Tennis Is The New Boxing

For all those who got up extremely early today to watch the Australian open finals, you witnessed one of the epic mano y mano battles of all time.

Tennis truly is the new boxing.

Replace Ali and insert Novak and Liston becomes Rafa.

With the Super Bowl coming up and people talking about just how fantastic athletes the players are - or when you get into an argument with someone who will make the argument that soccer players are better athletes than baskeball players remember these stats.

Soccer players run for 90 minutes - perhaps a little longer.

Basketball players run for 48 minutes - perhaps a little longer.

The Aussie open finals just lasted almost 6 hours - 360 minutes of 1 on 1 battle. No dogging it - no timeouts - nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide.

Check out some of these points:

Just unreal - 2 guys at the absolute pinnacle of their powers giving it their all for 6 hours.

And oh yeah, their semi final matches lasted 5 1/2 hours for Djokovic and 4 1/2 hours for Nadal - that's like playing 7 basketball games 2 days ago - then coming back out and doing it again today - at a pace that is nothing but run and gun.

Crazy - and just fantastic.