Throughout his storied career, and especially over the past three years, Roger Federer possessed feet of clay in the men’s singles final of the French Open.
The second-best claycourt performer in the latter half of this decade showed a manifest ability to play for championships on the terre battue of Paris, but the Swiss legend could [...]

The 2009 French Open men’s singles final offers a surprising matchup, but anyone who’s watched the first 14 days of the 15-day event at Roland Garros would find it hard ignore the notion that Robin Soderling should be the man standing in the way of Roger Federer’s path to an added measure of tennis immortality.
Federer, [...]

Over the past month and a half, only Rafael Nadal had played better claycourt tennis than Novak Djokovic. On a stunning Saturday afternoon in Paris, the Serbian superstar wasn’t as good as a 29th-seeded floater from Germany. As a result, the French Open has been turned upside-down… and a prolonged stretch of steady play no [...]

In horse racing, “winning by a head” represents a very small margin between the winner and the runner-up. In tennis, the same phrase could accurately characterize the way in which champions so frequently fend off talented challengers in the early rounds of Grand Slam tournaments. After surviving a scare from amped-up Argentine Jose Acasuso in the second round [...]