A Break from the Race

BOSTON--Good thing there's not trying to open the baseball season here today. Messy, with slush and snow and rain, is your forecast. Even a team being heralded as the best Red Sox team EVER (honest) might have trouble in that weather.

It's hockey weather, really. But let's take a quick break from the Leaf playoff push to point towards another big sporting event today, and that's the clash between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer down in Miami tonight.

Couple of interesting things at play here. It's the first time in four years they've met in anything but a tournament final, and really, once of the rare occasions they actually get to face one another. They played twice last year, twice in 2009. They haven't clashed on U.S. soil in six years. So it's a special occasion just on that basis.

What makes this different, meanwhile, is that they're not only not in the final together - this is a semifinal - but the winner faces a significant hurdle, unlike other occasions. Novak Djokovic of Serbia is arguably the game's best player right now - he's ranked No. 2 in the world behind Nadal and just ahead of Federer - and he likely awaits the winner of Nadal-Federer unlike American veteran Mardy Fish has a huge upset in mind this afternoon.

That said, Nadal-Federer is still the match most want to see, and the tennis world has been repeatedly denied the privilege in recent years because of injuries, upsets and other reasons.

But in steamy Miami tonight, the two greats clash, and with both still near or at the top of the game. Between them they have accumulated more than $100 million of career winnings, but it won't last forever. Federer is 29, and starting, perhaps, to slow. You can bet this is one of those contests that will attract even the non-tennis fan.