On Thursday, Roger Federer announced his retirement. This morning, in The Straits Times, Rohit Brijnath wrote about him and what it means to so many of us …
So many years he’d run, so long his racket had sung, so timeless he felt, that you took it for granted there was an extra summer left in him. But everyone’s autumn comes, even Roger Federer’s. Time is the undefeated champion of sport.
When athletes retire, we dig out weighing scales. How much did they win, where did they rank and it’s all necessary but really what did an athlete do to you? Beyond his 20 Grand Slam titles and 23 consecutive Slam semi-finals, where did he transport you? How did he change you and move you and enrich you?
People will argue The Greatest but in the end it’s not about who owns the game, it’s what an athlete does to the game, with the game, for the game, in the game. Federer elevated it, charmed it, adorned it. All without sweating or scandal.
Federer might have the fewest Slams of the Big Three, but he started this movement. He took tennis beyond the court with a game built by Leonardo da Vinci and Carl Lewis. Invention at effortless speed. People, like my mum, who didn’t care for sport, adored him. They watched because his game looked so easy, so fluid, even though there was so much intelligence wrapped in his dexterity and so much aggression entwined with his serenity.
The style of Federer was intrinsic to his appeal. Pictures of him are telling because he almost always looks elegant in them. His movement was a language in itself and even the dance critic of the Washington Post held forth on him. In the only time I met him, he told me: “I always liked figure skating.” Then, after a pause he added: “I like beauty in motion.”
He was physically unimposing, 1.85m but slim, not burdened with muscle and laughing once with Jim Courier about his withered left arm. It’s not how hard he hit the ball but where he met it, early, the ball trampolining off his strings in a triumph of timing. His tennis could be seen but also heard.
Everything was played at speed, in some high, sophisticated gear, at a level best described by a snooker player. As Ronnie O’Sullivan told me recently about Federer: “You can’t really teach that, can you?” But you can applaud it. Once, after a defeat, Sam Querrey would say: “He hits shots that other guys don’t hit. You want to go over and give him a high-five sometimes, but you can’t do that.”
The Swiss won politely. Handshake in the locker room and velvet-gloved beating on court. A civilised bruiser. James Blake, who was 1-10 with Federer in head-to-head meetings, tweeted: “You crushed me on the court, but were so nice and genuine that I couldn’t hate you for it.”
Federer was two people, player and person, one unnatural, the other seemingly normal, and this idea of Picasso as a regular guy was fascinating. He brought to the game a state of grace and as Mary Carillo, the commentator, said: “It was just in his bones to be that way.” I know, I saw it one evening in Dubai in 2015.
As I waited my turn to speak to him, a TV crew member from Asia started rehearsing how to greet him. “Roger, you are my super idol”, said the interviewer to his producer. They hemmed and hawed. Then they tried: “Roger, I am your super fan.” Perhaps that would do.
Then Federer walked in and how many times do you think he’s had compliments thrown at him and love expressed and yet when the crew greeted him, he wasn’t blase. Instead he seemed touched and in this conceited century, populated by entitled heroes, it was telling.
All athletes make sport personal, especially Federer. His art was emotional, inducing sighs and oohs and gasps and groans. No athlete surely was so beloved in so many lands and no athlete enjoyed it more. He’d play Andy Murray in England and the crowd would be split and Murray understood. Federer transcended nationality. He made you cheer the game.
In Melbourne once, on an unforgettable night in 2016, he, ageing, ran into a sublime Novak Djokovic and easily lost the first two sets of their semi-final and when the third began, the crowd just stood and howled for him, imploring him, lifting him, as if returning to a man all the hope he had for so long given them.
“Come on, man, please,” a voice pleaded in the sentimental din.
Federer lost the match but he won that third set.
It was a night to make you weep at what athletes do to us. And of course that would be fitting, for Federer through his career wept a small river of tears. Some found it unmanly but others revealing of what a game meant to him.
He cried when he won his first Slam at Wimbledon in 2003 and most famously when he lost to Rafael Nadal in Australia in 2009. He couldn’t talk initially, he was so emotional, and so Nadal came to receive his trophy and held it aloft and then gently put his arm around Federer.
“It’s killing me,” Federer had said earlier but really these men made each other, and tennis, come alive. They told us, again and again, till you couldn’t say you hadn’t noticed, that desire was never an excuse for disrespect.
Federer was a racket thrower as a boy, occasionally petulant after losses as a man and once swore at an umpire. After he won his first Wimbledon in 2003, he, so young and unformed, said on court, “I enjoy my game, watching myself” and as the crowd laughed and so did his now-wife Mirka, he quickly added, “because it’s so different so I hope you guys also enjoy it”. It was clumsy and endearing and true.
Federer made Nadal better and helped build Djokovic because the Serb realised the level he’d require. In turn they lifted Federer, forced him to attack more, find a sting in his backhand and change to a racket with a bigger head. It would lead, after a six-month break, to victory at the Australian Opens of 2017 and 2018 and Wimbledon in 2017. They were the last, fine stanzas of an epic poem.
Federer couldn’t solve Djokovic, he was wasteful with break points, he has fewer Slams than the other two, but who he was couldn’t be reduced to mere mathematics. It wasn’t the number of titles, it was the how of them.
The serve, like a ballet dancer doing stretching exercises. Then a single-handed backhand flick. A forehand whip. A swiped half-volley from the baseline. The underrated defence. The gymnast’s balance. The architect’s clean lines. The air-conditioned appearance in the fifth set. The ball flicked to ball kids. The invariably flawed challenges of HawkEye. The flick of his hair. In 60 seconds you’d get all of this and the score would read 1-0.
What a time we had.
So, then, what did he leave for you? For me, Federer filled the spaces I wanted from sport. His matches were essentially joyous, contests and yet celebrations. But it was also his ability to keep giving to a game, to laugh with Courier on court, to speak to radio, TV, print in English, German, French, to be a full-time evangelist in a time when stars feel their only obligation is to play.
The show is almost over and Carlos Alcaraz has the stage, but the Spaniard is like us. After 1,526 matches by the Swiss, he still wants a last look at the Laver Cup. For Federer the memory is never full. Till then I am stuck with an image of my friend, who told me on Thursday that he was sitting quietly in his den under a photo of Federer. Nothing tragic has happened, just that everything beautiful that is lost deserves mourning.
Just another Silly Point 