{"id":112781,"date":"2017-07-20T15:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-07-20T19:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112781"},"modified":"2017-10-30T10:48:27","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T14:48:27","slug":"the-fall-and-rise-of-roger-federer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/20\/the-fall-and-rise-of-roger-federer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall and Rise of Roger Federer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Stefan Wermuth<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The year 2016 ended for Roger Federer on a Friday, July 8. In the fifth set of his semifinal match at Wimbledon, he found himself sprawled out along his service line, face down, ruefully lifting his left leg slightly up and slowly letting it back down, as if to prove to the shocked and silent crowd that he was still alive.<\/p>\n

Even when he had been ahead in the match against Milos Raonic of Canada, Federer looked weary. In the fourth set, he double faulted not once but twice, ending any hope for a classic. Raonic\u2014six feet five inches of muscle topped with a Clark Kent hairdo\u2014is an elite-grade version of the typical North American thumper: a thunderous serve, a strong but finicky forehand, and a two-handed backhand right out of an instruction manual; yet he approaches the net like it\u2019s an electric fence.\u00a0Federer had spent his career feasting on this type of player.<\/p>\n

But not lately. He hadn\u2019t won a title all season; he had knee surgery earlier\u00a0in the year; he skipped the French Open entirely. These days he seemed more gaunt than gracile, more canny than casually assured. Now and then, he would see what the other player didn\u2019t, couldn\u2019t. At such moments\u2014half volleys in 2015 and overhead backhand smashes in 2014\u2014his fans rejoiced in their nostalgia. David Foster Wallace\u2019s Federer essay would make rounds on the Internet like uncorked champagne. For those of us his age, who grew up with Marlon Brando in Superman<\/i>, Alec Guinness in Star Wars<\/i>, Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans<\/i>, it was familiar and fine, though we didn\u2019t know why. He slowed, but slowed like a dangerous panther. He staged strange suicide missions to the net on his opponents\u2019 second serves. His game\u2014a sexy hybrid of tennis in black-and-white, tennis in standard definition and tennis in 3-D\u2014looked good in defeat. Other players grunted, lunged, sprinted into swinging splits, found the worn patch on a grass surface to buckle over, the drizzle-slicked white line to slip on. Not Federer. In his tennis dotage, he was like a Faberg\u00e9 egg spinning on a tabletop because it could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then at Wimbledon he fell. And he didn\u2019t just fall. He looked like your uncle doing the robot and having it all go wrong. If you saw that match live, you knew then that it was over.<\/p>\n

Except it wasn\u2019t. He started off the 2017 season ranked seventeenth in the world. Since then, he\u2019s won thirty-one matches and lost two. He skipped Paris again this year, not because of injury but because he could afford to. Clay wears on the body, and besides, why let Rafa Nadal take your measure on his sovereign surface, the dirt? Federer shedded, waiting for Wimbledon like Christmas morning.<\/p>\n

By the time he got there, he was seeded fourth. He looked sharp, dangerous, healthy, his game kaleidoscopic. At the start of week two, Djokovic, the second seed, withdrew with an injured arm. Nadal lost to thirty-four-year-old Gilles M\u00fcller and the defending champion, Andy Murray, succumbed in the quarters to American Sam Querrey and a bad hip. Suddenly, Federer\u2019s 2017 Wimbledon became something else entirely. It became a revenge tour.<\/p>\n

Federer cruised to the quarterfinals, where he faced Raonic again. Raonic dug in, threw everything he had at Federer, and still lost in straight sets. In the semifinal, Federer faced the player who had knocked him out of the 2010 Wimbledon quarterfinal, Tomas Berdych. This time, Federer gut checked him to the duck-season-duck-season-rabbit-season tune of 7\u20136(4), 7\u20136(4), 6\u20134. After the match, Berdych was asked if the 2017 version of Federer is better than the 2010, to which he replied, \u201cThere is no way to prove this, if we can measure it, if he\u2019s better or not. He\u2019s playing just too good.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the final, Federer again faced Cilic, who had beaten him in the 2014 U.S. Open. He went the entire tournament without losing a single set. Cilic wept after the second set, realizing that the foot blister he carried over from his semifinal hadn\u2019t magically healed. Blister or no, he had no clear path to attacking Federer, and Federer knew it. The pinprick-size holes in Federer\u2019s game, the ones that Nadal and Djokovic learned to pry open, seem gone now. But that\u2019s not to say Federer healed both his body and his game. He seems to have healed his body and changed his game.<\/p>\n

Tennis is a kinetic and rather lonely kind of problem solving. How do you solve for Federer? Serve as though your life depends on it, push him back with high balls to his backhand, make him not only play but also think defensively and, if any of those happen to work, floor it and don\u2019t look back. But he pushes back as hard now as he ever has when he gets a second serve to his backhand. He hits the backhand with topspin and space resolutely from the baseline, exclusively from the baseline, as though he\u2019d been told the world was flat and ended there. So much so that any ball that bounces at the baseline, the type of ball that even a professional would sensibly take a few steps back to hit at knee level, he plays as a difficult half volley that he makes look easy; to hit these with intention, in rhythm, again and again against top professionals, should be practically unthinkable, and yet they have become typical rally strokes in his game. Every point is about finding the first strike as soon as possible. He takes no time between serves. Rather strangely at his age\u2014he\u2019ll be thirty-six\u00a0shortly\u2014he has sped things up while making the court smaller. It is his younger opponents\u2014a chagrined Cilic but the latest\u2014who seem starved for time and space.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of\u00a0<\/i>The Ground\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Heaven. He is currently writing a book about tennis,\u00a0<\/i>The Circuit,\u00a0which will be published in 2018.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a harrowing defeat at Wimbledon last year, Roger Federer hasn\u2019t merely healed his body and his game. 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