Rarely will you see a Free Refills title quite like this. Please savor the moment.
My initial intent, unsurprisingly, was to write about Serena for publication on Monday and about Federer-Djokovic for publication on Tuesday. That way I would have kept all of my U.S. Open-related tennis writing topical. Generally when it comes to sportswriting, if you're not writing about something that just happened, you might as well be writing about something from the last century. E.g.:
"Thursday, September 6th, 1924, dawned cool and sunny over the New York Metropolitan area. It looked to be a pleasant but unremarkable late-summer day. No one waking up that morning would have expected that the quarterfinal match between E. Bartlett Witherspoon and Lucius Grimsby III would go down in history as one of the classic matches of all time. Witherspoon, elegantly tall, mustachioed, aristocratic in both mien and strategy, seemed unlikely to beat the upstart power game presented by Grimsby, whose new-technology maple racquet threatened to obviate the tactics of an entire generation of tennis players."
Et cetera.
But I struggled to turn the zero-draft about Serena into a piece about Serena--sometimes I really envy people who have deadlines and get paid and stuff--so I let it become three pieces, and here it is Friday and I haven't published anything at all about Federer-Djokovic, which is (to me) criminal, because it was an absolute classic tennis match.
However, the difficulty I ran into has created an interesting opportunity. Federer-Djokovic was a fascinating tennis match, but from the perspective of energy flow and dynamics, it was a complete master class. I'm pretty obsessed with tennis right now, but it's the practice of energy dynamics that's over the past year changed, well, pretty much everything about my understanding of how life actually works, and so Fed-Djoker remains worth writing about even as the match itself moves further and further into the past. What about the match still bears talking about a week, or two, or a month after the fact? With a little luck and some hard work, I aim to successfully answer that question.