Book Club: Federer's Progenitor

This week, TENNIS.com editor Kamakshi Tandon and I are discussing John Newcombe's Bedside Tennis, a collection of anecdotes and observations by the legendary Aussie player published in 1983.

Hi Kamakshi,

First, I hope the weather is better in San Jose than it is in NYC. You picked a good week to split. There was a fairly big snowstorm here, though not quite what was anticipated—another case of American weather hysteria. When did that start, exactly? It is cold, finally; as they say on the evening news, the northeast has been “gripped” by it.

You took me by surprise with some heavy stuff there at the end of your last post, about how the players could be in danger of giving some hard-won power back to the powers-that-be. It’s true, the 1973 Wimbledon boycott over the suspension of one player was a watershed. You could say it was the real birth of the pro era, which typically gets dated to 1968. And the ability of the players not to have their livelihoods messed with by the governing organizations has defined the pro era, the same way free agency has defined modern baseball (for better and worse); hopefully today’s players will never take that for granted. Suspending a Federer or Nadal or Roddick seems pretty self-defeating anyway: Is the best answer to a player’s absence to keep them absent longer? The only losers there are the fans.

How different were the players of Newk’s era from today’s? You’re right, the early pro era maintained an amateur ethos, of tennis as an adventure rather than a job. It reminds me of rock and roll. The hippie-era rockers “went pro” around the same time. Believe it or not, Neil Young said he didn’t realize that being a “rock star” could be his lifelong job until around 1972 or ’73, at which point he’d been making records for about eight years. Similarly, in John McPhee’s 1968 book Levels of the Game, he describes Clark Graebner commuting from his finance job in Manhattan out to Forest Hills to play the U.S. Open.

That doesn’t mean the best players didn’t work as hard on their games, of course. It may have been that they just didn’t do it in such an organized, professionalized way. I really liked the opening of Newcombe’s book, where he describes his obsession with tennis as a kid, to the point where the backboard become his friend and opponent. The drills he describes doing there for hours on end convey the sort of lonely passion of many junior players. He never had to be told to go practice; it was his favorite thing to do, and that’s why he got as good as he did.

Permit me a personal digression regarding practice. I can hit a pretty nasty kick serve (you know, for a rec dude). I’m a lefty (like Bodo, Drucker, and you, oddly enough), so the ball bounces in a direction that no one expects when they first play me. The typical reaction from an opponent is to say something like, “Where did you get that?” as if it’s some kind of trick or a freak talent I was born with. Somebody recently said it must have been a “mistake” that I just stuck with. I answered, to myself, “If it’s a mistake, it took me about a thousand hours of practice to make it.” In other words, the things that most of us think of as natural talent, like Newcombe’s volleys or Federer’s return of serve, are really products of hard work, and that’s always been true in tennis.

OK, digression complete. Since everyone seems to have Federer on the brain at tennis.com (a.k.a, the Church of Sire Jacket), I’ll let Newk describe what it was like to play the Federer of his day, Rod Laver. It also serves as a telling comparison of tennis eras.

Five set matches were my forte, but when Laver and I got to the fifth set he had this ever rare ability to change gear and suddenly produce something extra and carry the day. We might get to 4-4, or 5-5, then he’d pull off a stroke that turned the match. I had my wins against him, in fact I was the last amateur to beat him before he turned professional in 1962. But if there is one contest that for me best illustrates the artistry of Rod Laver, it is a challenge match we played one night in Rochester, New York.

I was down two sets to love, won the next two sets and we reached 3-all in the fifth set. All night I had been coming in and hitting the first volley down to his backhand and he had countered this by trying to pass me or play lobs over my backhand side. That had been his game all night. We stood at 30-all in the seventh game. I came in and hit the ball to his backhand and moved in to the net. He drew back his racquet to play the lob shot, and as I saw this I began to shift my weight backwards to my left, expecting to have to run back for the lob. He went into the ball shaping to play it exactly the same way as he had been doing all night -- until he got to the ball. Then he turned the lob into a chip shot.

It wasn’t designed to go for a winner; what he was aiming for was to set himself up for the next shot. Now, as the ball came towards me, I couldn't play the shot I’d planned. My weight was still inclined backwards, so I couldn’t get it fully behind the volley; I’d have to play it just with the arm. The next problem I had to decide in about a millisecond was: Where do I hit it? Laver was at the back of the court. If I hit it back down the line to him, he could play his whipped topspin backhand across the court, and I wouldn’t be able to get over in time to cover it. If I played the ball across to his forehand, I couldn’t hit it hard enough; my weight wouldn't be in the shot and he’d be able to hit a forehand winner. There was a third option. If I hit down the middle, and kept it deep, I’d be able to recover, get back to the centre of the court and be in a good position to reply. I went for the deep shot down the middle and hit it out by about three inches.

When the volley went out, I applauded his previous shot. He had done it again. Suckered me in for three hours to expect a certain kind of play, then changed up to another gear and beat me. That was the magic of Rod Laver.

Now that’s tennis writing, wouldn’t you say? You pretty much have to be involved in a match to know that it turned, not on any winner or spectacular shot, but on the most subtle change of pace imaginable, which produced a routine volley error. If you had been watching and had seen Newk applaud, you probably would have had no idea what he was applauding for.

This is revealing not just of Laver’s tactical skill, but of the type of tennis these guys played in that era. I imagine this was a fast court, and that they served and volleyed on virtually every point for five sets. From Newk’s description, there were set patterns that reoccurred over the entire night—Newk comes in on Laver’s backhand, Laver does one of two things—until Laver changed his response just enough at the right moment to throw Newk off for one millisecond. There was no topspin crosscourt winner hit, no bludgeoned forehand into the corner. It was a subtle and much more limited game then—it might be called “small ball” in baseball jargon. Laver was the best at it, but it's next-to-impossible to profitably compare him to Sampras and Federer, who play in the “long ball” era.

Thanks for the insight, Newk, and thanks for giving me this book, Kamakshi. What book should we talk about next month? Think we could get through Infinite Jest by mid-March? Or is it time to discuss the collected works of one Dmitry Tursunov?

Steve