Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, together again -- and just in time

The past few weeks have been busy for disillusioned sportswriters. There was Lance Armstrong's steroids confession. And new drug allegations against Alex Rodriguez. Barry Bonds appealing his obstruction of justice conviction. Oscar Pistorius' arrest on a murder charge.
The ugly underbelly of sports has been as big and unavoidable as the sequestration.
"Friday Night Lights" author Buzz Bissinger, fully awake now after buying into Armstrong's fantasy world for years, lamented what big money and celebrity have done to our sporting heroes:

They are narcissistic men. They have to be, anybody has to be, in pursuit of greatness. They are also men for whom the ends always justify the means, seek any edge to give them the millimeter that separates the successful from those toiling in obscurity. Just go to the beginning rounds of the U.S. Open in tennis. Watch the 88th best player in the world serve and volley with exquisiteness and then watch one of the top seeds and ask yourself what the difference is except that tiny slice. If it means the difference between anonymity and fame, financial struggle and millions, who would not grab for that sliver by any means possible?

Who indeed? Even our greatest legends who aren't in the dock for drugs or violence are being reevaluated. Here's ESPN's Wright Thompson, ostensibly celebrating Michael Jordan on his 50^th birthday:

He can be a breathtaking asshole: self-centered, bullying and cruel. That's the ugly side of greatness. He's a killer, in the Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone's weakest spot. He'd moo like a cow when the overweight general manager of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, would get onto the team bus. When the Bulls traded for the injury-prone Bill Cartwright, Jordan teased him as Medical Bill, and he once punched Will Perdue during practice. He punched Steve Kerr too, and who knows how many other people.

All of which is reason enough to celebrate the return of Rafael Nadal and the coming resumption of the epic Nadal-Roger Federer rivalry.
Somehow Federer and Nadal have become champions without becoming narcissists and cruel bullies willing to bend any rule to get ahead. They are paragons of fair play and sportsmanship, callbacks to an earlier era when their sport was a chivalric diversion for aristocratic gentlemen who were duty-bound to correct bad calls and apologize for mishit winners.
Sure, there are carpers. Nadal is an inveterate complainer about the ATP's rankings and the tour schedule, his critics say. Federer is arrogant and so lah-di-dah, insist his anti-fans.
Their proof? Let's start with Nadal.
The 26-year-old Spaniard, responding to daily questions from the press, does something that has long been out of fashion among celebrities: he actually says what he's thinking. This is, well, unthinkable in this day and age. Essayist Michelle Orange writes that our Facebook-driven compulsion to capture, edit and immediately upload moments from our lives is "more about representing a certain reality than remembering it." This observation applies to our expectations of our sports heroes, too. Athletes have their script -- watch the cliche-teaching scene from "Bull Durham" -- and they're supposed to stick to it. We're outraged when athletes actually show us real personalities and independent thought.
(Scorched-earth haters, of course, also like to say that Nadal is a doper just like Armstrong. To back up this persistent allegation they can offer only the following as evidence: the guy has big muscles. Which he has had since arriving on the pro scene as a 16-year-old. So if you want to believe that his doting, well-to-do parents and uncle decided to pump the adolescent Rafa full of steroids so he could win tennis tournaments, fine, you do that.)
As for Federer: the criticism is about much the same thing. The 31-year-old Swiss gets dinged for not offering up the fake-humility pablum that sportswriters use to put sports stars up on pedestals (from which they can later knock them off). But guess what? Federer is a wealthy celebrity who's feted everywhere he goes, and he holds the all-time world record for major titles in professional tennis. So, yeah, despite his goofy smile and awkward, cartoon guffaw, he really is comfortable in his own skin. How terrible!
All of that said, it's nevertheless understandable that to many people Federer and Nadal appear too good to be true. After all, in today's sports world, NFL teams put bounties on opposing players' heads. International soccer stars dally with hookers and get their teammates' girlfriends pregnant. The list goes on.
A kill-or-be-killed worldview and a sense of entitlement are big parts of this misbehavior by pro athletes, absolutely. But so is hatred. From Little League forward, we are taught that we must have a killer instinct, and that the best way to have a killer instinct is to hate your opponent. Just ask Jimmy Connors. His mother taught him that.
This is perhaps the key reason the Federer-Nadal rivalry has captured imaginations around the world, including those of folks who previously never had the slightest interest in tennis. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal really are aberrations.
Federer and Nadal are fierce rivals but they don't hate each other. In fact, they're sort of friends. They've hung out together off court, doing charity work. They only speak highly of one another.
"We know each other's (games) 100 percent perfect," Nadal said during a joint news conference with Federer before a 2011 exhibition in Oregon.
"Unfortunately," cut in Federer, famously the second banana in the rivalry even when he was the top-ranked player in the world.
Not only do they not hate each other, they also don't hate themselves. (Vanity Fair magazine: "If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?" Nadal: "I would be me again. I am having a lot of fun, really!") This would seem self-evident (they're famous, coddled athletes), but it's actually significant, because the flip side of the hating-your-opponents coin is self-hatred. Only insecurity and self-loathing would drive a baseball player who's already one of the all-time greats to begin taking performing-enhancing drugs in hopes of achieving god-like status. Only insecurity and self-loathing would lead a soccer star who has his pick of supermodels to seek out prostitutes or his teammate's gf. If you're going to have a hero, it probably is best if that hero likes himself.
Especially when it's leavened by self-awareness, too. Federer and Nadal are confident, happy men, but they don't take it too far. (If there's an international celebrity out there who's had sex with fewer people than you, it's probably Federer, who's been traveling the world with his wife Mirka since he was 20 years old.) The Swiss legend and Spanish great really do seem to keep things in perspective. They are jet-setters and high-life livers by definition, just like David Beckham, but that's not how you know them. To you and me, they're merely tennis players. Tennis players who happen to play transcendent tennis. Nail-biting tennis. Vicious, give-no-quarter tennis. Especially against one another.
So we should celebrate Nadal's return from seven months on the injured-reserved list. And we should look forward to his next meeting with Federer, coming soon to a tennis court near you in Indian Wells or Key Biscayne or Rome.
Their influence is such that their would-be successors Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray have adopted the aberrant "Fedal" generosity as their standard, rather than the tetchiness of the Pete Sampras-Andre Agassi rivalry, or the outright hostility that defined the Connors- John McEnroe-Ivan Lendl rivalries.
Maybe it's true that one man can't make a difference in this crazy, complex modern world. But we now know that two can.

Source:  http://blog.oregonlive.com/tennis/2013/02/roger_federer_and_rafael_nadal.html