British Press Finds Its Tragic Hero In An American

In London, sports are sport, Americans are ungracious blokes and Andy Roddick is brave, tenacious, athletic and bloody valorous. So like Hamlet, Othello and Romeo before him, Roddick naturally became the tragic hero in the British writer's five-act narrative arc. With no more excuses to fawn over Andy Murray, the British press needed to appoint a larger-than-life figure from Sunday's Wimbledon final, which, just one year after the Nadal-Federer epic, was "possibly the greatest, gutsiest attempted larceny the old tournament has ever seen." (That's sort of comparable to The Greatest Match Ever Played, I suppose.) Fortunately for the royal hacks, they had their choice of Roddick and Federer to laud. Most chose Federer. Some brave few extolled Roddick in a rather surprising twist heretofore not seen in canonical British literature. Martin Samuel, Daily Mail: Roddick made a mockery of that presumption, of so many presumptions in fact, firstly that it required his A ...