Federer-Nadal, take 125

Like everyone else with even a modicum of appreciation for tennis,* I found the Federer-Nadal match thrilling and place it high in the “Best. Match. Ever.” pantheon. JVL has some thoughts worth reading, and I’d like to touch upon one note he attributes to me:

Ten months later, Federer hasn’t won another slam. If he doesn’t win the U.S. Open, I suspect he can’t finish the year #1 in the rankings. Since January, Santino has been telling me that he thought Federer was done, that 26 is the wall in tennis, and that Federer would be lucky to tie Sampras’s 14 slam wins. I scoffed, but now that seems about right.

I don’t like making bold predictions about things like this because I usually turn out to be wrong (and, now that I’ve claimed credit for the thought, Federer will almost certainly win the next 8 majors, making me look exceptionally foolish). But I have been saying the same thing since Federer’s disappointing turn at the Aussie Open this year, and I might as well go on the record with it: Federer is done.

Now, with a player of Federer’s undeniably amazing talent, done is a relative term; when I say “done” I mean he’ll probably win two or three more majors but he’ll never dominate the game like he did for the four seasons prior to this one, four seasons in which he won 11 of the 16 major tournaments. Neither Borg nor Sampras at their most dominant averaged 2 majors a year over their best four seasons. In the open era, no one has dominated the game like Federer and it’s unlikely anyone will again.

“Anyone” includes Roger Federer. Blinded by the last five seasons of brilliance, people forget that at one point Federer was a monumental talent and a headcase. You could see the raw game but he was clearly in over his head emotionally. And then, one day in 2004, everything clicked: Federer transformed from a very good player to an unstoppable force. It was more mental than anything else. Federer was the best player on the planet, and he knew it…even worse, he was the best player on the planet and YOU knew it while you were playing him. If it wasn’t for Rafael Nadal’s emergence as the preeminent clay court player of the last 30 years, Federer would have almost certainly completed two consecutive single year grand slams. He was simply that good.

But he isn’t any more. It’s not something that you can put a finger on–there’s no stroke problem you can point to, no glaring flaw. Watching some of the shots he hit during yesterday’s match reminded me that I was watching the best player of the last decade, if not the best player of my lifetime. But something was off. He was dumping shots into the net he would have crushed for winners as little as a year ago. He went 1 for 15 on break chances against Nadal. His service game seemed off, and his return game was ineffective. Even more importantly was his behavior between points: it was subtle, but you could see the fear, see the wall starting to crack, feel the emotions about to pour forth. Federer’s famed mental edge has disappeared.

Nadal used to be the only player consistently able to get under Federer’s skin like that, but several members of the younger set (especially Novak Djokavic) have no fear of the great swiss: they know they can beat him, and he knows they can as well.

But why now? Why this year? I really think age is a large part of it. With a few exceptions, the shelf-life of a top-level tennis player is exceedingly short. Sampras hit his wall at 26: though he’d go on to win four more majors after hitting the big 2-5, three of those were at Wimbledon (on the surface he and he alone dominated for almost the entirety of the ’90s), and the last, at the U.S. Open, came after a two year stretch of early exits and in a tournament where only 3 of the top 16 seeds made it into the quarterfinals. His dominant years were at the age of 21-25. Bjorn Borg’s dominant years: 22-25. John McEnroe’s best years: 22-25. Etc.**

So yeah, I think Federer’s age is a large part of his sudden decline. (It’s a testament to his brilliance that we can call a year with second place finishes at the French and Wimbledon, and a semifinals appearance in the Aussie, a down year.) But let’s not think about that: let’s think about a better time when the champion of Wimbledon wasn’t a capri pants/cutoff t-shirt wearing Spaniard who moans on the court like a reject from the women’s tour. Let’s think about Roger’s time.

*By the way, Bill Simmons: keep your idiotic suggestions to yourself next time, okay?

**Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. See: Andre Agassi, or Ivan Lendl. But it is, generally speaking, one that holds up, especially when we’re talking about special eras of one-player dominance, of which there are only three in the modern era: Borg, Sampras, and Federer.