As the first week of Wimbledon draws to a close, there are still only four guys with a realistic shot at hoisting the cup:

Rafa Nadal.

The obvious pick, the defending champion, and the one tennis star you wouldn't be surprised to learn was a werewolf. Consider this: On the cursed-monsters decoder wheel, Federer is clearly a vampire: pale, aristocratic, a little dry, with a luxury-goth personal logo that looks like its mom was a bat. Nadal, by contrast, is all jaw and shoulders. He also has an uncle who travels everywhere with him looking concerned and jumpy. I'm just speculating here, but couldn't Toni Nadal belong to a secret order of werewolf hunters who have spent the past thousand years protecting mankind from the fell power of shape-shifting beasts? I mean, just going by his facial expression? And … come on. If you're lost in a foggy Romanian forest, and Nadal suddenly walks out of the trees, you're not stopping to ask for directions. You're going straight for the antique revolver that gypsy gave you last night. If I have a personal motto, it's "never underestimate the lycanthrope factor in tennis."

Novak Djokovic.

The hottest player on the tour, and the only guy over the past three or four years who's threatened to break into the Federer-Nadal duopoly. Given that Djokovic is by all accounts an affable dude who was best known early in his career for impersonating other players' serves, this is a little like Monaco rising up to challenge the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.1 But Nole just keeps getting better; this year, in the course of racing out to an early-season record of 41-0, he's tightened up his second serve and dramatically improved his forehand. He's still only won two majors — the Australian Open in 2008 and this year — but the real negative for him at Wimbledon is the surface: He's never won a tournament on grass. He looked shaky and annoyed with himself on Saturday in his four-set win over an inspired Marcos Baghdatis.

Roger Federer.
Having watched every minute of Federer's Wimbledon run so far, I can say confidently that it would not surprise me in the least if Mikhail Kukushkin, Adrian Mannarino, and David Nalbandian were about to be the main characters in an Annie Proulx novel about three lonely, wounded men who move to a tiny fishing village on the frozen coast of Greenland. Federer has been so dominant in his first three matches that it's almost hard to tell how well he's playing. He's eased off the gas early in every match and played a low-effort, efficient game, almost like a long-distance runner who's built a huge lead and just wants to win as comfortably as possible. It hasn't been thrilling to watch, but it's been impressive. And it's led to an ideal first week for English tabloid writers who've already concocted the headlines they'll use if Federer makes the final.2

Andy Murray.
Honestly, has there ever been an athlete who (a) more people agreed had a great shot to win a tournament, and (b) fewer people actually believed had any shot to win that same tournament? There's a great joke that goes around on Twitter whenever Murray struggles that "he's looking a little Scottish right now" — meaning that the English, who are eager to embrace his British heritage when he wins, are equally ready to desert him when he loses. Between that pressure, the endless Tim Henman comparisons, the constant second-guessing that goes with being the latest in a long line of British hopefuls who came up short,3 and the generally superhuman level his rivals are all capable of playing at, it's just extremely hard to see Murray lifting the trophy on Sunday. Against the supremely bald Ivan Ljubicic on Friday, he turned in one of the most "British head case at Wimbledon" performances you'll ever see, getting broken halfway through the first set, dropping the second set outright, hitting just enough amazing shots to stay ahead. He ran away with the third set and then crumbled in the fourth, losing his serve at 5-4 and needing a tiebreak to put Ljubicic away. He's playing skittish tennis, and he's only through the third round.

Still, you have to include him in the mix, if for no other reason than that being the British hopeful at Wimbledon is such a weird life-scenario that, really, anything could happen. He could go down in straight sets to Richard Gasquet, or the swirl of panic in his brain could throw him into a fugue state in which he plays transcendent tennis for a week. If Wimbledon were the Oscars, Murray would be the low-budget, feel-good English underdog that's one brilliant publicity campaign from upsetting the crap out of Saving Private Ryan. Apart from Federer himself, no one is going to be more intriguing to watch in the second week of this tournament.

And that's it. That's the list. I've watched roughly 900 hours of tennis over the past few days, and I couldn't even remember who the fifth seed was just now. (Hint: It was Robin Soderling. Robin Soderling has already lost.) Of course, there's always the chance that some journeyman player will get possessed and knock off one of the superstars. But if you're staking your sacred honor on a winner, it's not going to be Gael Monfils.4 That's just tennis this June. The gulf between the top 31 guys5 and everyone else is so great that the first week of Wimbledon was always going to be chalk.

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ljubicic