Tennis Players Illustrate How To Win And Lose With Dignity 4
Tennis players regularly have to deal with both the emotional high of winning and the emotional low of losing.
After a spectacular loss to Roger Federer in the 2007 Australian Open, Andy Roddick, said, “It was frustrating, it was miserable, it sucked, it was terrible…Besides that it was fine.”
Decades ago, for those of us in the US old enough to remember, ABC used to open a weekly sports show citing, in equal measure: the Joy of Victory…and the Agony of Defeat (using a horrible skiing accident to illustrate the latter).
The truth is that defeat, though agonizing, can often be the most inspiring illumination of character that comes out of a sporting contest.
This year, Roger Federer took two of the most spectacular losses a champion can accept, and also recorded two of the most spectacular wins a champion could ever make in meeting, then breaking, the all-time Slam record formerly held by Pete Sampras.
But this is an article about that state of grace that can sometimes be entered by a sporting champion in defeat.