Agassi is a complete hero. How can you not love him? Maybe my favorite person who is an athlete.
What the heck channel is this on? Tweet-dog is unable to find it.
I suppose it'll be on in HD tomorrow morning.
Is he? He's always seemed so fratty to me.
What the heck channel is this on?
It's on the USA network.
Is he a hero, or is he Iranian? His parents are Iranian, but he was born here and doesn't self-identify as one of us.
Not all of us have cable, you plutocrat.
Apparently on a time delay. No such luck on the east coast.
His wikipedia page is crazy:
Andre Kirk Agassi (Armenian: Անդրե Աղասի, Assyrian: ܐܢܕܪܐ ܐܓܣܥ)
Anywho, they're in the second tie-break in two sets.
Dude, he's Iranian. Get a grip.
He's a Christian Iranian, which is all the distinction that's necessary. Though he has your hair.
I really do think he's just a great, great sports story, though. I can't remember being able to watch anyone else mature in the way were able to do with him. I can't remember anyone else who went through that sort of process and came out in a good place.
Just love him. I'm going to be so bummed if he's nailing his kids.
Oh, it is on USA. Stupid DirecTV.
He's not a hero. He's a frat boy. I just didn't realize he was Iranian.
Most of us assume that people with long straight blond hair are not Iranian. There goes that destructive stereotype.
Roderick is going down this set I betcha.
On the other hand, the hair on the rest of his body supports the Iranian idea.
I was trying to imply that ogged was balding. It was a joke. Not a great one, but sometimes the effort itself is important.
20: Roderick? Am I at a ren faire? RODDICK. The guy who's actually playing. That one.
I wonder if Roddick will lose without losing a service game.
Oh, I didn't notice 14. I was explaining why it seemed odd for him to be Iranian.
Also, Ogged only shaves that part of his head so he can swim faster.
Am I at a ren faire?
You have your own chain mail, don't you?
I wonder if Roddick will lose without losing a service game.
That would be amazing. They're playing really well.
26: I'm more of a tunic and leggings kind of guy.
Geez Roddick has a pretty intimidating serve, doesn't he.
I'm sure he's in part being polite, but the awe with which Agassi, who is a legend of the game, talks about Federer is telling.
I wonder if Roddick will lose without losing a service game.
Nope.
I think it's pretty commonly held that Federer is in a whole other league from (almost) everybody who's ever played. That's why he gets compared to Tiger Woods all the time.
Yeah, it's still interesting to hear another great player talk about him this way.
I'm not sure that Agassi ever really compared to where Federer is now; that he seems to know that is certainly a credit to his ability to evaluate his own talent honestly.
Damn. He was toying with the poor guy.
Roddick played two fantastic sets. Federer is just so, so good.
Roddick ran out of steam. Just a guess, but dude might need to spend more time running, less time with teh ladies. I was hoping for 5 sets.
And Agassi has been the definition of graceful since I've started paying attention to tennis. So I'm not surprised at the quality of his commentary.
That third guy, an ex-baseball player?, could have talked less.
I was also watching the match, thought the key observation by Agassi was early on when Roddick had consecutive serves of something like 136 and 138 and Federer was able to return both. On a related note I'm still kicking myself for leaving Nadal-Ferrer last night four games into the third set just because I thought I should get some sleep before I had my first at a new law firm today. It was probably the right choice, but I never leave pro sporting events in progress and that was a particularly exciting one.
The thought of anything coming at me at 138 miles per hour is terrifying.
The thought of anything coming at me at 138 miles per hour is terrifying.
What about a shuttlecock?
The most powerful stroke in badminton is the smash, which is hit steeply downwards into the opponents' midcourt. The maximum speed of a smashed shuttlecock exceeds that of any other racket sport projectile. The recordings of this speed measure the initial speed of the shuttlecock immediately after it has left the player's racket.
Men's doubles player Fu Haifeng of China set the official world smash record of 332 km/h (206 mph) on June 3, 2005 in the Sudirman Cup. The fastest smash recorded in the singles competition is 305 km/h (189 mph) by Taufik Hidayat of Indonesia.[17]
First two sets were amazing, just jaw-dropping.
The recordings of this speed measure the initial speed of the shuttlecock immediately after it has left the player's racket
I have to point out that a quick glance at the shape and flight characteristics of a shuttlecock would suggest that this way of measuring the speed might overestimate the speed at which it approaches you, just a teensy bit.
That match made me depressed. I can't help but ge emotionally invested in Andy's beating this guy more than 1 fucking time in 15 tries. He's improved his net game so much, and still not enough.
Andre was great, though he didn't reign in the Federer sycophancy as much as I would have liked. But he is always graceful, always sensible-sounding. He was punky and arrogant ages ago, but never frat-boy-ish, to my mind. At all.
At least watching Fed crush Davydenko the cheater will be satisfying.
Yeah, the frat-boyish claim seems ... mysterious, to me. I don't recall that ever being an appropriate epithet for Agassi.
Leyton Hewitt strikes me as the most frattish of recent years. Or maybe Safin, in a gross hulking sort of way.
I heard this stat, btw, the other day about percentage of points won in games. Averaging out the last couple years, Fed wins 56% on points in games. I was shocked by how low that is given his total dominance. But it seems totally reflected by last night's match. He just always wins the right points; may lose a lot of 30-15 points, but rarely a 40-30 point.
Federer is just unbelievable. 9 consecutive grand slam finals, and likely to make it 10? And if it were not for Nadal's equal unbelievability on clay he would have won them all (and likely would have 10 consecutive finals as he lost to Nadal in the French semis in 2004).
Such dominance is usually reserved for the women's side (see, e.g., Graf, Navratilova).
Only Tiger and Phelps are equally brilliant.
And that is precisely the problem with Federer - there is, apparently, nothing else to say about him. I have to watch his matches on mute anymore because I can't deal with the redundancy of the fawning. Which is not to say it's not true, but rather that after 5 years it's gotten dull.
By the end of next year, Federer will likely have taken the total single slam title from Sampras, and he'll have done it in six years rather than the 13 Sampras took. Just shocking. I'm not expecting him to lap Sampras, but I'm not expecting him not to, either.
No more masturbating to Pavarotti.
The best part of Agassi's annoucing was when they showed Boris Becker in the stands and Agassi explained that Becker had a "tell" that tipped off his serve. McEnroe wanted to know what the "tell" was. Agassi said Becker always stuck out his tongue on his serve and if his tongue stayed in the middle of his mouth the serve was going down the middle (or into the body), but when Becker was going to serve out wide his tongue would go to the corner of his mouth in the direction he was going with the serve.
Mac was incredulous, but Agassi said Becker used to say he couldn't understand how Agassi could return his serve so well..."It's almost like he knows what's coming" to which Agassi commented, "And I did." Apparently he recently explained this to Becker and Becker said that made him feel a little better and a little stupider.
Pretty amazing story -- esp. since Mac was one of the greatest returners of service against Becker and everyone else. If Mac wasn't reading the tell, he must have had madd reflexes.
What kind of juice does Federer use?
That was a really great commentating moment, the tongue thing. Becker looked pretty skeezy though, and I thought Nastase looked like an evil Gerard Depardieu.
What kind of juice does Nadal use is the real question.
As an aside, am I the only one who finds discussions along the lines of "X is a fratboy!" to be tiring and juvenile? It seems like the frat/not dichotomy should be left to airheaded undergrad bullshit sessions.
There's no content in my previous comment from one could infer that I was in a fraternity.
Michael, everything here is juvenile. We had to figure out some other reason why you were offended.
Elliot Spitzer is good at this.
