The American Spectator

Counting Ryan Harrison’s loss yesterday, with Querrey out and Young and Blake and Serena Williams, things are not good for our side. Our boys and girls are not going to win this endurance tournament if they play like noodles. I never, personally, bought into the argument that Roland Garros is the “toughest” of the slams, putatively because the clay enables, even requires, longer rallies. It is true the matches easily run two, two and a half hours. But you also need endurance on a faster surface, precisely because it puts a lot more strain on you. The fact is, surface matters, but is irrelevant to these kinds of metaphysical questions. Endurance is a state of mind. A brave young Japanese player named Tatsuma Ito went up against Andy Murray yesterday in the Lenglen stadium, a favorite of the tennis-aficionado crowd, and for a while, in the second set, he endured all right, and very nearly won. He was matching Andy stroke for stroke and playing a beautifully clever game, tactical as a go master. But in the third, the intimidation Murray had imposed on him in the first, or exhaustion, or Murray’s own raising of the bar, he became an entirely different man, could not do anything right, missed easy opportunities to put the ball away, and he was done. He was a good sport, polite as all hell, bowing to the crowd that gave him a nice ovation and all. But the point is, the mental steel did not endure.

Without meaning to get philosophical or anything — I leave that to Mr. Scruton and Mr. Thornberry — we as a nation better get our mental steel back in the old bean, or we are headed for the exits. Like too many of these champions who, win or lose, we still love, because they are us, somehow, even as they are only themselves.