Federer Doesn't Give a Shit!

And That's OK!


"It's not the end of the world"

Although I was initially sad that my man Roger Federer lost last night's U.S. Open final to Juan Martin Del Potro after five mentally and physically draining sets (6-3, 6-7, 6-4, 6-7, 2-6,), upon reflection it made me appreciate the man and the athlete - and his accomplishments - even more. Federer made the finals of all four Grand Slams this year - for the unprecedented third time in his career! (2006, 2007, 2009) - and three of them went to five sets - five-set defeats at the Australian (to Nadal) and U.S. Open (to Del Potro) bookending the year, and a miraculous five-set tuff-it-out win over Andy Roddick (playing the Game of His Life) at Wimbledon being even more impressive to me than his French Open straight sets win over Robin Soderling (who in tennis terms became "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" for his upset dethroning of the King of Clay, Rafa Nadal) that gave him his career Grand Slam, broke his perennial run as Nadal's runnerup at Roland Garros, and reminded people once again that he was the Second Greatest Clay Court Player of his generation (a fact lost amidst all the "All-Time Greatest Player" talk). This was Roger's seventh consecutive Grand Slam final. He's appeared in a record 21 Grand Slam finals, winning 15 of them (but this was his first loss to someone not named Nadal). He had won 40 consecutive matches at Flushing Meadows. He had won 33 of his previous 34 Grand Slam matches. And he has made the final at 17 of the last 18 Grand Slam tournaments. And serving for the match at 5-4, 30-love, he was two points away from his 16th Slam.

He gave it his all, but at the end of the day maybe he just wasn't that hungry for it after all those accomplishments.

"Can't have them all," he said afterwards.

Federer's very competitive but even champions need their motivation recharged. I mean, even adult film star Johnny "Wadd" Holmes, after sleeping with over 1,000 women, must have reached a point where he found it hard to "erect the architecture of success" (if ya know what I mean, and I think ya do) at the sight of yet another nekkid babe. In other words, Federer's been there, done that (done it it all, in fact), and has no real hurtles to jump. As New Jersey Sports pointed out in its excellent "Grading the U.S. Open" review, "He's at a crossroads, really. There's no barriers left. He's conquered history and ruled the game for a while..." And let's face it, Roger's quip before the final that it would ne nice to win his first major as a Dad seemed a stretch even for him (the "First Dad To Win a Grand Slam" distinction isn't really a much coveted or sought-after goal on the men's tennis tour). Hardly a die-hard motivation, like beating Nadal at the French. But that's OK.

Tennis Superman Starting to Show He's All Too Human

Just as we get less tolerant as we age and let our true feelings be known (because we don't care what people think when we're running out of time and don't have anything to lose), Roger's starting to loosen up, show more emotion, show some human frailty, and let it all hang out - for better or worse. Witness him tossing a racket in a match earlier this year and then his heated expletive-not-deleted exchange with the chair umpire during the final when Juan Martin Del Potro was allowed to challenge a call after a lengthy period of time. Federer had already headed to his chair where, seated, he argued "I wasn't allowed to challenge after two seconds. The guy takes like 10 every time. Don't you have any rules?"

When the umpire told Federer to be quiet, the usually overly polite and gentlemanly champion took umbrage: Stop showing me the hand, OK? Don't tell me to be quiet, OK? When I want to talk I'll talk, all right...I don't give a shit what he said, OK? I just say he waited too long. Don't fucking tell me the rules. I was not allowed to challenge..."



Opening Up at the U.S. Open

I like it. It's controlled petulance and it makes it easier for us mere mortals to relate to The Living Legend. In this regard, perhaps only this regard, he is just like us. I'm actually finding the runner-up Federer to be a much more interesting and complex character than Roger the unassailable King. It may just keep him hungry instead of being merely sated once again, sitting at the head of the banquet table. Now he not only has Nadal chowing down at the fete, but now a giant of a giant-slayer in Del Potro (who also seems to have Nadal's number) - not to mention Andy Murray, Djokovic, and other would-be spoilers in the ever-competitive Top 10.

Back to New Jersey Sports' and their spot-on question of the hour about the man already called The Greatest Tennis Player Ever: "Can he keep himself motivated enough to maintain his place? The talent is there. But he needs to respond better when players punch him in the mouth. He rallied past Andy Roddick at Wimbledon, but couldn't conjure up the same spirit in the final against del Potro. Now that all the barriers are gone, will Federer keep his form up?"

So far, the form's there. But maybe there's just that little suggestion of, "Well, it's not so bad if I let this one slip away" lurking in deepest recesses of his will. Don't forget, back in August at the Montreal Masters, Roger inexplicably let a 5-1 third-set lead against Jo-Wilfried Tsongo slip away to lose his quarterfinal match 7-6, 1-6, 7-6. "I never should have allowed it," Roger said afterwards. "But it did happen."

We're all waiting to see what happens with Roger Federer from this point on. To see if he really doesn't give a shit, as he told that chair umpire. Or if he can rekindle the kind of competitive fire that saw him break down in tears after Nadal defeated him at this year's Australian Open final. Either way is OK, Roger; you've more than earned your place in tennis history. I'm just curious how this drama is going to play out.

Alas David Foster Wallace...

I Hardly Knew Ye (and That's My Loss)


The world lost a bright light in David Foster Wallace

I read the New York Times obit (by photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber) and appreciations yesterday about the apparent suicide of this apparent genius writer at age 46 and was fascinated. Not because he had suicidal tendencies - many authors and artists-in-general are clinically depressed (see William Styron, Hemingway, John Kennedy Toole, etc.). But when I read about how he was an avid tennis fan who was once a regionally-ranked junior tennis star, I was intrigued (being an avid tennis fan myself) - in the same way my only interest in seeing the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is to learn more about drummer Lars Ulrich's pre-musical career as a tennis player. So, working at a library, I decided to seek out his non-fiction works (since his most famous novel Infinite Jest runs over 1,000 pages and I have textbook AADD, I ruled out reading that book fast!)

One of the first things I found was his 2006 New York Times piece on Roger Federer, "Federer As Religious Experience." It was brilliant, the best appreciation of the Swiss master's skills I had ever read. In watching Federer play, Wallace saw the same kind of beauty Michelangelo realized in sculpting his David:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.

Further research led me to two of his non-fiction collections, Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2006) - which contained a piece about Tracy Austin and the "sports biography" - and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997), which had a superlative profile on Mike Joyce entitled "Tennis player Michael Joyce's professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, discipline, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness."

Now I've read every book ever written about tennis and I am here to attest that David Foster Wallace was the best writer on the subject I've ever encountered. He "got it" as only a handful of writers ever came close to "getting it" (e.g., John Feinstein in Hard Courts or Eliot Berry in Topspin). Or, in his own words:

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that's three-feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables - for example, a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent's own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he's sent to you are factored in. No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange - smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can only be done by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e., by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.

The physics behind the art of tennis

And it was an art that Wallace rightly concluded was best appreciated live, as "television doesn't really allow us to appreciate what real top-level players can do - how hard they're actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical artistry." (God knows I can appreciate that observation. Just this past weekend I was playing tennis on some nearby public courts when former Dark Side bass player Dave Jarkowski strolled in with his 15-year-old son Eric Jarkowski, and asked if I wanted to hit with Eric. I did, or rather, I tried to. Eric was the Baltimore City boys tennis champion last year - as a Freshman (!) - at Poly High School, and receiving his blazing forehand strokes was like seeing an asteroid hurtling toward me at supersonic speeds. Blink and you missed it. It took a half-dozen tries before I could return one measly ball over the net to him!)

I also have read just about every book written on the adult film industry (needless to say, I have divergent interests), so I was doubly pleased to read the opening essay, "Big Red Son," about the Annual AVN (Adult Video News) Awards at the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which was described as "the Apocalypse [taking] the form of a cocktail party.". It was a spot-on piece of reporting, Hunter S. Thompson with gravitas. Here's a sample:

The adult industry is vulgar...The industry's not only vulgar, it's predictably vulgar. All the cliches are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is a guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who's both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an Irony-Free Zone.

Irony-free vulgarity at the AVN Awards

Reading all the obits, I realize (all too late) that I must read his books which, thanks to an prodigious-to-the-point-of-exhaustive work ethic, are plentiful. As Sam Anderson wrote in New York magazine:

"He was the great enemy of word limits, proportion, and journalistic restraint. He aimed, in every single project, for the grand totalizing exhaustive gesture — whether it was a 1,000-page novel seeking to catalogue an entire culture (Infinite Jest) or a 100-page "experiential postcard" recounting a week on a cruise ship ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"). For Wallace, a thought could never actually, in good conscience, realistically, be finished — there was always one more reversal, one more qualifying clause, and an honest writer had to follow them out. Hence the famously never-ending sentences that spun off, even more famously, into never-ending footnotes. The black hole of his self-consciousness drew everything into it, even and especially self-consciousness itself. But that compulsion to be exhaustive was, apparently, exhausting."

It's ironic (and David Foster Wallace apparently hated Irony!) that it took a death to make me take notice of the man once considered by his peers to be America's greatest living author. Sign of the times?

Related Links:
Wikipedia
New York Times Obit (Bruce Weber)
"Exuberant Riffs On a Land Run Amok" (Michiko Kakutani)
"The Genius of David Foster Wallace and the Ugly Monster of Depression" (Baltimore Sun)
New York Magazine Obit (Sam Anderson)

The Greatest Wimbledon Final Ever?

Changing of the Guard: Roger hands over his bling...


...and settles for a first on grass: 2nd best.

Did you see it?

Yesterday, Roger Federer and and Rafael Nadal played tennis for 4 hours and 48 minutes on Wimbledon's Centre Court through wind, rain and near-darkness before a Federer forehand into the net finally ended his five-year reign as champion of the All England Club. Yes, after being down two sets to nil and twice facing match point, Federer lost to Nadal in near-darkness at 9:15 p.m. (it was the longest match in Wimbledon history - and that's not counting the three rain delays that prolonged the proceedings for close to seven hours) after five sets of tension-filled tennis of the highest quality. Or rather, to give the Spaniard his due - for he surely played brilliant tennis on this day - Nadal won, and deservedly so: 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (8-10), 9-7.


It's All Over Now: The devastating denouement

With the victory, Nadal became the first man since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to win Wimbledon and the French Open in the same season, ended Federer's 40-game win streak here, and ended Federer's grass-court win run at 65 matches. It also gave Nadal his fifth Grand Slam title, and first outside of his four French Open crowns earned on the clay courts of Roland Garros; Federer remains stuck at a dozen Grand Slam titles, two behind Peter Sampras' record 14 - a record which suddenly look to be relatively safe.

Three-time Wimbledon champion and TV commentator John McEnroe called it "the greatest match I've ever seen." And he should know, having played what many consider to be the greatest match prior to July 6, 2008: the 1980 final between Mac and Bjorn Borg that went 4 hours and 16 minutes (previously the longest Wimbledon match in history), which Borg won in the fifth set after losing an 18-16 tiebreaker in the fourth set - the match we seem to see every time there's a rain delay at Wimbledon. As McEnroe and fellow commentator Ted Robinson also observed, it's doubtful there was ever a final in which two opponents struck the ball so hard, so consistently, on virtually every shot. Listening to each volley was like hearing someone repeatedly smash a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The quality was of play was unbelievable. And it followed on the heels of an unexpectedly excellent final between the Williams sisters the day before, when Venus beat her sister Serena 6-4, 7-5 to win her fifth Wimbledon title.

I missed the first two sets (did Federer really blow a 4-1 lead in the second set?), but I caught the last three and as a viewing experience it was both agonizing and exhilarating. Agonizing in its nail-biting tension and exhilarating in the quality of play. As an emotional McEnroe put it, when he congratulated both players after the match, "As a tennis player I want to thank you for that match." The beauty of the game won on this day, for this was as good at it gets.

What a boost in the arm for the sport! As Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times wrote:

"Almost always, tennis is a niche sport, something watched by the general public if the garbage has been taken out and the ironing is done. Then, every so often, there comes a perfect storm. It happened Sunday, in the cathedral of the sport, Centre Court at Wimbledon, when typhoon Roger Federer met cyclone Rafael Nadal. Even for those who don’t know a backhand from a backbite, what transpired was mesmerizing...It doesn’t happen often, but it was a day when tennis stormed into the mainstream on the wings of two incredible players, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal... If tennis is lucky, the stuff that blew in may just stick around for a while."

And the quality of athletic play was matched by the quality of sportsmanship these two champions exhibited. As the Telegraph Uk reported,

"Every superlative imaginable has been deployed to describe the standard of tennis from the two men. But more striking even than their athleticism and skill was the way they played the game. How refreshing, then, that these two men, playing under great pressure for the highest prize available in their sport, were able to do so in a manner that did them both great credit. They both even agreed to read passages from Rudyard Kipling’s If for use during the anticipated interludes caused by the rain. Lines from the poem are above the entrance that the players use before walking on to Centre Court: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same. It would be nice to think that many youngsters witnessing the way Nadal and Federer behaved on Sunday night, both in victory and defeat, now understand the meaning of those words."

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Nadal and Federer exemplify the word "class."

What a shock. Although not really shocking to anyone that saw last year's final. Not after Nadal had reached two previous finals here against Federer and came within two points of winning it all last year. "It's a pity I couldn't win it...I tried everything," Federer said afterwards, exhausted. "But Rafa's a deserving champion, he's the worst opponent on the best court." And when John McEnroe asked Federer how he was feeling, Roger politely begged off, saying, with sincerity, "This is probably the hardest loss of my career so far. It really hurts right now." He later told the press that "Losing Paris for me was nothing, this was disaster."


Gloomy Sunday: Federer in his darkest hour (literally)

I'm still depressed after seeing it. Because my tennis hero has been shown to be human and vulnerable this year, and very likely will lose his No. 1 ranking to Nadal. I mean, Roger's only won two minor titles this season (winning Portugal's Estoril Open after Nikolay Davydenko retired with a leg injury and picking up his fifth Gerry Webber Open title at Halle, Germany by defeating the relatively unknown No. 35 Philipp Kohlschreiber) - albeit making it to the semis at Indian Wells and the Australian Open and two Grand Slam finals - and has even lost to nobodies like Czech Radek Stepanek (!) at the Rome Masters. Perhaps, like Icarus, the high-flying Federer has for too long flown too close to the sun of acclaim and now must plummet down to earth. After many a summer dies the swan, as Tennyson said. Asked how Sunday's result might affect his ranking, Federer told the press, "Write what you want. I’m going to try to win at the Olympics and the US Open and have a good end to the season. That’s it."

I hope Federer hasn't lost his mojo on the men's tennis tour. I know he would like to match or surpass Sampras' Grand Slam titles record, so he has the motivation to play for history. But I fear that his standards - and the standards the press have set for him ("I've created monster" he said after losing to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open, alluding to the fact that he's expected to win everything, all the time) - are so high that he might be tempted to pull a Bjorn Borg disappearing act. Shortly after consecutive Grand Slam final losses in 1981 to John McEnroe at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, a 26-year-old Borg shocked the tennis world by retiring from the tour, saying that the losses confirmed that he was no longer the World No. 1 and that he did not wish to be No. 2. Can Federer handle not being No. 1? "Tennis, life goes very quickly," he once said, "It happens very quickly for you, but it can also be over very quickly for you." For Borg it was a run of four straight French Opens and five consecutive Wimbledons before he felt his dominance slipping away. Is this the moment that Federer, approaching his 27th birthday in August, senses that his four-year stranglehold as the dominant force in men's tennis (315 wins, 11 Grand Slam titles, 13 Masters Series titles and a record 232 consecutive weeks ranked as World No. 1 from January 2004 to July 2008) comes to an end? And if so, will he want to stick around, lurking in the shadows of the spotlight?

Though Federer added that he learned nothing new about his opponent in this loss or about his own game that he could try to improve - other than his first serve percentage (this despite 25 aces) - I noticed that on key points Federer tended to abandon his backhand to fall back on his most trusted and reliable weapon, that Hammer-of-the-Gods forehand, only to overhit it. It's almost as if subconsciously he felt that in a pinch he had to go for that extra something against his nemesis, Nadal-the-indefatigable-retriever.

Meanwhile, the reign in Spain continues to fall mainly on the Iberian plains...Nadal's win coming on the heels of his nation's victory over Germany in the Euro 2008 soccer championship. (By the way, was I the only one who noticed soccer fanatic Nadal shaking hands afterwards with Ramon Calderon, president of Rafa's favorite team Real Madrid?). But despite being on cloud nine, Nadal put his rivalry with Federer - one in which he now leads the Swiss maestro 12-6 in head-to-head play - in an existential perspective befitting the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936), when he said of Federer, "For me it is hard to have to play in same time as him, best player in world...in history." Exactly! Think how many more titles he could have garnered playing in an era sans his Swiss rival. And think how many elusive French Open titles Federer - the world's second-best clay court player - would have amassed after making it to three finals at Roland Garros!

Federer could probably relate to Unamuno's world view that the deepest of all human desires is the hunger for personal immortality against all our rational knowledge of life. In other words, we know our limits, yet we still want to live forever and strive for perfection every time - be it in cheating death or winning Grand Slam titles. It's a tough pill for Federer to swallow to know that he is indeed, on a tennis court - even a grass court - mortal after all. He knows that, for Federer is a rational man. But as his courageous comeback yesterday proved, dreams - even impossible ones - die hard.

The king is dead, long live the new king. For Federer, who has been king for so long, here's hoping he can again find the motivation - other than his Quixotic quest to win the French Open - that he seems to have lacked this year. Nadal worked hard to improve his game after two finals defeats here. Now that Federer has been vanquished on his "home turf," perhaps he has a little more incentive next year for a Tolkienesque "Return of the King." And for Nadal? Strive for five.

Tennis Is A Game

Lest we forget, there was this photo op moment during the last changeover in the third set of Roger Federer's opening round match against his good friend Dominik Hrbaty on Wimbledon's Centre Court. Hrbaty walked past his designated seat on his side of the umpire's chair and instead went to sit next to Roger Federer - something you never see in professional tennis! I can't even envision Venus and Serena Williams doing it, and they're sisters! And if I saw James Blake and Leyton Hewitt pal around, I think I'd fall over.

Hrbaty and Federer chatted away, with Roger explaining later that Hrbaty said something along the lines of, "Can I sit next to you?" "Sure," Roger replied, "There's an extra seat." The 30-year-old Slovakian, who may be playing his last Wimbledon before retirement, added that it was an honor to be playing Roger and that he was glad they were friends. A charming moment and, like those American Express ads, you could probably put a price tag on what each player technically earned for this first-round match (needless to say, won in straight sets by Federer 6-3, 6-2, 6-2), but the end sum remains: priceless.