Roger Federer sank to the clay surface, doubling over, overcome by tears. The scoreboard at Court Philippe Chatrier read 6-1, 7-6, 6-4, a victory in straight sets for Federer over Robin Soderling. Federer's emotional outpouring after a match marked by cool efficiency - save a single, odd moment of fright - was embraced by the crowd's enthusiastic applause.
Roger Federer finally captured what long eluded him, the championship at Roland Garros, the only major championship lacking on his celebrated professional tennis resume.
So much of the ensuing celebration seemed right. Runner-up Soderling graciously conceded defeat with polite humor. Federer in the host tongue warmly thanked the French crowd that cheered on his victory. That crowd, in turn, went wild as he hoisted the trophy to his record tying fourteenth major. All the hallmarks of Federer's reign atop the tennis world were restored on one soggy French afternoon: an opponent humbled by his dominance, his artistry underscored by effortless sophistication, and an adoring public cheering on his latest heights.
Even Federer's custom Nike apparel seemed right. Federer's pale blue shirt, with touches of dark blue-gray like his blue-gray shorts, complemented perfectly the sodden, and thus ruddied, orange clay court of Roland Garros. In French Open finals prior, Federer wore blue, sometimes drab to the point of midnight, sometimes gleaming to the point of aqua. And though orange and blue are technically complimentary, lying directly across from each other on the color wheel, Federer's outfits never before matched the courts of Roland Garros like on this day.
Reports filed by journalists that night and over the next few days gushed over Federer's triumph, of the clay court, of the fourteenth major tying Pete Sampras's all-time mark. The reporters wrote of Federer's new-found relief at achieving the long-desired, long-delayed dream of winning all four majors. Christopher Clarey concluded his write-up for the New York Times saying, "Federer made it abundantly clear that he would like to win, but after Paris this year, he will probably never need to win quite to the same degree." Even the media was relieved by Federer's French Open victory, righted as it were by the narrative arch.
Yet with so much right with Federer's Roland Garros just a few weeks ago, what feels so wrong?
In competitive terms, Federer's victory was not christened by the slaying of his great rival, Raphael Nadal. Nadal lost to eventual runner-up Soderling, but it was clear that not all was well with the always-game, often-injured Nadal. His troubled knees - knees that even in his brief career have robbed him of late season surges especially at the final major, the U.S. Open - limited his effectiveness against the solid but unspectacular Soderling. Soderling downed Nadal, a man at the age of 23 sometimes called the greatest clay court player in history, in four sets. Nadal who had defeated Federer the previous four French Opens, the last three in the final round, spent the final at home on the island of Majorca hoping his knees would heal in time to defend his first Wimbledon title later in the month. (They wouldn't.)
Yet none of Nadal's physical ailments are, at least directly, Federer's doing. Yes, Nadal versus Federer - with Federer finally overcoming Nadal on his chosen surface as Nadal did to Federer the year before at Wimbledon - satisfies some grand narrative. And the relationship between Nadal and Federer, their on-court rivalry, is of fundamental importance to the meaning of both men's careers. But to reduce the wide world of men's professional tennis to two players, as great as they are, dismisses a champion's surfeit of achievement. We marvel that the great ones make it look easy because what they accomplish is incredibly hard, every last piece of it.
No, Nadal's absence wasn't the thing amiss. And it wasn't simply the lunatic who ran onto the court in the second set, waving a Barcelona flag and attempting to place his red cap on Federer's momentarily shaken head.
Rather, for all the returning hallmarks of Federer's dominance, there was something missing in his play. Or, if not within his play, something at odds between his play and the lofty tributes paid to it as he laid another claim to greatness.
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Greatness is a given when we speak of Roger Federer. Debate is irrelevant on this point. The man quite simply has altered the course of modern tennis with his complete repertoire, a power baseline game reliant upon intelligence and touch. The dominating run over the championships, major and minor, are simply a reflection of this primal truth.
The only question is whether Federer is the greatest of all-time, the sport's mythical Greatest Of All Time, the G.O.A.T.
Federer is rightly considered in the running. Along with Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, and Pete Sampras, Federer possesses the resume of an all-time champion. Consecutive win streaks, armfuls of hardware, years accrued atop the rankings. All objective measures of greatness aligned in their favor, evidence to be considered in some big-time accounting.
In S.L. Price's Sports Illustrated cover article following Federer's Roland Garros victory, Federer's G.O.A.T. status was assumed on simple numbers: fourteen majors, a five year run of domination. Any school child could add it up. Case closed.
The victory over Soderling that finally tallied these numbers, these absolutes, however, was anything but great. Soderling for his part looked out of sorts until late in the first set, commencing a run of fleeting confidence that lasted only till late in the second. And the wet weather deadened the already slow court making passing shots and winners difficult to come by.
Unable to drive long rallies from the baseline, waiting either for his opponent to err or for a near impossible angle to open up, Federer dialed down his strategy. Federer won the match on serve and his drop shot, essentially splitting Soderling over the length of the court. A solid strategy no doubt. So why the hesitation? Because Federer has often declared the drop shot a sign of weakness. Whether true or not, his reliance on the it at Roland Garros motioned to an unspoken and uneasy pact Federer has made with the decline of skills.
At age 27, we are witnessing one of the greats of all time confront the passing of that time. At moments like these, talk of greatness from a long deserving career puffs out its chest and shouts down the impending, more immediate, realities of sports mortality. We take a bit of the now and a heaping of the past and mix it together.
Consider this. In 2005 at the U.S. Open final, Federer facing Andre Agassi, to close a long rally, one well over 20 strokes, Federer uncorked a then rare drop shot, forcing a 35 year old Agassi to scramble for a ball whirring with backspin, falling cruelly just beyond the net. Former hot-headed champion now curmudgeonly announcer John McEnroe scolded Federer to the TV audience for the tactic, making an ailing Agassi run for an impossible return. (Never mind that the drop shot was a considerable weapon in McEnroe's serve-and-volley arsenal.)
Fast forward to a little less than four years later. McEnroe in the booth at this year's Roland Garros sings nothing but praise for Federer's slicing drop shots landing just out of Soderling's considerable reach. A tactic McEnroe once characterized as underhanded is now the stuff of genius. The only variable? Age, the inevitable fading of skill.
What is it about Federer's gift that has made critics and fans, even as it wanes, so fiercely protective of it?
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Any attempt to best describe Roger Federer's greatness is an exercise in futility. It's already been done. In 2006, the now defunct Play magazine enlisted the now deceased David Foster Wallace to cover Wimbledon and capture in words the most dominant player in the men's sport, certainly at the time and possibly ever.
Wallace himself was a regionally ranked junior tennis player at one point, uniquely attuned to the nuances of the game as well as his own literary muse. The resulting piece, "Roger Federer As Religious Experience," is exemplary sportswriting.
"A top athlete's beauty is next to impossible to describe directly," writes Wallace. "Or to evoke. Federer's forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice - the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game - as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or - as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject - to try to define it in terms of what it is not."
Wallace, mindful of his great but rare seat at Wimbledon, describes the view of Federer's game in person, noting how television takes away the third dimension, in terms of tennis, the length of the court and the feel for how quickly the ball is moving as Federer conjures up his brilliance, setting up his opponents several shots patiently in advance.
"He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces."
While noting Federer's likely slight kinesthetic advantage over his peers, Wallace reminds the reader that the crop of today's men in the tennis game are bigger and better conditioned than ever before, making Federer's reign all the more remarkable, ruling with "touch and subtlety" at the time of the power baseline game.
"In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson," Wallace writes, "Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today's pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men's tennis, and for the first time in years the game's future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds' outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year's Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead - all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can't be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform..."
What sets Federer apart, Wallace reasons, is the ability to combine all these disparate aspects together into a cohesive, modern game. Winning is almost a side effect of this artistry, this seemingly effortless shot making, creating winners from unforeseen angles. Wallace calls these "Federer Moments" and offers them as proof of the man's genius.
Or, as Wallace writes, "Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war."
Federer's effortless domination, what Wallace watched in religious ecstasy at Centre Court in Wimbledon, however, has undergone a serious challenge from Raphael Nadal, at the time dismissed as a clay court specialist and general lunkhead. Nadal, of course, has developed into a complete player, and before injury limited him in the French Open and forced him from a chance to defend his Wimbledon title, clearly the best player in the men's game right now.
Despite their general camaraderie and mutual respect, Nadal's unrelenting domination of Federer caused him to break down earlier this year at the Australian Open after another loss in a major final.
...
Jon Wertheim is a writer for Sports Illustrated. His most recent book is Strokes Of Genius. More descriptively, the book is subtitled: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played. His subject is last year's epic Wimbledon final between the two, a paradigm shifting match of exceptional quality and drama.
In service of that drama, Wertheim takes the standard themes of Federer versus Nadal and stuffs them rich detail. The sophisticated Swiss versus the aggressive Spaniard. While resisting some of the extremes to which the rivalry has been taken (Wallace summarily dismissed Nadal as martial and musclebound) Wertheim still casts the rival protagonists as embodying different types of chivalry. Nadal is an avatar of competitive spirit; Federer of artistic domination. Nadal a patron of clan ties; Federer of cosmopolitan grace.
(If it is true that Federer's and Nadal's play are evocative of their respective life narratives, as Wertheim expertly details in his book, then I'll leave those backstories alone in this piece, trusting that actions on the court speak loud enough for our bounded purposes.)
All of these things are true, or have basis in truth. But they taken too far can lead to flights of fancy, for example, that Nadal is short on physical gifts beside an indomitable will or that Federer lacks mental toughness, one of Wertheim's assumptions a bit too simplistic.
While Wertheim's book admirably achieves what it sets out to do, namely recount one helluva tennis match set-by-set while tracing the relevant narratives in each player's history, it can at times obscure the individual meaning of each player, artists in their own right.
It is not simply a matter of setting Federer against Nadal, or as it happens more commonly, Nadal against Federer. Their accomplishments derive context in part from their rivalry. But to reduce the meaning of the two players to a dialectic, a conversation carried between the two into infinity, would miss the point. To make them champions of opposing styles of the sport would undermine that both are unique practitioners.
If there is any truth to this dichotomy it's that Federer's game is a rich display of the sport's history while Nadal's is something almost ahistorical, meticulously constructed on quirks. But those formal distinctions merely indicate that time has folded in on itself. Neither embody a movement, neither are from this time. Federer and Nadal both are racket wielding aliens stranded in a strange land at a strange time.
Yes, Federer and Nadal look different from each other, act different, they probably eat and sleep differently, too. But perhaps no one understands either quite as well when it comes to matters of the court. Even if it's true that Nadal has taken up residence in Federer's head, Federer also understands what Nadal attempts. In a certain sense, as much as we push them together, both are trying break free from each other.
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I return to the tapes, the great finals of Federer's reign. The Australian Open versus Marat Safin in 2004. Wimbledon versus Andy Roddick in 2004. The U.S. Open versus Agassi in 2005. Wimbledon versus Nadal in 2006 and 2007. This is Federer at the height of his powers. A vast collection of "Federer Moments," as Wallace terms them, Federer not just a great defensive player, willing to lead his opponent into error, but Federer the shot creator, opening up the court with pace, setting up unforeseen winners from unlikely positions.
(Before the reader gets the impression that Federer fell directly from Heaven, feet snug in a pair of winged Nike's, hands gripping a racket made from Unicorn tears, Federer has played human, sometimes downright bad, tennis throughout the entirety of his career, even in his most dominant days. His tendency toward defense during long rallies from the baseline has led him into many unforced errors. What's notable in addition to his shot making is how rarely his mistakes deter him from his game plan especially when he's not playing his best tennis.)
Federer's forehand was and continues to be the best in the sport. Almost every time, then as now, Federer's form is so precise that as he rifles a forehand winner, whether for a routine or pressure-packed point, he looks exactly the same as he does in any iconic photograph snapped. His stance is opened to the court in front of him, his body momentum lifting him for the earth is whipping around the ball, his arm set to deliver the strike then returns to his breast like a favored child.
The weakest part of Federer's game is also perhaps the most distinctive. His one-handed backhand is a rarity in today's sport. In a loping, singular movement, Federer often employs his backhand to control a game's pace, slicing a ball with heavy backspin across the court. Of course, to call Federer's backhand a "weakness" is to speak in relative terms. His backhand's pace unraveled Safin in the 2005 Australian Open final, for instance, and it's expertly set up winners against all manner of opponents.
Yet the distinctive backhand is notable because Nadal attacks it relentlessly whether on clay, grass, or hard courts. This is hardly a secret. Still it sticks out when watching the French Open finals of the previous few years and last year's epic Wimbledon, all losses for Federer. Nadal's sustained attack hasn't destroyed the utility of Federer's backhand but the attack has undermined it. In the 2006 French final, Federer instead of loading up on backspin was returning the ball flat. And Nadal ate it up, smacking a high bouncing ball all over the court, forcing Federer into some 60 unforced errors.
While I'm inclined to agree with Wertheim, namely that we're only a year removed from the greatest tennis match ever played, it's clear that Federer is facing a change of his game as skills struggle to mask his flaws, however few those flaws might number... and that's when I'm put in mind of Michael Jordan.
Jordan's basketball career is for the most part neatly divided in two distinct acts surrounding the failed run at baseball. When we talk about Jordan we often talk about the first Jordan, the one with the tongue curling down his chin as he floats impossibly toward the rim. This is the Jordan emblazoned on sneakers and t-shirts, a silhouette recognizable across the common divides of time and culture (as I discovered on a trip to Costa Rica a few years back).
But the Jordan of the second act is what makes all debate about Jordan's primacy in the basketball hierarchy irrelevant.
When Jordan returned from the baseball experiment, he had lost some of his trademark athleticism. He could still run and jump and play. But not in quite the same way. He developed a new bag of tricks, a smaller one, but an effective one nonetheless. The fall-away jumper is the one that sticks in the mind, still elevating, still relying on some unforeseen connection with the rim, but now sending the ball to traverse the most of the space alone, not exactly a baby bird flung from the nest, more forcefully catapulted through the air.
The spectacular dunks were fewer and far between but Chicago still won at a ungodly pace. The aesthetics couldn't match the era of the first Jordan but the accomplishments nearly did.
For his part, Federer denies outwardly the necessity of change. But in this point more than any other actions will speak loudest. I can't help thinking we are at Federer's second act. Last year, Nadal broke the era of dominance begun at Wimbledon in 2003. A remarkable five year stretch that will forever define Federer. Just how preeminently it will define the entire sport of tennis is all on this new act.
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Maybe the problem is not with Roger Federer. Maybe the problem is with us, how we the witnesses attempt to define greatness in sport. Simple addition falls flat. As do forced platitudes.
The most convincing greatest-of-all-time argument I've read is Paul Zimmerman's from the last chapter of his seminal book The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football. The chapter is entitled "Strictly Personal: the Greatest Player" and is about Marion Motley, fullback and linebacker for Paul Brown's dominate early Cleveland Browns teams. Even for the sport's pre-Super Bowl days, Motley lacks the numbers and notoriety of more heralded peers like Jim Brown, Sammy Baugh, or even teammate Otto Graham.
Zimmerman in building his case for Motley doesn't deny his partiality. His readily owns up to his fascination with Motley starting as a boy with a photo-stuffed magazine. In fact, Zimmerman delves completely within his subjectivity to argue his point... albeit a subjectivity augmented with his credible expertise. The numbers certainly don't back Motley up. His career was shortened by injury. His coach often relied him as a crushing blocker for the passing game. His chance at professional football came late because of the war and because of race. But Dr. Z brushes those concerns aside.
Zimmerman writes, "There's a statistical table at the end of this chapter, detailing the numbers that made up Motley's professional career, but it's a kind of meaning less way of evaluating this remarkable player. it would be like trying to describe a waterfall in terms of gallons per second, or a sunset in terms of light units."
Zimmerman takes what he considers the most essential part of the game of pro football, "force of the blow," as he calls it, and claims he's never seen another like Motley. It's a simple argument and an elegant one. What's most important and who did it better than anyone else. Seen in this light, an armful of trophies lose a little luster.
If we turn our attention back to tennis, then, the matter of the greatest of all time hinges upon whichever quality of the game is most essential. There at least the conversation should start. Is it a game of speed? Finesse? Guile? Power? Endurance? Intelligence? And is it the player who possesses one of these in greatest measure? Or greatest number of them at once?
There's no doubt Roger Federer has displayed many, if not all, of these qualities in spades over the course of his career. Is he the greatest of all time, the G.O.A.T., by Zimmerman's measure? Likely. Very likely.
As Federer changes his game, however, a shift we are now witnesses to, will we still recognize it as greatness? Should we? Indeed, once applied, the label does not easily depart.
And for Nadal, should his mind be willing but his body refuse, what do we make of his truncated career? A career that threatened then overtook perhaps the greatest player by most measures if briefly. A career marked by a fierceness that ironically robbed him of any chance at august years. Is Federer still deserving then? If not, is Nadal?
I suspect, like Federer's mind as it considers angles impossible to a lesser athlete during a long rally of one single point, the answer is something we the witnesses can approach but still struggle to truly know.
[Cian spends his days in photos and his nights advancing the cause of the Einsteins... well, most nights anyway. If you like the magazine, he would really like it if you joined our mailing list. To read more by Cian, check out his profile.]
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