TENNIS

Rafael Nadal scrambled across the sun-baked clay for three hours in 30-degree heat, chasing another French Open title by repeatedly forcing Roger Federer to hit one more shot.

The effort by the 20-year-old Spaniard paid off with a 1-6, 6-1, 6-4, 7-6 (4) victory Sunday, spoiling Federer's bid for a fourth consecutive Grand Slam championship.

"This is my best final against the best player in history," Nadal said.

He earned his second successive Roland Garros title and extended his record clay-court winning streak to 60 matches. He also prevented the top-ranked Federer from becoming only the third man to hold all four major titles at the same time.

Nadal closed the victory with a swinging volley for a winner, then collapsed to his back and rolled over, covered in the clay he loves.

"He's a fighter and he's a grinder, and he deserves to win here," Federer said.

Federer's first loss in eight Grand Slam finals came at the only major he has yet to win, and at the hands of his nemesis. Nadal also won when they met at Roland Garros last year in the semifinals. Federer fell to 0-4 against Nadal this year; he's 44-0 against everyone else.

During changeovers, French fans tried to inspire Federer with chants of "Ro-ger! Ro-ger!", but they were answered with chants of ``Ra-fa! Ra-fa!" Nadal earned the cheers at the end, winning the first meeting of the two top-seeded men in a Roland Garros final since 1984.

With his unsurpassed retrieving skills, the Spaniard kept running down balls in both corners to extend points. And the left-hander kept pulling his heavy, high-kicking forehand crosscourt to break down Federer's backhand, his weaker side.

Waiting to be introduced before the match, Nadal bounced like a boxer preparing for a prize fight. But it took him awhile to really start swinging.

He lost 16 of 18 points during one stretch, and played 35 minutes and 46 points before he won a game after falling behind 5-0.

Federer couldn't sustain the fast start. Content to duel from the baseline — a questionable tactic against the king of clay — Federer had 51 unforced errors to 28 by Nadal.

In short, Federer looked flat, frustrated and even fragile, remarkable for a player who had won 27 consecutive Grand Slam matches.

The match began to turn with Federer serving at 0-1 in the second set. He took a 40-love lead and appeared to win the next point, but the chair umpire overruled a line call and ordered the point replayed, and Nadal rallied to break for the first time.

Nadal pulled ahead in the third set. He saved four break-point chances to hold for 2-all, then broke in the next game on four errors by Federer, including a blown overhead, and served out the set from there.

In the fourth set, Nadal was two points from the title serving for the match at 5-4, 30-15, but Federer rallied with some of his best tennis to break. He won one point when Nadal slid into the net chasing a shot, and another with side-to-side-to-side retrieving that rivalled the Spaniard's best.

Nadal made another save of his own in the corner for a 5-2 to lead in the tiebreaker and served out the final two points, extending his winning streak in finals to 14 in a row. He improved to 24-0 on clay this year, and he's 14-0 in two appearances at Roland Garros.

He became the youngest man to win consecutive championships at Roland Garros since Bjorn Borg in 1974-75. His reward: about $1.2 million US. Federer received $600,000.


Alice Munro's Vancouver
By DAVID LASKIN
NY Times

IN Alice Munro's Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs at the Granville Island market. Ms. Munro, the 74-year-old Canadian whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed "the best fiction writer now working in North America," set a handful of her marvelous short stories in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, blind to its own staggering beauty, Ms. Munro's Vancouver is an outpost where new wives blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to begin.

Which is pretty much what Ms. Munro herself was doing when she came here as a bride of 20. A small-town beauty from a poor southern Ontario family, Ms. Munro moved reluctantly to Vancouver in 1952 after her husband, Jim, landed a job in a big downtown department store. She brought with her two years of university education and a few published stories, a perfect 1950's cinched-waist figure, and a fierce sense of irony that she kept carefully hidden.

Alice and Jim moved into the dark downstairs of a three-story rental on Arbutus Street right across from the beach in the Kitsilano neighborhood — and the building, No. 1316, is still there, in need of a paint job, on a street of "high wooden houses crammed with people living tight." Cross the street, stroll out on the packed sand, and the brooding immensity of Burrard Inlet and the coastal mountains engulfs you; a 10-minute drive across the Burrard Bridge and you're cruising through downtown's smorgasbord of world cuisine and high-end retail. Yet Kitsilano seems blithely unaware of its world-class setting.

"Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known," Ms. Munro writes in "Cortes Island," a story in her 1978 collection "The Love of a Good Woman" that matches detail for detail with her first months in Kits. "No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind." After a day of wandering the city vaguely looking for work, the story's nameless narrator (dubbed Little Bride by one of the other characters) returns to Kits Beach at dusk as "the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun's setting — and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight."

The clouds were scarcer, the light stronger on the January afternoon I prowled around Kits — but otherwise Ms. Munro has nailed the scene. I can perfectly imagine the struggling young writer stretched on her bed in the tiny dark bedroom bolting down Colette and Henry Green or bending over a notebook at the kitchen table, as the Little Bride in "Cortes Island" does, "filling page after page with failure."

No sign of anguished artistes the day of my visit. Fit young women jog through the park. A spread of fruit and pastry awaits a hungry movie crew outside the trendy Watermark Restaurant (Vancouver has become a big movie-making town in recent years). I stroll a few blocks up from the beach to Fourth Avenue — 30 years ago the main drag of Vancouver's counterculture (the scoundrel hippie brother in Ms. Munro's story "Forgiveness in Families" lived around here in a house full of smiling Hare Krishna-type priests), but now as bright and tony as New York's Columbus Avenue or San Francisco's Fillmore Street. The one holdover from Ms. Munro's time is Duthie Books at 2239 West Fourth Street — a literary bookstore that once had branches all over the city but has recently retreated to this one last thoroughly gentrified location.

The Munros' Kitsilano chapter was brief. By 1953 the couple had decamped to the North Shore suburbs just across the Lions Gate Bridge — first to a rather drab tract house in rainy North Vancouver, and then to a nicer place with a big front garden perched on a slope in the Dundarave section of West Vancouver. Two daughters arrived in quick succession (a third died the day she was born). The family lived in Dundarave for the next seven years, Jim commuting to his job downtown, Alice attempting to keep her art alive while managing the household.

The West Vancouver setting crops up again and again in Ms. Munro's stories — but it's always colored by the strain she was under in those years. "When I got home from school my mother would be sitting in that chair in the living room in the dark," Ms. Munro's daughter Sheila recalls. "She had great promise — she had published some stories — but she didn't know if she would continue to do it. She just wanted to be left alone to write."

The Dundarave house is still there — it's at 2749 Lawson Avenue — and so is the shopping block on Marine Drive where Ms. Munro used to walk (she never learned to drive) to do her marketing or to work in the office she rented for a while or to take Sheila to ballet class. Sheila remembers the block of shops as wonderfully ordinary — a hardware store, grocery store, cleaners and a Chinese restaurant.

But some of Vancouver's new-found cool has wafted across the water and today downtown Dundarave has a bit of the air of Sausalito — galleries and coffee places, chowder and sushi, a scattering of petals on the sidewalk outside the florist. In summer it would be the perfect place to grab a cappuccino, assemble a picnic and then head for the beach, two blocks away at Dundarave Pier or a hop east at Ambleside.

"Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs," opens "Jakarta," one of Ms. Munro's most memorable Vancouver stories from "The Love of a Good Woman" collection. It's unmistakably Ambleside Beach — though faux Mediterranean palazzi have muscled out most of the cottages that line the shore in Ms. Munro's story. From their outpost behind the logs, Kath and Sonje clutch their D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield and eye the gaggle of blowsy, noisy housewives they dub the Monicas:

"These women aren't so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they've reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she's a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal functions."

This is pure Munro: the social anxiety, the fusing of insecurity and disdain, the heavy tug of ordinary life, the way dread can rise and spread until it erases everything lovely. "She's always dead on," Sheila Munro says when I ask if the descriptions of places ring true to her childhood memories. And yet it strikes me when I walk out on Ambleside pier that Ms. Munro has neglected to mention this stupendous setting — the echoing curves of bridge and cove and mountain, the dull silver of the sea, the green-black hump of Stanley Park, all this grandeur of land and water so close it's as if the great northern wilderness laps at the city's feet.

But Ms. Munro was always oppressed, almost crushed by Vancouver's fabled vistas. In the story "Memorial," also set in West Vancouver, a character named Eileen challenges a wealthy foolish man who boasts about his water and mountain view.

"Well suppose you're in a low mood, and you get up and here spread out before you is this magnificent view. All the time, you can't get away from it. Don't you ever feel not up to it?"

"Not up to it?"

"Guilty," said Eileen, persistently though regretfully. "That you're not in a better mood? That you're not more — worthy, of this beautiful view?"

In 1963, the Munros left Dundarave and moved to Victoria to open a bookstore. The marriage broke up nine years later, and Alice returned to Ontario and eventually remarried, but the bookstore is still there — Munro's Books, still run by Jim, still one of the finest in Canada.

Alice never again lived in Vancouver though she does visit to collect prizes and still occasionally sets a story there. "What Is Remembered," from the 2001 collection "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," is one of her best and touches on all of her totemic Vancouver spots. Meriel, the young wife at the center of the story, is at a funeral in Dundarave when a man unknown to her, a doctor and bush pilot from the far north, offers to drive her on a visit to a distant suburb. All afternoon, sexual tension mounts until the pilot pulls over at the Prospect Point viewing area in Stanley Park, and the two strangers get out of the car and start wildly kissing.

Ms. Munro brings them to the glass-bricked entrance of a "small, decent building" in Kitsilano, but while they consummate their mad upsurge of passion in a borrowed flat, she cuts away to describe the setting Meriel would have preferred for adultery: "A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins."

It's just the kind of place Ms. Munro herself prefers — places like the Buchan Hotel, tucked away on a leafy side street near Stanley Park, or the ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel overlooking English Bay. By a stroke of literary magic, Ms. Munro makes an afternoon of adultery in Kitsilano all the more electric by having it happen off stage and in the wrong place, the wrong part of town, the wrong kind of bedroom.

In a way, it's a perfect metaphor for Ms. Munro's own relationship to Vancouver. For her, this was always the wrong place — the views too grand, the weather too gray, the trees too tall. She never cared for the stodgy repressed Vancouver of the 1950's and by all accounts she hasn't warmed much more to the sleek city of today. And yet, after you read her Vancouver stories, you sense her watchful, uprooted presence everywhere. It's a sign of Ms. Munro's greatness as a writer that she so pervades a place that she never really surrendered herself to.

IF YOU GO

WHERE TO EAT

Watermark (1305 Arbutus Street, 604-738-5487) is on the beach in Kitsilano, across the street from the Munros' first Vancouver home. The food, like roasted duck breast and lobster ravioli, is far trendier than anything in Ms. Munro's stories. Dinner for two without wine will run about 80 Canadian dollars (about $74 at 1.08 Canadian dollars to $1).

Bishop's Restaurant (2183 West Fourth Avenue, 604-738-2025) is the place for a classy splurge in Kitsilano. Vancouver's well-heeled artsy sophisticates dine here on organic regional produce and seafood — crab cakes, Pacific squid, steamed smoked sablefish — as well as Fraser Valley lamb with fingerling potatoes. Lots of flowers and local art. Dinner for two will run about 120 Canadian dollars without wine.

Dundarave Fish Market (2423 Marine Drive, 604-922-1155) is a good choice for lunch in Munro's West Vancouver neighborhood. The fare is pretty much what you'd expect from the name — fish and chips, oysters, crab cakes, chowders, fish burgers. Lunch for two without wine will run about 30 Canadian dollars.

WHERE TO STAY

The Sylvia Hotel (1154 Gilford Street, 604-681-9321; www.sylviahotel.com) though it could use some sprucing up, is still the hotel of choice for Vancouver literati — and Ms. Munro has been spotted here. The location in the West End on English Bay at the edge of Stanley Park is unbeatable. Mid-season doubles run from 99 to 159 Canadian dollars.

The Buchan Hotel (1906 Haro Street, 604-685-5354; www.buchanhotel.com) also has a very Munro feel to it — a 1926 house steps from Stanley Park. Rooms are chilly in winter and bare bones (no phones). High season doubles run from 98 to 135 Canadian dollars.

The West End Guest House (1362 Haro Street, 888-546-3327 or 604-681-2889; www.westendguesthouse.com) is a lovely, cozy B & B . Winter rates range from 85 to 214 Canadian dollars, including full breakfast.

SOME CARAVAGGIO PAINTINGS


Caravaggio (Michelangelo da Merisi)
The Taking of Christ, 1602
Society of Jesus of Ireland, on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland


The Calling of St. Matthew, Caravaggio