08OPEN_BODO_Men.9a: 2004 US OPEN TEMPLATE 7/30/08 5:11 PM Page 4 Roger Federer is looking to join Jimmy Connors and Pete Sampras as the only men to win the US Open five times. Cameron Spencer/Getty Images Furthermore, every single player on the US Open roll of champions (with the exception of Andy Roddick) has won multiple majors, and Roddick a two-time finalist and America s top contender every year since he won the event in 2003 has a few good years to get over that hump. But wait, it gets better. While each US Open winner during the past 30 years certified his achievement by earning the No. 1 ranking, not every great champion has been able to overcome the well-documented challenges of winning the last major of the year, in the dog 78 2 0 0 8 U S O P E N days of late August and early September. The list of former No. 1s who fell short is led by that iconic player of the late 1970s, Bjorn Borg. He s joined by Jim Courier, Thomas Muster, Marcelo Rios, Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Carlos Moya, among others. The message is abundantly clear: If you win the US Open, you re almost guaranteed to hold the No. 1 ranking. (Think Roddick, Marat Safin and Lleyton Hewitt in this decade alone.) But being No. 1 doesn t guarantee that you can solve the mysteries of the Meadow. That makes the US Open the Champions Major, but that adjective casts too wide a net. Let s just call the tournament the Kingmaker Slam. The US Open has attained critical mass as a Kingmaker for a variety of reasons. As the last major of the year, the event is for contenders, not pretenders. By the time it starts, the hierarchy for the year is established, and the players roll (or limp) in with realistic expectations. In a game as intensely mental as tennis, history is all and recent history more all than the ancient type. Everyone is banged up by late August, and whether he s going to man up or succumb to the omni-present