Tennis fans may have found themselves wondering about Roger Federer this past weekend: Are there any praises left to sing? Is there anything left to be impressed by? Is there any reason to watch?
He certainly looked motivated to put a quick end to any speculation about his relative decline. Over his last three matches, he played what can only be called vintage Federer tennis, raising his level higher than he had all year in beating Andy Roddick, Rafael Nadal, and David Ferrer. He outclassed his opponents rather than merely beating them. Ferrer came into the final having spent the week grinding the best players in the world to dust. Against Federer, he suddenly had no options, no weapons, no way to hurt his opponent. Worse than that, he had no safe place to put the ball. He looked like he had fallen to earth.
While there was nothing shocking or even newsworthy about Federer's straight-sets win in the final, I was amazed—taken aback, really—in new ways by many of Federer's shots, and by his arsenal as a whole, which he showed off in all its variety: A slice, down-the-line backhand pass landed 4 feet inside both lines and was still far from Ferrer’s reach... A crazy topspin-sidespin crosscourt backhand a few games later dive-bombed onto the sideline... A stretch, stab backhand volley at the beginning of the match was punched past Ferrer with an absurd amount of pace; and a swinging forehand volley late in the third was flicked back crosscourt at the last second after he saw which way Ferrer was moving.
So, yeah, there are still reasons to watch Roger Federer. In the past couple years, though, it has grown harder to describe those reasons in fresh ways. One mark of how unique his achievements have been, other than the $10 million in prize money he walked away this year (no one else has ever won more than $6 mil), is the way in which writers are forced to go to outlandish lengths to do it justice.
Two of my favorite tennis-watching writers, David Foster Wallace and the New York Times’ Verlyn Klinkenborg, have each been guilty of overreaching when it comes to Federer. Foster Wallace wrote a famous piece entitled “Federer as Religious Experience” last summer in which he posited that the Swiss was “at least in part exempt from certain physical laws," could plan four or five shots ahead in a point, and was generally more worthy of a true tennis fan’s “love” than, say, the “totally martial” Rafael Nadal. More recently Klinkenborg wrote an essay called “Quantum Tennis” in the Times in which he described the Federer-Andy Roddick quarterfinal at this year’s U.S. Open. “Roddick hits shots to where Federer isn’t, only to discover that by the time he has hit the ball, 'isn’t' is in the past. Federer hits shots to where Roddick can’t be, which is an entirely different thing.”
Klinkenborg could have written this instead: “Federer is faster than Roddick.” But that wouldn’t be rarefied enough for an “essayist”—he might sound like a dully literal sportswriter. As for Foster Wallace, he judges tennis and its players in his article on purely aesthetic terms, as if it were a dance, or a form of art, or figure skating with racquets. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for elegance in tennis, but I could just as easily say that, for example, Nadal is a “passionate” player, and that’s what tennis should be about, passion, not beauty. Neither conceit gets to the bottom of the sport.
Then there is the overreaching by Federer’s fans. First, he’s a “genius.” This isn’t a helpful description for someone who, like all tennis players, is in part reacting to another player’s shots, not simply creating his own out of thin air, and who wins because he has honed his special athletic gifts—speed, hand-eye coordination, reaction time—on the practice court for years. “Genius” downplays the harsh, reactive, competitive give-and-take that exists in any tennis match, even Federer’s.
Or Federer is an “assassin” who cruelly waits until the right moment before showing that he can hit a certain serve or a certain return that will crush his opponent’s spirit. (Like when he supposedly “sandbagged” Roddick in the Kooyong exhibition in January into thinking he would suddenly serve and volley in their semifinal in Melbourne.) Federer, it should go without saying, wants to win points and matches as easily as possible. If he brings his best stuff at crucial moments, it’s just his natural competitiveness and confidence kicking in, not the result of a master plan. And if he uses a wide variety of shots, it’s not to show off his arsenal (unless he’s comfortably ahead and on a roll, in which case he might do a little experimenting). He mixes things up even if a match is close because he knows he has an advantage in that department, and that it will eventually win him points. His opponent will always have to guess what’s coming next.
I don’t mean to suggest that Federer is nothing more than a very good tennis player. He is more—now it’s my turn to overreach. When he started on tour, Federer lost a few matches to obviously inferior opponents. His reaction to one went something like this: “How could I lose to a guy with that kind of game, when I have such beautiful technique.” He linked technique—and how “beautiful” it is—with results, something that hasn’t been done very often outside of coaches’ clinics since the advent of power tennis. But Federer was onto something about himself.
Power tennis was exemplified most fully by Sampras. He showed that an impenetrable game could be built by maximizing a few key weapons. The goal of the sport was to take the other guy out of the point as quickly as possible, with an unreturnable serve, volley, or running forehand. There was nothing in Sampras’ tactics or technique that wasn’t designed to win points. Fans who believe that Federer is the greater champion because he’s a more complete player are missing the point of Sampras.
What does Federer represent? Just what he said when he was younger: That elegant technique has a point beyond its own elegance. That even today the most “beautiful”—in other words, the most stylishly correct—strokes can end up producing the most explosive, the most powerful, the best game. He puts the aesthetic together with the practical, and makes power tennis look traditional—it’s a kind of platonic ideal for the sport (told you I was going to reach). Federer isn’t a religious experience; he’s a classical one.
As he said after the final, that's pretty tough to beat.
Steve Tignor is the executive editor of TENNIS magazine. This column was originally published in Concrete Elbow.