Fatal attraction

The silliest thing I have read so far this year, or for many a year, is the suggestion that Roger Federer, very probably the greatest tennis player in the sport’s short open era history, is an underachiever. It is journalist and self-proclaimed Fedophile William Skidelsky’s contention, deep into his memoir of sporting obsession, Federer and Me , that Federer, like the cricketer Graeme Hick and snooker player Jimmy White (Skidelsky’s ridiculous examples not mine), “when the really big tests came, failed to live up to expectations.”

What tests? Whose expectations? My use of ‘open era’, when describing Federer as the greatest tennis player in history, is arguably too cautious. Only in 1968 did tennis become ‘open’, that is permit professionals to compete alongside amateurs for the most prestigious titles in the sport, the championships in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York. Since then, no player has been as successful as Federer. Perhaps, only Rod Laver — whose feat of winning the Grand Slam (all four majors in a single calendar year) twice, in 1962 before the open era, and in 1969, is unparalleled — has as strong an argument as Federer. Still, out of respect for the achievements of the likes of Pancho Gonzales and Lew Hoad, Bill Tilden and Donald Budge, I prefer to use ‘open era’ as a qualifier.

There is little doubt, though, that Federer is the open era’s most distinguished player: he has won more than Borg, Nadal and Sampras; he has been more consistent than Lendl; he has been the longest serving number one; he has played with more imagination and touch, creativity and brilliance, for more sustained spells than John McEnroe. If he is an underachiever, even accounting for the scale of his gifts, what does that make the rest of us? Those of us sitting on sofas watching, mouths stupidly open, as he hits a lob between his legs over a six-and-a-half-foot giant. At nearly 34, when most tennis players are either retired or nominal presences, Federer is still the second best player in the world and, at the time of writing, in the semifinals at Wimbledon.

But none of this, not the 17 majors, not the 302 weeks at number 1 (237 of them consecutive) not the 25 major finals (10 of them consecutive), is enough. Skidelsky, as becomes evident over the course of this arrestingly unhinged book, needs to think of Federer as a failure, needs to find a way to associate Federer with “pathos”. Skidelsky, despite a cosseted home counties childhood, is unhappy, unable to reconcile his love for sport with his desire to impress his father, a prominent academic and life peer. However hard William works to win a scholarship to Eton, be admitted to Oxford, get a respectable job, he feels trapped in his father’s admonitory shadow. What a consolation then that Roger Federer too should struggle, should fail to solve the problem posed by Nadal. It’s implausible, but a plangent account of life as a Federer fan makes for an implausible book.

Federer enters Skidelsky’s life at a stable point. Skidelsky had fallen out of love with tennis as it turned into a serving contest in the ’90s, titans hurling boulders at each other until Sampras won. Skidelsky had been a player of moderate promise as a boy but had given up the game in a pique, angered at being patronised as the “sporty” one in an intellectual family. Years of therapy, a job as a junior literary editor at an august weekly magazine, and a steady relationship help him relax enough to pick up tennis again as an adult. Inspired by victories over flabby, uncoordinated writers and publishers, he joins a tennis club, starts to watch the game and rediscovers Roger Federer.

Skidelsky only begins watching Federer in earnest in late 2006, on a trip to visit his brother in Shanghai. “I remember leaping off the sofa, dancing with joy,” writes Skidelsky, “my exclamations mingling with the utterances of the Chinese commentators.” He was having what David Foster Wallace famously called a “Federer moment”. Skidelsky owes a lot to ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’, Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile for the New York Times . It was, as the title suggests, an exercise in ecstatic appreciation. Federer was not the subject of the piece so much as its object, “a creature”, as Foster Wallace wrote, “whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.” The chapter on beauty and sport is Skidelsky’s paraphrase and gloss of Foster Wallace’s argument.

Very little in Federer and Me , released in the UK last month, in fact, is original. Even the insightful point about Federer’s forehand grip, a so-called modified eastern, being on the cusp of tradition and modernity, is gleaned from elsewhere. This is not to say that Skidelsky’s observations are without interest. He is good on the Romantic distinction between beauty and the sublime, the former’s cosy order and the latter’s capacity to evoke awe and terror. Federer’s game, Skidelsky accurately observes, is both beautiful and sublime. There is also a fine passage about a drop volley: “Such dramatic deceleration, apart from anything else, seemed to contravene the first law of thermodynamics (the one about energy never being created or destroyed but merely changing). What had Federer done with all that power?” Federer’s touch may be delicate, Skidelsky’s is anything but as he credits that volley with helping him recover from the sadness of an abortion: “I was returned to myself, to my life, to my girlfriend...” To ascribe such powers to Federer’s game is not just fanciful but disturbing.

I wanted to like this book. I’m the same age as Skidelsky; I was a literary editor at a weekly magazine; I play tennis for 90 minutes five or six mornings a week and have a one-handed backhand; I’m a Federer fan. But Skidelsky has nothing new to say. He shows no curiosity about Federer’s game beyond his own overwrought impressions. Skidelsky is enamoured of “the idea of something lost, an idyll that cannot be retrieved”. He picked the wrong player to support. If any human being still gambols in paradise, it is surely Roger Federer.

Shougat Dasguptais a freelance journalist

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