Federer the King of Tennis? Not on ESPN's Message Boards

To even a casual observer of men's tennis, it's been fairly unmissable of late that this Swiss fellow Roger Federer is quite a player. Just 25, he's already won eight Grand Slams: four straight Wimbledons, consecutive U.S. Opens, and two Australian Opens. He's been ranked no. 1 in the world for 132 weeks in a row. (The record is held by Jimmy Connors, who was no. 1 for 160 weeks.) He has made the finals of the last 17 competitions he has entered, winning 13 of them, and has won the last 54 matches he has played in North America. On average, he loses a game of tennis about six or seven times a year, usually on his least favorite surface, clay, to his least favorite player, Rafael Nadal. Rarely have artistic grace and silky skills, of which Federer has an abundance, been so happily blended with an unrelenting work ethic.

Former men's tennis greats, including Rod Laver, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Ivan Lendl are all of the opinion that the Swiss champion has got something pretty special going on. The consensus is that he has a real shot at beating Sampras' record of 14 career Grand Slam victories. His service motion is the smoothest in the game, his footwork has a dancer's precision, and his forehand is famously lethal. And all this despite the fact he only gets to play two tournaments a year on grass, the one surface which allows him to display every facet of his talent simultaneously.

So it would seem that Federer, popularly known in America as "The Fed," or "Fed-Ex," really is something out of the ordinary. This past Sunday at the Toronto Masters, Federer overcame a sluggish start against the talented young Frenchman Richard Gasquet before duly getting his name engraved on yet another trophy after a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory. "MASTER ROGER," proclaimed ESPN'S tennis home page, over a photograph of Federer waving his racket to the crowd following his victory.

But on ESPN's message boards, where hard-core tennis fans deliver opinions on everything from the players' strategies to their looks, sexual tendencies and forehands, it was a very different story. Two of the main threads there were, "Federer Has Been Lucky All Week" ("Tursunov, Gonzo, Malisse and Richard all could have beaten him this week. Chokers!"), and "FED'S BORING DOMINATION IS KILLING TENNIS!!!!!" ("bad enuf he's a hairy robot with no personality… richard [Gasquet] should have won that match but he choked it away"). In this arena, Federer is judged to be a talented -- yes -- but nonetheless vastly overrated player whose aura of invincibility has allowed him to hypnotize his opponents (Nadal excepted) into agreeing to lose to him before they even step on the court.

The chief proponent of the theory that there's less to Federer than meets the eye is someone who writes under the all-caps moniker, GRAF-SAMPRAS. Graf-Sampras is VERY, VERY keen on the use of capital letters, and on beginning and ending his thousands of posts, many of which are virtually identical, with the acronym, lol, or LAUGHING OUT LOUD.

Graf-Sampras, whoever he is, appears to spend much of his life watching tennis on television while laughing out loud, presumably in an empty room. (It has been suggested by some posters that the room may be in an insane asylum.) American tennis great Pete Sampras is his idol, and it is his belief, hammered home relentlessly in post after post, that since the demise of Pete the game of tennis has entered a WEAK ERA (lol), filled with MENTAL MIDGETS (lol), who just roll over at the critical moment and let Federer do whatever he wants to them. In other words, it's not that Federer is so good, but that his opponents (save Nadal) are such wimps. And the commentators who ooh and ah over his every shot, and speculate openly as to whether he is the greatest of all time, are either dupes or liars.

I haven't read all of Graf-Sampras' thousands of posts, but there are two questions it seems to me he fails to address. If, as he claims, Federer is terrified of losing even a routine match because, deep down, he realizes his game is much more vulnerable than it appears, then in trouncing his rivals repeatedly he has surely come up with an extremely sound mechanism for dealing with his psychological "problem."

Secondly, even if it's true that Federer's aura of invincibility fools opponents into thinking they can't win, how did he develop it in the first place? Wouldn't he have had to conquer them over and over again to convince them they could never beat him?

The fact is that few athletes have made utter domination as pleasurable to watch as Federer. While other players grunt and groan, mutter their sports psychologists' mantras and pound the ball according to their coaches' playbooks, Federer is usually silent and relaxed. Almost everything he does seems effortless, and his feet are so light on the ground as to be almost inaudible. As Martin Johnson, the Daily Telegraph's tennis correspondent, wrote in 2004,

"The thing about Federer… is that he appears to be on cruise control most of the time, and only rouses himself when he strictly needs to. He doesn't care to sweat a lot, and reminds you of that old comic-book football hero, Gorgeous Gus, who only came on to the field when his team were two goals down with five minutes to play. Gus didn't like running around either, and he would hand his cape to his butler, saunter on with strict instructions that the ball be delivered directly to his right toe, and duly deliver the winning hat-trick."

In short, for a while Federer made it look supremely easy, and thus embodied the universal dream of absolute physical genius and grace, the player who can hit any shot, at any time, simply at will. But that was two years ago. As the Guardian's Steve Bierley noted back in May, on the eve of Federer's defeat to Nadal in the French Open final, "The Federer façade, as clear as freshly fired porcelain a year ago, has suddenly begun to exhibit hairline cracks and nobody can be quite sure whether it is the lightest of damage or if the cracks will widen."

So far, Federer appears to be keeping the cracks under control. He followed his French Open loss by beating Nadal in the final at Wimbledon, and now he has another trophy under his belt. This week he plays in Cincinatti (the last major hard court tournament before the U.S. Open), where it seems highly unlikely anyone will prevent him from tying Ivan Lendl's record of making 18 straight finals. What's especially impressive about Federer is that he is probably aware that from now on he will have to fight much harder if he hopes to match Sampras' 14 Grand Slams, and that he has a window of three or four years at most in which to do it. Not only must he face down the muscular specter of Rafael "Conan the Destroyer" Nadal, it's increasingly evident that younger players have been tutored in his one obvious weakness, namely a difficulty returning a high-spinning ball to his backhand side. Gasquet managed to manacle him with that shot for an entire set at the Toronto Masters on Sunday, but then Federer started working that old Swiss voudou, changing the tempo, creeping up to the net, and before long he was scoring winners with his backhand rather than missing with it.

"I am only 20. I know I will beat him some day," said Gasquet meekly after the match. One could almost hear the gnashing of teeth on the ESPN message boards. MENTAL MIDGET! How about beating him NOW, dude!!!?????

Strangely, Graf-Sampras stopped watching after the first set -- he "had to run," according to his post, but someone else bravely entered the breach. According to this poster ("hs0022), Federer's success can be explained as follows:

         It's like this (for simple brains)

         Roger: "Hit me with your best shot."

         Opponent: "Bam"

         (Roger still on his feet)

         Roger: "Now, my turn" "BAM"

         (Opponent is knocked out senseless)

-- Brendan Bernhard

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