Time Remains Undefeated
Carlos Alcaraz crushes Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon.
A little old business:
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newsletter. If you’re a subscriber (or want to be one; all the money goes to charity!), you can enter your full name in the comments, and in a future PosCast, we might read out your name and tell you what sport you belong on based on absolutely nothing except what strikes us. This is the sort of dumb stuff we do on the PosCast. For instance, I believe Linda Holmes is a promising young biathlon prospect from Canada—which has not medaled at the biathlon since the great Myriam Bédard—and Alan Sepinwall is a scrappy middle infielder who played for the Chicago White Sox in the 1970s when they wore shorts. Mike will likely have his own opinions.
Age is the ultimate con artist. It doesn’t matter how many times you see the deception, how closely you watch the hands, how thoroughly you study time’s three-card monte act, you and I will fall for it again and again.
When Novak Djokovic won three of four grand slams in 2023—losing only to Carlos Alcaraz in a classic Wimbledon final that turned when Djoker missed a backhand that he can and has made in his sleep countless times—there was this feeling that he would be triumphant forever… or if not forever, at least for a very long time. Age, we are told, is a state of mind. “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” Satchel Paige asked us. Djokovic won his 24th grand slam title in August, and he won it convincingly, straight sets in six of his seven matches, a breezy final victory over Daniil Medvedev, who is nine years his junior on the calendar but looked twice as old on that day.
Twenty-four majors? Well, he would certainly leave behind Margaret Court, who shared the top spot in tennis history with him at 24. But that would only be the start, right? He would probably get to 27 or 28 or 30 or more! Even if he declined, as you might expect a 37-year-old tennis player to do, he surely had many more golden moments ahead.
This is the trick age pulls on all of us. We think of the years as a gradual slope that will graciously allow us to coast to something resembling a triumphant end. But that’s not it at all. The years are a series of fog-covered cliff endings, and we walk off the edges repeatedly, Wile E. Coyote style.
Carlos Alcaraz d. Novak Djokovic 6-2, 6-2, 7-6 (7-4).
The match was not nearly as close as the score.
It’s easy, of course, to overreact to a match like this. Djokovic had knee surgery less than a month before Wimbledon began. He made it to his TENTH Wimbledon final. He outclassed a much younger and supremely talented but clearly overwhelmed Holger Rune in the round of 16. After blistering past Lorenzo Musetti in the semifinal, Musetti swooned that it was the best he’d ever seen Djokovic play. As Djokovic himself said, “I have to be happy with the tournament. If someone had told me four weeks ago that I’d be in the final at Wimbledon, I would have taken it.”
Then again, it’s also easy to UNDER-react to a match like this.