As a general principle, the best athletes shouldn’t be our favorite athletes. We should appreciate greatness, of course. But actually rooting for Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Barry Bonds reflects a character deficiency. Like rooting for the Yankees.
My own preferences in fandom run to the tragic. I like my athletes doomed by fate or circumstance. As a boy, I adored Charles Barkley, who was consigned forever to Jordan’s shadow. Overachievers such as Jim Courier were also favorites, as were oddballs like Randall Cunningham. But I’ve always harbored a healthy ambivalence toward athletes who dominate their sports.
Until I found Roger.
Tennis has fallen on hard times in America, so you’ll be forgiven if you don’t know about Roger Federer. He’s the 26-year-old Swiss fellow who just won his fourth consecutive U.S. Open title. He may be the greatest player to ever play the game.
It’s difficult to describe Federer’s magnificence. There are individual moments: the behind-the-back-between-the-legs mid-court volley against Tim Henman; the twisting overhead he hit against Andy Roddick, from the baseline, while facing away from the net. Next time you’re tempted to procrastinate go to YouTube and search for “Federer.” Trying vainly to render these moments in language last year, David Foster Wallace penned a lengthy essay titled “Federer as Religious Experience.”
Roger has been number one in the world for 188 consecutive weeks (the second longest streak was Jimmy Connors’s run of 160 weeks at the top); he will almost certainly break Pete Sampras’s record of 14 Grand Slam titles (he has 12 now); and he has appeared in 10 consecutive Grand Slam finals (no one else has played in more than 7 in a row).
Federer no longer employs a coach. Instead, he lives on a man-made island in Dubai and lures top-ranked amateurs to his hideout, where he uses them to practice in the 130 degree heat. It has been noted that with his menacing good-looks and eccentric lifestyle, he would make an excellent James Bond villain.
And yet, despite all of this, I love Federer. I went to the U.S. Open this year specifically to see him play, and I cheered as he dispatched John Isner–the type of young, overachieving American I used to pull for–in the second round. Andy Roddick is one of the gifted, tragic types who used to capture my affections, yet when Federer rip-sawed through him in the quarterfinals, I couldn’t stop smiling. Roddick left the court completely dismantled, his lifetime record against Federer at 1-14. After Roger dispatched Nikolay Davydenko in the semis (he’s the fourth-ranked player in the world and is 0-10 lifetime against Federer), a wit in the stadium control booth played the Star Wars Imperial March over the loudspeakers.
Roger’s greatness is singular in one sense: With the very best athletes, dominance is almost always apparent from an early age. Both Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods turned pro at 21 and began crushing the rest of the PGA at 22. Wilt Chamberlain started playing professional basketball at 23 and was immediately the best player in the game; so was Michael Jordan when he entered the NBA at 21.
In boxing, the sport most analogous to tennis, Muhammad Ali won the Olympic gold medal at 18, turned pro, and immediately began working his way through the professional ranks, winning his first belt in only four years and remaining undefeated for 11 years. The only other two tennis players in the discussion with Federer, Rod Laver and Pete Sampras, became champions two years after becoming professionals.
But not Roger. He turned pro at 17 and began a merely respectable career. As René Stauffer writes in The Roger Federer Story, “Nobody expected greatness from Roger Federer.” For five years he was a pleasant, talented, top-25 player.
Then something changed. In 2003 he won two minor tournaments. Then he won Wimbledon, losing only one set during the fortnight. That victory began the greatest four-year run in the history of tennis, which continues to this day. It’s as if he’d sold his soul to the devil.
Federer seems to understand how strange that change was. “I have this worry that I’m not going to play well,” he told the Associated Press this summer. “That the day comes where I don’t know how to hit a forehand anymore, you know? That I’m blank.”
Whatever happened to Federer in 2003 took place inside him. He didn’t get a new coach, or change his technique, or start hitting the ball any differently. The transformation was entirely in his mind. And against my better angels, that is why I root for Roger: His greatness proves exactly how much of sports, and life, is in your head.
–JONATHAN V. LAST
