The great disappointment of this year’s Wimbledon was not that we were denied another classic championship match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Rather, it was watching Federer behave badly.

Sportsmanship is still alive and well in the world of professional tennis. A trip to the champion’s podium comes with certain responsibilities: among them, congratulating one’s opponent for having a great tournament.

As strange as may sound in our winner-take-all culture, these congratulations are rarely forced. Even if the English is occasionally mangled, the players’ hearts are in the right place. Most of them are happy to acknowledge the razor-thin margin that separates the winner from the loser in a tennis match played at the highest level.

Unless the match was a blowout, in which case there’s all the more reason for the winner to be gracious.

One prominent exception to this gallantry is an ugly strain of win-at-all-costs egotism, exemplified by Serena and Venus Williams, great champions in their own right, who scarcely seem to notice their opponents at all. In the world of the Williams sisters, if they win, it’s because they keep their focus, believe in themselves, and execute their game plan. If they lose, it’s because conditions are unfavorable for their style of play, or they have a nagging injury, or simply aren’t on their A-game.

Not because they’re outplayed.

Roger Federer’s thoughtful and supportive comments about other players have been a reliable antidote to this selfish attitude over the years.

Of course, he’s been one of the most dominant players that tennis — or any modern sport — has ever known. So it hasn’t exactly been torture for him to be thoughtful and supportive. Unlike poor Andy Roddick, who played runner-up to Federer’s champion in three agonizing Wimbledon finals, but who nevertheless had the wherewithal to praise Federer’s historic achievement, even as he fought back the tears.

But last week, after Federer was dismissed in the Wimbledon quarterfinals —gasp! — by the towering Czech Tomas Berdych, we heard all kinds of excuses. “I couldn’t play the way I wanted to play,” Federer said petulantly. “You know, I am struggling with a little bit of a leg and back issue.”

The fact that he was playing injured was news to Berdych, who was philosophical about Federer’s explanation. “I don’t know if he is just looking for some excuses after the match or something like that,” Berdych said.

Federer certainly didn’t look like he was playing hurt in the second set of the match, which he took 6-3. In fact, he looked like his brilliant old self, floating effortlessly around the court, wielding his racket like the deadly saber that it is.

But the other three sets were won decisively by Berdych, who took away Federer’s time with monster serves and gargantuan ground strokes. Federer was simply blasted off the court, a strategy that a new generation of players has been using against him with greater and greater success as he ages.

Federer is now 29 years old, which makes him an old man in the world of professional tennis. The days when he could dream of a Grand Slam, winning all four major tournaments in the same year, are probably behind him.

It’s a difficult time for him, and a poignant one for his fans. We watched him grow out of his impetuous early years, eventually living up to his promise as Wimbledon’s Junior Champion in 1998. In 2001, we saw him slay the then-king of Wimbledon, Pete Sampras, in the fourth round, when Sampras himself was a grand old man of 29.

We saw him blossom from “Roger Federer, the precocious Swiss player,” into “Federer,” or “Roger,” or simply “Fed,” a single name being enough — like “Tiger” —  to identify perhaps the greatest player in the history of the game.

Astonishingly, he seemed to be a nice guy, with a great girlfriend — now his wife — and unbelievable language skills. You have to hand it to a man who is more articulate about his sport in a foreign language, English, than virtually any native speaker.

I spent some time today with my favorite piece of writing about Federer, an article in the August 20, 2006 issue of the New York Times entitled “Federer as Religious Experience,” written by the novelist David Foster Wallace.

I’m not a big fan of Wallace’s fiction, which includes the blockbuster novel, Infinite Jest. But the Federer article achieves a kind of journalistic perfection. I highly recommend searching it out on the New York Times website.

Wallace, who was an accomplished junior tennis player himself, analyzes Federer’s game with an insider’s eye and a novelist’s descriptive powers. His conclusion: that Federer represented a new way forward for the sport, which had been locked in an era of power hitters content to pound it out from the baseline.

The article was written four years ago, when Federer was in full flight and seemingly invincible.

Let’s hope his descent from the heavens goes smoother than it did last week.

 

 

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 08 July 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com