In 2009, the headline-making players and stories have remained the same. The record books of the future will remind us that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Serena Williams continued to make history this season. What will be forgotten are the reasons that tennis fans kept watching in surprise from match to match and week to week: the sudden, unlikely rises and falls of the mortals who reside on the second rung of the sport’s totem pole. This year’s Wimbledon was rife with them. Andy Roddick, Tommy Haas, Elena Dementieva, and Andy Murray, while they didn’t end up winning anything, tantalized us with the idea that they could. If Federer made this year’s fortnight historic, it was those players who gave it its texture. I’ll memorialize their efforts here this week, before they fade out of our minds. But first things first: the A-plus performers.
Roger Federer
The spoilsports, curmudgeons, and logicians will tell us that we “can’t compare players from different eras.” I would answer by saying that we can do whatever the hell we want to do. Even if I admitted that their point, however prudish it may be, was a reasonable one, my mind would go ahead and make the comparison anyway before I could do anything about it—I’m a sports fan, which means I always want to know who's going to win. When I picture Roger Federer playing tennis, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s the best in history at it. But just when that idea seemed to be corroborated by all relevant statistics, the fact that Federer hasn’t won a calendar-year Grand Slam, à la Rod Laver, has begun to be used against him, presumably by those same spoilsports and curmudgeons (it certainly can't be the logicians). Leaving aside the fact that Federer was one match away from doing it on two separate occasions, Laver’s two calendar-year Slams—the first took place during the amateur era, when he didn’t face the world’s best competition—qualify as single-season achievements, not career achievements. If you consider them, by themselves, a reason to think Laver is untouchable, you then have to ask yourself: What if he had never won another match aside from those Slams? Would he still have the greater career than Federer? The answer, I believe, is no.
Still, when I picture Federer playing, my analytical skills fall far behind my appreciative ones. On dozens of occasions I’ve tried to describe to myself how he won a particular match. Often all I can visualize is Federer patiently slicing his backhand from behind the baseline, and then . . . winning the set 6-3. But this year’s French Open and Wimbledon crystallized for me what it is that he does better than anyone else, on and off the court: He takes what you give him.
If a draw opens up for him with the shocking defeats of his primary rivals, which happened with suspiciously destiny-like regularity in both Paris and London, Federer is always there, uninjured, to take advantage. If you don’t punish his floating slice backhand with a perfect approach, he’s there to stun you and take the point from you with a crosscourt forehand. If you leave a ball hanging in the middle of the court, he goes from passive to aggressive in one long, predatory stride. And if you don’t close out a tiebreaker on your first opportunity, when you’re up 6-2 and serving, he’ll take a Wimbledon title from you.
As you know, the second-set breaker was the tide-turning moment of yesterday’s final. Andy Roddick looked assured of going up two sets to love and putting a firm grip on the match. As you also know, he would eventually blow his fourth and final set point with an embarrassing backhand volley wide (to win 15 Slams, you have to take everything you’re given). But it wasn’t that moment that seems crucial to me now, or that exemplifies why Federer won. It was the reflex flick backhand that he hit to save the first set point, with Roddick serving at 6-2. The American hit a strong forehand up the line; Federer stood his ground and found a way to short-hop the ball and direct it into the open court. Nobody else owns that shot. Nobody else would have been alive in that tiebreaker long enough to see Roddick stone that backhand volley wide at 6-5.
And nobody else would have hung around long enough to win that match. As in 2007, when he beat Rafael Nadal in five sets, Federer snuck past an opponent who was frankly the better player on the day. He did it the same way, by serving lights out—the only thing you’re given on a tennis court is your serve, and he took it with everything he had—and saving his best tennis for the tiebreakers. Like the man he passed on the all-time Slam list, Pete Sampras, Federer continues to succeed in his late 20s because he does nothing more, or less, than win. Sometimes that means finding a way to take a match that belongs to someone else.
After last year’s Wimbledon final, it appeared that Federer, whatever his other achievements, would be known for losing his greatest battle. Now, along with his 15 majors and umpteen other records, he has an epic victory to his credit as well. This is a fitting capstone to a fantastical six weeks for Roger Federer. While his French-Wimbledon double will be remembered as one more historic achievement from the greatest player ever, those of us who were watching Federer all year know that fortune has smiled on him to an unusual degree since the 4th round of the French Open. In tennis, however, “fortune” has a narrower meaning than it does just about anywhere else.
In few other sports are you responsible for everything that happens during play, including your good and bad luck. Aside from aces, there are virtually no winning shots from your opponent that you can honestly say were “just too good.” Chances are, an imperfect shot from you allowed your opponent to hit that winner. (This is what makes a loss in tennis so hard to accept—deep down, you know it was your fault). And vice-versa, simply by putting one more shot in the court, as Federer did at 5-6 in the second-set tiebreaker, you give your opponent a chance to screw up, to send a volley 10 feet wide. If he does, you weren’t merely lucky; you had a hand in making your good fortune.
“You create your own luck”: It’s a phrase that’s both too optimistic and too cruel, but it’s undeniably true in tennis, where cause and effect, fortune and skill, are fully intertwined. Staying healthy for every Slam while your main rival falls to injury; getting yourself to the semifinals while your other rivals fall prey to pressure or exhaustion; remaining calm when you’re on the verge of defeat and you have a chance to break the all-time record for majors. These are seemingly routine marks of consistency, but no one else in tennis history has matched them. Luck? Roger Federer has earned more of it than anyone else. A+
!Sw Serena Williams
Her competitive energy was wild and unfocused in Paris, where she trash-talked Dinara Safina and threatened an early-round opponent. At Wimbledon it was just as fierce, but she channeled it into pummeling the little yellow ball. Does anyone, other than perhaps Rafael Nadal, embody the desire to win as much as Serena? She grunts—no extraneous screams for her—and pumps her fist, she bends over in disbelief when she’s missed, and most theatrical of all, she leaps after she hits a ball that’s going to land close to the line, hoping to bring it down safely with the power of her body English.
And while she’s never tidy about it, Serena gets what she wants. Talk about creating your own luck. Down match point to Elena Dementieva in the semifinals, Williams played with no fear, taking the first opportunity to come forward. You can sum up her subsequent net cord volley winner in four words: “fortune favors the brave.” You can sum up her crucial first-set tiebreaker win over her sister Venus in the final the same way. A+
Men’s Final
Nadal-Federer 2008 overflowed, with long rallies, daredevil shot-making, rain delays, flashbulbs, operatic drama, darkness, tears. This year’s was fast and spare by comparison, a quartet rather than a symphony. The points themselves weren’t as spectacular, though you also got the sense that no one wanted to claim it was as good as last year’s final, right after we all got done calling that one the greatest match in history.
This was just as entertaining, however. I’ve never seen anything quite like the end. Each player faced a quandary. On the one hand, the longer the match went, the more emotionally drained Federer and Roddick became with each game—how many aces and service winners could they hit? But at the same time, the longer it went, the more there was at stake for each of them—they must have been winding down just as the drama was winding up. They were stuck on a high-wire together. I had a feeling that, unlike last year, the end would be anti-climactic. Roddick’s terrible mishit into the back tarp proved me right. It’s too bad, for Roddick and for us, that we’ll have to watch that shot replayed for so many years to come. A+
!Ar Andy Roddick
Late in the final, John McEnroe seemed to overspeak while watching Roddick hit a strong backhand down the line. He said that that shot should make the people back home “proud to be Americans.” It’s probably a lot to ask from a ground stroke.
But McEnroe was right in the larger sense. We saw Roddick grow up in front of us over the July 4th weekend. He never lifted his eyes, changed his gait, or showed more emotion than what was absolutely necessary—he looked consumed by the task at hand. He ignored the wishes of 15,000 people in the semis and a soul-crushing blown tiebreaker in the second set of the final. Can you imagine him talking to the camera, the way he did the last time he played Federer in a Slam final, at the 2006 U.S. Open?
Moreover, has Roddick ever hit his vaunted serve so effectively or rushed the net with such intelligent selectivity? Has he ever hit so many forcing forehands and deadly backhands on the run? Has he ever looked more like a born tennis player rather than an all-around jock? This was muscular tennis at its most controlled and purposeful.
Roddick had been beaten three straight times by Murray and 18 times by Federer, but he approached both of this weekend's matches as if they were contested on even terms. He had been written off at Slams for years, but he set about remaking himself with a new coach for at least the fourth time. The upshot is that he just played the two best matches of his life at age 26: He pushed Murray back without trying to blast through him and controlled the rallies against Federer off both sides.
He's been known in some parts as the American who couldn’t keep his country’s tradition of great tennis champions alive. A win over Federer yesterday would have banished that criticism forever. Instead Roddick played beautiful tennis for 4 hours on Sunday only to run up against a brick wall and end the day in tears, a lifelong dream and career vindication thwarted by his more gifted nemesis again. Then he was forced to describe how he felt to the world. Asked by Sue Barker if he felt the sport could be cruel, Roddick said to the crowd, who had supported him as they always do at Wimbledon, “No, I’m one of the lucky few who gets cheered for, so thank you for that.”
Roddick may not be a champion on the order of Sampras or McEnroe or Connors, but none of those guys could match the breadth of his personality, or his unpretentious humanity. His performance on Sunday, first in his actions and then in his astoundingly stoical, winning words before a worldwide audience, was inspiring. It really did make me proud to be an American. A+