The Fed

(Disclaimer: For those members of my readership who do not play or watch tennis, I will be straight up and say that this post is entirely on the subject of tennis. That being said, I will attempt to the best of my ability to explain all of the tennis concepts so that you can understand them too.)

World, meet Roger Federer. Roger is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, tennis players of all time. In his career, he has broken most of the meaningful records in tennis: (Grand slams won, time spent at #1 in the world, and number of consecutive finals reached in major tournaments, just to name a few).

I love him.

By now, you know what’s coming: this is unusual. That sentence above just made many people respect my opinions less, made a few visibly wince, and might have caused some genuine anger in any die-hard tennis fans in my audience. (By the way, if you are out there, feel free to leave a comment. At this point, I’ll accept hate comments, as long as it’s a comment.)  Here is my concession to these people: I completely understand why one would not like Roger Federer. Society teaches us to love the underdogs, and hate those who win consistently, which group will be hereafter referred to as “over-dogs” for lack of a better word. I condone this is in every case except when one has a personal tie to the team. So Alabama grads can be respected if they support Alabama, but it is perfectly acceptable for everyone else to hope that Nick Saban loses every football game he coaches for the rest of his life. That’s just how it works.

                Roger Federer, up until recently, has been the top dog of tennis for an incredible amount of time. It’s unreal how long he was the dominant force in men’s tennis—it is extremely safe to say that he is the prime case of an over-dog. Yet I make an exception for him from my general rule of “rooting against the favorites”.  Why?

                The reason that I cannot bring myself to do anything but admire and cheer for “The Fed” is that he has done something that no other over-dog that I know of has managed to do: he transformed an athletic competition into something completely different. Federer is more than just a tennis player. When Federer steps onto a tennis court, he doesn’t merely play tennis; he transcends the game, turning an athletic competition into something beautiful. Federer doesn’t compete with his opponent to see who is superior at the sport. His tennis is more art than sport, a showcase instead of a battle. It is for the pure beauty of Roger Federer’s tennis that makes him different than any other over-dog.

                Yet this “artistry over competitor” idea by itself is just a cop-out. It’s an ambiguous idea, and thus is really up to the observer. An explanation is necessary: what is it that makes Federer an artist? The answer is one simple word, which in terms of tennis, Federer has re-defined: control.

Sports in general are by definition, chaos. Throwing athletes into an arena with a ball and some rules, then tell them to figure out who is better is never going to end up with a result that is calm. Yet Federer has brought a peculiar order to the tennis court, due to his complete control of nearly everything on the tennis court. He controls the ball. He controls his own emotions. He controls the flow of the match. Sometimes, from the way events go his way it seems as if he even has control of opponents’ minds.

So you say, “You’re still talking in the abstract Aaron. Show me this in real terms.” I’d be happy to. In the last Australian Open, Federer played the up-and-coming Australian hometown favorite, Bernard Tomic, in the fourth round. Before the match, tennis analysts and experts were saying that it could be a match that marked the changing of an era, as Roger faded from the scene, and Tomic began his rise. The following pictures were taken from a point in that match.

(A little aside: The video for this can be found here, if you can stand the strange Spanish commentary.)

A little background: Up to this point, the two have hit a couple of shots to each other, and Federer has hit a drop shot and advanced up to the net. Even with my idolization of Federer, I can recognize that this was not a good shot at all. (Federer is in the red shirt, Tomic in white)

 

       

Tomic easily reaches it and now has a great opportunity. There is a reason why you don’t often see tennis players standing in the middle of the court where Federer is now: it’s because it gives your opponent a chance to hit a shot that will bounce at your feet. It’s really hard to get control a ball that is hit at your feet. This situation is especially bad for Federer since both players are relatively close to the net, and he will not get a lot of reaction time to whatever Tomic hits his way. Regardless of these mistakes, Federer plays it smart and stays in the middle of the court, closing off the center but surrendering both sidelines for Tomic to take. At this moment, it looks as if Federer is going to try to make Tomic hit close to either sideline, and hope that Tomic overplays the ball and hits it wide.

Tomic plays the ball very well. His shot lands at Roger’s feet, and he has not tried to do too much with the ball, yet he still places it right up next to the left sideline. Traditional tennis doctrine, or at least what I was taught, is to come in behind the ball’s path when one hits an approach shot, as Tomic has just done. In this case however, Tomic correctly realizes that at times, traditional tennis doctrine is a bunch of bologna. The net is lowest in the center, and thus takes the least amount of control to hit over. Given the sticky situation he’s just put Federer in, Tomic moves towards the center of the court to cut off the easiest option of Federer’s. If the ball somehow manages to get back, he’ll be in the prime position to slam it over to the right sideline, way out of Federer’s reach. The only way to improve Tomic’s execution here would be to have hit the ball a couple of inches closer to the left sideline to make the shot absolutely perfect, but otherwise he has just made a flawless play. After all, not every shot in a tennis match hits the perfect corners, and so for all intents and purposes, Tomic has just hit the best shot he could have.

                Now to Federer’s side of the court. It is a testament to his quickness that he even has a shot of hitting this ball at all. I, I’m pretty sure most of the tennis players I’ve seen, wouldn’t have been able to do anything other than hit a big whiff of air in this situation. Of course, Federer is a professional, and I’m not, and so maybe it isn’t that unusual that he gets to this ball. This shot is on Federer’s backhand side, which for most tennis players is the harder side to hit off of, for the simple reason that swinging your arm and rotating your wrist forward is more natural than arm-swinging and wrist-rotating backwards. (Try it right now—see what I mean?). The fact that this ball is right at Federer’s feet, (depth-wise) combined with the fact that it is at the extreme limits of his reach, and to his backhand side, all combine to make this one incredibly difficult shot to hit. Like I said, most tennis players wouldn’t even get to it. A fair number of professional players could get a racket on the ball, but only to hit the ball into the net. Few are the people in this world who could get this ball back into play. Those people would simply pray for Tomic to make a mistake because they would have to hit the ball back to the middle of the court, right where he is patiently waiting for the opportunity to cream the ball back. Federer doesn’t fall into any of these groups.  

Look at this beauty. Federer gets to the ball, hits it, and puts in back in play, not up the middle where the net is lower and the shot is easier, but he lofts it high enough to clear the net by the left sideline. Whether it can still land inbounds after being hit so high is yet to be seen. Tomic scrambles to get to the ball…

                …Only to watch in amazement as Federer’s shot literally lands on the intersection between the baseline and the sideline. The perfect shot. Tomic didn’t even get a chance to swing his racket.

                Let’s take a review of this point for a second: Federer makes a pretty costly mistake. Tomic capitalizes nearly perfectly on that mistake, and it does not make one little bit of difference in the end result. Federer does the near-impossible and hits the perfect winner from a terrible situation. In contrast to the other athletes of this day, who can’t tie their shoes correctly without showing off, Federer doesn’t go crazy after this shot.

I kid you not, this was his reaction. He put his head down! He almost looks depressed in this shot, what with his lowered gaze and slumped shoulders. He just hit an incredible shot that 99% of all tennis players could spend their lives practicing and would never quite replicate. This picture is utter control of emotion. Not even a fist pump escapes Federer’s emotionless on-court persona. He’s long since realized emotion only clouds his game, and so he takes emotion entirely off the court, even after such a dramatic winner.

To me, that is total control. During this point, he has taken a terrible situation and turned it to his advantage by his control of his racket, the ball, and his emotions. This play speaks for itself—it’s simply beautiful. Masterful, even.

That’s artistry. That’s Roger Federer.