Federer and Me: ‘I hadn’t known such excellence was possible. And the effect upon me was instantaneous’
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Version 0 of 1. London, Sunday 6 July 2014. I wake up late, with a question in my head. Will I be going to the Wimbledon final? Before yesterday, this wasn’t something I’d even considered. But now I’m desperate to make it if I can. I’ve watched Federer play live about 20 times over the years, and nine times in just the past month, but I’ve never seen him play a Grand Slam final. Surely, this is my one opportunity: he’ll never make it to another major final, at least not one I have a hope of going to. And if he does win – not likely, admittedly – how great to be able to say: I was there. All in all, it has to be done. But how? Needless to say, I don’t have a ticket. Centre Court tickets are notoriously hard to get hold of at the best of times. For the final, they’re virtually unobtainable. The usual fallback – queuing – isn’t an option; the All England Club doesn’t release turnstile tickets from the semis onwards. Basically, to attend a Wimbledon final, you have to be one of four things: extremely lucky in the public ballot; extremely well connected; extremely rich; a member of the royal family. Sadly, none of these applies to me. The debentures are, of course, a possibility. Most Wimbledon tickets are “strictly nontransferable”. Debentures are different. Basically, it’s a system of seat-leasing. You buy a five-year debenture – the current cost for Centre Court debs is £50,000 – which entitles you to all the tickets for a particular pair of seats during that period. And these tickets, unlike others, are yours to do what you want with. You can give them to friends; you can sell them on. A pair of Centre Court debenture tickets for a normal day typically goes for two or three thousand. For the men’s final, the figure is up near 10 grand. For the past 24 hours, I’ve been keeping tabs on the various websites on which debenture tickets are sold, in the hope that some strange market anomaly will result in one suddenly becoming available at a less-than-stratospheric price. This hasn’t happened. The cheapest single ticket I’ve found is £4,000. I’m still tempted. I happen (unusually for me) to have a bit of cash in the bank. Not a huge amount, but enough to cover the ticket. And I probably would go ahead, were it not for one thing: the thought of having to tell my wife. She is currently away in Suffolk with our two-year-old son. She is eight months pregnant. She is already cross with me because I was supposed to be joining them yesterday, but I postponed on the off-chance that I managed to get to the final. If, in addition, she discovers that I’ve spent £4,000 on a ticket – well, I can’t imagine her response would be sanguine. No, that avenue is definitely closed. But there is one other option: the touts. As at all major sporting events, the touts come out in force for Wimbledon. I’ve often seen them myself, near Southfields tube station, lurking outside cafes, loitering by advertising hoardings. Mostly, the polished hordes who process up Wimbledon Park Road don’t give them so much as a second glance. But there’s surely something a bit odd about the touts at Wimbledon. How, after all, can they exist? If, as the All England Club claims, tickets for the tournament are “strictly nontransferable” – if the club really is scrupulous about enforcing this – then there wouldn’t be any point in buying touted tickets. They’d be a waste of money. Either they are total scammers, dedicated to ripping off gullible Joe Public by offloading unusable tickets. Or the Wimbledon authorities aren’t as strict about checking the provenance of tickets as they claim. When, at around 11am, I find myself on the phone to a man named Sam, whose ad for suspiciously cheap finals tickets I spotted on Gumtree, I am still unsure as to which of these two hypotheses is correct. Sam tells me that, yes, he can sort me out a ticket, so long as I can make it to a particular cafe near Southfields tube within the hour. The price will be £900. (“Yeah, I would like cash.”) Nine hundred pounds is, of course, a lot of money – still far too much, really, to spend on a tennis match. But I also think that, at this three-figure level, there’s some vague possibility that my wife will be sympathetic. She does live with me, after all. She knows how seriously I take this stuff. I set off on my scooter. It will take me just under an hour to get to Wimbledon. All I have to do is withdraw the money from a cashpoint on the way. But here I discover a flaw in my plan. My bank only lets me take out £500 per day. To obtain more, customer services tell me, I’ll need to visit a branch, which is impossible, it being Sunday. For a few minutes, I am in despair. But then I collect myself. All is not lost. Surely I can borrow the extra from friends. First, though, I ring Sam back to double check: is there any chance – any chance at all – he’d accept a cheque? He’s unyielding: “I’d like to help, mate, but I’m afraid my company doesn’t handle cheques.” I hurriedly make phone calls. An ex-flatmate agrees to lend me £150 if I transfer the money into her account the next day. Next I get hold of Jack, who lives a bit further away but, handily, is a shipping lawyer. He seems positively delighted by my request. “Of course, come on over,” he says, as if inviting me to pop round for a drink. I get to his house at noon. He’s still in his dressing gown. Yawning, he reaches into one of his pockets and extracts a wad of notes. Shortly before one, I arrive at the cafe with £1,000 in my wallet. I get out my phone, notice that my wife has called. I dial Sam’s number. No reply. I try again. Nothing. It rings endlessly. This is, unquestionably, a further blow, but, looking around, I realise that it may not be a fatal one. There are other touts in the vicinity, arranged in small clusters. I position myself near one group, make eye contact. A leather-jacketed man peels off, walks towards me, nods his head across the road – where a pair of policeman are standing – and signals for me to follow him down a side alley. “You want tickets for the final?” is his inevitable gambit. “Well, just the one please, if you’ve got any,” I reply. “Hmmm, not sure if we’ve got any singles right now, but wait here a minute, I’ll check with Dave.” Dave comes over: he’s grey-skinned, in his late 40s, veiny round the eyes. “You want a single? Think I can get you one. But it won’t be a posh seat.” We haggle over the price. He wants a thousand; I bring him down to eight fifty. I am led to a cafe, where I sit down with a third man, Steve, whose job, it seems, is to act as my minder. My phone rings. It’s my wife. “Where are you?” she says. “Are you going to come down today?” I explain that I’m not going to make it after all, that I’m in a cafe near Wimbledon, about to hand over £850 to a tout in exchange for a ticket that should – no, will – get me into the final. “A tout?” she says. “Are you crazy?” I tell her that I have a good feeling about it, that the guy I’m buying the ticket from seems honest; she replies that I should pull out right away. Then I notice that Steve is beckoning. “Look, sorry, I have to go.” We head to a nearby pub, where Dave is sitting at a table. He hands me my ticket. There’s a name on it – Mark Simpson – and a price: £148. It looks real enough. The date is correct. But how can I be certain that it will get me in? What happens, I ask, if they ask me to prove that I am Mark Simpson? Dave smiles. “Relax. They hardly ever check. But if you’re worried, just head round the side, and go in through that gate at the back, number 19 is it? The guys there aren’t bothered.” I still must be looking apprehensive, because Dave adds: “Look, if you have any problems, just come back here and see us.” Will he give me my money back? “Yeah, yeah, I will, no problems.” I get out my wallet, start counting my cash. I keep my wallet under the table, to avoid detection by any plain-clothed policeman lurking in the vicinity (not that it isn’t obvious what we’re up to). I’m flustered, though – my hands shake – and I keep miscounting, forcing me to start all over again. Dave breaks off his call: “Jesus, I can make money faster than you can count it.” Finally, I assemble the correct amount. Dave scrolls through the bills with practised ease. The deal is done. We shake hands. I haven’t (yet) been arrested. As I walk up Wimbledon Park Road, my wife calls again. “Look, I think this is a really bad idea. You’re wasting an awful lot of…” I butt in, tell her it’s too late, that I’m already heading towards the grounds with my ticket. “But it’s OK,” I say. “The guy said I can get my money back if anything goes wrong.” This information fails to have its intended effect. “A tout says he’ll give you a refund and you believe him? Bloody hell, how naive are you?” I tell her that it’s too late to worry about that, I’m about to go in. ***** I first saw Roger Federer play tennis at Wimbledon in 2003. It wasn’t love at first sight. In the years following my first glimpse of him, I kept vague tabs on his results but I didn’t watch many of his matches. Too much else was going on. I was in my mid-20s and was trying to carve out a niche for myself in the adult world. Work preoccupied me a good deal: I was finally making some headway as a journalist. And I was falling in love – something that hadn’t happened in quite a while. My relationship with my new girlfriend – a fellow journalist – was all-consuming. The result was that Roger Federer, for all his appeal, seemed like a distant, tangential figure. My life didn’t have room in it for me to become obsessed with him. By late 2006, though, things were beginning to change. I had just turned 30 and I felt less pressured at work. My relationship was running into trouble; my girlfriend and I hadn’t split up, but it increasingly seemed like a possibility. I’d also recently started playing tennis again. Through work, I’d met various writers and publishers who were enthusiastic players. The great thing about writers is that they tend to be available to play at any time, unbeholden as they are to office timetables. This suited me. Although rusty to begin with – I’d barely picked up a racket in 15 years – I soon located the remnants of my game and some of my former fluency returned. Playing a sport, of course, isn’t a prerequisite for becoming a fan. But it does help. As a consequence of taking up tennis again, I became more susceptible to the allure of Federer. I started paying closer attention to his results and I couldn’t help but notice how phenomenally successful he was being. Whole years seemed to go by in which he would barely lose a match. In the summer of 2006, at a family gathering of my girlfriend’s, I remember meeting an aspiring tennis pro, a young British player on the fringes of the tour. I asked him who, of today’s top players, he particularly admired. He told me he’d recently been on some practice courts near Federer and he couldn’t believe how good he was. As he spoke, awe entered his voice and his eyes acquired a faraway look. Increasingly, I realised, this was how Federer was being viewed. He was becoming a figure of legend, almost a god. Not long after this, I happened to stumble across an essay on Federer by David Foster Wallace. I was already a fan of Wallace’s writing – his fiction in particular – and the piece made a big impression on me. Here was a palpably clever writer – something of a genius himself – talking in candidly reverential terms about the wonder, the beauty, of Federer’s tennis. I was struck not only by Wallace’s concept of the “Federer moment” – the instances when his play appears to defy the laws of physics – but also by the way he sought to locate his subject within the game’s overall trajectory. And his sense of the sport’s development very much chimed with my own. Wallace’s basic contention was that men’s tennis had, for the previous few decades, been moving in a linear direction. Thanks to a combination of composite rackets, related changes in technique and advances in athleticism, a single style had come to dominate the sport. This style – the “power baseline” game – was, as its name suggested, based on hitting the ball with tremendous power (and copious topspin) from the back of the court. According to Wallace, it was Lendl who had pioneered the style in the 80s, in the 90s players like Agassi and Courier had raised it to new heights and, more recently, Rafa Nadal had taken it “just as far as it goes”. The problem with the power baseline style, Wallace suggested, wasn’t that it was inherently boring but it was “somewhat static and limited” and, if it were to prove the “evolutionary end-point of tennis”, that would be a problem for the game. Federer, however, had shown another way forward. He had introduced – or rather, reintroduced – elements such as subtlety and variety, an “ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and surprise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision”. Yet the point about Federer – and here was Wallace’s kicker – was that he could do all those things while also being a “first-rate, kickass power-baseliner”. He had demonstrated a new way of playing tennis that was as attractive as it was effective, and had done so from within the modern game. “He is Mozart and Metallica and the combination is somehow wonderful.” Wallace ended his essay on a note of optimism. At that year’s Wimbledon, which he’d attended, the junior event had been a “variegated ballet”, with players deploying “drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead – all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls”. The clear implication was that Federer’s approach was starting to influence tennis more widely, expanding the sport’s very possibilities. Every line of Wallace’s analysis intrigued me and his words were still in my head a month or so later when, in Shanghai, I chanced upon Federer on TV. My brother was living in the city for a semester, teaching the history of western political theory at one of its universities. In November, I went to stay with him for a week. The Tennis Masters Cup – the end-of-year tournament featuring the world’s top eight players, which at that point was held in Shanghai – was on; there were posters advertising it all over the city. Switching on the telly one afternoon, I happened upon Federer playing Roddick. Through the haze of my jet lag, I watched, transfixed, with a rising sense of astonishment. I already knew – or thought I knew – how good Federer was, but this was brilliance beyond anything I’d imagined. I remember leaping up off the sofa, dancing with joy, my exclamations mingling with the utterances of the Chinese commentators. Perhaps it was the result of my discombobulated condition – the jet lag, the unfamiliar surroundings – but Federer’s tennis that afternoon struck me as unearthly, stupendous, possessed of a magnificence I’d never before seen on a tennis court. I hadn’t known such excellence was possible. And the effect upon me was instantaneous. By the time the match was over, something in me had begun to shift. My future – or a part of it – had been determined. I knew that I wanted to follow this man, take what opportunities I could to luxuriate in the silky wondrousness of his play. My obsession had begun. ***** Between the ages of five and 11, tennis was pretty much all I thought about. I played as much as I could: I was a decent junior, an irregular county player first for Middlesex and then for Sussex, where we moved when I was 10. But it was as a student of the game’s history that I truly excelled. I could reel off the scorelines of long-forgotten Wimbledon finals; I knew all about Gottfried von Cramm and Helen Wills Moody; in the garden at home, I would knock balls against walls for hours on end, spinning fantasies of future glory. But tennis was more than just a boyhood passion; it was also, increasingly, a means of escape. Family life, dominated by my economist father, was highly, often relentlessly intellectual. We children felt like we were required to display copious brainpower at all times. Whereas my brother inclined naturally to cerebral matters, I gravitated towards sport, and this resulted in a growing sense of internal conflict. Doing what came naturally to me made me feel second rate, a failure. The thing I loved became a badge of my inferiority. And so while I cleaved ever more tightly to my sporting identity, I also ended up hating myself for doing so. Ultimately, largely because of these confused feelings, I gave up tennis. I played cricket for a while instead, initially with equal enthusiasm, but in the end abandoned that too. I wanted to turn myself into someone very different: someone (as I saw it) more serious and hard-edged, someone more like my father and brother. But it wasn’t easy. We can’t unmake who we are. During late adolescence, my life became dominated by what proved to be a protracted identity crisis. I went on ticking off most of the conventional milestones – school, university, first job. Outwardly, things may have looked normal. But in my head, all was misery and confusion. I spent much of my late teens and early 20s feeling intensely depressed. It’s too pat to say that my abandonment of tennis was the direct cause of the problem. But it was a symptom of sorts. Looking back, I realise the mistake I made was one of excessive literal-mindedness. I grew up thinking that my father’s distinctions and hierarchies, the absolute weight he attached to the life of the mind, reflected some wider truth about the world. That’s the problem – or one of the problems – with childhood: small things get magnified, what’s accidental and contingent becomes cast in bronze. In my mind, my father’s views and opinions had God-like authority, and if my experiences didn’t accord with them, that must mean my experiences (and not his views and opinions) were at fault. What I failed to understand was how much the dice had been loaded: for reasons that had nothing to do with me, things within our family had been set up a certain way. It was as if the spoils of my father’s personality had, at some formative stage, been shared out between his two eldest children, and while my brother had been handed the most valuable portion, I’d been bequeathed a subsidiary branch. And so I grew up sure of one thing: that the person I felt myself to be was flawed, insufficient; that I needed to slough him off. The exact identity of this magical alternative being was always somewhat hazy. All I knew was that my chances in life depended on becoming him. Now that I’m a father myself, I find it odd to think that so much of my life should have been given over to this lunatic project of psychic self-immolation. I watch my young son, see how naturally, how happily, he embraces the world, how effortlessly his personality unspools, and I find myself constantly wanting to warn him: be yourself, just be yourself, never try to become what others want you to be. But maybe that’s naive, impossible: I am his father, and the way I see him will inevitably affect how he sees himself; I cannot but influence the person he turns out to be. ***** In the summer of 2008, not long after Federer’s despair-inducing loss to Nadal at Wimbledon, I moved into a new flat in south London, and treated myself to a Sky TV “multi-room package”. My parents had recently given me a present of a massive flat-screen TV, which they’d found too imposing for their own sitting room. This I now installed in my bedroom. It was perfect: when Federer was playing in far-off places, at inconvenient hours of the night, I could watch him without even having to rise from my bed. Set the alarm, reach for the remote control, and hey presto: there he was! It’s probably not a coincidence that 2008 was the year my obsession ratcheted up a notch, became wholly entrenched within me. For me, this was a period of emotional turmoil. The girlfriend I’d acquired a few years earlier had ended our relationship in 2007. I took this very hard. Shortly afterwards, I got together with the woman who would become my wife. But not enough time had elapsed since the previous relationship had ended and I wasn’t yet ready for a new one. I couldn’t commit. Throughout 2008 and 2009, I behaved idiotically; my new girlfriend and I split up – and then reunited – several times. I tested her patience to its limits. Looking back, I can see that, during this confused time, Federer functioned as a point of constancy, of stability. It was as if he provided the security I craved but couldn’t achieve. There was a comfort in knowing that, throughout the year, he would be playing somewhere, and wherever that was, I could tune in and watch. And I’m sure it was significant, too, that his career was already in decline, that he was losing his aura of invulnerability. The losses he suffered – and there were some truly crushing ones – produced a pain that resonated within me, and the effect, paradoxically, was oddly consoling. These years, of course, weren’t all bad for Federer. He remained, with Nadal, one of the two best players in the world. And he had some great wins: the 2008 US Open; his first (and only) French Open the following summer; the 2010 Australian Open. Yet glorious as such moments were, it was the losses that seemed significant, that made the biggest mark. In 2010, my own period of emotional turbulence came to an end. I don’t know what exactly caused the change, but I suddenly realised that I was in danger of throwing away the opportunity I had – the best opportunity I ever would have – to make a life with the beautiful, strong, intelligent woman I loved. Just in time, I veered away from the train-wreck course I’d been stuck on. My girlfriend took some convincing that I was serious, but eventually I managed to persuade her. ***** One thing I discovered as a result of taking up the sport as an adult is that a surprising number of writers are mad about tennis. David Foster Wallace wasn’t alone. I suppose this isn’t really so surprising, when you consider the affinities between the two activities. Writers sit at home all day, and can keep whatever hours they choose, so have plenty of opportunities not just to watch the sport (an especially realisable goal in the age of satellite TV and online streaming) but also to go out and play. A game of tennis is in many ways the perfect way to break up a writing day. Unlike, say, cricket, it doesn’t take up too much time, nor does it require much organisation. Early afternoon, when inspiration often flags, tends to be the best time to play tennis: this is when the courts are most likely be available (and cheapest), the weather at its most amenable. A tennis match between two writers is also a chance, during the knock-up, and at changeovers, to exchange gossip and discuss works-in-progress. The result is that tennis can come to seem like a natural – indeed vital – extension of the writing life. But the similarities run deeper. Tennis, like writing, is technically complex: all those strokes to master, all those rules to obey (don’t take the racket back beyond your shoulder when volleying; assume the trophy pose just before striking the serve). It’s a game of endless small adjustments, a sport for tinkerers, perfectionists. At the same time, tennis is an unusually – perhaps uniquely – psychological sport. It’s not just that players have to be good readers of character, able to figure out what an opponent’s weaknesses are and how to exploit them, it’s also that the sport itself exerts such acute mental pressures. The margins between success and failure are so tiny, both at the micro and macro levels. (A millimetre’s difference in your swing can make the difference between a win or a miss; just one or two points can decide the outcome of the match.) This is why, playing tennis, it’s so easy to get frustrated. At every level, it’s common to encounter players who, more than anything, resemble madmen: gesticulating, hurling their rackets, talking to themselves. No sport is more inward-looking than tennis, more conducive to emotional turmoil, downward-spiralling patterns of thought. And in this too, of course, it has something in common with writing. ***** My girlfriend and I got married in 2011. A few months later, in October, our first child – a son – was born. It might be assumed that the switch to a more settled existence would have taken the edge off my ardour for Federer, relegated him to a firm second (or, indeed, third) place. But my feelings remained as powerful as ever. Instead of fading, they just took a slightly different form, accommodated themselves to the new presences in my life. Federer turned 30 in 2011. It proved, on the whole, a frustrating year. For the most part, he played well, but he wasn’t terribly successful. For the first time since 2002, he failed to win a Grand Slam and his ranking slid to No 3. There was bad luck involved: he lost some exceptionally close matches, none more so than the spectacularly ghastly Djokovic semi-final at Flushing Meadow, when, for the second year in succession, he lost after holding two match points. (And this time, moreover, they were on his serve.) He also kept coming up against opponents in the form of their lives – as was the case with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at Wimbledon. Nor were matters helped by the fact that he now had to contend not just with Nadal but with a newly formidable Djokovic, who went unbeaten for the first five months of the year, a run of 43 matches that only came to an end when Federer beat him, magically, in the semi-final at Roland Garros. With a second player threatening to eclipse him (and Murray also making a strong bid), Federer, at this point, was again being written off. But he responded – thrillingly – by powering back to No 1. It all started at the end of 2011, when he suddenly won three tournaments in a row: Basel, Paris and the World Tour Finals. I saw him thrash Nadal 6-3, 6-0 at the last of these events – this was just three weeks after my son was born. Nadal wasn’t at his best, but it was nonetheless immensely pleasing to see Federer rampant against his old rival. His revival continued in the early months of 2012, with triumphs at Rotterdam, Dubai and Indian Wells (where he again beat Nadal). He went on to win on the ill-fated blue clay in Madrid before, in July, lifting his seventh Wimbledon crown, dispatching Murray in the final. A wave of patriotism was sweeping the nation – it was the summer of the London Olympics – and a Brit hadn’t won the men’s trophy since Fred Perry in 1936. Was this, finally, “our” year? I remained immune to such sentiments. I admire Murray, and, in other circumstances, I would have been happy for him to win, but whatever patriotic feelings I had – and I don’t, nowadays, have all that many – were never going to make a dent in my loyalty to Federer. Federer’s Wimbledon win got him back to world No 1. A couple of months later, he broke Sampras’s record for the number of total weeks in the top spot. He retained the ranking until November, at which point he was again surpassed by Djokovic. Things at this point still looked positive – he ended the season playing well enough. There was no indication of what was to come. The following year, it goes without saying, was easily the bleakest year of my Federer-obsessed life. Something peculiar, unaccountable, happened. After a promising enough start (the semis in Australia), Federer’s form dipped precipitously, reaching a nadir in the middle stretch of the season, when he lost in the second round of Wimbledon to Sergiy Stakhovsky – a player ranked more than 100 places below him – and then in the last 16 at the US Open to Tommy Robredo, a journeyman he’d brushed aside in all 11 of their previous meetings. That defeat was the worst of all. Robredo wasn’t even playing particularly well, he was just doing what he always did. It was as if Federer had misplaced his game; the shots looked more or less the same, but the brilliance, the genius, had been scooped right out. His ranking slipped from two to seven and he was doubtful for a while for the World Tour Finals. Federer himself seemed at a loss to know what to do. After Wimbledon, he briefly experimented (unsuccessfully) with a larger-headed racket, before returning to his trusty 90 sq in frame. He claimed many times that his form was on the verge of returning – only to suffer another humiliating loss. As the defeats piled up, pundits rushed to proclaim that the once-great Federer, at the age of 32, was fading fast. Fellow players, including Djokovic, suggested that he had lost a yard of pace. Some observers argued that, by stubbornly prolonging his career, he was making himself look foolish, tarnishing his legacy. He maintained that he wasn’t unduly worried, that things would get back on track, and he referred repeatedly – though somewhat elliptically – to the back injury he’d been plagued by all year. There were some suggestions that he was making this up. At the end of the year, in November, I saw Federer lose to Djokovic, in three sets, in his first group match at the World Tour Finals. I’d managed to land a press pass and, afterwards, I attended Federer’s press conference. I was surprised by how tired and dispirited he looked: after all, had he really expected to beat Djokovic? He was tetchy, irascible with several of his questioners. Although his form had shown signs of picking up in recent weeks, he still wasn’t anything like the Federer of old, the one I’d delighted in all these years. That night, as I left the arena, I wondered whether I would ever see that Federer again. © William Skidelsky. This is an edited extract from Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession by William Skidelsky, published on 4 June by Yellow Jersey Press (£16.99). To pre-order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 |