For anyone who thinks the life of a professional athlete is by nature brutish, short, and occasionally nasty, you don’t know your French tennis players. On the whole, they consider the game more than merely a profession, or a competition where the sole goal is to line their bank accounts for the long retirement to come. Most of them enjoy singles and doubles. They play every week well into their 30s. They come out for each other’s matches. They give thoughtful press conferences. And they retain a sense of the game’s history—it makes some kind of sense that they excel on its original surface, grass. Just as, according to the phrase, “life is meant to be lived,” the French tend to believe that tennis is meant to be played.
The recently retired Fabrice Santoro exemplified all of these qualities, but there was more than a little of the spirit of Santoro in the match between Roger Federer and Michael Llodra in Toronto on Thursday. Santoro was famous for relishing his time across the net from Federer to the hilt. He thought of those matches as opportunities to play the “most perfect” player, and admitted that he loved to see Federer’s “beautiful” game, even if Federer was thrashing him with it.
What Santoro couldn’t do, for all of his tricks, was turn the tables and get Federer on the run. That’s where Llodra came in today. His lefty serve-and-volley game gave his opponent fits for most of the first set, a set that Llodra led 4-1. The veteran doubles specialist with the smooth serve, uncluttered technique, and backhand volley for the ages took Federer back to his roots, and the sport’s roots, by playing a game where there’s a premium on every shot.
“It’s fun playing that kind of style occasionally,” Federer said afterward, “You want to try to move forward early on in the point, because otherwise if you play just one shot a bit passive, he’ll be the one making the move, and then you have to come up with a passing shot on the run. That’s not something you want to do. This is how it used to be played.”
The name of the game with two baseliners is to impose your version of that game. The name of the game for a serve-and-volleyer against a baseliner is to take the baseliner out of his game. Llodra, 30, did that in masterly fashion against Almagro in the previous round, and he had Federer talking to himself for the first five games. Swinging him out of his strike zone with his serve, chipping and charging on his return, he made Federer something he’s so often not: uncomfortable.
“I knew before the match that I have to be aggressive,” Llodra said, “and at the beginning, he made a double fault because I think he knew I’m gonna do chip and charge. So it’s different, you know."
At 4-2, Llodra committed a rally-killing double fault. The air went out of his forward-flying sails. But his early success makes you wonder what a younger and more talented serve-and-volleyer could do to Federer. We’ll likely never know, as Federer, unlike Bjorn Borg, never faced a version of John McEnroe, a guy who could see what Borg did best—win baseline points—and rob him of his edge by denying him those baseline points in the first place. As Federer said today, he had been forced to go in the opposite direction at the start of his career. He misses the days when tennis emphasized placement and creativity as much as physical prowess.
“I remember that’s how I played [rushing the net] the whole time coming up,” he said, “and then I had to improve so much on my baseline game because all the guys leading the rankings were all playing from the baseline. [In the past] you had to maneuver the opponents around and be smart about it. So it was a really fun match [today].”
It's been fun to watch Llodra the last few days. Along with his vintage game, there’s a laconic, unhurried manner to his way around the court which is closer to that of the old serve-and-volleyers than it is to the fired-up baseliners we see today. Most of all, what a guy like Llodra brings is a different rhythm to tennis. He comes in with a one-two punch rather than a roundhouse. He brings a cause and effect, a relationship between one shot and the next. Watching a serve-and-volleyer, you’re reminded that there are many more possibilities—angles, tactics, strokes—in tennis than you normally get to see today.
Like Santoro once did, Llodra sat back this afternoon and answered questions in a thoughtful whisper—or maybe he was just searching for the right English words, who knows. He said he tried an underhand serve at the end of the match because he wanted to create something “special.” And he asked Federer for his shirt afterward so he could give something of the great man’s to his kids—“Roger is in the legends,” Llodra said.
In a sense, Federer is a transitional figure. He began by modeling himself after Sampras and playing the all-court game, but had to adjust to power-baseline tennis. It’s a credit to his talent that he could pull this off. You wonder whether the skills he learned in the old style—volleying, improvisation, proactive rallying—have given him a crucial edge over his opponents in the new.
Obviously Federer has mastered today’s game, but he has his regrets about leaving the old behind. He may have been even more remarkable as an entertainer if he’d been allowed to develop as a serve-and-volleyer. His sense of fun on court, of tennis as an athletic adventure, was clearly engaged by Llodra, as it used to be by Santoro. At 29, Federer still plays to win and detests losing, and he’s made a ton of money. But his smile when he talks about a match like today’s shows he’s a lover of the sport, and if you’re looking for a reason for his unprecedented consistency over a long period of time, you don’t need to look further than that.
Today Federer was asked, “I watched you practice a little bit in Miami this year . . . you were just having a great time . . . ”
Federer started to laugh and cut the questioner off.
“I like tennis, you know," he said. For those of you who think the life of the average pro athlete is nasty, brutish, short, and devoted to the almighty dollar, you don't know your Roger Federer.