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July 4, 2005
Like Hamlet, this had the air of inevitability
By Simon Barnes, The Times
SO ROGER FEDERER has won three Wimbledons
in a row. Who will be the first to say that it’s all rather a bore? But
listen: don’t do it around me, not unless you want the most frightful
earful. You thought that was boring? Huh! Perhaps you should try
something a bit less intellectually demanding. Shakespeare, for
example. You can enjoy sport, like everything else, on many different
levels. You can buy Van Gogh table-mats and spill your soup on them, or
you can give Van Gogh a lifetime of study. Yesterday afternoon lacked
cheap thrills: above all, it lacked uncertainty. It was without any of
sport’s usual soap-opera pleasures. And
it was as good as sport gets. Federer beat Andy Roddick in straight
sets, 6-2, 7-6, 6-4, and it was never for an instant in doubt. You know
from the first act that Hamlet will end badly for Hamlet: you
knew from the first handful of games that yesterday afternoon’s men’s
singles final would end badly for Roddick. That did not detract from
the pleasure — au contraire.
Federer has joined the hat-trick men. I missed Fred Perry, but I
know about Bjorn Borg and Pete Sampras. They are appreciated now as the
very greatest of champions but, at the time, those who preferred soap
opera to sport complained of boredom. Now Federer is in their company
and not by chance. He has done it by the same means as the other two:
excellence. And if you find excellence boring, then direct your
attention away from sport, where excellence is the goal, even if it is
rarely found. Instead, concentrate your mind, such as it is, on EastEnders, where they value cheap gratification above such tedious matters as excellence.
Last year, Federer won his second Wimbledon championship despite
playing badly. He won ever-so-slightly ugly. This pleased me deeply: it
showed the steel beneath the silk, the rock behind the velvet. But
there has been no such thing as ugliness to contemplate this time
around. I have had the privilege of covering Federer’s last three
matches in the tournament. Each opponent played well, and each one of
them played in a radically different style: Fernando González, a shot a
ball plus a demented forehand; Lleyton Hewitt, all-court angle-finder;
Roddick, power mixed with more power. And here’s the genius of it: each
person’s game seemed specifically constructed as a showcase for
Federer’s talents. And each person lost in straight sets. You come up with the
game, Federer will come up with the counter-game. You raise your game,
Federer will raise his. Raise again, again, you really are that good .
. . but Federer has more raises than anyone else on earth. And he has
improved since he first won; he is improving all the time and getting
mentally stronger. Roddick came in with a gameplan based on aggression. He
charged about the court in a blazing passion to set things aright — or
was he actually being lured? He came out to set the agenda and suffered
the spooky feeling that he was doing exactly what Federer wanted.
Worse, he was doing exactly what Federer told him: told him by means of power and angle and accuracy and tempo.
There was a point when Federer made a startling mis-hit — he
puts so much in to every ball that such things happen — and somehow
turned that into his own advantage. It was as if he had deliberately
set Roddick up with a shot off the frame — a nonsense of course, but
that is the illusion he creates. This kind of perfection is mesmerising
rather than exciting and it certainly mesmerised Roddick. By the end,
he must have felt like a man fighting a ghost. Not even the rain dismayed Federer. He broke Roddick twice in
the first set — Roddick the best server in the tournament — and dropped
a single point on his own serve. Federer was broken in the second set,
but he broke back and wiped out Roddick in the tie-break. After the
rain he simply carried on as before with a classic seventh-game break
and hold of serve to win. Don’t cheer. Sigh. Sigh, and then wag your head in baffled,
joyful silence. This was something very special, as good a bit of sport
as I have seen, and I have seen a fair bit here and there. And think of
Borg and Sampras: how these people are appreciated now, but were
thought of really rather dull at the time. On Centre Court yesterday,
Roddick was the man who had most of the support: you can do it, Andy!
But Federer is the one who can do it. Achieve serious greatness in
sporting terms, that is. And I think it would be an interesting and
instructive thing if we were to appreciate him while he is actually
playing. He failed to bring us a five-set nail-biter. Instead, when it
came to the end of the tournament, he brought us three successive
matches of incremental brilliance. There are people who will tell you that Sunflowers is a bit of a cliché and that Hamlet
is too full of quotations. The same people will tell you that Federer
is boring. You can find shallowness in all things, and you can find
profundity. It all depends on what kind of a person you are, or whether
or not you are concentrating. CENTRE COURT'S HAT-TRICK HEROES
BY CLAIMING his third successive Wimbledon singles title
yesterday, Roger Federer joined an elite band in the hat-trick club.
Fred Perry became the first in 1936, after the abolition of the
challenge round in 1922, Bjorn Borg captured five in a row from 1976
and Pete Sampras managed the feat on two occasions. One of Federer’s
more unusual benefits for winning Wimbledon is the presenting of a cow
by the organisers of the Swiss Open.
ROGER FEDERER 2003-05
Grand-slam titles: 5 (Wimbledon 2003, Australian Open 2004, US Open 2004, Wimbledon 2004, Wimbledon 2005).
PETE SAMPRAS 1993-95, 1997-2000
Grand-slam titles: 14 (US Open 1990, US Open 1993, Wimbledon
1993, Australian Open 1994, Wimbledon 1994, US Open 1995, Wimbledon
1995, US Open 1996, Australian Open 1997, Wimbledon 1997, Wimbledon
1998, Wimbledon 1999, Wimbledon 2000, US Open 2002).
BJORN BORG 1976-80
Grand-slam titles: 11 (French Open 1974, French Open 1975,
Wimbledon 1976, Wimbledon 1977, French Open 1978, Wimbledon 1978,
French Open 1979, Wimbledon 1979, French Open 1980, Wimbledon 1980,
French Open 1981).
FRED PERRY 1934-36
Grand-slam titles: 8 (US Open 1933, Australian Open 1934,
Wimbledon 1934, US Open 1934, French Open 1935, Wimbledon 1935,
Wimbledon 1936, US Open 1936).
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