The first weekend of the French Open is still underway because Saturday's matches were mostly canceled due to rain. The setup coming into the tournament was really all about looking forward to a Nadal-Federer final, but the reality is that the French Open draw contains 128 players and the probability that it will unfold as predicted is partial. The French has a reputation of being a place for upsets, which is mainly the result of the fact that the ATP ranking system does not accurately reflect clay court prowess until after the tournament. The players, though, know who will be hard to beat.

I've never really like being the idea of a pundit as I'm much more comfortable being a critic. Sport pundits have to pretend that everything unfolded, if not exactly as they had imagined, at least generally according to their understanding. That's because they predict outcomes and influence bettors. I wanted to predict the outcome the Champion's League final mainly because I had a strong hunch about what would happen and I wanted to test it out. Turns out I was pretty much totally wrong.

The French Open has a history of treating the world's number one players badly. In my lifetime only Borg and Lendl have fared well from the top spot. This year, Roger Federer, perhaps the best male tennis player in the game's history, will again attempt to conquer the surface that is so uncompromising to tennis's best all court players by defeating his young nemesis, Rafael Nadal, the two-time defending French Open champion and undoubtedly the world's best clay court player.

I think maybe it was the trip to Somerville, TN , the place where my grandparents lie in the ground, that got me started thinking about what it means to be Southern again. For me all life can be read metaphorically. I choose to read it that way. So that when I couldn't find the cemetery where my dad's family is buried, I couldn't merely explain it by telling myself it's an unmarked, unnamed cemetery off of a farm road in a town I visit every five or ten years. I had to look for some deeper import...