June 20, 2005

Federer's art of deception

How the world No 1 is able to make the ugly appear beautiful

By Simon Barnes, The Times

HERE’S A SUGGESTION FOR LIVENING up your Wimbledon. Watch it on television and every time someone says that Roger Federer is an artist, pour yourself a glass of Pimm’s. You’ll be as boiled as an owl before teatime every day. The sober truth of the matter is that Federer is not an artist. He is a businessman, a mercenary, a man whose task is dispatching the opposition. He is no more of an artist than anyone else who plays sport for a living.

No one will call Andy Roddick an artist, with his colossal serve. No one will call Lleyton Hewitt an artist, with his insane baseline persistence. No one will call Tim Henman an artist, with his sumptuously athletic volleying. But Federer will be mistaken for an artist so many times that you will pluck the mint-bed bare long before the final if you play the Pimm’s game.

Don’t ask the commentators. Ask Federer. He never claims to be an artist — and he should know. All he is trying to do is to win tennis matches. He is not trying to paint his masterpiece, he is trying to put a furry ball in places where his opponent cannot reach it, and that, so far as he is concerned, is the beginning and end of the matter. Federer is charming and modest and soft-spoken. He also has a will of iron, but that can be hard to spot behind the self-effacing press conferences, the genuine decency, the genuine beauty of his shot-making. And he uses that will not to create art but to dispatch opponents.

Take last year’s Wimbledon final against Roddick. It was not a very good final: that was what was so good about it. Federer did not play very well, not by his own standards. And Roddick really did play pretty well, by anybody’s standards. But Federer won. He did not win by means of his artistry. His art, if you care to call it that, had rather deserted him. It was a stuttering, uncertain performance. But Federer won because his will was stronger. If his plan A involved something people like to call art, plan B was to keep buggering on and be damned if he was going to come second.

It was this, rather than his long moments of perfection earlier in the tournament, that made me think that Federer really may develop into one of the greatest men to have lifted a tennis racket. Anyone can win when everything goes his way. Federer won when an awful lot went against him. He won the sordid way, the philistine way. He went slumming, and he won — well, not precisely ugly, because Federer is incapable of ugliness, but he won in a manner that was a little common, a little vulgar, a little coarse. He won the way a lesser player might win and by doing so, showed that he might be on the way to becoming a great one. He revealed the will behind the poetry — and it was enough to do for Roddick.

If I were Federer’s coach, and he were to come up to me and say: “Patron, I see myself as un artiste,” I would say: “Merde, my old son. I resign. If you claim to be an artist, then you destroy the art in yourself. And with it, the tennis.” Federer does not create art. He creates the illusion of art. It is a joy to watch, but it is not art. It is not supposed to be — any more than a cruise missile is supposed to be art. Art is not Federer’s purpose: art is, if you like, his method.

Why do we confuse Federer’s tennis with art? First there is the virtuosity: the control, the movement, the shot-making ability. Then there is something to do with angles. Federer, because of his eye and his control, can play shots at angles that do not seem physically possible. He constantly makes us see the possibilities of tennis, and for that matter of physics, in a different way. “Make it new,” as Ezra Pound was always saying as standard instructions to anyone trying to create art.

But more than anything, the idea of Federer as an artist comes from the illusion that his opponent is co-operating with him. At times, watching Federer, it seems that tennis is not a duel but an exquisitely choreographed pas de deux. You can see that same illusion in other forms of sport: the thrown judo-fighter apparently co-operating with the thrower: the full back’s apparent desire to enhance George Best’s ability, Malcolm Nash apparently conspiring with Gary Sobers to allow him his six sixes.

Tennis is a prolonged and uniquely theatrical form of sport and there are sustained periods of time when it seems that the opponent is slowly hypnotised into becoming Federer’s straight man, his gofer, his roadie. And this is deeply pleasing to watch, almost literally spell-binding. There is an aesthetic dimension to sport, which is at least part of the reason why we watch it. But the point is that sport’s aesthetics are inadvertent. We have goal of the month competitions but if one goal is better than another — more pleasing to the senses — that is purely an aesthetic judgment, one that has no effect on the scoreboard.

Federer plays the shot of the tournament half a dozen times a set. He is a shot-of-the-tournament player, but not because he is seeking to impress or seeking to create beauty. He is seeking to win. Beauty just happens to be the most potent weapon in his arsenal. In sport, no winning method is superior to any other kind. Athletes are not seeking to please you and me, they are seeking to win. To Roddick the bomb, to Hewitt, the back-court gunfire, to Henman the rapier-volley, to Federer, beauty. It’s all about trying to win, and as for method — it’s all in the way these things take you.

Federer is not an artist, no. But he can create beauty all right. And that’s when he is most dangerous.

At the court of King Roger

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