Novak Djokovic of Serbia celebrates after defeating Rafael Nadal of Spain during the men's singles final at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne early Monday.
One of these days men's tennis is going to get boring again. There will be a fallow period. Greats will retire, get hurt, fatten up, open bad restaurants, babble on TV and buy vineyards. There will be a new, unremarkable No. 1. A murky two through 10. Maybe a U.S. player—a real-live U.S. player!—will crack the top five. Grand Slam finals will shrink to three uneventful sets. Tennis will return to that stale-aired foyer it got trapped in a while ago—dull, characterless, skippable.
That time isn't now. Men's professional tennis may be the most satisfying sport on the planet at the moment. There is no game with so much excellence currently swirling at its top, that so reliably delivers not just entertainment, but historic greatness. It isn't to be missed. Conventional superlatives fail. Once-a-lifetime? Symphony of brilliance? Wicked good? It all sounds cheesy, inadequate. But what's happening in the men's game is as close as sports gets to unadulterated joy, the kind of outrageous viewer experience that leaves the audience gasping, as if anaerobic, as it did Sunday morning, in the men's final of the Australian Open.
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