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LONDON -- Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic set up a Sunday shootout for both the ATP finals title and the year-end No. 1 ranking.The worlds top two players had contrasting wins in the semifinals at O2 Arena on Saturday, with Murray surviving a match point to beat Milos Raonic 5-7, 7-6 (5), 7-6 (9) in 3 hours, 38 minutes, the longest ever three-setter in the ATP finals.Djokovic needed just 66 minutes to dispatch Kei Nishikori 6-1, 6-1.Murray arrived at the tournament simply needing to do better than Djokovic to finish the year at No. 1, a position he has held since winning the Paris Masters two weeks ago.Now, that means winning the final.This has never happened in the history of tennis, Djokovic said of the winner-takes-all match on Sunday. Im privileged to be part of the history. This is one of the biggest matches we will ever play against each other.Djokovic might just be in better shape after overwhelming Nishikori, who held his serve only once all match.I pretty much executed everything I tactically planned to do, Djokovic said.My level had been going in the right direction. Im very glad I get to experience this feeling on the court. Now its coming up to the last match of the year, the match everybody anticipated.After squandering chances while serving for the match twice in the final set, Murray converted on his fourth match point during the tiebreaker to finally come through.It was unbelievably tough, Murray said. I had to fight very, very hard. Being broken twice serving for the match was frustrating. It was one of the harder matches Ive played indoors. They are never this long.Murray had won all six of his meetings with Raonic this year, including a straight-sets victory in the Wimbledon final.Murray just needs one last push at the end of a stunning second half to 2016, when he has won Wimbledon and the Olympics before topping the rankings for the first time.Im tired, Murray said. Ive played so much tennis the last few months. Ill just give my best effort tomorrow. Its going to be tough, obviously, but Ill give my best shot. Wholesale China Jerseys . -- If this was Aaron Gordons final home game at Arizona, and it almost certainly was, then he went out in style. Cheap NFL Jerseys . Bjorn, who had a 36-hole total of 8-under 134, made a testing six-foot putt to save par on the 16th and a birdie on the 17th before bogeying the final hole after a misjudged approach shot. American Kevin Streelman was in second place after shooting a 69. http://www.wholesalejerseysfastshipping.com/ . LOUIS -- The New Orleans Saints looked like a team playing out the string. Wholesale Jerseys . One game after a miserable showing in Oklahoma City, Gay tied a career high with 41 points and the Sacramento Kings cruised to a 114-97 victory at the New Orleans Pelicans on Tuesday night. Cheap Jerseys Authentic . Detroit and Boston are deadlocked, 1-1, and Tigers manager Jim Leyland could be forgiven if he was caught rationalizing instead of dissecting how his club could blow a 5-1 lead late in Game 2. RIO DE JANEIRO -- There may have been a time, when athletes smoked pipes, competed in everyday clothes and didnt tweet sponsored messages, a time that fewer and fewer people can remember, when sports were real, not theater.Theater requires audiences to suspend their disbelief, to pretend that the cardboard tree on stage is a forest and that the actor holding a skull is Hamlet.Today, after decades of doping, the best performances in the world of sport are almost immediately followed by whispers and social media postings with one question: What are they on? That wasnt always the case. Sports used to be seen as the most real form of entertainment, with regular humans doing amazing things.Paavo Nurmi, the first athlete to win five gold medals at a single Olympics, in Paris in 1924, was a former bakers errands boy who used his earnings from running to provide his family with electric light and running water.Bill Foulkes, who played in 688 matches for Manchester United from 1952 to 1970, kept his job in a coal mine when starting out at Old Trafford, underground five days a week and training with the club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.Ethiopias Abebe Bikila retained his Olympic marathon title in 1964 just 40 days after having his appendix removed. Swedish skiing great Ingemar Stenmark strapped on his first skis at age five.Their achievements, one assumes with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, didnt need to be second-guessed at every turn. The Say it aint so, Joe reaction in more innocent times to suspect performances has become a jaded shoulder shrug of Dude, what did you expect? or its 140-character equivalent.The acidic drip, drip, drip of cheating by greedy individuals and insecure governments in the past half-century caused this corrosion of the Olympic experience. Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, abused East German teenagers, urine-swapping Russian agents, they all brought doubt to sports. The paradise of being able to accept sporting excellence for what it is, simply excellent, has been lost.Not completely. But enough that arched eyebrows have become as necessary as a cold drink and a comfy cushion when watching cycling, track and field, and other sports taken for too many rides by dopers. Olympic weightlifting isnt worth watching at all, given how history suggests that a sizeable proportion of medalists in Rio de Janeiro will likely be handing them back when the International Olympic Committee gets around to thawing out and retesting drug-test samples taken at these games, as it has done with those from Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012. Those retests have so far yielded 98 positives from multiple countries and sports, including 12 weightlifting medalists from 2012..dddddddddddd.So, of course, Wayde van Niekerk had to be asked whether he is on drugs after he broke Michael Johnsons 17-year-old world record in the Rio Games 400-meter final. Hopefully, Van Niekerk didnt take the questions personally. They are just symptoms of the twice-bitten times; boxes self-respecting journalists must tick. The South African replied that he is clean.Armstrong, of course, used to say the same thing, evading most journalists sniff tests even more expertly than he and his teammates used to limbo under doping controls. Even now, after Armstrongs belated confessions that his Tour de France wins were a sham, the ease with which he lied remains remarkable for its assured delivery.Ive never taken performance-enhancing drugs, he said in a sworn deposition in 2005 . How many times do I have say it?Re-watching that, thinking how much of sports credibility he and other dopers have stolen, it is impossible not to feel cynical and angry. Likewise, watching any Russian athlete in Rio has been a struggle. Hard not to picture urine samples being passed at night through a hole in the wall of the drug-test lab at the 2014 Sochi Olympics for tipping down a drain.Still, it is important to have some faith.The reason to believe most of what you are seeing from Rio is not the 5,500 drug tests, which smart dopers know how to trick, or what athletes say, but because the alternative -- not believing -- is simply too depressing. Not trusting that most Olympians got here through hard work, good genes and honesty would mean that hard work, good genes, honesty count for nothing. And that is not true.Not believing in Van Niekerks time of 43.03 seconds simply because no one has run that fast before would mean also not believing that 43.03 seconds is humanly possible at all. Same goes for Michael Phelps unprecedented 28 swimming medals or Usain Bolts now seven (and counting) Olympic sprinting golds. Doubting brilliance simply because it is brilliant undermines the strongest reason for holding the games: so that humanitys fastest, springiest and strongest can get together to expand the envelope of what is physically and mentally possible.So although that voice in your head asking Is this for real? is understandable, even healthy, dont be drowned out by it.Dial down the cynicism, arch just one eyebrow, and try to enjoy the theater.---John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at http://twitter.com/johnleicester . 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