The resurgence of the Celtics dominated the NBA’s news. It had been 22 years since the Celtics had won an NBA title and 21 since they last played in the finals. Led by the Big Three of Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, the Celts dominated the regular season. They survived a seven-game conference semifinal against the Cavs and LeBron James, then took out Detroit in six to advance to the finals, where they found Kobe Bryant and the Lakers waiting for them.
The Celtics were too much for the Lakers, as they won in six games. But it was the matchup the NBA and its fans had dreamed of, an echo of the game’s glory days.
The NHL, meanwhile, saw its brightest young star, Sidney Crosby, reach the Stanley Cup Finals with the resurgent Penguins. The Pens lost to the Red Wings dynasty, but Crosby established himself as every bit the budding star the league’s hype engine made him out to be.
And then it was June and the U.S. Open golf championship played on a public course at Torrey Pines. It was supposed to be a battle between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, both of whom were intimately familiar with the course. But Mickelson played himself out of contention while Tiger plowed ahead, limping and wincing and gimping on a left leg that he would later admit had two stress fractures in addition to a wrecked knee. Tiger birdied the 18th hole to force an 18-hole Monday playoff against Rocco Mediate, the tour’s aging everyman.
Woods built a three-stroke lead in the playoff, then give it all back plus a stroke. Needing a birdie on the 18th to force sudden death, Woods drained a tricky putt to tie the match. On the first sudden death hole, he won it. Within days, he was undergoing surgery on his leg that would sideline him for the rest of the season and the beginning of 2009. Considering his injury and Mediate’s heroic play, it went down as one of the greatest Opens ever and the greatest win of Woods’ incredible career. It was the 14th major of his career, just four short of Jack Nicklaus’ all-time record.
Sports fans could be forgiven for wondering what could possibly top Woods’ win at Torrey. Three weeks later they found out when 22-year-old Spaniard Rafael Nadal, who had won his fourth straight French Open earlier in the spring, faced Roger Federer, in the Wimbledon Finals.
Federer was 26 and being called the greatest player in the history of the game. In the final, played the day after Venus Williams beat her sister Serena in the women’s final, Nadal won the first two sets with relative ease. Federer won the next two in dramatic fashion in tiebreakers.
The match included two rain delays which served only to draw out the drama. It would last nearly five hours in actual playing time — an all-time record. And the final set went 16 games, with Nadal finally defeated Federer 9-7. It was immediately hailed as the greatest final in Wimbledon’s long and storied history.
Federer would come back to win the U.S. Open in September for the fifth straight year — a streak matched only by Bill Tildon in the Roaring Twenties. The U.S. Open would also see the return of Serena Williams, who won her first title in Arthur Ashe Stadium since 2002 and took over the top spot in the rankings for the first time since 2003.
Golf fans who were wondering what the use would be of watching the British Open without Tiger found out. The 50-something Greg Norman, with new wife Chris Evert beaming from the gallery, darned near won the thing. He fell apart in the final round, as he used to do in his prime, but no one objected. The fact he’d gotten close and had so much fun doing it was enough to make it a tournament to remember.
Summer would end with the Beijing Olympics, played in the finest facilities the Olympic Games had ever seen. It was a fitting stage for the greatest individual performance of all time.
There is nothing harder than living up to extraordinary expectations, and no one had ever had more on his athletic plate going into the Games than Michael Phelps. The swimmer had won six gold medals in Athens, and now he was coming to Beijing in quest of eight. If he could do it, it would be the most gold medals ever won in one Olympics, one more than the seven swimmer mark Spits had won in 1972, when the competition was far thinner than that faced by Phelps.
Phelps pulled it off, his quest saved by Jason Lezak, who swam the greatest anchor leg ever in a 4x100-meter medley relay, beating his French rival by inches in the last few yards of the race. He also won the 100-meter butterfly by .01 seconds, trailing the entire race and winning on his final stroke.
When Phelps was done, there was no question he was the greatest swimmer ever. The real question was whether we had just seen the greatest athlete even in any sport.
Swimming consumes the first week of the Olympics. The second week is dominated by track and field, and that’s where Jamaican Usain Bolt put on the greatest demonstration of raw speed ever seen. He started by shattering the record for the 100 meters, so thoroughly trashing his competition he pulled up before the finish and cruised across the line. His time was 9.69 and could have been faster if he hadn’t pulled up.
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Bolt followed that with another world record in the 200, running a 19.20 final into a headwind. Three days later, he anchored a world-record performance by the Jamaicans in the 4x100-meter relay.
The other great story of the Olympics was the return of U.S. men’s basketball to world prominence. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James led a team coached by Mike Krzyzewski through the preliminary rounds. In the final, the so-called “Redeem Team” needed all their talent and passion to beat Spain, 118-107. But beyond reclaiming world supremacy, the team also behaved impeccably, charmed a basketball-mad Chinese public and restored the honor of the NBA.
We returned from the Olympics in time for the final month of the Major League Baseball season that had surprises of its own. The Yankees struggled all season, finishing out of the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. And the best team in the AL East wasn’t the Yankees or the Red Sox but the Tampa Bay Rays, who had never had a winning season and had been the worst team in baseball the previous season.
Elsewhere, Manny Ramirez pouted his way out of Boston and onto the Dodgers. In two months, he single-handedly carried Los Angeles into the playoffs. In Milwaukee, CC Sabathia, acquired from the Indians, was doing the same for the Brewers. And in the NL East, the Mets were in the process of blowing yet another September lead, opening the door for the Philadelphia Phillies to try yet again to win the franchises second title ever and Philadelphia’s first major sports championship in a quarter century.
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