Two days before his emotional farewell at the Laver Cup, Roger Federer was asked how he would fill his time once the final ball of his professional career had been struck. His first thought ran to browsing through the tributes compiled in his honour.
“What I’m going to do next is I want to read a lot of what maybe [journalists] have written, and a lot of TV stuff,” said Federer. “I haven’t seen stuff that has been produced and put together for me.”
Much of what he encounters will be familiar enough. Federer’s stylistic elegance and the flowing grace of his movement have long encouraged a certain kind of analysis. When the Swiss won his first grand slam title at Wimbledon in 2003, the world’s press spoke with one voice, hailing him as a player with “an artist’s touch on a tennis court” (New York Times) who had “composed a masterpiece” (Washington Post). He was, by universal assent, a man able to use his racket “as a brush”, painting “pictures of a hue that few others can reproduce” (Guardian).
Portraits of the young man as an artist set a tone that was to alter little in the years ahead. Following Federer’s retirement announcement, he was described as “an art installation in human form” who “bequeathed a museum’s worth of masterpieces” (Telegraph), a “Nuryev in shorts” who belonged in a pantheon “alongside names such as Mozart and Joyce” (Times of London).
The qualities that have triggered this reflexive grasping for bombastic metaphor require little explanation. The bewitching aesthetics of Federer’s game are undeniable. At the same time, it was clearly not only Federer’s opponents who fell under his spell. In the early years of his career, he was routinely characterised as a talented underachiever (perhaps most memorably by Jon Wertheim, the Strokes of Genius author, who quipped of the Swiss in what he later described as a “snarky” ballad: “If you want to win a wager, Bet against me in a major”). But once Federer had a first grand slam title, observers felt able to wax lyrical with impunity. Almost overnight, his portrayal as an artist became the most overused motif in sports writing.
Unsurprisingly, little has changed since. How could it? Federer was only 21 years old when he won the first of his eight Wimbledon crowns. Those who characterised him as a latter-day Leonardo da Vinci after just one grand slam victory had already set the bar as high as it could go. There was plenty of mileage left in the Federer story, but what superlatives would be left to chronicle the tale?
The answer, alas, was provided by the late American author David Foster Wallace, whose famous 2006 essay Federer Both Flesh and Not – first published in the New York Times as Roger Federer as Religious Experience – argued that Federer’s talents seemed to transcend the physical and mental laws governing mere mortals.
Wallace contended that, just as Michael Jordan seemed to jump higher and hang in the air longer than gravity should allow, or Muhammad Ali could “float” across the ring and land a flurry of blows at preternatural speed, so Federer’s exceptional movement and coordination – his “occult anticipation”, court sense, mastery of spin and speed, and (more contentiously) ability to fashion the outcome of a point several shots in advance – enabled him to slow down time itself, giving him a split second longer to hit the ball than his rivals. You could anatomise Federer’s qualities as a player until you were blue in the face, said Wallace, but “none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play”.
Wallace was alive to the dangers of this thesis. Describing how a bus driver had spoken of watching Federer as a “bloody near-religious experience”, the author acknowledged the temptation “to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to” when confronted by those moments when the Swiss produces a moment of jaw-dropping brilliance. Yet he maintained that merely describing these “Federer moments” does scant justice to “the beauty and genius of his game”. “You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it,” argued Wallace, “to try to define it in terms of what it is not.”
Wallace, a gifted and influential writer, was taken at his word. Federer became “the physical manifestation of some Platonic ideal of truth, of beauty”, as William Skidelsky put it; a player who “sends the ball streaming to the opposite baseline like lightning from the fingertips of Zeus” (Washington Post), “like some classical Greek or Roman half-god/half-statesman (think Pericles, Cicero, Augustus)” (News & Observer).
As Federer flicks through the paeans composed in his honour, a Swiss centime for his thoughts would be worth the investment. In a career spanning 24 years, Federer won 1,251 of his 1,526 professional matches. Not one of those opponents was beaten because his strokes looked pretty. If that were the case, image really would be everything, to borrow a phrase once beloved of Federer’s former clothing sponsor. But winning is a matter of substance, not style – and Federer, like all great champions, and for all his elan, was never averse to digging in, to finding a way, to doing what had to be done with whatever he had at his disposal on any given day.
There was little by way of Platonic idealism about the way Federer fumbled and shanked his way to a five-set win over Colombia’s Alejandro Falla at Wimbledon in 2010, having trailed by two sets to love. There was plenty of defiance, though, plenty of stubbornness and courage and steely resolve. Just as there was when he survived match points against Gaël Monfils in the US Open quarter-finals of 2014, a feat of escapology he would repeat against Marin Cilic at Wimbledon two years later and, most remarkably of all, against Tennys Sandrgren in the Australian Open quarter-finals of 2020, when he stood within a point of defeat no fewer than seven times.
That win over Sandgren – which came after a most ungodly 56 unforced errors, and a less-than-statesmanlike warning for an audible obscenity – marked one of 22 occasions on which Federer fought back from match point down. He also rebounded from two sets to love down 10 times, an open-era record he shares with Andy Murray, Boris Becker and Aaron Krickstein.
These numbers rarely receive mention. Yet, without the grit and resilience on which they were built, the more familiar statistics – 103 titles including 20 majors, 237 consecutive weeks at No 1 – would look very different. Not least because Federer would never have completed the career grand slam, as he did at Roland Garros in 2009 after trailing Tommy Haas by two sets to love in the fourth round. Federer, who faced a third-set break point that day that would have left Haas serving for the match, has described the off-forehand he struck to avert catastrophe as the most important shot of his career. Yet it was no more prominent in the video montages composed in his honour than any of those 22 match points he survived. Brief and brutal, it lacked the required aesthetic allure.
Wallace must bear some responsibility in all this, for the more Federer was described in terms of what he was not, the further we drifted from an appreciation of what he was – and, crucially, what he eventually became. Yet Wallace died in September 2008, and did not witness Federer’s evolution as a player. He never saw the earthier qualities – the bloody-mindedness, the gumption, the ability to dig in – that underpinned Federer’s longevity. Nor did he witness the humility with which the Swiss acknowledged his inevitable physical decline, or the intelligence with which he addressed it by adding new dimensions to his game. The adoption of a more aggressive style, epitomised by the SABR (Sneak Attack by Roger), essentially a half-volley return of serve. The switch to a larger racket that added fresh potency to his service and topspin backhand. The addition to his team of Stefan Edberg, a past master of the attacking arts, and later of Ivan Ljubicic, who encouraged refinements to the blueprint laid down by the Swede. The late-career success these various changes yielded, most notably in the form of two more Australian Opens, another Wimbledon, and six wins from his final seven matches against his old rival Nadal.
We can only guess at what Wallace would have made of Federer’s reinvention, but it seems reasonable to suppose that his perception would have shifted to accommodate the more prosaic layers of Federer’s brilliance. What we are left with, however, is an eloquent but partial account of Federer at his peak. And that would be fine, were it not for the hugely influential nature of Wallace’s essay. The author took the idea of Federer as an artist to the nth degree, to the point where his words became a subliminal influence on almost everything that has been written and uttered about Federer since. Challenge any disciple of Federer on the idea that his gifts bear comparison with history’s greatest creative masters, press them hard enough, and eventually their case will fall back, directly or indirectly, on arguments articulated in their most persuasive form by Wallace.
The difficulty in all this is that, if Federer is primarily viewed through the lens of a piece written in 2006, with limited knowledge of his career, then we keep him frozen in time. And if we only embrace that version of Federer, if we remember him purely as the guy who was almost unbeatable for three glorious seasons between 2004 and 2006, when he won three of the four majors for three years in a row, then we acknowledge only a fraction of his achievement.
For if the first decade of Federer’s career was about the realisation of gifts that elevated him into a realm where only Nadal could initially follow, the second was about the realisation that even a slightly diminished version of that perfection was good enough to keep pace with the world’s best. But we have become stuck in that early period, appreciating the first phase of Federer’s journey without acknowledging the things he did to keep winning when the old magic no longer came quite so easily.
Asked about Wallace’s essay at Wimbledon in 2009, Federer described it as “fantastic”, adding that it was “completely different to what I’ve read in the past about me”. Thirteen years on, however, it is clear he would also like to be remembered for more than just his virtuosity. Federer has often spoken of his longevity as the achievement in which he takes most pride, and he reiterated this view at the Laver Cup, where he spoke of his place alongside other enduring greats like Michael Schumacher and Tiger Woods as having “special meaning” to him. Tellingly, the 41-year-old also underlined how much his durability owed to the more warrior-like qualities that those in thrall to his artistry, often eager to downplay any similarities with Nadal, have deliberately tended to underemphasise.
“People won’t talk about that, [but] that’s fun,” said Federer. “They will talk about the other things, which I’m very happy and very proud of as well. But you need everything, especially grit and fight and all that toughness to come through and stay at the top for as long as I did. I think it’s logical. It’s not gifted or handed to you just to have that.
“For some of the players, it’s maybe easier to have that. It’s like more ingrained in their DNA. I feel like I had to go and find it and take care of it, which maybe is harder in my position. Me, I was more lucky to [be] gifted with racket head speed or that stuff. So, yes, I’m proud of how far I have come, because I know that this was something I really struggled with early on.
“I was criticised a lot, heavily maybe sometimes even, fairly or unfairly, whatever it is, why wouldn’t I fight more when losing? Because they thought [that], when I lost, I didn’t give it all I had, even though I care probably more than most players. So I didn’t quite understand what that meant. Do I have to grunt, do I have to sweat more, shout more, be more aggressive towards my opponents? What is it? It’s not me. I’m not like that. That’s not my personality.”
This inability to see the real Federer owed much to the way he made everything look effortless, an illusion at odds with the more warrior-like physical and mental attributes that kept him at the top of the game for so long. It was often said Federer did not break sweat, a legend that should be treated about as seriously as claims that Bjorn Borg had a resting heart rate of 35 beats a minute. The Swiss played a combined total of 1,749 singles and doubles matches without ever retiring injured, something no professional player achieves without putting in the hard yards to build a body fit for purpose.
For all the hyperbole, Federer’s career was not simply a prolonged exhibition of silken skills and untrammelled excellence. The beauty of his strokes was the product of endless endeavour on the practice court. If he seemed to float, it was down to the countless hours he devoted to his fitness and movement patterns with Pierre Paganini, the cerebral Swiss conditioning coach with whom he worked for 22 years.
“I think we underestimate all the work Roger does, and it’s a beautiful problem he has,” Paganini once said. “We underestimate it because when we see Roger play, we see the artist who expresses himself. We forget almost that he has to work to get there, like watching the ballet dancer: you see the beauty, but you forget the work behind it. You have to work very, very hard to be that beautiful a dancer.”
Glimpses of that diligence were rare, but one came during a fourth-round win over Roberto Bautista Agut at Wimbledon in 2015. As his opponent received treatment on an ankle injury, Federer kept himself limber by bouncing on the spot for a few seconds and performing some hip flexor stretches. With any other player, the moment would barely have registered; with Federer, the effect was almost startling. Not because one imagined he had no truck with such mundanities, but because it offered a rare gesture towards the graft behind the grace. This too was a “Federer moment”, albeit one of a very different nature to those described by Wallace and his emulators.
Perhaps, then, Wallace’s disquisition has a wider and more enduring resonance after all. For Federer never stopped leaving us slack-jawed. It was simply that, over the years, the nature of our admiration shifted. We continued to marvel at the beauty of his game and the magnitude of his achievements – of course we did – but, as the prodigy became a man, Federer gave us reasons to appreciate him beyond the court. With his respect for his rivals. His philanthropy. His sportsmanship and dedication to his family. His obvious love for the game, which made him such an outstanding ambassador. And, above all perhaps, the humility that characterised the second half of his career.
The last of these qualities was laid painfully bare in the immediate aftermath of his Laver Cup swansong – particularly when, no longer able to find words, he thanked the crowd for the umpteenth time and performed a kind of awkward quarter-bow. In that instant, hands clasped in front of him, tears flowing freely, no longer the racket-wielding colossus of old, Federer offered an abiding image of his diffidence and humanity.
It was a Federer moment as compelling as any.