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Thursday, December 14, 2006
In finest year yet, Federer just keeps on winning
In Shanghai, Federer's drive was on display
By Christopher Clarey, International Herald Tribune
BOSTON: The tennis season is history, but on the television screen in my
office, Roger Federer is still wearing his white bandanna and whipping
determined forehands into the corners, making Rafael Nadal bend and
eventually break.
You could pick a number of matches to illustrate Federer's
phenomenal 2006, in which he put together a 92-5 record and came within
just one victory of completing the Grand Slam, but this match — a
semifinal at the Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai last month — is the
match to which I keep returning.
It was hardly the best Federer-Nadal duel in 2006. That was their
five-set, five-hour tug of wills in the Rome final. It was hardly the
most significant Federer-Nadal match in 2006. That was the French Open
final, won by Nadal, which stopped Federer from holding all four major
titles simultaneously and halted, at least for a while, any further
Grand Slam chatter.
But the match in Shanghai intrigues, because of its relatively
lopsided nature — Federer won, 6-4, 7-5 — and because of what it said
about Federer's drive and focus at the end of a globe-trotting,
glad-handing year that would have drained many a top athlete of his
energy and ambition.
Instead, the Artful Roger (the best of Federer's several sobriquets)
was in something like full flight in late November: swooping around the
indoor, medium-speed court in Shanghai and giving a hint to his closest
pursuer in the rankings and frequent conqueror in head-to- head matches
that something fundamental had changed between them.
If not for Nadal, Federer would be an even more obvious choice for
the global sports figure of the year. No man, after all, has pulled off
a Grand Slam since Rod Laver in 1969, and that was when three of the
four major tennis tournaments were on grass and the game had not yet
been globalized and supposedly democratized.
If not for Nadal, Federer would have joined Laver's excellent
company and would have lost just one match in 2006, a thoroughly
explicable defeat by the British teenager Andy Murray in Cincinnati on
the heels of a draining Masters Series week in Canada.
But even though Nadal still finished the year ahead in the count,
with a 6-3 overall advantage and a 4-2 edge in 2006, Federer won their
final two matches, and he did so while applying the afterburners like
they have never been applied in the modern history of the game.
After losing that French Open final to Nadal in four essentially
anticlimactic sets and walking off the clay feeling frustrated with his
tactical choices, Federer's record the rest of the year was 48-1, while
Nadal, the younger, presumably hungrier man, slipped to 23-9 and did
not win another tournament.
But my favorite Federer statistic of the year, and I promise not to
besiege you with many more, is that he played 17 tournaments and
reached the final in 16 of them.
To sum up, this was Federer's finest season, which is quite a
statement considering how fine 2004 and 2005 had already been, and
while tennis does not have the same global talent pool as soccer or
basketball, there was nobody in any sport who put together that same
run of consistent excellence in events big and small.
Not Fernando Alonso, the Spaniard who had some dips in results on
his way to becoming the youngest man to win two Formula One titles. Not
Ronaldinho, the creative genius of Brazilian soccer who propelled
Barcelona to a Champions League trophy and then ran out of inspiration
at the World Cup. Not Janica Kostelic, the Croatian Alpine skier who
won the record-setting fourth gold medal of her career at the Winter
Olympics in Turin but was too physically fragile to race much more at
the Olympics and is taking a sabbatical this season.
Dwyane Wade led the Miami Heat to the NBA title and then had to
settle for bronze with the talent-heavy American team at the world
championships.
Asafa Powell, the sprinter, did all one could ask of a 100-meter
runner in 2006 but had only the Commonwealth Games for a championship
forum and no rival to help him capture public interest after Justin
Gatlin sucker- punched every track fan and competitor by failing a drug
test after talking so freely for so long about the new, better values
of his generation of athletes.
Not even Tiger Woods could quite match his new friend Federer, who
invited him to watch the U.S. Open final from his box. Woods won two of
golf's four majors and six other tour events.
True, history shows that tennis dominance is more common than golf
dominance. There is no question that the world's best golfer has less
statistical chance of winning any given tournament than the world's
best tennis player. Viewed through that lens, Woods's eight tour
victories in 2006 might get the best of Federer's 12, but Woods missed
the cut at the U.S. Open and was part of a Ryder Cup team that got
swamped in soggy Ireland by the Europeans.
Federer did not miss any cuts at the big ones in 2006, although he
did miss the opening round of this year's Davis Cup competition to
husband his resources. "There was a lot of highs; not many lows," he
said of his year. "But I think the most emotional probably was the
Australian Open, my speech. That was quite incredible, you know. I
couldn't believe how emotional I got."
He got emotional, choking up during his victory speech, because
Laver was the one who had presented him the trophy. Federer, like Pete
Sampras before him, is particularly attuned to the history of his game,
perhaps because he is well aware that he is eventually going to be a
big part of that history.
Like Sampras, Federer is also a traditionalist. He is no fan of
denim shorts or tennis's recent initiatives, no lover of round-robin
tournaments, no supporter of on-court coaching and also against
electronic line calling, which, even without his endorsement, was a
clear success in its first year of use.
But that was about all Federer got wrong in 2006. He clinched the
year- end No.1 ranking in September. At 25, he is still in his prime
and, as Shanghai made clear, still interested in dominating. In a long
interview at the U.S. Open, Federer made it clear that he has looked to
Woods and Michael Schumacher for inspiration when it comes to remaining
hungry, and with Sampras's 14 Grand Slam singles titles for a
benchmark, he has a shining goal to spur him on.
And at this stage, with nine major titles already secured, you have
to like Federer's chances just as much as you like Woods's chances of
surpassing Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors.
With Lance Armstrong retired and Schumacher now joining him, Federer
and Woods are the only active athletes in major sports who have a very
good chance of being considered the greatest of all time in those
sports.
Federer generally constructs his schedule well and plans to play a
reasonable 18 tour events next year, beginning with the Australian Open.
Federer's fluid style seems built to last, even though his
small-boned frame might not seem to agree. For a sportswriter who comes
across so many world-class athletes, most of whom are larger-than-life
figures with larger-than-life figures, what separates Federer from the
norm is his normalcy.
Sit next to him and look at his slender wrists and forearms, and it
is difficult to believe that this is the envelope- pushing athlete who
can generate such phenomenal spin and forcefulness with his forehand.
But it is the backhand that often made the difference in 2006. He has
to hit it so often — opponents dodge that forehand — and in hitting it
so often, he has clearly improved it, as Nadal could not help but see
in Shanghai.
Nadal's left-handed spin was not getting up as high to the backhand
indoors as it did on clay in Paris or as it presumably will on the
rubberized hard court in use, as ever, in Melbourne. But Federer
certainly appeared to be in a very comfortable place as I examined and
re-examined their last match of 2006, and isn't that how a sportsman of
the year should look at the end of a phenomenal season?
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