In defence of Roger Federer

By all accounts, Rafael Nadal’s 6-1, 6-3 victory over Roger Federer in yesterday’s Rome final was as anticlimactic as a title match could get. Nadal was his usual relentlessly probing self and Federer was well below his best; normally, that’s a combination that can only end in a Nadal victory. But when you’re talking about Nadal and clay, everything gets magnified to monstrous proportions, and a victory doesn’t remain just a victory any more; it gets heightened to the level of a wipe-the-floor-with-the-opponent demolition job. As derisive as that may sound though, it is not the most unflattering thing that was said about Federer’s performance yesterday. The man may have fought off the rust and reached the final of a Masters 1000 tournament on his worst surface despite being well past his peak, but descriptions of his showing ranged from ‘embarrassing’ and ‘cringe-worthy’ to ‘shameful’ and ‘junior-level’.

Do we really love kicking a player when he’s down that much? Or do we reserve that kind of gleeful condescension only for the failures of the most celebrated of our champions? When Nadal seemed on the verge of inflicting a double breadstick (that’s a 6-1, 6-1 victory, for the uninitiated) on Federer as he served at 6-1, 5-1, even the most die-hard of Federer fans started hurling abuses at their idol. The Swiss did manage to salvage a bit of standing room as he broke serve for the first time in the match and then held his own serve to halve the deficit, but by then the damage had already been done. The legend had been brought down to his knees, and the tennis world, shocked as it was, let out its wrath in full force.

The question here is not whether Federer deserves that kind of treatment or not. The man is 31 years old, after all; for a tennis player, that is roughly the equivalent of the age at which you are sent to a ‘home’ in the real world. To put things in perspective, here are a few fun facts: John McEnroe failed to reach a Slam final after turning 26; Jimmy Connors, who is often held up as a symbol of longevity, won just 2 Slams after turning 30; Pete Sampras, the consensus lifetime member of the ‘Greatest of All Time’ club, stumbled about in the wilderness for two whole years without a title between the ages of 29 and 31, before finally attaining salvation with that sensational US Open triumph in 2002.

There is very little precedent for a tennis champion to keep hauling in the titles after crossing the 30-year barrier. There have been exceptions in the form of Andre Agassi and Serena Williams, but those two are precisely that: exceptions. The norm for a tennis player is to fade away after crossing the age of 28 or 29, no matter how great a champion he or she may be; anything to the contrary is singularly belief-defying, almost the stuff of folklore.

Advancing age must likely be even harsher for a player like Federer, for two reasons. For one thing, he has achieved more success than any man in this history of the game, so even a tiny fall from the lofty heights of his heyday must feel that much more difficult to bear. For another, his game relies so heavily on timing and anticipation – things that are the first to decline as you grow older – that even a slight slowing down of his reflexes must severely cripple his on-court abilities. Federer’s recent results bear testimony to his fast-dwindling sense of timing; his return of serve has been consistently sub-par lately, and the manner in which his forehand and backhand take turns to go AWOL makes for quite a spectacle.

Yet Federer keeps plugging away, still firmly holding a place in the top 5, undeterred by his age or exhaustion, and motivated solely by his love for the game; a love that seems destined to burn bright till the end of time. And what does he get for that? Brickbats and calls for retirement.

The scoreline of yesterday’s match, more than the result itself, seemed to have really rankled the lovers of ‘beautiful tennis’, who couldn’t stop themselves from vehemently bemoaning the shamefulness of Federer’s supposed lack of fight. But what was lost amid all the frothing-at-the-mouth indignation is that expecting Federer to keep producing beautiful tennis day-in and day-out, the way he did in the ‘good old days’, is almost akin to expecting Julie Andrews to recreate her Sound of Music magic today. If our expectations are too high, it’s our fault, not Federer’s.

Another thing that is often overlooked after a particularly one-sided Federer loss is that the apparent lack of fight may actually be nothing but the stubborn refusal of a man to sacrifice his chances of winning for the sake of a ‘respectable’ score. Federer knows that he can’t hang with the big dogs from the baseline any more; grinding out a win from the back of the court is as much a thing of the past for him as capturing three Slams in a year. So he sticks to what he knows best: going for his shots, even on the days that they keep missing the lines by a mile. So what if he ends up losing by a lopsided score? At least he gives himself a chance to win.

The question, as I said earlier, is not whether Federer deserves the criticism that’s been coming his way all of this year. The question is whether we deserve to be entertained by a practitioner of the game as passionate as Federer. Tennis is not a team game; by continuing to chug along, Federer isn’t harming anybody’s chances of success except his own. Playing tennis, and playing it to the best of his ability, is all that he wants to do as his career winds down towards its inevitable end. And if we are too blinded to let him do that - either by our conceited admiration for his past glories or by our envy of his imperviousness to the accumulating losses – then we should be questioning ourselves, not Federer.

Everyone has off-days, even the greatest of athletes. And there is certainly no shame in being drubbed by Rafael Nadal on clay. Federer seems to have made his peace with that; it’s time that we did too.