A writer I much admired died on July 4, apparently taking his own life. Jody Bottum has a nice note about Disch. And, proving once again that it’s a middle-brow magazine at heart, so does Entertainment Weekly.

Very sad news.

Santino has put together some coherent thoughts on Federer’s future that I find highly persuasive. Yet this morning Galley Friend and Tennis Afficionado R.M. argued to me his belief that Federer still has a future as a champion. R.M.’s case went something like this:

* Federer was sick for a good chunk of this year (mono) and will be fully recovered by next season.

* Federer could benefit from the right coach, under whose care his game could improve.

* Unlike Borg and McEnroe, Federer doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or other pursuits. All he wants to do is win matches. This monomania should keep him engaged and in the game in ways other greats weren’t. (And unlike Sampras, Federer seems to have a monstrous work ethic.)

The exception to this last is Agassi, but he seems a special case since he basically had three very distinct careers, each separated by long pauses where his engagement with the game was minimal. I’d argue that Agassi was so different as a player and had such a singular career that it isn’t really worth using him as a point of comparison for anyone else.

I’m not sure I buy R.M.’s argument. But on further consideration I do agree with him that the 2008 final was the greatest match I’ve ever seen. Consistently high-level play from both guys; giant momentum shifts; several incredible rallies; the highest possible stakes; and a fifth set where it was unclear who was going to win until the very end.

This last point is the most crucial, obviously. Normally, going into a fifth set you have some sense of who is collapsing and who is surging. Yesterday there were a bunch of occasions where either player could have folded and allowed himself to lose honorably. But the outcome was always in doubt, until the very finish.

One of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in sports; I put it up there with Keri Strugg sticking the landing for the gold at the 1996 Olympics.

I’m not ready to call it Citizen Kane yet, but Drew McWeeny has a review which describes a single line of the Joker’s dialogue: While Batman is interrogating the Joker, the Joker says to him, “When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

For me, this is a pure and perfect distillation of the Joker’s worldview and it suggests that The Dark Knight may have gotten the characters right in what I’ll un-ironically call the most important franchise in Western literature.

Only 8 days until the press screening . . .

The 2008 Championships were a solid affair made transcendent by Sunday’s men’s final. A few thoughts:

* I keep waiting for Richard Gasquet to become the great player he’s meant to be, but his quarterfinal meltdown against Andy Murray suggests it may never happen. Gasquet has as much natural talent as anyone in the game other than Federer. He’s as pretty to watch as Federer; everything about him is smooth as glass. But as soon as Murray broke him to stay in the third set (remember, Gasquet was up two sets to none, and a break, and was serving for the match), he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world but on court. All of a sudden he looked like Eli Manning. Galley Friend S.H. calls that “loser face.”

* Andy Murray is an animal. But he may not have the tools to win a major.

* It’s frightening how fast things fall apart. Last September, Federer had just finished his third consecutive year with three major wins. With 12 slams in the bank we were wondering how much he’d pass Sampras by.

Ten months later, Federer hasn’t won another slam. If he doesn’t win the U.S. Open, I suspect he can’t finish the year #1 in the rankings. Since January, Santino has been telling me that he thought Federer was done, that 26 is the wall in tennis, and that Federer would be lucky to tie Sampras’s 14 slam wins. I scoffed, but now that seems about right.

The age of Federer is over. He’ll hang around near the top for the next 18 months. He’ll be a regular in the semis and finals of the slams, but absent him getting some help (injuries to other players, a draw with lots of upsets) I don’t think it’s certain he will win another big one. It’s hard to imagine how he could win three more. Nadal and others are still on the upswing and Federer has nowhere to grow but old.

This is not a shot at Nadal–I like him a lot. He’s a special player, a sweet guy, and a deserving champion. Yesterday’s epic final was super-high-level tennis. Some of the best I’ve ever seen. But Federer lost the match by clutching up on most of his break chances. I forget how he finished the match–was he 1 for 15 on break points?–but it wasn’t like Rafa was fighting them off brilliantly. Federer dumped backhand after backhand (some of them off of second serves, even) into the net on break points. The old Federer doesn’t miss those.

I suppose I should just be glad to have had the chance to see him play at his peak. But I can’t help being a little sad at the prospect of his diminishing.

* One of the aggravating aspects of tennis coverage is that the tennis community has all of the cliquishness of the ballroom dance world. Commentators and former players will go to any pains to excuse boorish behavior or even just foolish decision-making on the parts of players and their entourages. It’s a criticism-free zone. (Unless, of course, you’re some poor schlub ranked 235th in the world, in which case Pam Shriver will feel free to criticize your outfit, your body, your fitness level, and your lack of a second serve. Qualifiers don’t get the same courtesies.)

But for the first time last night, I was grateful for the closed-shop tennis mentality. McEnroe was interviewing Federer just outside the locker room a few moments after the presentation ceremony. Federer, having held it together on court, was a mess. He looked like a man who understood that all of a sudden, his powers had been stripped from him, that his career was now a dead-end. After a minute or so of interview, it looked as though Federer might break down. And McEnroe, bless his heart, simply cut the interview short and gave Federer an awkward hug–the purpose of which seemed less to comfort him, than to get between Federer and the camera.

If a regular NBC reporter had been conducting that interview, they would have strung Federer along as far as possible, eager to get emotion out of him. For the first time, I was happy to see tennis protecting its own.

Who knew that owning the rights to Strawberry Shortcake would be such a big deal? As the Los Angeles Times reports, Miss Shortcake belongs to DIC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., which intended to be sold to the Cookie Jar Group of Toronto for approximately $31 million. But DIC’s licensing partner American Greetings actually owns the rights to Shortcake and everyone else living in Strawberry Land and found a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and prevent DIC from being bought by Cookie Jar.

I thought Strawberry Shortcake went the way of My Little Pony, He-Man, and Inspector Gadget. Not so, reports the Times:

“In the last four years, according to DIC, Strawberry Shortcake has generated nearly $3 billion in retail sales.”

Well, at least we know what Strawberry Shortcake does for DIC.

Free markets are the best available system of allocating resources and we’re all blessed to live in one and blah blah blah. I like the free market. I certainly like it a lot better than all of the alternatives. But I am driven to distraction by free market androids who insist that markets are perfect and that any result a free market produces is, by definition, a correct result.

You know the type. This is the guy who insists that the Worldcom CEO was absolutely worth $120 million a year–because if he wasn’t then nobody would have been willing to pay him at that salary!

Instead, I would content that while free markets are great and all that (see above), they produce failures at a much higher rate than most Americans would probably suspect. These matters normally hinge on something subjective, but today we have an example that seems pretty cut and dry, courtesy of Santino.

Betting markets are a pretty pure distillation of a free market. But Sonny notices that at least one casino in Vegas was (earlier this year) giving Tiger Woods 4-1 odds on winning exactly three majors–but 3-1 odds on winning the Grand Slam. That’s right: The betting public thought that there was a better chance of Tiger winning all four majors (something which has never been done) than there was of him winning three of the four.

I’m not sure there’s a way to dress up this result as anything other than a market reaching an objectively irrational result.

My friend Adam White has the goods:

Juan Johnson is a police officer whose off-duty act of kindness to a stranger in distress landed him in the middle of a drug bust in which he was repeatedly kicked in the groin by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal.

Anthony Sacramone has the best review you’ll read anywhere.