Prediction No. 2: Roger Federer Will Win Wimbledon and Make Us Learn to Love Davis Cup Again
Thinking about Roger Federer’s status as he heads into 2009, I keep returning to his win at the U.S. Open last September. In retrospect I'd call it a clarifying victory.
All through last summer, after Federer had been whacked upside the head in Paris, had his Wimbledon crown taken, and lost his No. 1 ranking—each time at the hands of the diabolical Rafael Nadal—many of us wondered which former champion Federer would resemble in the future: would he become Bjorn Borg, or would he become Pete Sampras? Going Borg meant flipping out about being No. 2 and never winning anything again; going Sampras meant accepting that even gods slow down and plugging away for four or five or six more Slams.
Federer’s routine win at Flushing Meadows settled it: He’s going the Sampras route. While he may hate being announced as No. 2 in the world, he respects the current No. 1 player, accepts that he will lose to him sometimes, and knows that it is no longer a given that he’s superior to all who stand across the net from him. This is healthy. Knowing Federer’s basically sane mind-set, it seems absurd that anyone ever thought he might not win big again. Burnout just doesn’t seem to be an issue with Federer; he’s always played a lot of tennis and rarely seemed to feel the effects. I probably wouldn’t either if I won everything in sight.
So Federer is going to be with us for a while, and he’s going to break Sampras’ Slam record either this year or next. (I’ll say he’s going to finish his career with 17 or 18 majors.) The three-Slam seasons are likely over, but I doubt that will keep him up at night. The French Open is also getting less likely each year—this may be the season when Federer backtracks and loses before the final—but that doesn’t seem to weigh on him the way not winning the U.S. Open seemed to weigh on Borg.
What Federer loves is to compete on a tennis court, an in-born trait that will serve him better as he ages than any conditioning program anyone could devise. The Swiss is unlike Borg, and even unlike Sampras, in that traveling and playing tennis has never been a chore for him. As always, Federer is focusing on winning Wimbledon in 2009. It’s a rote statement he makes at the beginning of each year, a way of keeping his goals manageable. But he also means it—as with Sampras, that tournament is his Holy Grail. Last year's final aside, when I think of Federer at Wimbledon, I see him holding the winner’s trophy, not that lame runner-up plate. (Is there a bigger letdown in sports than to have to hold that little thing up rather than the big golden cup?)
I think Federer will reclaim Wimbledon this year, that it will tie him with Sampras at 14 majors, and that it might lead him to No. 15 at the Open (my crystal ball is fuzzy on that one). It’s not that Nadal’s Wimbledon win in 2008 was any kind of fluke; he’d been to the final the previous two years. But it took more of a special effort, a major build-up of momentum that had begun two months earlier, to get Nadal that golden trophy—and he still almost fell short. For Federer, winning Wimbledon is part of life, an annual rite, a pilgrimage by which he sets his yearly schedule. Plus, grass is still a more natural fit for his game than it is for Nadal’s.
This would obviously be a highlight of the year for many fans, and a moment we'd see replayed forever, but there's another intriguing possibility involving Federer in 2009 that should be mentioned. As you know, he has added Davis Cup back to his schedule. He and Stanislas Wawrinka will be a formidable team, but they'll begin with a tough tie against the U.S. in Alabama. It should be a barn burner of a weekend, right down to the doubles, where the Bryan brothers will want to avenge their loss to Federer and Wawrinka in Beijing.
If the Swiss get past the Americans, they would play the winner of Chile and Croatia, then perhaps the winner of Argentina and France in the semis. If it's Argentina, Federer would get a chance to enter the clay cauldron of Buenos Aires for the first time on September 18. (As you probably already know, the last tie between the countries took place in 1952 in Lausanne, so this one would be in Argentina.) I won't predict that the Swiss team will win down there—despite last year's debacle, the Argentines haven't lost at home on clay for more than a decade. For now, I'll just will say that the thought of Federer, suddenly a fish out of water, digging into the orange clay and fighting the whistling fans, the wild atmosphere, Nalbandian, del Potro, and Maradona is enough to make this tennis fan relish the 2009 season just a little bit more.