Beautiful, magical and sinister... Roger Federer has his rivals under a spell

The Harry Potter of tennis destroys his opponents with subtlety and status
Wizard: Roger Federer
Getty Images
Simon Barnes14 July 2017

In 2003, a group of former tennis players decided that enough was enough.

The game was being destroyed before their eyes. Where was beauty, where was subtlety, where was touch, where was accuracy, where was the perfection and joy that great tennis can bring? It was all being destroyed by racket technology: reducing the game to biffing and banging and grunting. It was time to make a stand for all that we hold true and sacred.

Wrong year, guys.

It was also the year of the fifth Harry Potter book, HP and the Order of the Phoenix. It was published on the Saturday before Wimbledon in massive numbers and it seemed that the whole world was reading about Harry defeating evil and getting his first kiss. Made us all young again.

We had noticed him before, of course we did, he had beaten Pete Sampras two years earlier, but we never quite expected this. Here was the boy wizard Roger Federer, and never mind the usual racket manufacturers: it was at once clear that Federer’s racket was made by Ollivanders in Diagon Alley, the shop where Harry bought his wand.

It was not that Federer made tennis as lovely as it used to be. He made it lovelier than it had ever been before. Not that loveliness was the goal he was seeking: loveliness was just the method he used to win tennis matches.

Over the years we had got used to loveliness of the Henri Leconte kind: the perfect set, sometimes even the perfect match, but it never adds up into anything of substance. The perfect championship is always beyond Leconte and his like. Then came Federer who played with the loveliness that destroyed.

He won Wimbledon that year, and it was gorgeousness made flesh, as Little Alex says in A Clockwork Orange, and Federer’s loveliness was as sinister to his opponents as it was wonderful to those who merely watched. Inevitably he became world No 1 — and no one has played the role better.

He used his status like a club, he used his serenity like a knife and opponent after opponent was destroyed by the calm, measured perfection of his play. He was at the top of the rankings for 237 consecutive weeks. Then he slipped.

Here is the next great thing about Federer: he did not give up. In 1983 Bjorn Borg gave up at the age of 26, burned out, exhausted, and unable to cope with tennis now John McEnroe had the upper hand. His life’s work was done, nothing will ever be as good again, time to go and have some fun.

But Federer stayed. He learned to cope with not being the inevitable champion. He loved the struggle, he loved the rivalries, he loved the striving, he loved the failing and the succeeding; above all he loved the damn game. He loved playing that whiplash forehand, he loved playing that rolled single-handed backhand, he loved to construct a rally, he loved turning defence into attack in a moment of inspiration and audacity. He still picked up grand slam titles here and there, of course. In 2012 he won Wimbledon for the seventh time, beating Andy Murray in the final: you will remember Andy’s tears, and you will also remember that pussy-cat smirk of Roger Victorious: the smile on the face of the Fed. That was his 17th slam.

Then he stopped winning them. Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Murray won most of the slams between them, and that went on for five long years. So here is the next great thing about Federer: he still did not give up. He still came out and played and gave everything - not that it ever looked like that, he was calm and elegant even in defeat. He took his beatings because he still loved the game.

Wimbledon 2017 - In pictures

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But he never lost his love of winning. It is an acquired taste, and it takes a lot of acquiring, if you seek the biggest prizes, but the idea of winning one more big one never left him. He was pretty much alone: everyone else has assumed it would never happen again. Five years is a pretty long old interval.

But Federer’s game has never been like other peoples. Extreme physical fitness is not necessary. He adapted his game to his advancing years, shortening the points. He stopped creating beautiful ballets of cut and thrust, and went for winners. Especially, he came to the net and volleyed: and the Federer volley, as a regular rather than occasional item, was inevitably as lovely as every other way he struck a ball - including patting the ball back to the ballboy.

And here is yet another great thing about Federer: he won another grand slam. Aged 35, he won the Australia Open this year. And smiled. It was surely a flash in the pan, a last moment of greatness, his 18th - will anyone else get close? - grand slam singles title.

One last great thing about Federer: as you may have noticed, he is in the semi-finals of Wimbledon. He was playing Tomas Berdych this afternoon for a place in the final: and no one is playing better at this championship. He is out there looking serene, playing the whiplash forehand, a backhand that seems to have acquired an added waspishness, while the volleys cut off point after point in their prime. Oh, and he is serving rather well: clean and certain as a scalpel.

In sport, we often live in the past: how wonderful he was in 2003, the boy-wizard with the world’s cleanest pony-tail. More often we live in the future: what will happen next and he could not, he really could not - could he?

But let us try to be like Roger and savour each point because there will not be that many more and we will never see another like him. But then this fine old philosophy slips: what? A 19th slam? In SW19? Come on,

Roger: make us young again…

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