Fifty parting shots from Wimbledon

Cleaning out the Wimbledon notebook while still in awe of that final.

Four weeks after winning the French Open, Rafael Nadal is the King of Wimbledon, the first player to pull off the summer double since Bjorn Borg and the first player to beat Roger Federer at the All-England Club since 2002. If your heartbeat has returned to normal after that final, you're in better shape than we are. And if Nadal can improve on hard courts as radically as he improved on grass, this could get really scary.

• All hail women's winner Venus Williams, who has now taken the title five times. Discuss: any case to be made that her career eclipses Serena's?

• Serena Williams may have lost the women's final. But consider this: her record on the year is 31-4. And, in a weird way, it WAS good to see that her sour disposition in defeat extends to intra-family matches as well.

• Roger Federer is obviously at a bit of a crossroads, having failed to win a major this year, losing at Wimbledon for the first time since 2002 and, almost surely, finally abdicating his top ranking. Know what? A lot of players ranked No. 2 still win majors (especially when you're rival has never even reached hardcourt Slam final.) Has Federer fallen a level this year? Unquestionably. Has he won his last Slam? Hardly.

• Nice to see Marat Safin break through. We all know about his frailties and mercurial nature. But does anyone doubt that when he's on, he's a top-five player? (And where was Dinara for that semifinal match?)

• The Chinese equivalent of props to Zheng Jie both for run semifinal run and her decision to donate much of her winning the Sichuan earthquake relief effort. So long as that backhand doesn't desert her, look for her in the second weeks of more Grand Slams.

• Discuss: has Elena Dementieva leap-frogged Jelena Jankovic as the best WTA Player never to have won a Slam?

• If you were going to pick one player to score the most dramatic victory of the entire event, you could do worse than Andy Murray. His comeback defeat of Richard Gasquet was watched by more than 10 million people in Britain alone. Consider that ESPN's solid rating of .5 represents barely 500,000 homes.

• Hats off to Germany's Rainer Schuettler, reaching the semifinals and halving his ranking in the process.