Most of the top male players today rely on brute power and ferocious topspin, camping behind the baseline and whacking the ball as hard as they can, metronomically, until one of them makes an error or hits a short ball that the other can put away. His timing was off, he was making a lot of unforced forehand errors, and, more troubling still, he played tentatively on crucial points. His serve, the most consistently deadly weapon in his glittering arsenal, kept letting him down. I went to Miami in March, to see him play in the Sony Ericsson Open, and his game there was nowhere near its upper level. A lung infection disrupted his practice schedule this spring, and he lost in the early rounds of three non-major tournaments. Since then, however, Federer anguish has been building up again. Federer, who doesn’t believe in false modesty, said later that in Australia he had “played some of the best tennis of my life.” John McEnroe, Sampras, and other tennis deities joined the ecstatic chorus hailing Federer as the greatest player of all time, and he went on to win his sixteenth major, at the Australian Open, early this year, dominating Andy Murray in the finals. Open, and the Australian Open), and went on to capture his sixth Wimbledon, breaking Pete Sampras’s record of fourteen majors. But then, in a brilliant reversal, Federer won last year’s French Open, the only one of the four major, or grand-slam, titles he lacked (the others are Wimbledon, the U.S. It looked like the end of the Federer era. Three months later, when Federer was losing to Novak Djokovic in Miami, he smashed his racquet-something that has rarely happened since his tempestuous career as a junior player. Open that September, as usual, Nadal beat him the following January in the finals of the 2009 Australian Open, and, in a public demonstration of the personal bond between them, offered an awkwardly consoling hug when the loser couldn’t hold back his tears after the match. His archrival Rafael Nadal, who is five years younger, had demolished him in three sets at that year’s French Open, and then broken Federer’s run of five consecutive Wimbledon championships in a five-set thriller that is regularly cited as the greatest match ever played on Centre Court. Two years ago, when Federer was twenty-six and struggling with mononucleosis and chronic back pain, there was much anxious talk about his decline. “I can’t watch when he’s losing,” a friend of mine confessed the other day, and then added, touchingly, “I go and clean the kitchen.” Then I found out that others had similar reactions. I used to be ashamed of my own agonized cries and writhings, alone in front of the TV set at home, when he mishit a ball or sent a game-clinching overhead wide of the line. Some people are so enthralled by the way Roger Federer plays tennis that they can hardly bear to see him lose. ![]() At twenty-eight, Federer is going for a record seventeenth grand-slam title.
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