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The winner of our Apology for Gurgliness contest is jaime!

The question was: What would our guest Mike do if a victorious tennis player tossed his/her sweaty towel at him?

jaime’s answer: “If it’s Sharapova, he would wring the towel and put it in a vial. Then he would wear it on his neck.”

He added that if it were another player he would have the towel laundered and have it framed, but we’ll accept that answer. Congratulations! Your prize will be delivered to National Bookstore in Rockwell on Monday.

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Marat Safin is now in the Russian Parliament. Someday he will be president. Good or bad for humanity? We say great.

It’s the Tennis episode with guest, filmmaker, director of commercials, tennis trivia-head Mike Alcazaren. We cover the year in slams, tennis tantrums, future Russian president Marat Safin, the ideal length of tennis shorts, and why there are no tennis movies. Then we launch our campaign to get Filipino tennis great Felicisimo “The Mighty Mite” Ampon into the Tennis Hall of Fame. Ampunin si Ampon!

The weekly podcast is available for streaming or download here. You can also subscribe to it on iTunes.

Thanks to JT’s Manukan for treating us to dinner!

Massive apologies for the sound quality—we were so busy yakking, we didn’t monitor the recording or check the playback. Just think of it as the Spongebob Squarepants episode, recorded in a pineapple under the sea.

Thanks to Ricky and Manny for tweaking the sound file, and to our podcast site manager Ren for uploading the episodes every week.

By way of an apology for the gurgliness, here’s a giveaway.

You can win these Ancient Aliens seasons 1-3 DVDs by answering this question:

What would our guest Mike do if a victorious tennis player tossed his/her sweaty towel at him?

Post your answer in Comments. All correct answers qualify for the raffle.

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From Robin in New York:

So we were at Lady M, a cakeshop on the Upper East Side, kinda near were we saw Aling Martha Stewart…and who walks in?

RF in the flesh!

An avid fan asked for a picture with him but he politely declined.

In fairness, mabango siya and malinis ang paa…

Reminds us of a gag from high school.
– May ipagtatapak ako sa yo.
– Ano yon?
– Paa.

And of Tennis Mike’s rankings of players’ feet at the Shanghai Open. (Gay Tennis Mike, not Het Tennis Mike. We must know 100 Mikes. Not, alas, Magic Mike.)

Oh good, Roger’s eating cake. No Anna Wintour in the entourage?

Send sightings, photos, questions, and stuff that doesn’t fit in the posts to saffron.safin@gmail.com.

Cartoon from The New Yorker

Before Sunday, Roger Federer’s last grand slam victory was at the Australian Open in 2010. Since then it’s been two and a half years of mental torment, recrimination and self-doubt—not for Federer, whose perfect hair remained unruffled by the dominance of Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, but for Federer fans like myself.

I hope you’re a better human than I am, because I was reduced to hoping that Nadal’s knees would fall off (Not impossible, given the way he plays) or that Djokovic would split in half (Not impossible either—his upper torso goes left, his legs go right, boom! Manananggal). Sportswriters wrote Roger off (He’s 30)—I stopped reading them. He got cranky after his losses—I figured he’d been babysitting his twins. I watched the grand slams almost furtively, lest others gloat that he’d become “vincible”.

Suddenly we’re back! Okay, technically not “suddenly”—he had to win seven matches at Wimbledon—and not “we” because he did all the work. But we’re back, as in 17 grand slams, 7 Wimbledon titles—matching Pete Sampras’s record—and as an unexpected bonus, the world Number One ranking.

To Federer fans everywhere, the universe makes sense again.

Funnily enough, I was thinking of rooting for Andy Murray. I feel bad for Murray and the Brits, 76 years without a champion at home. And then Federer beat Djokovic in the semis by playing like Federer circa 2006…

Listen, to support Murray and Britain out of pity would be an insult to a fine player and a great nation. Go Roger! You’ve won everything, you don’t need another slam, but I need this. Just one more slam and I swear I will expect nothing more from you.

Last Sunday two narratives clashed. On one side the “old” warrior reminding the forgetful public that he was still around; on the other, the young hero seeking to prove himself while carrying the hopes of an entire country. Pundits like to say that the victory goes to the competitor who wants it more. Seriously, how do you measure that?

The possibility that I would have a nervous breakdown during the final could not be ignored, so I outsourced the match report to filmmaker and fellow Federer fan Mike Alcazaren. This turned out to be an excellent idea. I watched the first two sets curled up in the foetal position while my cats sniffed my face periodically to see if I was alive. This is how I stayed until halfway through the third set (including the rain delay), when Federer broke Murray’s serve in a 20-minute battle to go up 4-2. When you’ve been watching Roger for 11 years, you can spot the exact moment when every doubt is erased and the rest of the match is a formality. I got up, refilled the cats’ food bowls, and made myself a sandwich.

While writing Sunday’s column we looked up some facts about Roger Federer’s career and found this bit in his Wikipedia entry.

Controversy

When confronted with this evidence in the winter of 2006, Federer denied the allegations, stating they were “preposterous” and that to his knowledge “such technology does not exist, even in Japan.” Federer then dispensed hot chocolate from a cavity in his chest and flew away, powered by rockets located in the soles of his feet.

Hah!

Roger Federer photo from the Guardian.

Roger Federer has won the Wimbledon men’s singles final for the 7th time. It is his 17th grand slam championship. With this victory The Fed returns to World Number One.

And many had written him off.

Fantastic effort from Andy Murray.

This is our Wide World of Pain column from the December 2011 issue of Esquire (Phils). Yeah, everyone gets emotional during the holidays.

The Fractured Skull and the Avatar
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Roger Federer faces Andy Murray in the Wimbledon men’s singles final tonight, Manila time.

Pressure on Murray:
-To fulfill the expectations of 60 million Britons who have been waiting close to 80 years for a British men’s singles champion at Wimbledon.
-To win his first grand slam.
-To be acknowledged as a Briton and not “that Scottish guy”.

Pressure on Federer:
-None, actually, he’s done everything. But pressure on Federer devotees for Federer to win after a two-year drought, because our lives make more sense when he wins.