Pity Novak Djokovic, the Serbian megastar, who faced Federer in the 2015 U.S. Open final and had to deal with roars of approval for his double faults by forcing himself to imagine that the crowd was chanting his name instead of Federer’s.
So it went so often during Federer’s long run near the top of his game, and when I researched and wrote a biography of Federer after 20 years of covering him for The New York Times, one of my objectives was to fully comprehend what lay behind that deep connection with so many different cultures.
I finished with four big reasons:
First and most evidently, there was the beauty of his game, something closer to dance than tennis with his feathery footwork, flowing stroke production and something even closer to improvisational dance in that Federer, happily for nearly all involved, often strayed from the choreography: leaping or lunging to intercept a ball and create some fresh move with a flick of the wrist and barely a sound.
His sleight of right hand sometimes left opponents dumbfounded: see Andy Roddick’s expression in 2002 after being Federered in Federer’s real home city of Basel. Above all, Federer’s game was an immersive viewing experience, one that could transform even a rout into a happening because of the aesthetic quality of the drubbing. The score sometimes seemed beside the point. You did not need to be a tennis fan to appreciate Federer’s art, but his art could certainly make you a tennis fan, which is part of his legacy as he retires next week from competitive tennis.Second, Federer endured while excelling, remaining highly visible and relevant without any dramatic dip in results or appeal. For 20 years, he was a reliable on-screen presence: on television when he first emerged in the late 1990s and on all manner of devices by the time he played his last major tournament at Wimbledon in 2021. His record of 20 Grand Slam singles titles has been passed by Rafael Nadal and Djokovic, but his record of 23 consecutive Grand Slam singles semifinals may never be beaten. And then there is the pièce de résistance of his statistics: Federer never called a halt to any of his 1,526 career singles matches or 223 doubles matches because of injury or illness. Jimmy Connors, the only man to have played more tour-level matches than Federer, retired from 14 tour-level singles matches. Djokovic has retired from 13; Nadal from nine. Federer’s tennis was not just pretty. It was gritty.
Third, he conducted himself, on and off the court, with class. After a shaky start, full of tossed rackets and shrieks of frustration, Federer became something much closer to a Zen master by the early 2000s. That was in part because he realized, as he rose in prominence, that he did not want to project a temperamental image to his public but also because he realized he played better under tight control. That the release provided by bemoaning the injustice of it all was seriously outweighed by the precision and focus acquired by mastering his emotions even if that old fire, as he once told me, still burned intensely behind the modern facade.
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