Roger Federer has always made the impossible look easy, and this skill was abundantly in evidence against Andy Murray on Friday. I must have watched the Swiss play hundreds of matches, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him reach such giddy heights of brilliance. His serving was flawless. He barely missed a groundstroke. No matter how much pace Murray injected into his shots, Federer would be there, cat-like, to meet them. And then, of course, there were the irruptions of pure fantasy, the fairy-dust sprinklings that gave his performance its aura of other-worldliness. That flicked cross-court backhand in the final game, for instance: has Federer ever produced a more outrageous – and, for his opponent, spirit-crushing – shot?
In a sense, none of this is news. Federer, playing magisterially, dashes a nation’s hopes. The ice bucket of class deposited over the drunken head of jingoism. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Except that the Swiss turns 34 next month – an age when tennis players aren’t supposed to be capable of pulling off such feats. Not now the game is so fast and demanding. (Back in 1974, when a 39-year-old Ken Rosewall reached the final, things were different.) We’ve learned, from Agassi and others, how shattering top-level tennis is – the rack of post-match recovery, those frayed tendons and aching backs. Doesn’t Rafael Nadal, five years younger than Federer but already looking older, seem to illustrate precisely this predicament?
The Spaniard undoubtedly has the will, the mindset, to make it back to the top, but it’s as if his body is defying him, as if those famously dodgy knees are saying: “Enough already!” Federer’s appeal, for me, has always been based on the fact that his achievements aren’t readily comprehensible. I’m not talking here simply about his ability to pull off remarkable shots. More fundamentally, I mean the way he made it to the top when he did, playing the type of tennis he did. It didn’t make sense. At the end of the 90s, men’s tennis was caught in a cul-de-sac. Power-hitting was all the rage, with its pounding baseline rallies and mammoth aces. The Wimbledon authorities, concerned by the dominance of the lanky big serving brigade, took the step of slowing down the grass, but this had the effect of making the courts at SW19 resemble those at Roland Garros, and produced such unedifying spectacles as the Hewitt-Nalbandian final of 2002, when neither man served-and-volleyed once.
And then along came Federer, with his dreamy touch, his array of spins, his sense of always having a hundred options, his style that was a mash-up of Rosewall, Borg and Sampras with just a hint of Lendl – a game that shouldn’t have been world-beating but was, and then some. He raised men’s tennis up again, exposing, as the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote of Federer in 2006, its “limits and possibilities”. He achieved dominance not by taking tennis forward, but by taking it back. He reconciled the modern game with its lighter, more elegant antecedents. This was phase one of a career that increasingly looks as if it will end up dividing into three neat acts. It lasted roughly from 2003 to 2007 – the years of out-and-out dominance.
Act two’s keynote was decline. For Federer, of course, decline was a relative concept. He went from being the best in the world to being eclipsed by his great rivals – first Nadal and then, increasingly, Djokovic and Murray. This period lasted from 2008 to 2013. Federer went on winning things, made it back to number one a couple of times (aided, it has to be said, by Nadal getting injured), but there was a sense of a gradual falling away. Age was catching up with him, they said; his reactions were slowing. Not even Federer could carry on competing with the best into his late 20s and 30s. We fans kept hoping for a magical return, proof that his best wasn’t beyond him. This we got, in a way, in 2012, when he won Wimbledon for the seventh time, beating Murray in the final. But that success was followed by the annus horribilis of 2013, when he slid down the rankings. Inglorious retirement beckoned.
But it wasn’t the end. He came back once more, aided by a bigger racket and a new coach in Stefan Edberg. Last year was wonderful, and he nearly won Wimbledon again. I was there, at the final, having paid a tout a small fortune for a ticket. He so nearly pulled it off too, coming back in that incredible fourth set, cheered on by a raucous, feverish crowd.
Yet Djokovic ended up winning. I remember my disappointment being less sharp than I’d expected. I thought it was enough that Federer had once again come so close. I never imagined that one year later, we would be here again. Except this time, there is a difference: he is playing better than last year. All tournament, he has looked phenomenally sharp, in a Djokovic-toppling frame of mind. The dangers remain considerable. The Serb, as he has so often shown, takes great pleasure in spoiling a party. But if Federer does win, it would be the perfect final act in a career not short of miracles. It would be his single greatest achievement. And it would make millions of us fans incomparably happy.
William Skidelsky’s Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession is published by Yellow Jersey Press
