Underrated Traits of the Greats: Roger Federer and winning ugly

Welcome to Underrated Week! From May 4 through 8, TENNIS.com is focusing on the most overlooked aspects of the sport, from stats to achievements to tactics, and beyond. We're also featuring 10 players because of something they do extremely well, but which isn't their signature quality. It's a series we're calling the Underrated Traits of the Greats.

Crafty Bob’s weekly match with powerful Mark offered a remarkable contrast. Well over 50 years old by now, Bob had a full bag of tricks he deployed versus his 14-year-old opponent. A self-taught player, Bob’s herky-jerky strokes were quite different from Mark’s contemporary Western topspin forehand and crisp two-handed backhand.

The ebb and flow of the points was intriguing. Serving in the deuce court, Bob liked to hit a slow, short breaking slice that Mark usually hit crosscourt, making it easy for Bob to take two steps inside the baseline and shovel a forehand down-the-line. Sometimes, as Mark ran to his left to cover that shot, Bob would roll a forehand crosscourt. Often, when Mark missed a first serve, Bob—90 percent certain the next one would be a kick to his backhand—stepped in and followed his return to the net. If Mark hit short in a rally, Bob would occasionally eschew a deep approach and instead poke a drop shot.

Rather than trade deep, flat backhands with Mark, Bob would frequently strike a short slice that would force Mark to either awkwardly retreat back to the baseline, or come to net off a fairly weak approach shot. Given that Mark was not particularly comfortable at the net, Bob could usually win the point with either a lob or a soft, angled passing shot. Even on those days when Mark would beat Bob, he’d feel that he hadn’t played well at all, that his contact point was out of sync, and the best way to regain his rhythm would be to spend 20 minutes hitting against the ball machine.

Mark’s father, Roy, would watch his son play Bob and be completely befuddled. Much money had been spent on Mark’s tennis education, thousands of dollars in lessons to learn well-chiseled technique and be able to repeatedly crack one clean drive after another. But there Mark was, struggling with a man 40 years his elder who didn’t seem to hit the ball so much as hack it.

“That’s not very pretty,” Roy said to Bob after he’d carved yet another short slice backhand that Mark drove long. “Who did you learn that from?”

“Ugly?” Bob replied. “What are you taking about? I’m just imitating Roger Federer.”

Getty Images

As detectives say in mystery novels, it added up. The breaking serve. The forehand into the open court. Bob coming in on that return: known for 100 years as the chip-charge, was simply a less elegant version of the SABR (Sneak Attack By Roger). The drop shot, a tool that in 2009 had helped Federer at last win Roland Garros. And, of course, that stiletto of a slice backhand. As those detectives also said upon witnessing a slain femme fatale: there you had it, one heck of a bloody crime scene—pretty and ugly, all at once.

What? Consider that the Swiss maestro, the man who has elicited more swooning than any tennis player in history, might best be understood via Brad Gilbert’s 1993 tactical classic, Winning Ugly. As Gilbert wrote:

Study and build. Deploy and destroy. Does anyone in tennis history do this with as much technical and tactical acuity and diversity as Federer?

“When you play tennis, you play to a rhythm,” says Tennis Channel analyst Jimmy Arias. “It’s instinctual. You’re used to a similar pace. Roger doesn’t let you do that. He does so many things to take time and space away from his opponents.”

But how can the Swiss Maestro and Crafty Bob occupy common ground? Surely that can’t be, not when such writers as the late David Foster Wallace describe Federer like this: “The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.”

Ah, the exaltation of genius at the expense of education. Tennis players, often cocooned in cushy clubs, headed home in comfortable cars to cozy homes, tend to imbue tennis with aesthetic notions far different than the argot of other sports. Do recreational basketball and softball players evaluate the artistic composition of a tip-in or base hit? Since when was tennis meant to be a judged competition like gymnastics, figure skating or even boxing?

In 1925, nearly 70 years before Gilbert’s book was published, world number one Bill Tilden wrote Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, an ancestor to Winning Ugly that has been praised extensively by such champions as John Newcombe and Billie Jean King.

Here again, Federer is a master. If the allure of Federer is his dance, the ballet-like movement that evokes Baryshnikov, the rules of competition are such that he is obligated not to tango, but to repeatedly trip his dance partner—albeit, in Federer’s case, rather subtly.

“With Nadal you feel bludgeoned, beaten with a club while you’re on the ground,” says Arias. “With Federer, you feel more like you’ve been dissected. You’re losing points in so many ways, it becomes interesting, as if you’re a witness.”

Getty Images

“Roger’s got this great ability to probe one shot ahead,” says Gilbert. “He bunts a lot of returns in play and makes you hit a shot you don’t want to hit. He plays a short return or slice inside the court, to draw you in. You have to come underneath the ball. He knows you can’t do much with it, so then he’s going on the kill.”

Having studied Federer’s patterns for years, most notably when he worked with Novak Djokovic, strategy guru Craig O’Shannessy says of the Swiss, “His game is the ultimate Swiss Army knife of tactics. Today’s players are a little robotic. But Roger’s got the full gamut of everything possible on a tennis court.”

One disruptive Federer tactic O’Shannessy would like to see more is the SABR. “He shouldn’t have ditched it,” says O’Shannessy, who points out that the SABR not only wins points on its own, but also applies a special kind of pressure to the opposing server that can elicit double-faults.

As Tilden wrote, “always work to break up your opponent’s game.” Bob knows this quite well too. Of course, Federer’s technique is much better, as refined a set of swings and movements as the sport has ever seen. And yet, the lesson from Federer might be to spend less time sitting in rapture of his pleasing finished product,. and instead paying closer attention to his willingness to assemble it, one deft cut at a time.

UNDERRATED TRAITS OF THE GREATS: Roger Federer—Winning ugly | Simona Halep—Boldness | Rafael Nadal—When to come to net | Sofia Kenin—Variety | Pete Sampras—Movement | Serena Williams—Plan B | Novak Djokovic—Forehand versatility | Chris Evert—Athleticism | Daniil Medvedev—Reading the room | Naomi Osaka—Return of serve

RANKINGS: The five most underrated tennis stats | The five most underrated No. 1s | The five most underrated Grand Slam runs

YOUR GAME: Why mental strength is underrated | Five underrated tennis tactics