Watching Roger Federer play the final two games against Ernests Gulbis yesterday in Rome reminded me of my favorite opening line from an album review. Greil Marcus wrote it in Rolling Stone in 1970, about Bob Dylan’s abominable Self-Portrait.
“What is this st?”
After his mind-bending mid-60s peaks, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, which threw all the old rules out the window, and his smaller, mellower, autumnal end-of-decade gems, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, which showed what could still be done when you brought the old rules back, the long, weird, and deliberately irritating Self-Portrait was the first clear signal of decline, of exhaustion, of capitulation from Dylan. Is that what we saw yesterday from Federer? Was his loss to Gulbis his Self-Portrait? And by that somewhat dubious whimsical logic, will his 2010 Australian Open the equivalent of Nashville Skyline, a long walk into the sunset that was so smooth it deceived everyone into thinking he could pull it off forever?
I’ll start by saying that we’ve been here before, or close to here before. I wrote a post after Federer’s almost-as-ugly loss to Gilles Simon in Toronto in the summer of 2008 about how the world would be a different place if Federer never found his forehand again. He found it pretty quickly, in time to win the next Grand Slam, the U.S. Open.
The next thing I’ll say is that the end of this match was worse than Simon. When he was broken at 5-5, after Gulbis had, in Federer’s words, “donated” the previous game to him, it was as if Federer intentionally found different ways to get his forehand to land outside the lines. Over the last two games, the only shots I can remember him making were a few desperate stabs that barely crawled over the net. Federer had the match handed back to him, but he declined to take it. During changeovers in the third set he hunched under his umbrella like a chastened, fuming schoolkid, and tossed his empty water bottles behind him with exasperated disgust.
It was hard to read Federer’s mindset at those moments, and it’s hard to figure out why he’s performed so poorly at the Masters events this year, particularly at this Masters event. Like I wrote at the start of 2010, his season would be intriguing primarily because he was in a position that few, if any, players had ever reached. He was starting his tennis afterlife; Federer had reached every individual goal imaginable, but he still had years left on his career. Forget the inevitable physical decline, the question for the moment was: What would this do to his motivation? There really wasn’t anyone he could go to for advice.
But back to the physical for the moment. Decline, as we know, is inevitable. In fact, outside of the majors, it’s been happening to Federer for a couple of years now. His last dominant season when Rafael Nadal was healthy came in 2007. In tennis, I’ve always thought that age manifests iself not in loss of speed or power but in consistency, in the ability to do the same thing over and over with precision—ask Lleyton Hewitt or Pete Sampras. And there’s plenty of evidence for Federer’s lack of consistency in 2010, both from shot to shot and tournament to tournament. If the Gulbis case was extreme, it also wasn’t totally surprising from a shot-making standpoint. Federer is going to have bad days, he’s going to have very days, he’s going to lose.
What’s harder to gauge, of course, is the mental aspect, which brings us back to motivation. In his last three post-loss press conferences, Federer seems to have moved from bitterness to a bewildered acceptance of his newfound propensity for chucking away close matches. He was unhappy and even a little defiant in Indian Wells, but as you can see from the clip below, he was calmer in Rome, at least when he was answering these particular questions. He said he never felt saved, he couldn’t find his serve, he knows he’s got work to do (did he pick up “hard yards” from Brad Gilbert, by any chance? please give it back to him, Rog), he’s looking forward to the next tournament (he’s “curious” about what’s going to happen), it’s easier to take because he’s won so much, and that losing wakes you up to some of the things you're doing wrong. The only strange element to the video is the noise that Federer makes as he walks into the press room, in answer to the fans’ cries. I don’t know what he says, but there's a cranky old man aspect to it.
So, what does all this, the rancid forehands and the fairly low-key post-match assessment, tell us about Federer now and in immediate future? I’d venture to say that he's in an odd psychological position when he’s not playing a major, not playing for history. On the surface of his brain, he wants to win and hates to lose as much as ever. But motivation and will and desire are only semi-conscious attributes—you can’t fool your own mind into wanting something more than it really does. What was disturbing in the second set was how quickly Federer faded away after Gulbis asserted himself early. What was disturbing in the third was how he didn’t capitalize on his extra chance at 5-5, seemingly because at some level he didn’t think it was his day to win. That’s where the extra, unconscious motivation may have been missing: Federer couldn’t manufacture a win purely out of his will and his experience. I’m sure, at that point, that even Gulbis believed that Federer would make him pay for his double faults and choked forehands. Maybe, after the losses in Indian Wells and Key Biscayne, Federer has become fatalistic about the Masters, maybe he’s starting to assume he won’t find his best game. Afterward, he even uttered a word that has never been associated with him: “I may have to get through some ugly matches.” Hopefully he’ll take that prediction to heart, but it can’t be a pleasant thought for the man who has always been aware of, and proud of, his “beautiful technique.”
There are plenty of mitigating factors to the loss. Gulbis is a good player; he can beat anyone (Federer made an interesting comment in his presser, about how much pace Gulbis can get on his second serve). This was also Federer’s first match on clay, his weakest surface. He lost early in Rome last year and went on to win the French Open. But if his present form continues, it will only get harder for him to summon his best on command at the majors. Or maybe it won’t—maybe that extra level of motivation will always be there for the big ones. The bottom line, as it always is with Federer these days, is that we won’t know the meaning of Rome until we see what happens in Paris. With him, no Masters result can be looked at separately from the ensuing Slam result.
Can the fate of Bob Dylan shed any light on Federer’s future? Self-Portrait was indeed a sign of decline, of artistic exhaustion and capitulation. And that exhaustion lasted for a few years. Then Dylan made Blood on the Tracks, which redefined what a rocker could do in his 30s—of course, it was also about break-ups and anger and regrets, but let's not worry about that right now. The point is, nobody asked “What is this st?”