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July 3, 2005
Federer master of the beautiful game
By Brough Stott, Telegraph
There's
something in his smile. It only comes after the match and there is
nothing flashy in it. The teeth may barely show but a warm and blissful
wonder grows through the down-turned Federer face. At last he can be
happy with what has gone before. On Friday, Roger had those three sets against Lleyton Hewitt
to smile upon, the first two as dazzling in their power and beauty and
invention as anything you will see in tennis. Poor Lleyton hardly got a
sniff as Roger stretched and hit and surprised him. It was highly
charged. It was one-on-one combat, and yet for Federer the histrionics
were confined to that little double-footed jumping turn of frustration
when a would-be winner had strayed. Hewitt was important, but the real
test was to play to the Federer potential, to try and paint that
masterpiece on to the court. There should be
arrogance here but Federer's genius has a purity about it which is
uniquely appealing. The next few weeks will see two other men with
claims to be the greatest performer their sport, or any other, has ever
seen. But for all their astonishing respective achievements, neither
Lance Armstrong nor Tiger Woods handle themselves in and out of
competition with an open charm anything like that of Roger Federer. True,
both Lance and Tiger may have new records up ahead and both can be
winningly articulate when they wish. But there is also an unattractive
jaggedness about Armstrong and an unappealing control-freakery in Woods
which makes it hard to imagine either walking into a press conference
as Federer did on Friday to modestly and wittily handle questions in
English, French, German and Swiss/Deutch not even excluding the
compulsory joke in each language about the cow Juliette, his hometown
reward for Wimbledon 2003. Before the tournament
started, BBC TV asked 10 leading players to film a preview for them.
Every one bar Federer found a reason to decline. A day later a walking
interview with Radio Wimbledon hit a technical snag as he entered the
most famous gates in tennis. "Could we ever do it again," gulped the
hack. "Of course," said Federer, "I have the time." Yes,
he has the time. That was the glory of it on Friday. We all know that
Hewitt is a scrapper, the fastest man in tennis, but here he was being
pushed around by a force that was just awesome to behold. In no other
sport do you get a full two hours of close-up study of the athlete in
extremis. In tennis on the Centre Court you seem to be looking not just
at a player's shots but into his very soul. With
Federer, even the physique is something of a contradiction. At 6ft 1in
and nearly 13st, he is a big, almost heavy-looking figure with a
crumpled face that in concentration is hardly a thing of beauty. Yet
the moment he picks up the racket he is transformed into an
extraordinary creature with a lightness to match the power, a speed to
equal the stealth, and, above all, the hawk-eyed intelligence to
harness the skill. He doesn't just trade shots
from the baseline. He is always keen to move you about until either the
angle has got sharp enough to make the return impossible, or to give
him the chance to leap around the backhand and hammer away with the
full force of the forehand. "A lot of people say
that his backhand is his best shot," said Frew McMillan on Friday, "but
they are wrong. The forehand is something else." Later
in the day the rain came and the TV gave the one billionth showing of
the Borg-McEnroe tie-break in the 1980 final. Once again you were
gripped by the drama and by the skill and nerve of the participants.
But for power and speed they were on a different planet to the big
Swiss cat who had made the Centre Court his own that afternoon. In
their separate ways both Borg and McEnroe were driven by fires from
deep within. So, too, is Federer and in his early days he was a shouter
and a racket-thrower of almost Supermac dimensions. What's exceptional
about Roger is that he has fuelled the force and can talk about it. "I
had the feeling that I was wasting too much energy on getting upset,"
he explained in all those languages on Friday, "but it took me another
year or so to actually get the fire back because I was getting too
quiet, too calm." Today we will see him in his
pomp and yet he's not 24 until next month. As a man and as a performer
he is at this moment so close to perfection that there is a wistful
thought that history says it cannot last. Life is an unsparing partner
and distractions come to the mind just as injuries slow the body. So
let's relish while we can the winning made beautiful. If Roger Federer
plays like he has this past fortnight we, as well as he, will have
plenty to smile about.
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