Tom Cruise and his wife Katie sat in the Real Madrid box as guests of the Beckhams. David is apparently a prized recruit for Scientology . He fits the model. Attractive, rich, talented, and not that smart. Meanwhile across the way, in the Mallorca box, sat Rafael Nadal, who won his third consecutive French Open two weeks earlier. He was there as a football fan supporting his hometown team Mallorca, and like almost everyone else in Spain and the rest of the world, he was rooting against Real Madrid in its bid to win a historic 30th Spanish League title.

I usually focus, when writing about soccer, on the English Premier League, because I like the speed and parity in the English game, harbor some Anglophile tendencies , support Arsenal , and subscribe to Fox Sports Channel. But there are times when the best soccer in the world is somewhere else. To my mind those time usually occur in Spain, because while you can't argue with the quality of competition in Italy, the game is so bottled up these days that the world's best talent prefers to play elsewhere. All that as introduction to what happened in Spain this past weekend...

The 2007 French Open has come and gone. Nadal beat Federer again in the very same way he has the last two years. And we are left to contemplate the significance of watching two men simultaneously demonstrate unparalleled dominance in their sport. Nadal became the first man since Bjorn Borg to win three consecutive French Open titles, a feat that Justine Henin accomplished on the women's side this year also. And Federer is still the best tennis player in the world. But in an individual sport, to quote French national Christopher Lambert, there can be only one.

Since we are poised on the verge of tomorrow's men's semifinals, I thought I would use today's blog to take stock of the way the draw shaped up this year. The matchups tomorrow are not a surprise. Most people had Federer, Nadal, Davydenko, Djokovic, and Canas in the hopper and four of them made it through. In fact, so far, there really haven't been any surprises at this year's French.