Federer is not a King. Calling him “His Majesty of him” is nonsense, even though he has the class of any noble. He declared himself “the enemy of war and the reverse of it, the medal”. He does not want to hold power, or crush anyone. He is not interested in showing power, speed, conquering land. If there is something you want to conquer, it is souls. The soul of his rivals, of his friends. Twinkling souls, pensive souls, energetic souls, troubled souls, erratic and giddy souls, dagger souls, fluffy souls, souls like sleepless guns 1, souls of various caliber on any court he goes. The souls of the public.
Federer thanks the public when they revere him; he raises his arms as humbly toward the bleachers as any neighbor’s son. He doesn’t yell when he wins. He doesn’t scream when he loses. Only the left fist clenched to his chest.
He never played tennis with a racket. On the right he uses a brush with which he draws strokes to the lines. He has the sensitivity and genius of an artist. The anxiety of creation. He invented the surprise attack at the 2015 Cincinnati Open: during the opponent’s serve he would stand very close to the midfield line and bounce the opponent’s serve early. The ball fell behind the net. Baffling.
The Swiss can never be a King, perhaps an artist, and since I don’t really know what he is, I’ll just say that Roger Federer is a kind man.
Reina María Rodríguez wrote that everyone in Geneva knows where Borges’ house is, even if they don’t know the name of the Swiss president. In Munchenstein, everyone knows about the Schaulager, a former warehouse converted into a well-known art gallery by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. But no one can tell about the house where Federer lived as a child. There is no monument, no symbol dedicated to Roger. There is no street named after him, nor a plaque on the front of the house where he was born, nor even evidence of his passing through school.
Federer can be the president of Switzerland. His first surname and his name are in themselves a symbol, a monument, a street, the city, the entire country. And a little more.
May he be a God. The God of time. He was born in the land of the great watchmakers and dominated a sport where – presumably – points are scored following the quarter hour. It must be paradoxical, or to put it like Borges, it will be a truth that seems like a lie; but the Swiss displays a game in which time is erased.
“And no player is faster, or gives such a misleading impression of being so effortlessly, than Roger Federer,” wrote David Foster Wallace in his book In body and in the other.
For the American writer, he is one of the few supernatural athletes who seem to be exempt, at least in part, from certain laws of physics:
“Other comparable beings would be Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high, but also hang in the air for a moment or two longer than gravity would allow, and Mohamed Ali, who could actually ‘float’ across the canvas and deliver two or three blows in the time it takes to deliver one. There are probably another half dozen examples from 1960. And Roger Federer belongs to that category: a category that can be called a genius, a mutant, or an avatar. You will never see him lacking in timing or balance. The ball that approaches him hangs in the air a fraction of a second longer than it should.
For Michel Contreras it was Michael Jordan who confirmed that God looks elegant in shorts…And white, Federer added, on the Wimbledon grass.
Therefore, the gods play in short and Roger does it with a different light, with a wise hand to reproduce on the court a single long shadow, (thus we could call in a way the beauty that covers the whole court). It’s nice, that’s his game. Malleable, and its mold is that: the beauty contained in 24 meters of cement, clay or grass.
The minute hand seemed to move at the whim of his racket. In 2017, after six months of inactivity, he won the Australian Open at the age of 36 and became the oldest winner of a Grand Slam. He also holds the record for the oldest number one in the entire circuit and for the most consecutive weeks. It was the time in his time, regardless of the greatness of Nole or Nadal.
But if Achilles for his heel is Achilles, Federer for his knee is Tommy, Ishmael or Alexander, he is not Roger. Perhaps a demigod.
Federer might be human, but his kinesthesia in a court casts serious doubt on that hypothesis. His name, almost a sentiment for tennis lovers. His backhand parallel to one hand, orgasmic: challenge the first dancer of any ballet company. He flows in the serve, in his patented smash crossed, on his volleys. Nobody ever danced better tango with the net than the Swiss. If tennis is a dance of two, Federer did it of three.
According to Foster Wallace, seeing him on the track was like having Mozart at a Metallica concert. If we follow that rally, Roger would be an Ennio Morricone of tennis. The classic and the contemporary in the same (in)genius. Innate ability to generate multiple solutions. The mixture of old tennis and modern tennis. Finesse and subtlety in the face of physical play from the back of the pitch. The Federer moment against the Nadal impulse: “the passionate virility of the South of Europe against the intricate and clinical artistry of the North.”
This is how he wanted to say goodbye, on the same side of the net of the man who prevented him from winning his sixth Wimbledon in a row, who won him six Grand Slam finals, who pushed him to the limit. Nothing amazes him anymore, therefore nothing outrages him, he hates no one, he already assumes everything, he waits for everything, not even the 2019 Wimbledon final hurts him, he stones no one, he embraces everyone, he no longer aspires to anything, although some remnants remain from when he was human…
In the 2022 Laver Cup, both come out in ultramarine blue with a white headband. Jack Sock and Frances Tiafoe, the rivals of the farewell, wear red. It starts at the Federer net and on a forehand sneaks it through the gap between the post and the mesh. Rare point for the rest of the world.
He hasn’t played doubles since 2015. He hasn’t played officially for over a year. He’s flabby and his bump is flat as Nole’s abdomen, who’s looking at him from the bench. Rod Laver in the stands. Tennis has the luxury of having three living legends in London along with 17,000 fans. Papa Robert in the audience, also his mother, his wife Mirka and the pair of jimaguas.
He stops Sock’s returned ball dead in its tracks with the backhand. Second service. Is a deli of the Swiss who still remembers using the racket. In his career he changed rackets 13 times. In the first set the Europeans broke with 5-4 up. In the second there will be a break per side and a tie-breaker for the youngest. And to break the tie by 10 points, with the super tiebreaker.
Tiafoe walked across the field to greet Nadal, who narrowly returned a ball behind the net. The Helvetian is like out of coverage. He doesn’t get hooked up front. He draws the racket slowly, but invents an ace to make it 6-5 in the super tiebreak.
7-6. Up by a cross down volley from the Swiss. Still the heavy hand and a shot that only he can execute. Tiafoe’s hard forehand hits Federer in the right arm. The public boos him and the Frenchman makes an unforced error.
9-8. Federer serves to win or to finish everything he started 24 years ago or his whole life ago. Sock and Tiafoe make three points in a row and give the second goal to the rest of the world team in the Laver Cup.
Since the announcement of Federer’s dismissal, everything has been so dramatic that there was no event that made it worse or better.
Nadal has the palm of his left hand on his jaw. He is dislocated as if he was forever banned from doing his ritual before the serve. Two tears of uncooked rice come out dedicated to the man who will ask what he had to do to win…
There are the records, the statistics, the comparisons, and then there is the metaphysics of the sport. Roger is tennis, although he is not all tennis. And people know it how Baudelaire knew it in the 19th century: “What has been created by the spirit is more alive than matter.”
Federer is the imaginary friend for those of us who never accompanied him live and couldn’t see him close up put his service ball in the V of the racket, nor throw his locks back; for those of us who gave us tachycardia to see him lose a tie-breaker or leave a crosscourt backhand at the net; for those of us who live on this side of the world and had to wake up at four in the morning to keep up with him in Australia. Record or no record Federer moves mountains higher than the Alps like a King, like a God, like a president, like a common human being, like none of that or like Federer.
At the end he hugs the whole team. The first thing she says is that he is not sad about the result. Cries that make you want to cry and keep crying. He can not talk. Can not. And then what the hell am I going to continue talking about in this chronicle…
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Note:
1Fragment of “Salva de Bienvenida”, poem by Manuel Díaz Martínez
