The Outlaw

Being a newish sort of tennis fan, I have only been watching and playing the game for about two years, I am not sure it behooves me to comment on the decline of Roger Federer, tennis player extraordinaire and legend in his own day. However, because I am a huge fan of  Federer, and because (as far as I know) this blog has had exactly zero visitors, I feel easy in this task.

First: The French Open cheated me out of an excuse to stay up all night. More distressingly,  it showed that Federer, even while in good form, was capable of making human errors. Some shots hit the net, some went too far. What was clear though, was that the “Old” Federer had gone. Wimbledon showed he wasn’t coming back.

To go back a step: “Old” Federer was not only a genius – by which I mean a sublime and unsurpassed practitioner of a type of tennis owing more to poetry than science – but he was also possessed of such an intense and underlying belief in his scientific quality (simply, an ability to win a game of tennis) that mere exceptional players could do very little to circumvent the inevitable.

 Now, it is this latter characteristic that Federer has lost, in my view. Moreover, this latter characteristic must not be overlooked. It is the sole criterion upon which mortal players of some quality (think Djokovich, Roddick et al) build their reputations.

 Of course, the next question is why Federer has lost this 2nd quality alluded too. I think there are two reasons.

1) These missed/duffed shots and so forth show me that if Federer had favoured the sort of regime that conceived the fruition of his exceptional talent then he would not only have won Wimbledon, but probably the French as well. Put simply, he didn’t train hard enough.

2) Nadal is himself an exceptional player. I would say that no-one else, that day, facing the Federer who did show up, would have won. No way. In Nadal, Federer faced a man so intent on victory and so untroubled by this goal, so focussed, that it must have been like looking at a younger version of himself. No matter what Federer said, I believe that after 4 sets, not two, he was shaken. Why? Because he had summoned the most exacting and scientific tennis that he possessed, and won by a mere point in each.

After that, the result was a formality, as long as Nadal held his nerve. To his very great credit, Nadal did exactly that.

Now, as to why Federer will not regain his former position (being proven wrong would be fine with me) is that Federer has seen the future, and it is not his style, his way. Federer himself imposed on an era in which he had no business gracing. We are immensely fortunate that he did, and if Federer plays on, I want to see more of the same, rather than some truncated, coaching manual perfection. I love that Federer declines to chase the odd hittable ball and loops the odd outrageous backhand wide.

 And finally, there would be something inherently uncool about beating Sampras’ record. The true tennis luminaries, McEnroe, Borg are two that spring to mind in the wake of Wimbledon, are somewhere near the middle of the pack in terms of majors. Aggasi as well, had a flair for the dramatic. Being no. 1 shows too much of the science of tennis, Sampras must surely have eschewed many many timeless shots, shots he would have loved to play, to play it safe, to win those games. To hell with that.