Day by day, obstacle after obstacle, Rafael Nadal keeps raising his game. On the 15th day of the U.S. Open, afternoon turning into night, he willed himself into a career Grand Slam, making himself a master of all surfaces. Even the demolition derby of New York could not beat down this athletic, persistent lefty. He outlasted the heat and then the rain, ignored the bustle of the Open, the spectators with poor impulse control who kept calling out at inappropriate times, and he outlasted Novak Djokovic, too, winning the Open, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, on Monday night. Nadal, 24, displayed the serve, the strokes, the patience, the stamina of a great champion, which he has now become. He won the ninth Grand Slam tournament of his still-young career, including his first Open, making himself only the seventh man to win all four Grand Slam events -- the Australian, the French, Wimbledon and now the demanding Open. He joined Roger Federer, Andre Agassi, Roy Emerson, Rod Laver, Don Budge and Fred Perry in having won all four, but he is not done, judging by the way he blasted serves into the Bermuda Triangle far to Djokovic's right-handed reach. But Federer has still won 16 Grand Slam events, the most by any man, and he has the right to be regarded as the best player in history, just on that accomplishment. But Nadal has beaten Federer six of the last seven times they have played, and now Nadal has thumped the talented 23-year-old Djokovic, who outlasted Federer on Saturday. Wherever Federer was Monday -- and he promised not to watch -- he could hear the express train roar of Nadal catching up to him. Nadal's excellence lighted up the dampness and the darkness of Flushing Meadows, with autumn coming on and tennis trying to hold its place amid all the football. The final was originally scheduled for Sunday after 4 p.m., always an interesting dance because CBS carefully squeezes in the final after the early NFL games. This usually forces the spectators -- who pay prodigious amounts of money -- to stand around in public while waiting for some large galoots in some distant stadium to stop killing the clock with timeouts. But Sunday's final was rained out, making this the third straight year in which the men's final was played on Blue Monday, as in the old Fats Domino song ('Blue Monday, how I hate Blue Monday'). The rainouts brought up the old question of why the U.S. Tennis Association has not put a roof over the joint, the way Wimbledon has done. The answer is that Wimbledon is in London, whereas the Open is in New York, where it does not rain that much in early September. Besides, it's a moot issue now. The real question is, what to do about a rainout? The final could have been played in at midday, when it happened to be sunny. But networks tell sports what to do -- witness the glut of night games during the baseball postseason. When Monday's match began, copious swaths of empty blue seats were leering downward at the court, although the crowd was eventually announced as 23,771. After the long rain delay, the telecast was lateraled from CBS to ESPN2 because CBS wanted to show off its prime-time schedule against 'Monday Night Football' on ESPN. I looked it up: from 8 to 11, CBS was showing: 'How I Met Your Mother,' 'Rules of Engagement,' 'Two and a Half Men,' 'The Big Bang Theory' and 'CSI: Miami.' Supply your own punch lines. I'm saying Nadal was a better show than any of that stuff. Nadal became the third Spaniard to win the Open, after Manuel Santana in 1965 and Manuel Orantes, who survived a classic Open endurance test in 1975. He was down by two sets to Guillermo Vilas -- a slow match because they both were clay-court specialists -- and then he won three straight sets. It was long after midnight when he got back from dinner and soaked in the tub. Then on a windy Sunday afternoon, he held off Jimmy Connors in four sets. Nadal had it easier. He didn't play Sunday, then he added to Spain's great year in sports, having already won Wimbledon, after Pau Gasol was a member of the Lakers' championship team and before Alberto Contador won the Tour de France again. Right after Wimbledon, Nadal flew to South Africa and was allowed into the locker room, with a few members of the royal family, after Spain won the World Cup for the first time. 'I cried like a baby,' he said then. 'We have to celebrate for a whole year, because this is unbelievable. It is very difficult to repeat this.' Two months later, Nadal made Spaniards cry and cheer again. He also pleased the fans in New York by surviving everything the weather, the schedule and Djokovic could throw at him. Tennis fans will have a chance to cheer Rafael Nadal again. This is just getting good. 