TENNIS/French Open: When Bjorn Borg zipped up his wooden Donnay racquet at 26 years of age and left the game with five Wimbledon and six French Open titles, it hit some almost like a death in the family.
Borg cracked at his peak and, without warning, walked away. His legacy, however, will endure, though his lack of affection for the Australian Open prevented him winning a Grand Slam there.
Borg is one of those who despite being regarded as the world's best failed to win all four majors. But unlike the other close-but-no-cigar players, Borg, somewhat perversely, actually dominated on clay and grass.
John McEnroe was a volley away from beating Ivan Lendl to win the French Open. Given his hot temperament, that loss to a player he intensely disliked is bound to still cause night sweats in his New York penthouse.
But Lendl, to his credit, came to accept the challenge of Wimbledon; he employed Tony Roche, a grass-court expert, to coach him and went on to reach the final in 1986 and 1987, losing ultimately to two specialists, Boris Becker and Pat Cash.
Becker, a Wimbledon winner as a teenager, didn't have enough sustained boom-boom for the dirt. Pete Sampras, arguably the best of them all, also struggled in Paris, where even the sinewy Stefan Edberg also ran out of gas.
The sure-footed Lleyton Hewitt, who missed last year here with a cracked rib, has not been past the quarter-finals.
The current world number one, Switzerland's Roger Federer, has won all the majors except this one.
Of the last 17 French Open men's singles titles, 13 were won by players who did not win any of the other Grand Slam titles.
Only two men have won all four majors in the same year since the idea of a Grand Slam emerged 70 years ago: Donald Budge (1938) and Rod Laver (1962 and 1969).
Roy Emerson and Fred Perry won all four but not in the same calendar year.
In 1999 when Andre Agassi beat Andrei Medvedev, he became only the fifth man, and first American in 61 years, to win all four - he had won Wimbledon in 1992, the US Open in 1994 and the Australian in 1995.
Agassi was also the first to do it on three different surfaces. When Budge, Perry, Laver and Emerson accomplished the feat, all except the French were grass. Now Australia has Rebound Ace, Roland Garros clay, Wimbledon grass and the US Open Decoturf.
The reality is that many professionals prefer the slowness and higher bounce of clay to the speed and low bounce of the grass at Wimbledon. The slower surface tends to play to strengths that include adeptness at sweeping ground-strokes and keeping the ball in play. Clay also nullifies the artillery of big servers such as Andy Roddick and Goran Ivanisevic.
This year, however, Federer, has put down the foundation for a possible calendar Grand Slam. Having won in Australia in January, he has to negotiate the clay over the next two weeks (the tournament starts tomorrow) before moving on to the grass at Wimbledon, where injury aside, he will be an unbackable favourite.
But casting a long shadow over the possibility of the Grand Slam becoming a reality is not only the brilliant 19-year-old Spaniard Rafael Nadal but also a long list of other Spaniards, South Americans and French who will all be relishing the chance to play the world's best player on a surface where he is distinctly uncomfortable.
They will all, of course, try to keep him on court for as long as their durable legs will allow.
But Nadal, ranked two in the world, is the player most likely to stop the Federer Express in its tracks. Already the young brawler has built a record against the would-be history maker of five wins from their last six meetings on clay.
In recent weeks Federer has been doing what Lendl did to hone his grass game - practising with the left-handed Roche in an effort to get used to the whizz, spin and angles of the best "lefty" in the world.
Given Federer's current dominance, that statistic against Nadal is almost embarrassing - though he is demonstrably not at the stage where the flamboyant Vitas Gerulaitis found himself in relation to Jimmy Connors. When Gerulaitis, who died in 1994 aged 40, scored a rare win against his US compatriot, he drawled: "No one beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row."
Federer need not panic but history suggests that winning all four tournaments, whether in the same year or successive years, is difficult even for a player who possesses his wizardry and has so easily annexed the others, as he has over the past three years.
What Borg possessed, and after him that other great clay-court exponent Thomas Muster of Austria, was the ability to keep running, keep hitting the ball back and last for three, four or five hours over seven games in two weeks.
Federer has shown he can, when required, abandon his more radically artistic game for the trench warfare of the clay court.
The problem for him is that Nadal over the past two years has proven himself capable of doing it better. His ability to retrieve, his left-handedness, his brutal strength, his endurance, his temperament so suited to the hot, dry clay - all must be broken if Federer is to achieve his goal of joining the cosy club of Budge and Laver.
