http://sport.guardian.co.uk/tennis/story/0,,1866443,00.html
The beauty of Roger FedererHe's the best tennis player in the world. And apart from being supremely efficient at beating opponents - right now he's cruising towards the US Open final - he is also pure poetry in motion. So what exactly is it that makes the Swiss master such a joy to watch? David Foster Wallace believes it's a sublime blend of the technical and the metaphysical
Thursday September 7, 2006
The Guardian
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the past few years, had what might be termed Federer moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're OK.
The moments are more intense if you've played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We've all got our examples. Here is one. It's the finals of the 2005 US Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There's a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today's power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner ... until suddenly Agassi hits a hard, heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which, of course, is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer is scrambling to reverse and get back to centre, Agassi is moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does - Federer's still near the corner but running toward the centreline, and the ball's heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there's no time to turn his body around ... and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi, who lunges for it but the ball's past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi's side, a winner - Federer's still dancing backward as it lands. And there's that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), "How do you hit a winner from that position?" And he's right. It was impossible. It was like something out of The Matrix. I don't know what sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.
Anyway, that's one example of a Federer moment, and that was merely on TV - and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of love.
Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at 25, the best tennis player alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound. It's all just a Google search away. This present article is more about a spectator's experience of Federer, and its context.
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 sport no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their "love" of sport, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination v advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervour, 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. You too may find them so, in which case Spain's mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man's man for you.
A top athlete's beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer's forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice - the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game - as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or - as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject - to try to define it in terms of what it is not.
One thing it is not is televisable. At least not entirely. Television's slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we're not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what's lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen's image is only 2D. The dimension that's lost (or rather distorted) is the real court's length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot's pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold. That may sound abstract or overblown, in which case by all means go in person to some professional tournament - especially to the outer courts in early rounds, where you can sit 20 feet from the sideline - and sample the difference for yourself. If you've watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they're able to move and rotate and strike and recover. And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Federer.
Interestingly, what is less obscured in TV coverage is Federer's intelligence, since this intelligence often manifests as angle. Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision, and television's perspective is perfect for viewing and reviewing these Federer moments. What's harder to appreciate on TV is that these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere - they're often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer's manipulation of opponents' positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce. And understanding how and why Federer is able to move other world-class athletes around this way requires, in turn, a better technical understanding of the modern power-baseline game than TV - again - is set up to provide.
There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer's ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical.
The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could "float" across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. Federer is of this type - a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan and Maradona, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. He looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.
This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss's will - there's real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After the Wimbledon semi-final in which Federer destroyed Jonas Björkman - not just beat him, destroyed him - and just before a requisite post-match news conference, Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was "like a bowling ball or basketball".
He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better; but he's also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you're a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you're playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won't experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.
Velocity is just one part of it. Now we're getting technical. Tennis is often called a "game of inches", but the cliche is mostly referring to where a shot lands. In terms of a player's hitting an incoming ball, tennis is actually more a game of micrometres: vanishingly tiny changes around the moment of impact will have large effects on how and where the ball travels.
By way of illustration, let's slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce (right) corner's baseline. A ball is served to your forehand. You pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball's incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualising up to where you're about halfway into the stroke's forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court, versus down-the-line, return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke's motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you're swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent's court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course - like, there's heavy topspin v light topspin, or sharply cross-court v only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you're allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you're using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight's moving forward, and whether you're able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent's doing after he serves. These all matter, too.
Plus there's the fact that you're not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you - coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic's first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130mph. Since it's 78 feet from Ancic's baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you. This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice. The upshot is that pro tennis involves intervals of time too brief for deliberate action. Temporally, we're more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought.
Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what's sometimes called "the kinesthetic sense", meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on. For promising junior players, refining the kinesthetic sense is the main goal of the extreme daily practice regimens we often hear about. The training here is both muscular and neurological. Hitting thousands of strokes, day after day, develops the ability to do by "feel" what cannot be done by regular conscious thought.
It was only weeks after quitting school that Federer, at 16, won Junior Wimbledon. Obviously, this is something that not every junior who devotes himself to tennis can do. Just as obviously, then, there is more than time and training involved - there is also sheer talent, and degrees of it. Extraordinary kinesthetic ability must be present (and measurable) in a kid just to make the years of practice and training worthwhile. But from there, over time, the cream starts to rise and separate. So one type of technical explanation for Federer's dominion is that he's just a bit more kinesthetically talented than the other male pros. Only a little bit, since everyone in the top 100 is himself kinesthetically gifted - but then, tennis is a game of inches.
This answer is plausible but incomplete. It would probably not have been incomplete in 1980. In 2006, though, it's fair to ask why this kind of talent still matters so much. Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros that has ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that's said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.
It's 2-1 to Nadal in the second set of the Wimbledon final, and he's serving. Federer won the first set at love but then flagged a bit, as he sometimes does, and is quickly down a break. Now, on Nadal's advantage, there's a 16-stroke point. Nadal is serving a lot faster than he did in Paris, and this one's down the centre. Federer floats a soft forehand high over the net. The Spaniard now hits a characteristically heavy topspin forehand deep to Federer's backhand; Federer comes back with an even heavier topspin backhand, almost a clay-court shot. It's unexpected and backs Nadal up, slightly, and his response is a low hard short ball that lands just past the service line's T on Federer's forehand side.
Against most other opponents, Federer could simply end the point on a ball like this, but one reason Nadal gives him trouble is that he's faster than the others, can get to stuff they can't; and so Federer here just hits a flat, medium-hard cross-court forehand, going not for a winner but for a low, shallowly angled ball that forces Nadal up and out to the deuce side, his backhand. Nadal, on the run, backhands it hard down the line to Federer's backhand; Federer slices it right back down the same line, slow and floaty with backspin, making Nadal come back to the same spot. Nadal slices the ball right back - three shots now all down the same line - and Federer slices the ball back to the same spot yet again, this one even slower and floatier, and Nadal gets planted and hits a big two-hander back down the same line - it's like Nadal's camped out now on his deuce side; he's no longer moving all the way back to the baseline's centre between shots; Federer's hypnotised him a little. Federer now hits a very hard, deep topspin backhand, the kind that hisses, to a point just slightly on the ad side of Nadal's baseline, which Nadal gets to and forehands cross-court; and Federer responds with an even harder, heavier cross-court backhand, baseline-deep and moving so fast that Nadal has to hit the forehand off his back foot and then scramble to get back to centre as the shot lands maybe two feet short on Federer's backhand side again. Federer steps to this ball and now hits a totally different cross-court backhand, this one much shorter and sharper-angled, an angle no one would anticipate, and so heavy and blurred with topspin that it lands shallow and just inside the sideline and takes off hard after the bounce, and Nadal can't move in to cut it off and can't get to it laterally along the baseline, because of all the angle and topspin - end of point. It's a spectacular winner, a Federer moment; but watching it live, you can see that it's also a winner that Federer started setting up four or even five shots earlier. Everything after that first down-the-line slice was designed by the Swiss to manoeuvre Nadal and lull him and then disrupt his rhythm and balance and open up that last, unimaginable angle - an angle that would have been impossible without extreme topspin.
Extreme topspin is the hallmark of today's power-baseline game. Carbon-based composite rackets are lighter than wood, and this allows modern rackets to be a couple of ounces lighter and at least an inch wider across the face than the vintage Kramer and Maxply. It's the width that's vital. A wider face means there's more total string area, which means the sweet spot's bigger. With a composite racket, you don't have to meet the ball in the precise geometric centre of the strings to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flat through it. Composites' lighter, wider heads and more generous centres let players swing faster and put way more topspin on the ball and, in turn, the more topspin you put on the ball, the harder you can hit it, because there's more margin for error. Topspin causes the ball to pass high over the net, describe a sharp arc, and come down fast into the opponent's court (instead of maybe soaring out).
So the basic formula here is that composite rackets enable topspin, which in turn enables groundstrokes vastly faster and harder than 20 years ago. The generic power-baseline game is not boring - certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who's shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he's shown it from within the modern game.
This within is what's important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions such as touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it's not either/or. Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It's just that that's not all he is. There's also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace - all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men's tennis as it is now played. Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today's pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men's tennis, and for the first time in years the game's future is unpredictable.
AuthorTopic: The beauty of Roger Federer (Read 378 times)
March 22, 2006, 03:37:12 PM