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July 2005 Issue
The Master
Three years ago, Roger Federer was a solid Top 10 player. Now some are calling him the greatest of all time. What changed?
By Andrew Corsello, TENNIS Magazine
AN ODD THING HAPPENED in the final of the NASDAQ-100 Open in early April—one of
those subtle, spooky, turn-on-a-dime moments before which things are one way, and after
which they are very much another. Up until the end of the third set, 18-year-old Spaniard
Rafael Nadal was doing what rational people say cannot be done: beating the living daylights
out of the great Roger Federer. Nadal was beautifully unconscious, leaping about, taking brazen
risks, afloat, untouchable. He broke Federer twice in the first set, taking it 6-2, and won a
second-set tiebreaker. Federer, for once, looked bewildered. Where the world's No. 1 usually
struts through matches with the confidence of one who can see two or three shots into the
future, who knows far in advance where the ball will be and positions himself accordingly,
Federer seemed trapped in some kind of psychic goo, a whole second or two behind the
reality his opponent was occupying. The champ kept staring dumbly, with slumped shoulders,
at the spots where Nadal's winners were landing, as if to ask, Is this really happening?
If Federer and Nadal had been playing in, say, the 1998 NASDAQfinal, the crowd would have
been treated to a ribald display of John McEnroe–style punkdom. “As a teenager, I was a
terrible hothead,” Federer admits. “I screamed. I cried on the court. I couldn't control it. If I
didn't make the shot I wanted, I would get angry. Then, when I missed a second shot, I would
think, Now the racquet has to go .” Federer has often spoken of one incident during his teens
when his father called from the stands for his son to cut the histrionics; Federer retorted that
the old man should go get a drink and leave him alone. Pops responded later, quite reasonably,
by shoving young Roger's face into a nearby snow bank.
But this was 2005, and even as Nadal whipped him around
the court, Federer displayed the imperturbable dignity that
has become his trademark. The racquet stayed in hand. He
didn't bark or howl. He didn't upbraid the linesmen.
Part of Federer's quietude is simply the result of maturation.
But part of it is also strategic. When asked what he does to get
into the zone, physically and psychologically, he says, “I try to
stay very much in the present tense. To think only about the
moment that I am in a point, and to not even think about that
if I can. It's no good if when I'm playing, I'm thinking ahead
to the next match or the next tournament. And it's really no
good if I'm thinking about the last point, what I did wrong, or
the last match I lost. I don't let it stay with me. I tell you, I
don't lose much now, but when I do, I don't think about it. By
the time I get back to the hotel, I'm OK with it. On to the
next thing.” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “I think that
I am now a very happy, very honest person.” Another pause.
“I believe in my talent. I don't fear anyone anymore.”
There's nothing offhand or self-pleased in Federer's tone
when he says these things; he's possessed of supreme
confidence, but not conceit. (Conceit, after all, usually masks
a lack of confidence, and Federer, who went 51-2 from the
2004 U.S. Open to Monte Carlo this year, proves the adage
that it ain't bragging if you can back it up.) When Federer
talks about his happiness, he's referring to the calm, clean
feeling that comes to those rare individuals who have vast
potential and tap it consistently. When a person is blissfully
free of the could-haves and should-haves that haunt the rest
of us, the kind of happiness Federer is crowing about
is inevitable, and self-fulfilling. Some champs—Jimmy
Connors, McEnroe, even Andre Agassi—have used their
own complexity and inner conflict to fuel their motivation
and intensity on the court. Federer doesn't truck in inner
demons. Not anymore. He uses his psychic serenity to
loosen his body and steel his will, which creates victory after
victory, which in turn creates more happiness, until victory
and happiness conflate in an upward spiral of utter dominance
that daunts every other player on tour.
So it was that Federer kept his composure in the face of
Nadal's onslaught. That is, until he didn't.
Four-all in the third. Nadal's serve. Federer got a break
point. He squandered it. Nadal battled back, held serve. And
then Federer's inner teen punk emerged, like some alien
beast. There was a primal howl, both guttural and whiny. The
right arm went up; Federer tomahawked his racquet onto the
court. The frame rose in a high somersaulting arc, landing in
the alley. Could it be? Had the young Nadal caused the great
Federer to lose control?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Look at what happened next. The
two players held serve and went to a tiebreaker. But even as
they did, and even as Nadal went up 5-3, a shift was taking
place. One of those abstract psychological things that happen
at the highest level of sport, a polarity shift, a momentum
hemorrhage, whatever you want to call it. Though impossible
to pinpoint, the effects were clear: The dreamlike bubble in
which Nadal had been floating was ruptured, and it was
Federer's uncharacteristic outburst that had ruptured it. Even
as Nadal was two points from winning the match, you could
see that he had become consciously and unbearably aware of
the enormity of what he was about to accomplish, and that he
found this sudden knowledge crushing . The whole attitude of
his body and his face changed. He looked skittish and tense,
like a treed animal. The exact opposite happened to Federer.
He knew exactly what was going on, and what it would lead
to. And as soon as Federer brought
the tiebreaker to 5-all, any fool
could tell: He was going to win the
tiebreaker and cruise through the
next two sets. And that's exactly
what he did.
The match was a perfect illustration
of what it takes, above and beyond physical skill, to
be No. 1. Moreover, it was an illustration of the manifold
nature of Federer's talent, of the way his arsenal contains
psychological weapons that other players don't have. “I
resort to anger very seldomly,” Federer says. “Usually I stay
very neutral, especially now that I'm playing with the confidence
I have. But sometimes, in rare situations, it can
carry me through.”
It became clear in retrospect: That primal howl and racquet
spike were not impotent gestures of surrender; they
were the means by which Federer wrestled control back
from Nadal. He used his outburst to disrupt Nadal's flow
and to goose the crowd, then fed off the heightened energy.
Eerie but true: He knew what he was doing.
How does Federer do it? How has this 23-year-old Swiss
wonder, born and raised in Basel, come to dominate
his sport to the degree that, as Marat Safin has put it,
he seems to be toying with all the other players? Rod
Laver and McEnroe have predicted he may become the best
ever. Agassi has called him an “inspiration.” Pete Sampras has
declared that Federer's only competition from now on is the
record book—in other words, Sampras himself.
It's interesting to compare Federer to Sampras. Federer,
like Sampras during the unprecedented six consecutive years
he held the No. 1 ranking, is significantly elevated above his
peers. But where the source of Sampras' dominance was easy
to identify—the rocket serve and forehand that ended most
points before they began—Federer's is more elusive.
He's correct when he describes his technique as “beautiful.”
The enormous, perfectly round Os drawn by his groundstrokes
have a kind of sculptural perfection. The movement
of both his racquet and his body is so cleanly efficient, so
rhythmically deliberate, that the man seems to be playing in
ever-so-slight slow motion. This can sometimes create the
(false) impression of indifference, or of his having just woken
up. The efficiency and fluidity of Federer's movement is readily
apparent when he plays against someone like Agassi,
whom he's now beaten seven times in a row. Both men are
remarkably fast, but where Agassi's is an agitated quickness,
Federer never seems to scramble because he's never out of
place; he sees early where he needs to be and moves there so
fluidly that his motions appear choreographed.
Federer says that one of his shortcomings as a teen player
was his artistic inclination to seek the most “beautiful” shot,
rather than the most effective. Even now, he speaks fondly of
the “fluid” and “perfect” nature of his strokes, which may
explain his disdain for the drop shot. He calls it a “panic
shot” and a “copping out.” When asked if it's the staccato of
the drop shot that bugs him, the way it interrupts the lovely
legato of his game, he says, “Yes! The drop shot—it is not me,
you know? I feel like I am fooling around when I do it, and I
am a person who doesn't like to fool around.”
Federer is certainly a powerful player, but he rarely overwhelms
his opponents by overpowering them. He simply
out plays them. He will serve and volley if it suits him, but he's
also content to rally at the baseline and wait for the right
opportunity to present itself. Fact is, it's difficult to pin down
Federer's game because Federer doesn't really have a game.
He has games . He's the most whole player the sport has ever
seen. Depending on his opponent and his mood, he might
decide to play a strictly north-south power game, or he might
slow it down and play the angles. Indeed, we haven't seen
angles this perverse since McEnroe was carving them with his
Dunlop Maxply. When Federer puts away a half-court halfvolley
that cuts across the north-south of the court at a 120-
degree angle, a spectator has a complex, evolving response.
One first thinks, How'd he do that? Then one replays the
shot or two that preceded the putaway, the slow, sure advance
Federer made to midcourt, and realizes, He was planning that
putaway four or five strokes before he actually hit it . Then
one comes full
circle and thinks,
once more: How'd
he do that?
“I do sometimes
feel that
time is kind of
altered when I play,” Federer says. “Like the other guy is
slowed down and I can see what he's going to do a long
time before he does it. It's a feeling that I can rely very
much on my footwork, that I'm moving very smoothly.
People, when they see my beautiful technique and talk
about it, a lot of it has to do with the footwork.”
What they may not be talking about is the man's uncanny
vision, the way Federer can fix his eyes on the point of
contact—regardless of whether he's at the beginning, middle,
or end of his stroke. “Believe it or not, it used to be
even more extreme,” he says. “I would hit a slice and almost
look backward. Somehow my head is always looking at the
ball for a long, long time.”
Most tennis players, despite the advice drilled into their
heads from the time they pick up a racquet, don't truly
keep their eyes on the ball, at least not in the way Federer
can and does. With those deep-set peregrine eyes—on and
off the court, the man has a habit of pinching the bridge of
his nose two or three times every minute, as if to make sure
the line of his vision is trued—he never stops looking,
never loses his visual grip on that ball. Asked if he sees what
happens at the instant he strikes the ball, he says, “Oh,
yes.” Asked, incredulously, if he really sees what happens
during the microsecond in which the blunt force trauma of
his strings flattens the sphere into an ellipsoid, he says,
again, “Oh, yes.”
I knew years ago that I was capable of playing as well as I
am playing today,” Federer says. “But I thought that at
best I could keep it up for maybe a week at a time. I did
not know that I would be able to do it over the course of
a season. I had no idea that I could be so consistent.”
If Sampras is right, and Federer's only competition for the
foreseeable future is the record book, consistency is the
object. One would think that to stay in the zone in a consistent
way, Federer would endeavor to turn his mind into a cool,
antiseptic space, empty of worries, empty of what has happened
in the past and what may happen in the future, empty
of everything except the strategy for today's match. One
would be wrong. “There needs to be uncertainty,” he says. “I
want to be nervous before a match. When I walk on the
court, I want my hands to feel cold with sweat. And the most
important thing for me is not to tune out the crowd. I may
have my eyes on the ball, but I like to be very aware of my surroundings.
I like playing in a big atmosphere. I always look
around quite a bit between points. It helps me to see what's
going on, how many people are there, what they're doing. If
they cheer for me, I can feed off of that. And if they boo me,
I can feed off of that, too.”
As stoic as Federer is on the court, the Nadal episode
notwithstanding, he revels in the drama of his own performances.
At the same time he sees the ball in microscopic detail,
he sees himself as most of us see him—from afar, through the
lens of the TV camera, as an otherworldly figure to be marveled
at. This acute sensitivity to drama may explain the way
he's able to elevate his game on big points. You can see it in his
body language, the same way you used to see Michael Jordan
deciding, with six minutes left in the fourth quarter and the
Bulls down by 10, OK, it's time to take over now .
“I usually play best in the most important matches,”
Federer says. “I play best in a big stadium, when I'm against
the other best players in the world.” He continues.
“Sometimes, I am able to step out of myself. I am in the
moment, in my body playing the rally, but I'm also watching
myself as I do it, thinking, That was great! How did I hit that
shot ?” Another pause. “A lot of people have been comparing
me to the all-time greats. I love that. It's proof that I've made
it. But after a while I don't necessarily like being compared to
somebody else. I don't want them saying, 'He's the next Rod
Laver' or 'He's the next Pete Sampras.' I just want them saying,
'Ah, he's Federer!' I am the first Federer. I want to be
remembered only as Federer. I want to get to the place where
I won't be compared with anybody anymore.”
Andrew Corsello , a correspondent for GQ, last wrote for TENNIS
on the subject of cheating.
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