More highbrow sports commentary at Grantland, where Brian Phillips describes Roger Federer‘s Wimbledon loss to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in literary terms. Whereas “Tsonga tiptoed around the court like Ferdinand the Bull…Federer, by contrast, played like a puzzled scholar.” Phillips continues:

[I]t was as if he were studying the points and waiting for an insight that never came. At one point my Swiss friend, a longtime Federer fan, sent me an e-mail with one word in French: tétanisé. Paralyzed.

On the Shakespeare Scale for evaluating athletic performances in terms of their tragic flaws, in other words, Federer rated a full Hamlet. He was indecisive. He was slow to act. He looked like he’d rather be in a grove somewhere getting depressed about epistemology than knifing the motherfucker who X’d his dad.