Monday, September 11, 2006

The Roger Federer Experience

I watched a tennis match after a long long time yesterday. It was the US Open men's finals between defending champ Roger Federer and Andy Roddick. And what a game it was! I've heard and read many things about Federer the last few years, but none of that prepared me for what I saw. The man is sheer brilliance, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. Chicago bears were annihilating Green Bay Packers on another channel. I admit I'm not the biggest football fan, but normally I would've switched between the games. No, not this one.

Federer is good looking in that sleek Russian mafia hit man sort of way. This is accentuated by the fact that he never gets riled up. He has this cool about him. And his game! What can I say. I've seen Boris Becker and John McEnroe serving and volleying. I've seen Ivanisevic serves and Andrew Agassi returns. I've seen Pete Sampras' athleticism and Michael Chang's speed. But I've never seen all this in one person.

It all starts with the serve. He can pull out aces when he's cornered. After the serve, he mixes up his game. The opponent never knows if he's going to approach the net or battle it out from the baseline. And he moves with a sort of lithe grace, like a ballet dancer. He never seems hurried. He just gets to the spot a microsecond before the ball is on him. the ball seems to hang in the air, while he goes through a list of possibilities of where to hit the ball, at what speed and at what angle. Once he's eliminated all human possibilities, he comes up with that shot that no one else can replicate. It could be his signature whipped forehand shot that rips out an opponent's will to live, or his heavy topspinned backhand that could travel just as fast or float and drop on the baseline. And the audience gasps in that Federer moment.

Roddick is no dummy. He showed a lot of spirit and put up a fair fight. And for a while in the third set when he had Federer 1 set all and 0-40 down, it looked like this might go down to the wire. But Federer has this aura of invincibility about him. You just know he's not going to let this match go on for too long, much less lose it. You just know its only a matter of time before he elevates his game. And elevate, he did! For the next 20 or so minutes, Roddick did'nt know what hit him. Federer moved to the next plane of existence and forgot to inform Roddick about it.

Ahhh! The pure joy of watching a perfect tennis player... In your mind, you see your man approach the shot. With your camera view, you think you know where he needs to hit it to turn it into a winner. And those few times when you are right and when you see Federer hit that shot better than you had imagined it, you let out a slight gasp, hold your breath and stare bewildered at the screen.

He'll probably go on to be come the greatest tennis player of all time. He'll probably beat the record for most number of grand slams held by Sampras. But to me, all this is besides the point. When I watch Sachin Tendulkar, I'm not thinking about the runs and records he's amassed. I am only interested in the moment. When he rises up on his toes and punches a perfect outswinger through the cover, the feeling is hard to describe. That's genius. And Roger Federer, to me, is a genius. The one that comes along once in a generation. And watching him is pure entertainment and elevation from reality. A whiff of the impossible in our everyday mediocre lives.

One of the best articles about sports I've read a long time is this one by David Foster Wallace.
I leave you with an interesting excerpt:

It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.”

1 Comments:

Blogger WestEnder said...

I remember the first time I saw Federer play. He was 18, I think, and it was an early round of the U.S. Open. I was watching at my parents' home and I called in my dad to take a look at this guy.

"He plays like Sampras," I said, referring to his artistic (rather than power) game. We were Sampras fans and-- like many tennis fans-- lamented the fact that Sampras was the last of a dying breed.

Federer played beautifully. Take a good look, I told my dad, because I doubt you'll ever see him again. There's no room in tennis for this kind of game anymore.

I couldn't have been more wrong, and I couldn't be more pleased that I was.

I recorded the U.S. Open final and I'll probably watch it again this week just to confirm that it was as amazing as I thought it was. He's unbelievable.

9/11/06, 3:49 PM  

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