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Sunday, September 16, 2007
Supermen
By Jon Henderson, The Observer
Truly great sportsmen and women are a rare breed. Now two are illuminating the world stage at the same time - with outstanding victories last weekend emphasising their brilliance. Jon Henderson decides who is number one
Tiger Woods and Roger Federer may be
the best of pals - but to the rest of us the world's number-one golfer
and tennis player are contestants in what is developing into a
compelling rivalry. Who is the greatest of the great? The odds
against two such performers parading their brilliance concurrently must
be considerable - and while this has become the basis of their
friendship, it has enabled the watching world to construct a conflict
through the convenient points of comparison between their sports. These
include a tournament structure that is roughly equivalent in terms of
being divided into weekly (occasionally fortnightly in tennis's case)
chunks, the paramount importance each year of four major events and
regular publication of lists based on results and earnings.
So far in 2007 Woods, who at 31 is the older by five years, has won six
titles, and so has Federer; Woods' tour earnings are $9.6million
(£4.8m), nearly double the next man's, and Federer's are $7.1m, nearly
double the next man's. In
the past week the pair have reminded us - once more - just how special
they are. In Lemont, Illinois, last weekend Woods claimed his sixtieth
title on the US PGA Tour with a record low score, then went to Atlanta
in search of the sixty-first and on Friday night played six successive
holes in birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, eagle. Several hundred
miles to the east in New York, Federer won the US Open, his fifty-first
tournament success and twelfth in one of tennis's four grand slams that
also include Wimbledon and the Australian and French Opens. Both men's
latest triumphs were masterly in their execution and were characterised
by a completeness that owed nothing to luck, which is so often the
tiebreaker in big sporting showdowns with the best taking on the next
best. Woods is now two behind Arnold Palmer for fourth on the
all-time list of tournament victories. Ahead of these two lie Ben Hogan
(64 titles), Jack Nicklaus (73) and, at the pinnacle, Sam Snead (82).
Last Sunday Woods became the youngest player to complete 60 wins by
humiliating the championship course at Cog Hill with a score of 262,
22-under par, which broke by five shots the tour's tournament scoring
record. Federer's tally of 51 victories - he has lost only 16 of
his 67 singles finals - places him ninth among tennis's outstanding
champions, with Ilie Nastase on 57 titles running just ahead of him.
Then it goes Andre Agassi (60), Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas (62),
Pete Sampras (64), John McEnroe (77), Ivan Lendl (94) and Jimmy Connors
(109). Connors played at a time when there was less strength in depth
and went on slugging away into venerability, winning the last of his
titles when he was 37. Even so, with Federer having hinted that he
expects still to be competing hard beyond the 2012 Olympics, during
which he will celebrate his thirty-first birthday, Connors' daunting
record may yet be vulnerable. With his late father, Earl,
standing over him, Woods started playing golf extraordinarily young -
too young, no doubt, for those who think toddlers should be left to do
their own thing. But ask the man himself if it was a mistake and he
would no doubt refer you to his bank manager. And away from golf, he is
worryingly normal. He keeps up with his childhood friends, loves taking
rides on rollercoasters and does all his own driving. Still,
photographs exist of Woods with club in hand before he was even one
year old. At the age of four, he came under the tutelage of Rudy Duran,
the head pro at Heartwell Golf Park, Long Beach, California. Duran, who
has been in Britain this past week, told Observer Sport about a child
who was preternaturally mature. When he was seven, he played and beat a
TV journalist who came to interview him, never once faltering despite a
camera crew filming his every stroke from a few feet away. 'Tiger
always had a huge amount of trust in his mental and physical ability.
He never showed worry or anxiety,' Duran said. 'From very early on he
picked his own clubs, read his own greens and would never make things
easier for himself by moving his ball to a preferred lie. 'By the
age of five he was already playing amazing golf based on his size. I
came up with what I called the Tiger-par - a figure that related to the
distances he was hitting the ball. Whereas most people very rarely
shoot under their personal pars, Tiger did it almost always. When he
was five, he shot eight under his personal par.' The boy became a
top college player who in 1996, aged 20, won the US Amateur title for a
third time, a feat described by one American golf scribe as almost
inconceivable, and announced he was abandoning his academic education
to turn pro. The decision was made easier by a $40m endorsement deal
with Nike, who were prepared to take the risk despite the fact their
golfing merchandise did not exist at that time. The risk quickly
evaporated in the firestorm that Woods visited on the tour. He won two
of the seven remaining regular PGA Tour events that year, narrowly
missed out on the top prize in two others and helped himself to victory
in the first tournament in 1997. Given these achievements and
Woods' relentless continued success over the past decade, it may seem
absurd even to suggest that Federer has surpassed him - and yet the
case can be made, while accepting that comparing the two can also be
reasonably dismissed as a cock-eyed attempt to make an exact science
out of what is palpably an inexact one. With his staggering
effort of reaching each of the past 10 grand-slam finals - and winning
eight of them - Federer has, by one measure at least, comfortably
outperformed Woods. The American's record in golf's 10 majors since and
including the 2005 Open Championship at St Andrews, which he won, has
been a mere four victories. And Federer has achieved what he has in the
kill-or-be-killed scraps of the matchplay format, which Woods has never
really been comfortable with on the infrequent occasions he has
submitted himself to it on the golf course. Woods is more at ease
playing strokeplay, invariably on home courses that he knows and likes.
In this form of competition, he can lock himself away, avoid looking in
the eyes of his would-be vanquishers and knows that one bad day can be
redeemed the next. 'I wish I could be down the stretch in a major
championship every week,' Woods has said, 'because it's the calmest I
ever feel.' In combat, Woods endlessly rubs up against fellow
Americans who, subconsciously at least, might feel a little deference
is due - unless their name is Phil Mickelson, in which case the green
mist of jealousy becomes the problem. Woods has never really
experienced the raw competitiveness of the final-stretch battles to
which opponents regularly subject Federer. Federer's five-set
tussle with Rafael Nadal in this year's Wimbledon final or the
intensity of his effort to quell the confident Novak Djokovic in New
York a week ago are the sort of examinations of his greatness that
Woods has been able to avoid. Unlike Woods and golf, Federer did
not become obsessively attached to the sport that would define him from
a very young age. Although he was three when he first picked up a
racket, he did not start playing seriously until he was eight (at which
age Woods was almost a golfing veteran) and, as an equally keen
footballer, might well have regarded scoring goals for FC Basel as a
far more worthy ambition than winning Wimbledon. He was nowhere near as
composed as the young Woods. One coach called him 'a little satan'
because of his bad behaviour on court. Nor did Federer's career
soar from the moment he turned professional in 1998. In his first six
grand slams he won only seven matches, going out in the opening round
of his first two Wimbledons in 1999 and 2000. The first real intimation
that he would realise the potential that was evident from his having
been the world's number-one junior came at Wimbledon in 2001 when he
beat Pete Sampras, champion in seven of the preceding eight years, in
the fourth round. He promptly lost to Tim Henman in the next round and
went out in the first round in 2002 before starting the remarkable
sequence at the All England club that now stands at 35 consecutive wins
and five successive titles. Whereas Woods prefers to touch
lightly on his greatness, Federer has grown deeply analytical of his.
'You just go play,' is how Woods, typically, responded to his winning
last weekend. 'You try and win the tournament. As I've always said,
winning takes care of everything, so you don't have to worry about it
if you win.' Federer, meanwhile, has become almost compulsive in
seizing every possible opportunity to scrutinise his greatness, always
in a quietly undemonstrative way that places it apart from
boastfulness. 'For me, it is very important to know my own game,' he
has said. 'I think a lot of the players play well without knowing why.
They can't really analyse their game. I got to understand mine when I
didn't have a coach, why I didn't like this shot, why I preferred the
other shot. Those things have all made me a better player.' On
another occasion he came up with this: 'I do sometimes feel that time
is kind of altered when I play. Like the other guy is slowed down and I
can see what he's going to do a long time before he does it. It's a
feeling that I can rely very much on my footwork, that I'm moving
smoothly. People, when they see my beautiful technique and talk about
it, a lot of it has to do with the footwork.' There is a definite
sense that the force is now with Federer. Based on their performances
in the four majors of their respective sports, which both men agree are
the touchstone by which they should be judged, Woods is just ahead with
13 victories (five behind Nicklaus's record) to Federer's 12 (two
behind Sampras's mark). But none of the great universal sports has known a domination quite like the one that Federer is now enjoying.
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