen Kelesi, (Taranto, Italy.)
On the same day of the Nadal-Federer final, Toronto’s Daniel Nestor captured his first Wimbledon doubles final to complete a career Grand Slam.
Nestor, who is playing German great Boris Becker in an exhibition Monday night at the Rexall Centre, will keep tennis on the sports pages in the coming weeks as one of Canada’s best medal bets at the Beijing Olympic Games in doubles.
But all eyes this week will be on Federer and Nadal, and frankly, anything short of a Sunday final featuring the two will be considered a disappointment.
The good news for tournament organizers and fans is the likelihood of the two meeting is highly possible, and both players should have no shortage of motivation this week.
So far in 2008, Nadal and Federer have met in four finals (Monte Carlo, Hamburg, French Open, Wimbledon), with Nadal winning all four.
For Nadal, the No. 1 ranking is now within reach, and a win here and next month at the U.S. Open would go a long way towards ending Federer’s four-year reign atop the tennis world.
As for Federer, for the first time in four years his status as not only the world’s best tennis player, but arguably best athlete as well, is in question.
But perhaps more importantly, if Federer is ever to surpass Pete Sampras’ record of 14 Grand Slam titles he knows he will have to start beating Nadal, and soon.
Federer is only two behind Sampras with 12 Grand Slams, but at 26 he is four years older than Nadal, who appears to be only getting better with age.
For his career, Federer’s record against everyone not named Nadal is 588-131. Against the speedy Spaniard he is 6-12.
"We've played many times in big occasions, but sometimes it takes a big match like (the Wimbledon final) to really breakthrough for both of us," Federer told reporters Sunday at a Rogers Cup press conference. "I think now that we did, every match we play from now on will be very interesting between us."
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