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January 13, 2006
Ace of grace
By Rahul Jacob, Financial Times
As
part of China’s campaign to be a sporting superpower, the city of
Shanghai last year wrested the right to hold tennis’s eight-player
finale, known as the Tennis Masters, from Houston. Billboards and
banners on the roadside leading from central Shanghai out to the
80-acre tennis complex in the suburb of Minhang showed images of the
players, and proclaimed such slogans as “Friendship in Masters Cup,
Passion in Minhang”, like nonsensical fortune cookies.
On
a cool morning last November, I set off for Minhang, so far from the
city centre that it seemed like it was in another province, to watch
the world’s number one Roger Federer practise a few days before the
Masters tournament started. But by then, the billboards were an
unsettling reminder that three of the top eight had pulled out - Marat
Safin and Andy Roddick because of injury and Lleyton Hewitt because his
wife was expecting a baby. Worse than that, injury called into doubt
Federer’s participation as well. Just after making a special trip to
Shanghai in early October to open the new Qi Zhong stadium, Federer
injured his ankle practising at his home near the Swiss city of Basle.
On crutches for two weeks, he had pulled out of three tournaments
before the Masters and arrived in China short of match practice and
stamina. His part-time coach, Tony Roche, who had not seen him since
the summer when he won his third consecutive Wimbledon title, had
arrived early to practise with him. It was the second year in a
row that Federer had won both Wimbledon and the US Open. No one has
done that since the late 1930s when the American Don Budge stamped this
double imprimatur of domination on the sport. Many former champions
believe Federer could become the greatest tennis player ever. Over the
next two weeks, the tennis world will have its eye on him at the
Australian Open, the first event on the sport’s four-tournament
obstacle course on different surfaces, to see if the 24-year-old Swiss
can clear the first hurdle towards winning all of them in the same year
- the fabled Grand Slam. Even though there were doubts that he
was fit enough to play, Federer was chasing records yet again in
Shanghai. He had lost just three matches all year and arrived in China
seeking to emulate John McEnroe’s commanding 1984 season tally of 82
wins and three losses. Tennis stadiums, like theatres, lack magic
when they are empty. At Qi Zhong that November morning, technicians
kept testing the courtside electronic displays that alternately flashed
“China Mobile” and “Shanghai Stock Exchange”, a reminder that in the
world’s most frenetically capitalist economy, even play is work.
Federer walked on for his one-hour session and warmly greeted his
practice partner that morning, the Argentine David Nalbandian, the
world number 11. The only visible sign of Federer’s injury as he
headed for the baseline was a black ankle wrap that he would wear all
week, but when he started trading balls with Nalbandian, his shots flew
out of court as often as not. From the sidelines, Roche, dressed in a
pink shirt and blue track suit bottoms and a baseball cap, made quiet
suggestions. Federer’s personal trainer, Pierre Paganini, who had been
working on strengthening and stretching exercises in the weeks
following the injury, watched with a worried look on his face. When
Nalbandian and Federer started playing games in the second half-hour of
their practice session, it was apparent that a mortal Federer had
arrived in Shanghai. If the world of tennis champions seems
glamorous from afar, it did not feel that way in Shanghai. A
semi-permanent cloud cover made the city look like the set for a Blade
Runner sequel. The Hilton lobby, where the players were staying, had
been taken over by the tournament sponsors: in one corner, a lurid
green Heineken booth made a pretence at being a bar; in another, a
silver Mercedes transformed part of the lobby into a car showroom.
Crowds of autograph hunters swarmed outside and airport-style security
greeted anyone entering the hotel. Amid this bustle, I see
Federer’s girlfriend, Mirka Vavrinec, dressed in a yellow sweater and
jeans, walking across the lobby with two friends, but there is no sign
of Federer. He is caught in rush-hour traffic. “Sorry, I am waiting for
him as well,” she tells me. “It took one and a half hours to get back
from the stadium yesterday. Maybe we have to organise a helicopter.” In
the rarefied and ridiculously wealthy world of professional tennis, top
players are usually contactable only through their management agents.
Tournament rules require that they hold a press conference after every
match they play, so it is understandable that most limit non-tournament
press interviews to a minimum. But Vavrinec had confirmed the night
before that she had arranged for me to meet Federer this evening. Close
to 7pm, she sends a text: “Pls come up to Room 2024. Roger is here!” Federer,
in jeans and padding around without shoes on, lets me in to his suite.
He looks thinner in person than the imposing figure he cuts on court. I
joke that having endured the long commute to the stadium and back, I
have shelved my plans to become a professional tennis player. He laughs
and says that it is really not so bad. A giant fruit basket and a wine
bucket are on the table between us. I begin by asking about the injury
that has everyone in the tennis world in Shanghai pursing their lips.
He says he is pleased with his recovery, but “I think about it a lot so
I have to get that out of my system.” A few minutes later, he
discovers I will be around for the whole tournament so there are likely
to be other opportunities to interview Paganini, who I am scheduled to
see that same evening. Federer wheels around and asks Vavrinec to
cancel that interview and then sprawls across the couch in such a
relaxed way that it looks as if he is preparing to chat all evening. Throughout
our meeting he is extraordinarily modest and natural - he sometimes
seems almost as interested in the interviewer as I was in him. I
had read that Federer is training harder than he did before he became
number one, so I ask why he feels the need to. “The funny thing is
finally I’ve made the big breakthrough and I’ve become number one in
the world and now people are asking me, ‘Are you still interested in
the game, are you still motivated?’ Of course I am,” he says. “This is
where it starts really, where the dream comes true and then you can go
two ways: you can say, ‘OK I’m going to be a party animal’ or you can
say, ‘I want more of this.’ I decided to have more of it. It’s very
simple. I feel a great pride in being number one in the world and
representing my sport, and that for me is more important than anything.” I
ask how it happens that the public engagements of a tennis superstar
came to be arranged by his girlfriend. “It just feels too complicated
if you had to call somebody in London and then they had to call the
hotel. This way, it’s very simple. You call Mirka, Mirka asks me if
it’s OK. I say ‘yes, that’s OK’ and everything is sorted out.
Obviously, she’s my girlfriend and if everything got too much, I would
stop it right away.” He says he usually stays in hotels the other
players are not in so that he gets away from tennis when he is not on
court. On occasion, childhood friends “help him” by joining him on
tour; last year, one required extra time off from the bank he works at
to do so. Halfway through the interview, Roche drops by to see if
Federer and Vavrinec would like to go out for dinner. Federer takes the
opportunity to set up a time for me to speak with the coach the
following day. It seems always to be this informal: a couple of days
later, I am at work in the FT office in Shanghai when my mobile rings.
The connection is bad and I think it is a squash partner in London
scheduling a game. The caller rings again. It’s actually Federer trying
to arrange the interview I had asked for with his mother. When I
meet Lynette Federer, a brisk and energetic woman in her early fifties,
she says that “when Roger could barely walk, he would kick the ball
with me. He couldn’t even see over the table-tennis table but he could
hit the ball over the net. People kept saying ‘he’s amazing.’” Federer
played squash with his father every Sunday, and soccer at school till
he was 13. And he hit tennis balls - at cupboard doors, garage walls,
anything really. It seems his extraordinary hand-eye
co-ordination was apparent very early on and was not the product of
coaching. Although Lynette Federer coached children at the local club,
she did not coach her son. He played at a tennis club where he was
coached by an Australian, Peter Carter, who was a seminal influence on
his game. “We had no plan A, no plan B. We had no intention of making
him a professional tennis player,” she says. Federer himself credits
the range of sports he played as a child - he also played badminton and
basketball - for his hand-eye co-ordination. “I was always very much
more interested if a ball was involved,” he says. Most tennis
prodigies, by contrast, play tennis at the exclusion of pretty much
everything else. At the age of 14, Federer told a local tennis
magazine he had decided to try to qualify for the Swiss national tennis
centre in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. He hadn’t told his
parents of his decision. “This is quite a quote. It could change our
lives,” his mother recalls telling him when she read about it. The
decision initially knocked Federer’s happy childhood sideways. He spoke
no French and had to live with a host family. The dislocating move away
from his family coupled with the rigid discipline of the tennis centre
completely sapped his confidence. He challenged the regimented drills
of the coaches. In just a few months, Federer went from being a bubbly
teenager to one who was withdrawn and lacked confidence. “He said,
‘They seem to be saying I can’t play tennis,’” Lynette Federer recalls
emotionally, even a decade after the event. She and her husband,
Robert, sought a meeting with the coaches and told them it was fine if
their son trained hard but they didn’t want his personality changed:
“He is mischievous, but if you give a little, he will give you back so
much,” she says. The coaches eased off. The easy-going star that
we know today was not always so even-tempered. As a youngster, he would
rage and burst into tears and fall apart in matches. His father would
be so embarrassed that they would drive home in silence afterwards. But
by the time he was beginning to be noticed on the world circuit in
2000, ranked 29, Federer had controlled his temper so well that he
worried about not showing enough emotion on court. “Then I got too
calm, too quiet and that was a problem.” The next year, however, at 19,
he beat seven-times Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round
of the tournament (although he would have to wait another two years
before winning it himself). The following summer, his mentor,
Peter Carter, was killed in a car accident on holiday in South Africa.
Federer was devastated. By the summer of 2003, after crashing out of
the French Open in the first round, Federer felt he was in danger of
being written off. “People were starting to ask, ‘Is this one of those
talents who will never achieve something... who wasted his talents?’ I
was starting to feel the pressure from all sides,” he recalls. After a
sluggish start because of a bad back, he won Wimbledon that year,
beating Australian Mark Philippoussis in straight sets. He fell back on
the court and wept. When it counts most, Federer seems able to
lift his game to a metaphysical high that on the tennis circuit is
known as being “in the zone”. In last year’s Wimbledon final he made
number two seed Andy Roddick look flat-footed. At 5-5 in the second set
Roddick punched a volley into open court and Federer, his arm like an
aeroplane propeller, crashed a forehand past Roddick that prompted
two-time Wimbledon champion Jimmy Connors to remark in the BBC
commentary box that such shots “take my breath away - I can’t
comprehend it”. In his first match in the Shanghai Masters,
Federer played patchily, coming back to win from 1-3 in the final set
against Nalbandian. After the match a Chinese reporter asked nervously:
“It is a rumour that you will quit the Masters Cup after the first
[match] because of your injury. You won’t quit, right?” Federer
didn’t quit. But Rafael Nadal, who beat Federer on his way to a French
Open victory in June, and the veteran Andre Agassi both pulled out
because of injury the next day. The shell-shocked organisers held a
hasty press conference, promising discounts the following year to make
up for the mediocre field. Nadal went on court to apologise to the
crowd. Later, when in the middle of his hard match with the Croatian
Ivan Ljubicic, Federer called for a physiotherapist to help warm up his
thigh muscles, you could feel the tension in the stadium. Federer
eventually won 6-3, 2-6, 7-6. That evening, a huddle of veteran
tennis journalists had formed around the tournament director,
Australian Brad Drewett, in the corridors leading to his offices.
Drewett was recounting how Federer had made a special trip to Shanghai
in early October to open the new stadium. What started as a request to
be at the opening ceremony expanded into a 12-hour day of photo shoots,
chats with sponsors and the press, and two sets of tennis with the
former mayor of Shanghai as his partner. After a formal dinner with
senior government officials, Federer asked Drewett if he and Vavrinec
could go to the restaurant where the staff of the players’ union and
the tournament were having dinner so he could thank them personally. He
stayed till 11pm. The story prompted a reverential murmur from
the tennis journalists. A few days later, Federer was asked about it by
one of the British journalists: “A few of us who have been around for a
few years can read off a list of people who would have said ‘No way.’
Why is it that you’re the sort of guy who doesn’t say no?” Federer’s
reply was matter of fact: “I knew I was here for the opening, not for
myself. In the end, it was good fun. I don’t get to spend every day
with the government, especially from China.” In an era when
tennis has been dominated by big serves and powerful groundstrokes,
Federer has it all. Jim Courier, who won the French Open twice and was
world number one in 1992, says: “I’m still looking for a shot he can’t
hit.” What he lacks in miles per hour compared with the service of
bionic men such as Roddick, he makes up for in placement. Federer
credits Carter and a later coach, Peter Lundgren, with insisting he “go
more for accuracy than power”. That fabled hand-eye co-ordination
allows his early racket preparation on the return to blunt the weapons
of the game’s big servers. Federer’s only relative weakness is
his volley, in particular the drop volley. “As I kept improving from
the baseline, I started to forget about going to the net,” says
Federer. “When Tony’s around, he gives me advice on that. He volleys
better than me... it’s amazing to see how he does it. It’s a very
simple stroke and the more simple it is, the better it is.” It is
the fluency with which he strikes the ball and the balletic grace with
which he moves that have sportswriters searching for superlatives. One
said seeing him play was like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine
Chapel. He never seems to be out of position and appears to be blessed
with an internal positioning system that guides him to the ball. Trainer
Paganini pushes him to what he calls “endurance of explosivity” - the
ability to play your best at 7-5 in the third when you have run the
equivalent of three or four kilometres. One of the standard exercises
is for Federer to mix sprints for a minute with playing for a couple of
minutes. Another involves throwing medicine balls at a player crouching
at a distance of 2m. “If you propose an exercise, he does it very
quickly and sees more possibilities,” Paganini says. When Federer
is not playing a tournament, the two work six to 10 times a week, and
his appetite for training has increased dramatically in the past couple
of years. “Last year his potential went up athletically,” Paganini
says. “He wanted to do everything in practice to be able to be even 1
per cent better.” Over the past two years the gap between Federer
and the rest of the top players, with the exception of the Spanish teen
prodigy Nadal, appears to have widened. He beat Hewitt in the 2004 US
Open final by the embarrassing score of 6-0, 7-6, 6-0. Roddick
acknowledged after being trounced in the Wimbledon final last year that
he had run out of options because Federer had improved so much in the
12 months since Roddick lost to him at Wimbledon in 2004. The American,
a baseliner, was forced to try to take to the net. “Once those players
are [pushed] out of their comfort zone, they’ve got to come up with
something different and if it’s not quite their game, then you’ve
already won a small victory before the ball has been hit,” observes
Roche, who compares Federer’s all-court game and persona with Rod
Laver. Laver won two Grand Slams in 1962 and 1969 and is widely
regarded as the greatest player ever. “The beauty of Roger’s game is
that depending on what surface and what type of opponent he is playing,
he has a lot of variation - you don’t see that often in today’s game,”
says Roche. Purists may marvel when Federer is in full flow, but
tennis’s fortunes, like those of boxing, peak when there are great
rivalries. Federer has served up some great routs, but routs don’t do
much for the sport’s popularity - his demolition of Hewitt received the
lowest ratings of a US Open final in decades - and he is not being
challenged in the way John McEnroe tested Bjorn Borg or Martina
Navratilova and Chris Evert pushed each other to new heights. Both
those legendary rivalries were celebrated in nostalgic books last year,
yet another indication that tennis’s best days in the public eye are
possibly in the past. There is some hope of a great rivalry
between Federer and Nadal. They are made for each other. Nadal is all
brute power and chases everything down, while Federer has both power
and finesse. “This makes it easier for the non-hardcore tennis fan to
get involved,” says Courier. “You are either for the man in black or
the man in white.” In Miami last year, when Nadal held a matchpoint
against Federer and at the French Open when he beat him, it looked like
the battle had been joined. Both won 11 titles each in 2005. “We all
want to see Federer pushed to see how he responds at 5-5 in the fifth.
That will draw the line in the sand between him and Sampras,” says
Courier. In Shanghai in November, however, it was not to be.
Nadal’s injury and withdrawal prompted questions about whether his
hard-charging style was taking a toll on his young body. Instead,
Federer squared off against Nalbandian, who in spite of his loss to
Federer in the first match, had won through to the knock-out stage and
then into the final. The players came on court to Queen’s “We will rock
you” - an improvement on Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” the day before
- and an announcer rolling out every syllable of “Day-veed
Naaal-bandeeeeean”. Federer was soon up two sets to love. Then,
in a rerun of his performance earlier in the week, he appeared to run
out of stamina and ideas. Nalbandian, who beat him in their first five
encounters and is something of a bogeyman for the Swiss, moved him all
around the court and out-hit him from the baseline. Despite an
abundance of Swiss flags being brandished by Chinese supporters, the
crowd seemed evenly split. Nalbandian fought back to two sets apiece,
and suddenly the stadium reverberated with a roar of “Roger, Roger.”
Buoyed by that support, Federer rallied from 0-4 to pull ahead to 6-5
and 30-0. Then his normally spectacular serve misfired and the
Argentine won the tiebreaker and the match. Nalbandian looked as
surprised as the crowd. It was Federer’s first loss in 25 finals. Roche
looked sombre. When the trophy was presented to Nalbandian, he began
his acceptance speech by joking, “Roger, don’t worry. You’re going to
win a lot of tournaments so let me keep this one.” Even if the
quality of the play see-sawed, it was the kind of final - offering both
a riveting contest and contrasting styles - that tennis fans routinely
witnessed in the 1970s, 1980s and much of the 1990s. Chinese fans, the
great new hope for tennis as for so many other industries, had risen to
their feet, cheered lustily and taken sides. I bumped into
Richard Evans, a veteran journalist for Tennis Week, as I left the
stadium. Federer simply didn’t have the stamina today for a five-set
match because of his injury-induced layoff, he said. I knew that in the
early 1980s Evans had written a biography of John McEnroe, arguably the
most naturally gifted tennis player ever. How did Federer measure up?
“Federer has more natural ability than anyone - even Lew Hoad [the
Australian great who nearly won the Grand Slam in 1956],” said Evans. This
week in Australia, Federer will again have to live with the lofty
expectations that come with being routinely described as the kind of
player we see once in a lifetime.
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