Not just a tennis game

When played at the highest level, sport reaches into art.

I traveled to Basel today to see the final game of the Davidoff Swiss Indoors, one of the top three tennis indoor tournaments in the world. ATP's number 7, Fernando Gonzalez of Chile - who won last year - was playing the number one, Roger Federer of Switzerland, arguably the world's best tennisman ever. Pressure was on both: Gonzalez had never won against Federer; Federer had never won in Basel, his hometown. They offered a great game, sending the ball down corridors that only they could see, scoring ace after ace, in a rare show of beauty and strength and intuition. At the end, Federer won: 6-3 6-2 7-6. Just 12 years ago, the man ran around this same court as a ballboy.

On a side note: the tournament's catalog is a heavy 200-pages book full of information and statistics about the players and, of course, of ads from sponsors and supporters. Among them, one attracted my attention: this is the first time that I see an event featuring (follow the blue arrow) an "official defibrillator supplier".