January 15th, 2009
[In 2008, Federer lost in the semifinals of the Australian Open to Novak Djokovic. Then Rafael Nadal took his measure in the finals at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. It seemed, to some, that we were in the midst of a changing of the guard. But at the US Open Federer became the first man since Bill Tilden to win five straight titles at the U.S. Nationals, and also won the Olympic Games gold medal with his Swiss teammate, Stan Wawrinka. At the start of 2009, he was still one title shy of Pete Sampras’s all-time record of 14 majors.]
It’s been months, it seems, since I’ve written anything even remotely in-depth about Roger Federer. But yesterday, I found myself thinking about his situation as 2009 unfolds, and discovered that the subject is a little more complex and textured than I had imagined.
After all, The Mighty Fed has become a given. He’s the Grand Slam title bagger extraordinaire, the omnipresent man-to-beat, the towering dominator, the dominating tower on the tennis landscape, from which there issues a few times a day a call to prayer to which the faithful bow, although it’s in the general direction of Basel, Switzerland, not Mecca.
But in 2008 and carrying over into early this year, those supplicants have grown a bit nervous, and they now glance over their shoulders as they bow their heads. It’s partly due to the threat Andy Murray presented last fall.
You know how this goes. There’s something wrong. . . there’s nothing wrong; I have this funny feeling. . . nah, I’m being paranoid; Roger needs to focus on those two precious majors that will earn him the most coveted record in tennis (and close to unanimous acknowledgment as the GOAT). . . he needs to win everything under the sun, over and over.
It goes on: Roger has nothing to worry about when it comes to the likes of Andy Murray. . . he has to stop losing matches to the likes of Andy Murray (although TMF has built a bit of a tradition of losses to Murray); we want the old Roger back. . . we want Roger to be new in any way he wants; we want to see him fist-pump and scream and blast his way out of desperate situations. . . we want him to wax snot-nosed punks in sleeveless shirts, 0-1-2, without a single bead of sweat exploding from that artfully snipped goin’ on auburn hair.
In other words, Federer fans face the same dilemma as theists confronted by the imperfection of the world. We want to accept things as they are, but tie ourselves in knots wishing they were better in order to justify our enormous investment of emotion and faith. Our belief in Him.
Oh, Roger, strap on those sandals and lead us from the wilderness of the cube farm and the imperfections of those unbearably dull rainy weekends into the sunshot land of Gatorade and Gel shots. This we ask of thee.
All of which is to say that Federer has an awful lot on his plate, and sometimes his fans don’t make it much easier on him. It’s a bear, being an icon. TMF plays a lousy match in some forgettable tournament and the sheer denial indulged by his staunchest fans is useful in one specific way: it is a pretty strong gauge of the pressure the man is under.
Federer loses a match and his fans begin talking of the end-times; Rafael Nadal blows a chance and he gets the equivalent of a pat on the fanny and a maternal “That’s okay, Rafa, you’ll get him next time!”
See—there are advantages to having spent a few years in futile but inspirational pursuit of dream most others would judge delusional. Of course, if TMF is a true deity, all this speculation means nothing. But I’m guessing there’s a little everyday homo sapiens in him. Call me crazy.
Most of the talk about “pressure” these days has centered on Andy Murray, who’s arcing toward his first Grand Slam title (just think, if he wins Down Under, he’ll need just 12 more majors to tie Federer!). But I would take the kind of pressure he’s facing over the kind that the sovereign will be fighting off any day. Murray has time, and the forward-looking nature of youth, on his side.
Federer, by contrast, while still young (he’s 27), has started to feel the flesh-and-blood equivalent of metal fatigue. He’s been bent and twisted and turned by lunge volleys and running forehands.
As well, after a career spent issuing declarative sentences, ellipses, semicolons and much-dreaded question marks have crept into his articulations. Instead of recognizing the natural and inevitable toll taken by the standard Federer set for himself, and more than lived up to, some of his most passionate fans have chosen to ignore the basic, human narrative playing off right before their eyes. They write off his lapses as aberrations, rather than signs of Excellence Fatigue and the decline that always follows. The decline need not be precipitous; but in TMF’s rarefied gallery, any decline can be perceived as disastrous.
There are two Roger Federers afoot today: one is a glittering and hollow effigy, no more substantial than a reputation. The other is a real guy named Roger Federer who stands in its looming shadow, shivering in his loincloth (and cardigan).
I noticed this most dramatically after my post on the men’s final of the 2008 US Open—a match during which TMF showed more grit, emotion and character than in all those pretty and seamless beatdowns of years past. Last September, Federer triumphed over frustration, anxiety, fear and ragged form to take the US Open title, but casting it in those terms struck many as outrageous—Frustrated? Anxious? Afraid to lose? Our Roger? How dare you suggest it—It’s sheer blasphemy!
I’m not complaining, mind you. It isn’t me who has to pay the price for all this—it’s you-know-who.
So as the Australian Open approaches, I have a lot of sympathy for Federer. If he’s lucky, he will draw comfort, confidence, and calm determination from the fact that everyone is talking about Murray et al. A guy in TMF’s shoes knows—or ought to know—the joys and advantages of flying under the radar. But Federer has also been set up in a less comfortable position than necessary, and his own hand was sometimes evident in the process. His problem is encapsulated in the mono narrative. Last year in Melbourne, TMF had mono—so that edition of the Australian Open isn’t relevant. The implication is that this year, it will be back to business as usual—meaning, another silken Federer triumph. In the Federer era, this will be the grand restoration.
That’s a tough position, because the most important thing people forget about tennis is how quickly the game can change, and most especially how quickly a player’s degree of confidence or even superiority can decline. Great players tend to understand this, and it’s a grave weakness when they don’t, and thus fail to adjust to it.
Up until 2008, the arc of TMF’s career demonstrated that he’s expert at dealing with success (no easy thing). But starting midway through last year, he was prevailed upon to show how he deals with adversity. If Federer himself buys into the restoration theme, he invites that much more pressure. None of us knows the degree to which he feels he must win in Melbourne; his fans ought to hope that he doesn’t feel he needs to win, merely that he wants to win.
The urge to win is a hunger, and great players need to know how to win when they’re no longer hungry at the most basic level. At points in the past six months, Federer hasn’t seemed very hungry at all, which helps explain why he’s skipped a couple of meals.
But the idea that the Australian Open will make him hungry be virtue of its status as a Grand Slam is a little deceptive. When you’re famished, any drive-through window will do; when you’re sated, no number of stars on the door will lure you inside. And before you cry “but isn’t the Grand Slam singles title record tempting enough?” keep in mind that the idea itself is merely an abstraction. It’s not about the quality of the meal; it’s about the degree of hunger.
For that reason, I don’t necessarily expect “full-flight Federer” to be in display in Australia, nor do I particularly doubt that we’ll see him in that mode, either. What we’re likely to see, early on, is his state of confidence. What we’ll see later, if he goes deep into the event, is his degree of determination. As I’ve said before, Federer has demonstrated that he may be the greatest performer of our time; in this last stage of his career, we’re most likely to see his deepest abilities as a competitor.
In a way, that bodes well for TMF, because it gives him a few more inches of pipe on which to move the bar up. There’s nothing worse than having nowhere to go but down, which is why this is a much more hopeful analysis than the most bedazzled Federer fans might think.
And that’s why Federer’s performance in the US Open of 2008 can be taken as a good sign. It was the first challenge in the new phase of his career. Underestimate the degree to which he had to fight to win that match, dismiss the troubles he created for himself as the handiwork of his bout with mono, deny how close he was to perhaps losing that battle (no matter what the final score line read), and you do the man an injustice—although the effigy won’t have a problem with it.