Just watching the match between Federer and Djokovic and seeing Becker in the stands just brought back a host of memories. Exactly 30 years back, on July 7, Becker became the youngest player to win the Wimbledon. I saw that match on a small TV at Air Force academy, Hyderabad. Dad had explained the game to me, the scoring and the strategy .. :). I don’t know when dad had played tennis, he played badminton but he seemed to have found out about tennis too.
I got addicted to watching the game and never missed any tennis match for three years after that. Boris Becker and Steffi Graf became my favorites and they still are. Only after seeing color pictures of Becker in Sportsworld did I know for the first time that some people can have blond eyebrows and eyelashes …. Somehow that fact stuck in my head. I read about Bjorn Borg in Readers Digest and decided I liked him more than Becker for a short while. 🙂
Then for nearly 25 years I didn’t watch the game much … And missed Pete Sampras, Federer, Nadal, the Williams’ sisters … Haven’t watched them play except the news clips every now and then. Today suddenly I tuned into Star Sports and saw that it was these two greats and stuck on. And it is at match point for Djokovic, what an amazing match and he has won the Wimbledon championship this year. Wow.
Somehow I felt Federer was out of form and it tells you that form is so important in sports and in the corporate world too …. When you are out of form nothing works, even if you are the champ.
Remembering Boris Becker, Navratilova and Steffi Graf wins those many years back and someday we will watch two other greats play the great game of tennis in Wimbledon live, rather than on the TV. That’s on the bucket list.