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July 05, 2003
Entranced by Roger Potter and the Racket of Fire . . .
By Simon Barnes, The Times
THE great and the good of the tennis world
are campaigning for a change in the legislation about rackets and the
size of the sweet spot. It seems that Roger Federer is leading a
one-man support movement among the actual players. For Federer
yesterday abandoned his conventional racket and replaced it with one he
bought at Olivander’s in Diagon Alley. I am not sure what it is made from — certainly not graphite or
Kevlar — but I suspect that it is the wood of the holly tree, with a
core of phoenix feather. I may be wrong about this, though: it might
actually be dragon’s heart-string. No matter: the point is that Federer
bought his racket where Harry Potter bought his wand. He
played a match of deep, complex and advanced magic to beat Andy
Roddick, the tournament favourite, 7-6, 6-3, 6-3 in their semi-final.
There was no sweet spot on his racket. The whole damn thing was as
sweet and delicious as summer pudding. The racket did not hit the ball,
it issued instructions and the ball carried them out with slavish
devotion. And to think that those old boys and girls were moaning that
there is no artistry in the game any more. This was art of new, high
and contemporary order — challenging, but beautiful to experience, at
least from the stands. Tennis insiders have been waiting a while for the genius of
Federer to erupt on the big stage. Yesterday, it happened. It is great
to be a promising young man, but there comes a time when promises must
be kept. Some people manage to remain promising for years. People speak
of their future achievements almost as a matter of course, but they
never actually train on and become grown-up achievers. Roddick has been a coming man for a few years now, with a
fearsome serve and power game to drive anybody off the court. Most
people had assumed that he would win this tournament once the former
champions had been cleared out of the draw. It seemed for a while that
he was ready to give up promising and start delivering. But Federer, just a year older at 21, made Roddick look like a
boy — and a callow one at that. It was magic of dark and malevolent
kind that the American was subject to, magic that sucked the game and
the strength and the confidence out of him. Roddick is from the
my-serve-is-myself school of tennis and Federer delicately and
precisely robbed him of his own identity. Roddick blasted one service down at 149mph at Queen’s Club,
equalling Greg Rusedski’s world record, and his plan A is always to
hammer opponents into submission. Federer read his serve as if it were The Beano (or perhaps the Daily Prophet).
The new ace of aces hit only four in the match, with only one other
service winner, while Federer was serving as well as he did everything
else, hitting 17 aces. But it was Federer’s all-court game that had the Centre Court
a-purring. His brilliance gave us the illusion that he was aiming at a
court a good deal bigger on the opposite side of the net. He found
angles that surely wouldn’t have been playable on a normal-sized court.
Roddick looked lost in the vast open plains, the ball seldom anywhere
near him. It was as if he was trying to defend the Serengeti. There should be a word for it, when someone plays to the
topmost level of his ability. There is a phrase, of course: the players
say that someone is “in the zone”. “You get a different feeling,”
Federer said yesterday, which is about as close to a definition as you
can get. Presumably you know it when you are in it. Certainly you know
it when you see it. Federer played more or less a complete match, and certainly
two entire sets, from within the zone of perfection. It was about an
hour of tennis that was utterly and perfectly zonic. “I really do feel
quite good about myself,” Federer said. Federer presents himself as the neatest, cleanest, tidiest
rebel in tennis. He wears the smartest, cleanest, whitest headband and
ties his hair back in the shortest, neatest, cleanest ponytail. That
must be the way you rebel if you are Swiss; certainly this was a
display that won the hearts of the neutrals. The only question now is whether he can do it again. As a
Swiss alpinist, he may have reached his peak too soon. He is perfectly
capable of playing a stinker against Mark Philippoussis in the final
tomorrow. He has always been one of those players who can blow hot and
cold out of the same mouth. It was so absurdly easy for him yesterday, like a David Gower
century, when he created the illusion that the man on the other side of
the net was not so much an opponent as a willing accomplice. The
problem with this is that there are times even for the most gifted when
life suddenly gets hard again and you get out swishing outside leg
stump, or get rolled over by a big man with a Hulk-will-smash service
game. But let us be like the pros and take each match as it comes.
Savour the magic and celebrate the magician after an afternoon that was
genuinely zonic. Federer left the court with his racket emitting
intermittent green and yellow sparks and inadvertently transfiguring a
ballboy into a frog.
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