“We need to see some more genius now.” This was BBC commentator Boris Becker’s on-air coaching advice to Roger Federer during the fourth set of his match with Tomas Berdych on Wednesday. That’s a pretty tall order, wouldn’t you say?
Genius on command: It sounds like on oxymoron and seems like a logical impossibility, but, unfortunately for Federer, that’s what he’s made us expect will happen every time he steps on court. First we watched him in his years of unprecedented dominance. More recently we’ve seen his nervy comebacks from the precipice of defeat, one of which he’d pulled off just the week before, against Alejandro Falla in the first round. Put it all together and most tennis fans, and even observers as knowledgeable as Becker, believe that when Federer doesn’t reach perfection or turn his game around at exactly the right moment, that something has gone wrong—with him, with the sport, with the universe. There’s a disquieting element to a Federer loss at Wimbledon, because at this point it’s more than an individual failure. It’s almost as if he’s failed us, failed to prove that good—i.e., the superior player—will always win out in the end. Down a break at 3-4 in the fourth, with Berdych serving at deuce, Federer went for a big forehand return, caught it a hair late, and sent it just over the baseline. Becker’s BBC boothmate was, in his understated British fashion, flabbergasted. “We’ve not used to seeing that,” he said. Two games later, at 4-5, Federer had a break point and a look at a second serve; this was the moment everyone had been waiting for, when he would turn on a dime, raise his game from iffy to brilliant, and break his opponent's heart. But Berdych hit his second ball with a little more depth and firmness than he had been, and Federer’s forehand reply slumped and died on its way to the net. This time both commentators cried, with real disbelief, “What happened?”
What happened was exactly what’s happened to every tennis player, including Federer, since the game began. When a pro misses, it's not just because he couldn't find the court; it's because he couldn't place the ball exactly where he wanted it to go. At that level, each player needs to calculate how risky or conservative he can make each shot, judging by the score and by what his opponent can do in reply. In the final game, knowing Berdych would be nervous, Federer’s calculations leaned to the conservative. He played a series of low slice returns and low slice backhands, trying to force his 6-foot-5 opponent to hit up on the ball. It worked. Federer got to 15-30 and had Berdych on the move in that rally. The Czech made a brilliant backhand save from the corner and eventually won the point with a backhand volley that just touched the sideline. Despite that, Federer still reached break point, where he netted the return that so shocked the BBC's announcers. It appeared that Federer was sticking with his conservative calculations—they’d gotten him to break point, so why not?—by trying to poke a forehand return low and down the middle. But, surprised by Berdych’s gutsy second serve, he put it a little too low.
In a broader sense, to answer Becker’s question, "what happened" was a tennis match. Perhaps the biggest tribute to Federer’s achievement over the last six years—and to Rafael Nadal’s similar achievement on clay over the last five—is that everyone seems to have forgotten that fact when he plays. As anyone who has ever played one knows, a tennis match can go in any direction at any time; miss as few as two shots in a row (and we’ve already seen the calculations that must go into every one of those shots) and the whole thing can change complexion in your head and head south in a hurry. This particular match was one that, going in, was even less of a given for Federer. His last two Grand Slam losses had been to Juan Martin del Potro and Robin Soderling, both of whom, like Berdych, are tall guys who pummel high, relatively flat balls off both sides. All of them, when they’re clicking, have the power to knock Federer back and keep him from moving them side to side. Most important, this spring Berdych had beaten Federer for the first time in six years. He knew it could be done, and aging legends like Federer live off the fact that most of the guys they play don’t know that it can be done (see Falla).
Berdych won this match because he got low for Federer’s persistent slice backhands—I love how balanced the Czech is on both sides, but particularly when he gets in his stance for a low backhand; great preparation on that shot. He won because Federer’s forehand went off for a couple of games in the first set, long enough to surrender his serve. Berdych won with his wide serve into the deuce court. He won by taking advantage of second serves. He won because Federer was unsettled enough to play ill-advised drop shots on key points, when forehand drives would have done the trick. Berdych won because, when Federer had a game point at 3-3 in the fourth, he anticipated where he was going with a forehand, kept himself in the point long enough to win it, and went on to record the decisive break from there. He won because, while he wavered a bit in the final game, Berdych never played outside himself. He believed in his game, and in his ability to finish against Federer, enough to take his last forehand and do exactly what he would have done with it at any other time: Drill it for a winner.
So another tall man has sent Federer packing from a major, this time at his beloved Wimbledon, where he had reached seven consecutive finals. Does this herald a new future for men’s tennis? There have always been tall players on the men’s side, and there have always been bombers. But guys like Krajicek, Ivanisevic, and until now Soderling have been primarily a sideshow, dangerous on any given day but a little too inconsistent to take the sport over from its more well-rounded champions. With Berdych and del Potro, though, we’re beginning to see big guys who are also well rounded; they can bomb, but they can also move and rally. Berdych gets an immense amount of power with a very smooth and effortless-looking swing, something we’ve rarely seen from a guy his height. It remains to be seen whether he and his fellow big men can finally take center stage, and whether the ideal tennis frame will go from 6-foot-1, 185 pounds, where it has been for 20 years, to something larger. Who knows, Federer may appear to future generations the way the 5-foot-9 Rod Laver looks to us in old clips today.
As far as Federer himself goes, is the end of his era? Is he in terminal decline now that his Wimbledon finals run has come to a close and he has dropped to No. 3 in the rankings? Well, we asked the same question two years ago, and he came back to reclaim the No. 1 spot in 2009. At the same time, his three-Slam seasons are almost surely a thing of the past. Players whom he has owned are beating him, and he’s finding that he can’t turn it on at the majors the way he has been in recent years. He’ll also need to find some kind of answer to the big boys; what that is, I don’t know. Still, there’s no question in my mind that he will win more Grand Slams, simply because he’ll always put himself in contention. Unless he really falls off the map, though, I don’t think “decline” is the right word for what will likely happen to Federer. I’d call it a “return to reality." Maybe, as he loses more often, we can all realize again that tennis matches aren’t sure things, that winning them over and over and over is not normal, that even Roger Federer can’t always measure the perfect return of serve every time he needs one.
Afterward, Federer said he had leg and back issues. I’m not sure why he volunteered this information. Maybe in the past he felt that he had kept quiet about injuries and illnesses after losses only to feel the need to mention them later, and this time he wanted to be up front about it. My first reaction was that he had dug in his heels in front of the press, which is what happened after he lost to Marcos Baghdatis at Indian Wells this year. We’d tried to get him to praise Baghdatis’s serving, but Federer wasn’t having any of it. He’s one of those champions—Pete Sampras and the Williams sisters are three others—who don’t believe they should lose if they’re playing the way they should. It’s a useful attitude to have, and a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it can also make these players search for excuses, extenuating circumstances, for losses. That’s what I thought Federer was doing here when I read his remarks, and so did Berdych when asked about them later. And to a certain extent he was. Federer even blamed “unlucky” bounces and Berdych’s ability to hit the ball “on the line over and over,” as if that were about his opponent's luck rather than his skill.
Federer is right to be honest about what happened on the court. That’s why he’s in the press room in the first place. Still, talk of his injuries perpetuates the idea that I mentioned earlier: That he can’t actually, really, officially lose a tennis match. It’s the same for Nadal on clay. His fans want to believe that he couldn’t possibly lose at the French Open to Soderling unless his knees had hindered him. Like I said, it’s a tribute to Federer and Nadal that they've made people think this way, that they've made people believe that the laws of tennis have been suspended for them. Nevertheless, Soderling won in Paris, and Berdych won yesterday. I believe Federer when he says he was hurting, but when I write about a match my rule of thumb is that if I can’t see any visible sign of an injury from a player, any slowing down or wincing, then I’m not going to consider it a factor in the outcome. As Federer also said at Indian Wells this spring, every player has some physical issue going on most of the time. If you go by those words, Berdych probably did as well yesterday.
This morning I watched Federer’s presser, and his words struck me a little differently. His heels weren't all that dug in, and he didn’t seem to be blatantly making excuses. He was much more even keel than I thought he would be. Did he even sound resigned to not winning Wimbledon? It seems incredible to me, considering the reverence he has for the place. When I read his line about the quarterfinals being "a decent result,” I'd assumed that he was covering up so he wouldn’t have to express his disappointment in public. And I’m guessing that was part of it. But Federer also put this loss next to his quarterfinal loss in Paris, as if it they were part of an unavoidable trend. He said, twice, that “I’m winning my matches,” as if getting into the second week was an accomplishment. Was this because of the injuries, or because his sights have been lowered? Was it all a rationalization, a cover, or was he sincerely OK with losing at Wimbledon? Was he just tired of shouldering all those expectations of perfection and wanted to shrug a few of them off? I don’t know. What I do know is that the day that Roger Federer says that the “quarters is a decent result” for him at the All England Club, we really have reached the end of an era.
It will be different in the new one. Commentators won't be able to call for genius on command. Fans will have to stop believing that one player can suspend the laws of tennis. We may have to start accepting it: Reality has returned.