It’s been a hard day to figure in Paris. This morning it was bright and humid where I was in Montparnasse, but from my hotel window I could see colossal storm clouds beyond the Eiffel Tower, in the direction of Roland Garros. Later, while fans were running for cover, play continued on one outside court, No. 10. In all of Paris, it seemed the sun was shining only on that rectangular patch of clay. Currently the rain has held up, but five minutes ago it was bombing down grape-sized drops, and there are more clouds moving this way.
So what does a tennis fan do now in these uncertain moments? French TV has been showing yesterday’s “lot of ugliness” between Andy Roddick and Jarkko Nieminen, but I think even Roddick would agree that we can do better than that. How about we talk about Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal? That might kill some time.
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It’s the fly in the ointment of immortality, the chink in an otherwise flawless piece of armor. It's Roger Federer's head-to-head record against Rafael Nadal, and, if the two were to meet in the final of the French Open 10 days from now, it might just be part of the tennis conversation again. Not that we’ll have much of an idea of what to do with it. Their H2H, in which the greatest player of all time trails 7-14, has to be the most difficult statistic in tennis to gauge. Even Pete Sampras, a staunch Federer supporter, wasn’t sure what to do with Federer's 2-5 record against Nadal in major finals. It might get even more difficult in the coming years, as Federer enters the latter stages of his career and Nadal comes into what are traditionally a great player’s prime seasons.
Two years ago, when Nadal was in the process of beating Federer five consecutive times and ascending to No. 1, some began to ask a not unreasonable question: How can Federer be considered the best ever when he has a lopsided losing record against someone from his own era? In 2009, Federer seemed to answer that question once and for all when he completed a career Grand Slam at Roland Garros and broke the men’s record for Grand Slam titles a month later at Wimbledon. Those pesky head-to-head numbers, which remained 13-7 in Nadal’s favor at the time, didn't fit into the happy theme of the moment, namely, that in Roger Federer we were lucky enough to witness a living legend, the greatest, the best there ever was. This designation, as the hokey quality of that last phrase indicates, is mythic, of course; but sports fans need to believe. Not having a gold standard, an immortal, to point to, to bow to, to aspire to, seems a little Godless—not to mention boring. It felt good to believe in Federer, a happy person who had no glaring hole in his resume.
Except for that pesky H2H, which we agreed to forget, or rationalize, or dismiss.
We were right to believe in Federer, for several reasons. (1) The fact that one guy has found a way to beat him doesn’t invalidate Federer’s dominance of everyone else, everywhere else, for as long as anyone else. (2) Federer has been punished for doing better on clay at the French Open, where he’s lost three finals to Nadal, than the Spaniard has done on hard courts at the U.S. Open, where he has never kept his final-round date with Federer, a five-time Open champion. (3) Finally, and most crucially, tennis players can only be judged by what they set out to accomplish. The best of them play to win the most prestigious tournaments, not to beat certain opponents, and by that measure Federer reigns supreme.
Last Sunday, though, for the first time in a year, the head-to-head numbers made a cameo appearance in the ever-evolving and never-to-be-resolved Goat drama. Nadal beat Federer on clay in Madrid to up his record to its current 14-7. Ten of those wins have come on Nadal’s favored clay, but surfaces aside—and you can’t punish a guy for being so good on one of them—he wins two-thirds of their matches. What’s more important, though, and what’s often not mentioned, is that Nadal hasn’t just built those numbers on a mound of red dirt. He’s 1-2 on grass (all in Wimbledon finals) and 3-3 on hard courts. One of those hard-court wins took place in the most important match they've played on that surface, the 2009 Australian Open final. At the Slams, Federer's specialty, Nadal is 6-2 (2-2 on surfaces other than clay).
Like I said, this one stat doesn’t undermine Federer’s other accomplishments. But let’s say the H2H continues along the same lines that it has for the last six years, with Nadal dominating on clay and holding his own when he does reach finals against Federer on other surfaces. What if Nadal gets to 16-8, 18-9, 20-10? What if, as Federer reaches 30 and beyond, it gets more lopsided in Nadal’s favor? Is there a number that we won’t be able to ignore? Will the H2H ever mean anything, or will we just have to dismiss it because there are two many variables involved for us to explain that the greatest of them all lost most of his matches to his most important rival?
I’d say that the only way Federer's status could come into question in the future, and the H2H become a decisive factor, is if Nadal makes a run toward his Grand Slam record. But while tournament titles are how players should be judged, it also can’t be forgotten that tennis is, at its heart, a head-to-head sport. Unlike golf, your success or failure is always in direct relation to the success or failure of the person on the other side of the court. It's both a special psychological difficulty and a cruel satisfaction of tennis that you don’t just win with excellent play; you also must make a specific opponent lose. This adds another mental element and level of anxiety to the game, and explains how certain players can "get in a guy's head." That's why a head-to-head record in tennis can never be meaningless. This one is more meaningful than most: It proves again how the greatest-ever exists only in theory and myth, and that when we descend from the abstract stratosphere of statistics, of Slams won and weeks spent at No. 1 and consecutive wins on a certain surface, the sport is still about individual matchups, played and adjusted to and figured out one at a time. Federer remains the best, the Goat, for his ability to dominate more of those match-ups than anyone. Nadal, for now, has a more peculiar title. In the old World Wrestling Federation, he would have owned the Intercontinental belt. This was a kind of side champion, but it was a champion nonetheless. In tennis, where, despite the differences in surfaces, there is only one belt, Nadal is the fly in the ointment, the guy who makes the Goat seem a little more mythic than real again. Nadal's title isn't as exalted, but it can't be argued with: He’s the best at beating the best.