Mendoza: Zeroing in on Tiger, Rory, Rafa, Novak

Friday, February 3, 2012

TIGER Woods finishing third in Abu Dhabi is fine by me.

He played well and good and it just happened that The Rock played a little better to prevail.

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Woods was two shots back after the tournament, blowing a third-round lead with one round left to play.

Not bad, although not too long ago, Woods would have proceeded to win if he had a grip of the lead after 54 holes.

But that was before, when winning for Woods was as natural as tying your own shoelaces.

Today, Woods, the winner of 14 majors and 82 tournaments overall, is still a work in progress after his fall from grace in 2009 following revelations of extramarital affairs that led to divorce.

Woods could even find solace in the thought that Rory McIlroy, the strongest pretender to Woods’s crown of old, lost to The Rock by just one.

And, take this: McIlroy could have won the tournament by one had he not been assessed a two-stroke penalty the day before the final round for moving his ball.

Breaks of the game?

You bet.

But how about – or how would you describe – Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open victory on Sunday?

The way the Serbian survived Rafael Nadal in five sets defied logic, if not
imagination even.

If it were boxing, Djokovic was always almost pinned against the ropes by Nadal’s non-stop, two-fisted bombardment.

No one could fully unearth the correct words to describe that epic war, if not Djokovic’s classic, lung-busting win.

Even Shakespeare would have groped for the right words to glorify the match.

Shot for shot, they fought with the tenacity of two gladiators each fighting for sheer survival.

If it were a marathon, they’d go 24 kilometers more beyond the tape if only to prove how superbly conditioned they were.

So classic the battle was that Djokovic and Nadal did not only end it with both their heads held up high, it also made tennis the undisputed star this very moment.

In the end, it didn’t matter much anymore that Djokovic had retained his crown.

Never mind, too, that he did it against a man who simply refused to fall despite absorbing the most telling blows in tennis ever.

I’d say nobody won.

Djokovic merely survived.

(alsol47@yahoo.com)