Un Jour Avec

One way to think about losing a tennis match, and specifically to think about the pain and disappointment of losing a great, tense, five-set tennis match the way Roger Federer did on Saturday, is to imagine yourself walking in to talk to the media afterward. Imagine that you have just spent several hours doing a physically exhausting, phenomenally difficult thing; that many thousands of people, and several television cameras, were watching you do this thing; that you could not look up while doing it without seeing a giant image of yourself hovering overhead; that your entire life revolves around this thing to the point that most of your waking hours are consumed by your obsessive work toward the goal of doing it successfully; that this has been the case since you were very young, so that succeeding in moments such as the one you have just been through is effectively the only purpose you have ever known; that you have just done the aforementioned thing at such a high level that almost no one in the history of the world could claim to have done it better; that you failed anyway; and that you failed because of an outrageous bit of bad luck, which came out of nowhere and upended all your work at precisely the moment when you thought you had succeeded. There: Now ready to answer some questions?

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