NEW YORK—The first words that I scrawled, hurriedly and blurrily, in my notebook during the match between Roger Federer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Thursday night were these: “JWT aggressive early; RF not keeping up.”
A second earlier, JWT had taken an RF serve and followed it forward to win a point; a few seconds before that, he’d taken a mid-court ball and snaked to net before Federer was ready to react. It seemed possible, in those very early moments, to think ahead and imagine another instance of Federer being knocked back, and knocked out, by an explosive younger player, the way he had earlier this year by Tsonga at Wimbledon and Montreal, Tomas Berdych in Cincinnati, and Novak Djokovic in Melbourne.
Rarely have the opening moments of a match been so misleading. Federer, despite being pushed around by Tsonga, held for 1-1, and immediately everything turned around. It became clear that the Frenchman, far from being ready to blow Federer off the court, was in fact completely off his game. He tried and failed with a drop shot that floated high in the air and landed at the service line; and at 1-3 he began his own service game with a double fault. While Federer would help Tsonga’s cause by playing a poor game on his serve in the middle of the set, he was the one making things happen. He was the one mixing spins and placements and trajectories with his serve. He was the one coming over his backhand return instead of slicing it so often, as he had at Wimbledon. He was the one going back to the slice in the middle of rallies and eliciting shanks from Tsonga’s forehand. Federer eventually served for the set at 5-4 and held at love. From his perspective, it only got better from there. By the start of the second set, Federer was so relaxed that he could get a laugh out of a dancing fool in the upper deck who was having his moves broadcast on the big screens in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
This year there has a been a concern, not unjustified, that Federer had lost either a step in speed or an m.p.h. or two in pace. For the first time in his career, he was the one who had been getting knocked back from the baseline, who had faded down stretch runs, who struggled to keep up with younger athletes. But tonight’s match, besides getting him to his third Grand Slam semifinal of 2011, also showed that Federer at 30 can still turn the tables on those young athletes when the night is right. This was a blast-or-be-blasted type of match; there were very few shots that could qualify as a mere “rally ball.” The last two times they’ve played, it’s been Tsonga who has blasted first and blasted best. This time the Frenchman spent most of the first two sets on his heels, catching forehands and backhands late. The only truly reliable shot he owned was a gimmick, his roundhouse, desperation one-handed backhand. Federer, with his body serves, kicks into the ad court, aggressive returning, wickedly efficient forehand, and strike first mentality, took everything else away from him.
Federer owns the night in New York. He’s looked extremely sharp, to the point of appearing unbeatable, in his last two matches. Now it’s on to the big one, a semifinal with Novak Djokovic. Neither player appeared to want to give the other any bulletin board material today. Asked if he wished he could face Federer in the semis, Djokovic shrugged and said, “Why not?” For Federer’s part, he refused to claim that his win in the same round over Djokovic in Paris would have any bearing on this semifinal. On form at the moment, it would be hard not to pick Federer; right now he has regained his fast and slashing style from late 2010—maybe it just takes the old man nine months to find his range these days. Whatever the reason, and whatever the result on Saturday, Federer has again put the questions of decline aside. Tonight the questions are about his incline.
We've heard about signs of Roger Federer's descent from the mountaintop. Was this win, with all of its old-fashioned easygoing excellence, a sign of ascent?