Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


FEDERER-NADAL…So I came down with some version of the creeping crud yesterday, which was a bummer. But there was a bright side: I kept waking up throughout the night, and whenever I did I turned on the TV and watched a few games of the Federer-Nadal match, inconveniently scheduled in the early California morning by our upside-down friends in Australia. The parts I saw were great tennis, and I don’t blame Federer a bit for tearing up at the end. One of the stretches I was awake for was him blowing six consecutive break points at the end of the third set, any one of which would probably have won the match for him. Instead, he took home another loss. It was pretty excrutiating.

But I love this picture of the two of them after the match. When I first saw Nadal play a few years ago, he was a kid with stringy black hair, a sneer on his lips, always dressed in a muscle shirt, and hitting the absolute stuffing out of the ball. “This guy’s a thug!” I thought, a tennis-playing Terminator — but of course nothing could be further from the truth. As I quickly learned, Nadal may very well be the nicest, sweetest, most generous tennis machine on the planet. He’s almost too nice. It’s hard to convince people that this is one of the great sport rivalries of all time when they spend more time hugging each other than trash talking.

But still a nice picture. And hopefully Roger will get his 14th before much longer.

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate