The Last Word returns, and each weekday, starting on Monday, December 5, we'll give you our year-end thoughts about tennis' best players—this time focusing on the ATP and WTA Top 10. We'll alternate tours each day; here's who we've looked at so far.
Best of 2011
By winning the season-ending ATP World Tour Finals, Federer channeled Mark Twain and declared, as so many have so often in the past, that, “rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.” That performance included a savage beatdown of career rival Rafael Nadal, and it earned back the No. 3 ranking Federer had surrendered a few weeks earlier to Andy Murray.
Worst of 2011
Going into the Miami tournament, Federer had lost to just one man all year—Novak Djokovic, against whom the Mighty Fed was 0-3. And while Djokovic was developing into the story of the year, the Federer/Nadal rivalry was still a major narrative in men’s tennis. Thus their semifinal night match at Crandon Park was a highly anticipated event. But Federer barely showed up and played one of his worst matches ever against a top player at an important tournament, bowing to Nadal, 6-3, 6-2.
Year in Review
Federer had a tournament win in Doha in his first outing of 2011 (d. Nikolay Davydenko in the final), and who would have guessed that he wouldn’t win another tournament until October, in his hometown of Basel, Switzerland?
Yet we’re talking about Roger Federer here, and thus even his shortcomings are relative ones. It’s almost a historical oddity that he went almost 10 months between titles, because he was always in the mix, never more so than at the majors. He was a finalist at the French Open (l. to Nadal) and a semifinalist at the Australian and U.S. Opens (l. to Djokovic at both). And that loss to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the quarters of Wimbledon can hardly be deemed inexplicable.
The word that probably best describes Federer’s entire year is “struggle.” There were those three, bam-bam-bam loses to Djokovic (Australian Open, Dubai, Indian Wells), the debacle at Miami, and further disappointments on clay (including a loss to Jurgen Melzer in the quarters of Monte Carlo) leading to Roland Garros. True, Federer exacted a bit of revenge when he ended Djokovic’s remarkable 43-match winning streak on a windy, damp evening Paris, but all it got him was the right to lose to Nadal in the final on the court all but owned by the Spanish (then) No. 1.
Federer was solid but not great during the summer hard-court stretch, and at the U.S. Open he faced a great opportunity to turn things around when he had two match points against Djokovic in the semis. Bold play and a touch of serendipity allowed Djokovic to slip the noose. Just think how different the story line of 2011 in tennis might have been had Federer converted one of those two match points.
Fully aware of the implications of turning 30, Federer decided to skip the Asian swing and rest up for a final push. It was a wise decision: Federer won the last three events he played (Basel, the Paris Masters, and the World Tour Finals) to close the year with a 17-match winning streak that had fans and pundits muttering, “He’s ba-a-a-a-a-ck.”
See for Yourself
Glutton for genius? Feast on this compilation of Federer glory shots compiled at the 2011 Paris Masters: