In 2008, at the age of 27, Roger Federer had finished his fourth consecutive year as the number-one ranked tennis player in the world, already won 13 Grand Slam tournaments, and made most of his opponents look as if they had come to play against him with a cricket bat instead of a tennis racquet. That year the Onion published a photograph of Federer, on which was listed his strengths and weaknesses. Among his weaknesses was cited “speaks fluent German,” “has weakened knees by falling to them in victory 750 times a year,” and “incapable of hitting a 120+ mph serve with his left foot.” The joke, of course, was that Federer had no weaknesses. He was, clearly, among the favorites of the gods.
Seven years have passed, leaving Roger Federer, at 34, no mere veteran but in that ambiguous category of athletes known as Older Player. People, recalling his past glory, have begun referring to “the old Federer.” Still very much a contender—he made it to this year’s Wimbledon finals—he is now far from invincible. If he gets knocked off in a tournament in the round of 16 or in the quarter-finals, it is no longer shocking news. Yet Federer retains a large number of fans—fanatics, really—who look upon him as the last remaining connection with tennis as a sport of elegance played by men and women of good character.
William Skidelsky, the son of the biographer of John Maynard Keynes, is among these fanatics, a man for whom Roger Federer has been more than a splendid athlete, merely, but a symbol, an idol, an image made flesh of a world of perfection he has longed for in his own life yet realized he could never attain. His book is an account of his one-sided romance with Federer (the two personally encountered only twice, at press conferences) which along the way is filled out with a good deal of useful information about how the game of tennis has altered over the years and is played today.
Owing to the change in tennis equipment—chiefly the advent of graphite racquets, allowing the controlled use of topspin, and of co-poly strings that allow still more spin—tennis has gone from a game of strategy and stylishness to one dominated by raw power. Topspin, as Skidelsky notes, has become “the bedrock of the game.” The players have grown larger, with most female professionals 5’10” or taller, many male players over 6’5”. Serves are clocked at a blistering 130 mph and more. Players now stand at the baseline slugging away with killer topspin forehands and two-handed backhands in what is known as “the power-baseline game.” The velocity of serves and strokes is noted by speed guns; cameras record and arbitrate close calls.
Watching television film of the tennis matches during wooden racquet days, one sometimes feels one is viewing the sport played in slow motion. The notion of amateur spirit—playing, that is, for pure love of the game—has also departed. Everything in tennis has become professionalized, with players now having what they call “teams,” by which they mean coaches, trainers, and sometimes sports psychologists, on their payroll. A single goal reigns: Win the match, take the money, get back to the weight room and practice court, bring on the next opponent.
William Skidelsky is excellent at showing how tennis has changed over the decades. He is informative in showing how technology has been the chief factor of change. He is quite marvelous in setting out the strange drama inherent in tennis owing to its system of scoring. Tennis is, after all, the only athletic contest in which one can win a match without winning a majority of points, or even games in the match. In tennis, not all points carry the same significance. The rhythm of a match can be radically altered by a decisive winner or unforced error, for tennis is more mental than most sports, its players more given to mood, shifts in momentum, drifting concentration, and leaking confidence. A clearly superior player will defeat an inferior player, but one superior player can lose to another for tenebrous, even mysterious, reasons.
The traditional spirit of tennis was irreparably altered with the appearance of two American players in the 1970s, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. Connors was the first self-congratulatory tennis player: fist-pumping, touchdown dancing when he scored an important or otherwise impressive point, revving up the crowd at every chance. McEnroe stopped matches to scream at umpires and linesmen when close calls did not go his way, all this in the name of an unashamedly ugly competitiveness. Both men, each unattractive in his own way, violated every tenet of sportsmanship once integral to the game of tennis, and left it changed for the worse.
The last honorable generation of tennis players was the 1960s Australian crew of Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Lew Hoad, John Newcombe, and Fred Stolle. Many of them were from working-class families. All played under the guidance of Harry Hopman, the Australian Davis Cup coach. They were first-class players, and Hopman helped weld them into first-class human beings, never evincing the least whining, bad temper, or dreary egotism.
The Swiss Roger Federer is, in some ways, a throwback to the great Australian generation, though as a boy player he is said to have been a foul-tempered, racquet-busting brat. In his adult incarnation he does not complain about calls that do not go his way. Nor is he demonstrative, restricting himself to an occasional single fist pump after winning a key point. He never falls on his back after a victory, or kisses the court, or tears off his shirt to do a Tarzanic pounding of his chest in ape-like self-approval. He does not wipe himself down with a towel after every point.
Above all, unlike Rafael Nadal and Maria Sharapova and many others on the pro tour, Federer does not grunt loudly with each shot in lengthy rallies, thereby turning the tennis court into what sounds like nothing so much as a session at the old Masters and Johnson sex clinic, with the pock-pock-pock of tennis balls added.
Every Greek hero needs a nemesis, and Roger Federer found his in Rafael Nadal, the only player against whom he has a losing record. Nadal has been not only Federer’s nemesis but, in style, stands as his antithesis. As Federer is smooth and lithe, Nadal is jerky and muscular. As Federer’s game is seamless, Nadal’s is punctuated by scores of tic-like interruptions. As Federer is calm and without obvious neurosis, Nadal is genuinely obsessive-compulsive and unable to play through a single point without putting himself through a panoply of ritual movements, easily the least elegant of which is picking away at the seat of his shorts. As Federer’s career has been, for the most part, free of injury, Nadal’s seems to have been played between injuries. Federer is a pleasure, Nadal painful, to watch.
Yet the Spaniard has had the Swiss’s number. Skidelsky attributes this to Nadal’s game as a great counter-puncher. “He hangs back, lies low, lets his opponents come to him,” Skidelsky writes. Nadal is a lefty, Federer a righty, which means that Nadal’s cross-court topspin forehands go to his opponents’ backhands, the weaker side for most players: “Nadal habitually annihilates players with single-handers for one basic reason: his deep, powerful, extraordinarily consistent, violently kicking forehand means that he is able to wear them down.” The best of players go down before the Nadal juggernaut, including, even in his prime, Roger Federer, whose sad record against Rafael Nadal is
23 losses and 10 wins.
Skidelsky compares Nadal to a boa constrictor, whose grasp is deadly; Federer to a leopard or cheetah, a beast of speed and beautiful movement. Of Nadal, Skidelsky writes: “I cannot stand the man or his tennis.” Nadal is about effort, Federer about effortlessness—or at least the appearance of effortlessness. Federer is in manner aristocratic, Nadal a prole. I have myself elsewhere described Federer as Apollonian, Nadal as Dionysian.
For those of us who have added wasted adulthoods to misspent youths by continuing to follow various sports, the question of which athletes we admire or dislike tells a good deal about us. Show me a man who admires the retired Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka and I’ll show you a man whose first love is not subtlety. Those who despise the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady—rich, talented, handsome—may have an envy problem. If you admire Muhammad Ali you may be revealing more about your politics than your knowledge of boxing.
What does his unqualified love of Roger Federer say about William Skidelsky? Admiration for Federer speaks foremost to a yearning for effortless elegance in one’s own life. Federer is one of those athletes, rare in any sport, who make elegance look easy. Their number is far from legion: Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Sugar Ray Robinson, Pele, Gale Sayers, Wayne Gretzky, Julius Erving, and Michael Jordan pretty much fill out the roster.
The late New York Giants running back Frank Gifford may also have made this elite squad. Although Skidelsky doesn’t mention it (and as an Englishman not yet of a certain age may not know of its existence), an American named Frederick Exley wrote a book similar to his built around his obsession with Gifford called A Fan’s Notes (1968). Exley’s book carries the subtitle A Fictional Memoir, but it is much more memoir than fiction. Exley and Gifford were contemporaries at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s, and Exley remarks in his book that there was no way of describing the All-American Gifford’s standing at the school “short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican.” Exley writes:
Messrs. Exley and Skidelsky have in common that both felt themselves not up to their fathers’ standard of approval. Exley’s father was a revered local athlete and high school basketball coach, Skidelsky’s a high-powered intellectual and author. Skidelsky had the additional problem of an older brother to whom the life of the mind seemed to come more easily than it did to him, though he, like his brother, went to Eton and afterwards to Oxford. Exley suffered from, and eventually died of, alcoholism; Skidelsky tells us that he was long victim to depression, and spent eight years in psychoanalysis and occasionally pops back into therapy. His book is shot through with bits about his various inadequacies. At the book’s close, he asserts that his obsession with Federer “was somehow integral to my recovery” from depression, adding that “thanks to him, I have sometimes felt as if I’ve been able to live my life over, to make sense of all that went wrong, and, as a result, to be a happier, freer adult.” Unfortunately, it is less than clear how his obsession brought this about.
Of the obsession itself, there cannot be any doubt. Skidelsky paid $1,300 for a ticket to watch Federer play at Wimbledon. He travels to Halle, in Germany, to watch him play. On another occasion he buys a tent and camping equipment, and spends the night on Wimbledon grounds to be early in line for tickets. He is far from alone in his cult of Federer: Many Fedheads, lots of middle-aged women among them, travel across national boundaries to watch him play.
Not everyone admires Roger Federer. The long-retired Swedish player Mats Wilander claimed that Federer “has no balls,” by which one gathers that he means he doesn’t always tough-out close matches. In 2012 the novelist, Ben Markovits published an article in the London Review of Books called “Disliking Federer.” What Markovits dislikes is Federer’s near-perfection, the want of obvious weakness in his game; his “victories lack the sweetness of struggle, of obstacles overcome.” He also doesn’t cotton to Federer’s “self-regarding modesty,” or that so many people who write about him offer arcane explanations for his game, and are really writing about themselves.
Markovits cites David Foster Wallace, who in 2006 wrote an essay called “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” for overkill in the line of metaphysics and mysticism in explaining Federer’s attraction. In that essay, Wallace wrote that “the metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.” Later in his essay he wrote: “The thing with Federer is that he’s Mozart and Metallica at the same time, and the harmony’s somehow exquisite.”
Roger Federer has acquired all the skills known to tennis: He has great anticipation, court sense, ways of disguising his shots, a vast buffet of spins and slices and speeds all under supreme control, great timing, and an uncanny ability to read his opponents, playing to their weaknesses and avoiding their strengths. “All this,” as David Foster Wallace noted, “has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.”
True enough—and yet is this sufficient to cause so intelligent a man as William Skidelsky to pay out more than he can afford for a ticket to a tennis match, or to spend a cold sleepless night in a tent so that he may watch Roger Federer whack tennis balls around for a few hours the next day? Skidelsky argues that something greater, something grander, is going on. He hints at what it is throughout his book. He refers to “the silky wondrousness of [Federer’s] play”; to his “timelessness”; to his being “both archetypal and unique, rooted in history, and seemingly untethered from it”; to the tension when he plays that “has less to do with the match itself . . . than with the ebbs and flows of his own performance”; to the belief that he “made tennis beautiful again.”
Skidelsky attempts to establish what is behind the magic of Federer’s tennis in a chapter titled “In Pursuit of Beauty.” Here he brings up the distinction between beautiful and merely winning performance, and argues against the notion that “qualities like grace, elegance, effortlessness, and litheness are mere superfluities, distractions from what really counts.” What really counts, of course, is winning. Yet beauty and victory are not always coterminous. In contemporary sport, we now have the phrase “winning ugly,” with the emphasis falling on winning.
Beauty in sport isn’t necessary—with the exception of gymnastics, diving, and equestrian competition—but for some fans among us it is, finally, what draws us to watch athletes at play. Skidelsky notes that even to bring up this subject is to have one’s masculinity questioned. But the beauty he has in mind, the beauty that drew him and so many others (me among them) to Federer and a few other athletes, is not in any way homoerotic but purely aesthetic. There was something balletic about a Michael Jordan jump shot, suave about a Joe DiMaggio home run swing, grace shown under pressure in a broken-field touchdown run by Gale Sayers. The beauty in Roger Federer’s tennis is not so dramatic as any of these but lies in the balance and harmony, the order and cleanliness, the near-perfection of his overall game. Kant described such art, wherever it occurs, as “purposefulness without purpose,” like that of a flower or a cloud formation.
Skidelsky quotes J.M. Coetzee (another Fedhead) on watching Federer play:
Coetzee compares the experience to that of “responding to masterworks of art on which I have spent a lot of time.”
Beauty, the cliché has it, is in the eye of the beholder. Outside the realm of cliché is the sad fact that, in sports if not in art, beauty doesn’t remain long in the possession of even the most astonishing of athletes. Roger Federer, at 34, is learning that lesson now. Frederick Exley’s ideal, Frank Gifford, when last I saw him on television before his death, had blurred features and vastly thinned ox-blood dyed hair. The old champions sit in the center-court stands at the Wimbledon finals with mottled skin, bloated faces, receded hairlines.
Everywhere, in all sports, it is the same. In the ultimate Grand Slam match, that between the greatest of athletes and age, the score is always the same: 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, in favor of age.
Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport.
