Much of the appeal of sports is in the risk-free banter that surrounds it: the Monday morning moaning, the second-guessing, the speculating, the once-a-decade all-out go-flip-a-car-over celebration.
This isn’t quite as true in tennis. The individual game doesn’t give its fans as many opportunities to play armchair QB as team sports do. You can spend a long evening at a bar discussing the moves that the GM of the Yankees or Arsenal or the Sixers should make. You can spend the next evening discussing the pros and cons of the latest decision made by that team’s coach. And then, after all that, on your seventh beer, you can start to break down the performances of the various performers. But tennis players don’t come with GMs, and what their coaches tell them is largely kept secret. All you really have to go on is the performance on the court, and half of that is up to the player’s opponent. What can you say about Rafael Nadal if he loses a set to Ivo Karlovic? Why weren't his arms longer so he could reach for all of those aces?
Which leaves us with, for the most part, speculation. How is Julia Goerges going to do now? Can Novak Djokovic win the Grand Slam? Who has the better upside, Dimitrov or Raonic? When will Andy Murray cut his hair? And the perennial, Can Andy Roddick win another big one? The honest answer to these questions is, of course, “I don’t have a clue,” or “We’ll see.” But that doesn’t make for very good banter; it makes for a long, quiet night at the bar.
The most frequently asked speculative question in tennis at the moment is, as I’m sure you’re aware, “Is Roger Federer done?” I get asked it at the gym, at the dentist, at the tennis club. (Though I’ve heard it considerably less since his loss to Nadal in Key Biscayne; maybe people think they know the answer at this point.)
To respond intelligently, to say something other than “I don’t know” or “We’ll see,” you first have to figure out what “done” means. Does it mean Federer will never win another tournament, never beat Nadal or Djokovic again, never win a Slam, never return to No. 1? Let’s take the answer from Federer’s point of view, or our best guess at it. He’s said he wants to get back to No. 1, and we can believe him: He only needs a couple of weeks there to break Sampras’s career record for most weeks at the top. Federer also said at the start of the year that he cares about winning any tournament he enters. And he certainly doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life losing to Djokovic or Nadal in semifinals. But it’s still about the majors for him. If Federer had to choose between returning to No. 1 and not winning any Slams, and winning a Slam but never returning to No. 1, which do you think he would take? If it weren’t for the odd element of the Sampras record, I’d say the latter. I don’t think Federer would be nearly as enthusiastic at this stage of his career if he didn’t feel like winning majors was still a real possibility. I wonder if he’d be playing at all.
Let’s say winning at least one more Slam is our baseline for Federer’s future success, for what he and his fans would find satisfying. The thing about winning majors is that a player of Federer’s caliber is never “done.” It’s not like a baseball or soccer season, where each loss sinks you deeper in a hole and farther from the playoffs and the championship. A loss at Wimbledon has no bearing on how he’ll do at the U.S. Open. Everything can be fixed with the luck of the draw. Look at Federer in 2008, the first time that the word “done” was thrown around with his name. He was thrashed in the French final and edged out in an epic at Wimbledon by Nadal. A month later, Federer appeared to be reeling—he lost to Simon, Karlovic, and James Blake at the Olympics. Then, Andy Murray beats Nadal in the U.S. Open semis and **Federer is back in business. His title at Flushing Meadows that year didn’t necessarily mean that he was “back,” just as his loss to Nadal at Wimbledon that year hadn’t meant he was “done.” Each Slam is an entity unto itself, a new draw, a blank slate.
Federer will be 30 in August, an age that’s traditionally seen as a Rubicon. The common wisdom is that tennis players decline precipitously because they lose that all-important “first step.” And this seemed to be what happened to Stefan Edberg and, to a lesser degree, Pete Sampras—serve and volley is all about those quick movements. Pat Rafter probably quit at the right time. But looking back at a century of men’s champions, you see a lot of variety in how they aged. Maurice McLoughlin flamed out fast, but Bill Tilden was competitive well into his 30s and, on the pro tours, well beyond. Pancho Gonzalez, a serve-and-volleyer, won matches at Wimbledon in his 40s, while Bjorn Borg, because of burnout, took an absolute nosedive at 25. John McEnroe may be the best over-50 player in history, but he also won his last major at 25, a victim of the game’s changing equipment and emphasis on power, as well as his own distractions. On the other hand, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Connors won Slams after 30.
So for every champion there’s a unique story. What's unique about Federer? There’s his dominance from 2004 on, of course, and his Grand Slam title record. But I’d point to another of his signature achievements as the most useful in assessing his future ability to win majors: His 23 straight Grand Slam semis. I’ve said in the past that what Federer does better than anyone else is take what he’s given—90 percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen said, but in this case it’s no joke. Federer, while he hasn’t reached a Slam final in more than a year, has kept showing up. He still loses very few matches to anyone other than Djokovic and Nadal. How did Federer get that 2008 U.S. Open title, when we were starting to talk about his demise? By showing up for the final when the No. 1 player at that time, Nadal, didn’t. Now, of course, there's a second guy in that mix, which makes it more difficult. But Djokovic has never dominated for a long stretch, and never been to a Wimbledon final. It won't get any easier, but even at 30, Federer can bide his time, make his semis, and take his chances—he still knows how to win these events better than anyone.
Federer may not get back to No. 1 and break the Sampras record, which would be a bummer. He may never beat Nadal or Djokovic again, which would be infuriating (and unlikely). But the good thing is, to make the rest of his career a worthwhile endeavor—and to keep us from saying he's "done"—he doesn’t have to.