|
June 30, 2005
Federer the genius, an artist with a racket for a brush
By Simon Barnes, The Times
IT IS becoming increasingly apparent that
Roger Federer was Leonardo da Vinci in a previous life. It is not just
that Federer is a genius. It is the form that his genius takes that
convinces me that the two of them have something important in common. Think of the famous notebooks: the mirror writing and the
extraordinary drawings of helicopters, parachutes, wheel-locks, siege
towers, tunnelling machines, submarines, dredgers, foetuses, dissected
corpses, muscle formation, plants and geological strata. It is not just
the fertility of the mind that entrances, it is also the beauty of the
pages. Leonardo,
it seems, was physically incapable of the unbeautiful. He could draw a
dredger but couldn’t make it anything other than beautiful. He was
doomed to beauty, condemned to beauty, shackled to beauty. For
Leonardo, beauty was more than his genius. It was also his method. Leonardo was perhaps the last man on earth to understand the
entirety of Western thought and culture. For Federer, it is enough to
hit furry balls. Federer seeks only to defeat other tennis players, but
to do so in a way that avoids beauty is beyond him. And — beautifully — he moved into the semi-finals yesterday,
defeating — beautifully — Fernando González 7-5, 6-2, 7-6. Let’s have a
little taster: a perfect drop shot from González, but Federer is there
with a quick float over the court and little dink over the net, going
cross-court to make it a winner. Now let’s have another: on the next
point he is pushed far beyond the tramlines and, at full pace and full
stretch, hits a fizzing forehand slice that surprises the hell out of
González, who can only shovel the ball into the net. Bemused, poor fellow, utterly bemused. He played his best
tennis — a shot a ball, a forehand that could knock down walls, mad
running, total commitment — and yet Federer dealt with everything with
a kind of gentle sorrow, tying his opponent up in silken threads in the
manner of a spider. As you may have gathered, Federer is coming into a bit of
form. He will play Lleyton Hewitt in the semi-finals tomorrow and he
has a seven-match winning streak against him. You might deduce that
Hewitt’s game dovetails rather nicely into Federer’s. Which is true
enough, but so does everybody else’s. González played out of his skin yesterday, but Federer was out
of this world. He took the big-hitting style of González and turned it
into a weapon against the man who wielded it. He appeared to do it
without malice, without animosity; almost with reluctance. As he did
so, he created patterns and cross-patterns. He did things that
delighted because they were so sweetly inevitable and others that
thrilled by their unexpectedness. Federer could not invariably take the initiative against
someone so determined to hit a winner every time the ball came over the
net. Nor did he try. He can play a thousand different styles and all of
them beautiful. At times he was content to play his — beautiful —
defensive tennis against González, sometimes to lure him into an error
out of sheer exasperation, and sometimes — most beautifully of all —
turning defence into attack with a change of pace or angle. Beauty is not his aim, of course it isn’t, but if you are
condemned to the beautiful, beauty is the way you must live. Federer
often looks as if he is playing a slightly different game to everybody
else, or perhaps using a slightly different device with which to play
it. Nobody else plays like that. Nobody else could.
Racket-head control is only an aspect of it. Hidden behind that
mostly serene manner is a ferocious competitive will. It is deceptive,
because it is invariably expressed in a beautiful form. It looks as if
Federer is hitting his opponents with a flower, but the opponents get
knocked to the floor just the same. Federer had to raise his game for González, but don’t worry.
He has plenty more raises available to him should he need them. He is
not just Leonardo, he is also Sergey Bubka, the pole vaulter who made a
career of raising the world record centimetre by centimetre. If his
next two opponents raise the bar, Federer has it within him to raise
himself that little bit higher. He has more raises within him than
anyone else in tennis. Yesterday he gave us tennis from another dimension. González
played flat out, Federer appeared to be moving in slow motion, but by
doing so was much the faster. The balls he hit had a magnetic
attraction for the lines. The ball did whatever his racket told it to.
It was beautiful, but it just wasn’t fair. Poor González: beaten up in
three rounds by the Mona Lisa.
|
