andy roddick
NEW YORK — After losing to Jimmy Connors in 16 consecutive matches and then doing the unthinkable by winning, Vitas Gerulaitis commented: “And let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row!”
Tennis can be a crushing sport. Andy Roddick must have had Gerulaitis’ sinking feeling many times in the course of his 19 defeats in 21 matches to Roger Federer. I watched several of those encounters and Roddick, hustling through his unvarying game, tugging at his sweat-soaked shirt, resembled a guy banging his head against a wall.
It was different in Sunday’s epic Wimbledon men’s final. A slimmer, smarter, more purposeful Roddick played the game of his life, holding serve 37 times in a row and reinventing his long vulnerable backhand as a down-the-line weapon of choice, before coming up short against the Federer machine. The case that Federer, 27, is not the greatest player of all time has become untenable.
It’s not merely Federer’s five U.S. Opens, three Australians, one French and six Wimbledons — a record of 15 Grand Slam singles titles, one better now, as the world knows, than Pete Sampras. It’s not just his 21 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals. It’s not only his relentless consistency, uncanny timing, impossible angles, ferocious forehand, dinking deftness or big-point cool.
No, there’s something else at work here. People develop Federer obsessions the way teenagers have crushes. They can’t get the guy out of their heads. The late novelist David Foster Wallace, a devotee, said of one Federer forehand against Andre Agassi that, “It was impossible. It was like something out of ‘The Matrix.’”
I think that gets us close to the heart of the matter. Let me put this bluntly: Is Roger Federer part of a Matrix-like artificial reality or is he flesh and blood?
During the final, I couldn’t help focusing on three things. The first was the button on Federer’s Nike shirt. Through more than four hours of punishing tennis, sun-baked by British standards, it remained buttoned up. I mean, come on!
Think back to the upstart Andy Murray, the latest Brit who couldn’t quite, in his losing semifinal to Roddick. The Murray shirt was unbuttoned, of course, and somewhat disheveled, like his game on the day, and there was absolutely no question about the young man’s appurtenance to the human race, a rather surly branch of it at that.
The second was the absence from Federer’s face of even a bead of sweat as droplets poured from Roddick’s forehead and slid from the underside of his endlessly adjusted cap — further evidence for The Matrix theory.
The third was the fact that Federer wore a belt — a belt — in his stylish shorts, as if he was ambling through a Calvin Klein ad rather than serving 50 nonchalant aces and putting on a record-breaking athletic display.
Perfection is always a little unworldly, the more so when it’s packaged in Switzerland, and of course perfection can be galling. I wanted Roddick to win because he may never play that well again while Federer will seldom play much less well. I wanted Roddick to win because he broke a sweat.
So is Federer real, or is he in fact the computer-simulated perfect tennis player, a science fiction hero, his body heat drawn invisibly into energy creation, switching from slice to topspin backhand on the basis of some nerd’s formula no opponent can grasp or grapple with for long?
I know, Federer broke down at the Australian Open after his five-set loss to Rafael Nadal in February, sobbing into the microphone and saying, “God, it’s killing me.” A few weeks later, in Miami, he lost the plot entirely during an error-strewn semifinal loss to Novak Djokovic, smashing his racket as he often did during his tantrum-filled youth.
My colleague Christopher Clarey wrote then that it “was like watching the owner of a health food store start fumbling through his desk drawer for a long-lost pack of cigarettes.”
Case closed, it seems. Federer, he of the warm smile and perfect love affair with Mirka Vavrinec, is indeed human. He rages, he cries, he gets sick, he has back aches and doubts, and occasionally he just can’t take it any more.
Unless, of course, all this is only further proof of the devious genius of Federer’s cyber-creators, who imbued him with a touch of human vulnerability in order to lull young upstarts like Murray and Djokovic and Nadal into thinking he was past his peak, and so open the way for the French and Wimbledon triumphs this year.
Perhaps I’m over-suspicious, or undergoing a severe case of obsessive envy, but when Vavrinec gives birth in the next few weeks, I’d say there’s a case for the Association of Tennis Professionals ordering a quick examination of what flows in the baby’s veins.
And then of course, as a last resort, we can ask the masterful, charming and irresistible Federer to take the red pill and reveal all to the human world.
NEW YORK — After losing to Jimmy Connors in 16 consecutive matches and then doing the unthinkable by winning, Vitas Gerulaitis commented: “And let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row!”
Tennis can be a crushing sport. Andy Roddick must have had Gerulaitis’ sinking feeling many times in the course of his 19 defeats in 21 matches to Roger Federer. I watched several of those encounters and Roddick, hustling through his unvarying game, tugging at his sweat-soaked shirt, resembled a guy banging his head against a wall.
It was different in Sunday’s epic Wimbledon men’s final. A slimmer, smarter, more purposeful Roddick played the game of his life, holding serve 37 times in a row and reinventing his long vulnerable backhand as a down-the-line weapon of choice, before coming up short against the Federer machine. The case that Federer, 27, is not the greatest player of all time has become untenable.
It’s not merely Federer’s five U.S. Opens, three Australians, one French and six Wimbledons — a record of 15 Grand Slam singles titles, one better now, as the world knows, than Pete Sampras. It’s not just his 21 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals. It’s not only his relentless consistency, uncanny timing, impossible angles, ferocious forehand, dinking deftness or big-point cool.
No, there’s something else at work here. People develop Federer obsessions the way teenagers have crushes. They can’t get the guy out of their heads. The late novelist David Foster Wallace, a devotee, said of one Federer forehand against Andre Agassi that, “It was impossible. It was like something out of ‘The Matrix.’”
I think that gets us close to the heart of the matter. Let me put this bluntly: Is Roger Federer part of a Matrix-like artificial reality or is he flesh and blood?
During the final, I couldn’t help focusing on three things. The first was the button on Federer’s Nike shirt. Through more than four hours of punishing tennis, sun-baked by British standards, it remained buttoned up. I mean, come on!
Think back to the upstart Andy Murray, the latest Brit who couldn’t quite, in his losing semifinal to Roddick. The Murray shirt was unbuttoned, of course, and somewhat disheveled, like his game on the day, and there was absolutely no question about the young man’s appurtenance to the human race, a rather surly branch of it at that.
The second was the absence from Federer’s face of even a bead of sweat as droplets poured from Roddick’s forehead and slid from the underside of his endlessly adjusted cap — further evidence for The Matrix theory.
The third was the fact that Federer wore a belt — a belt — in his stylish shorts, as if he was ambling through a Calvin Klein ad rather than serving 50 nonchalant aces and putting on a record-breaking athletic display.
Perfection is always a little unworldly, the more so when it’s packaged in Switzerland, and of course perfection can be galling. I wanted Roddick to win because he may never play that well again while Federer will seldom play much less well. I wanted Roddick to win because he broke a sweat.
So is Federer real, or is he in fact the computer-simulated perfect tennis player, a science fiction hero, his body heat drawn invisibly into energy creation, switching from slice to topspin backhand on the basis of some nerd’s formula no opponent can grasp or grapple with for long?
I know, Federer broke down at the Australian Open after his five-set loss to Rafael Nadal in February, sobbing into the microphone and saying, “God, it’s killing me.” A few weeks later, in Miami, he lost the plot entirely during an error-strewn semifinal loss to Novak Djokovic, smashing his racket as he often did during his tantrum-filled youth.
My colleague Christopher Clarey wrote then that it “was like watching the owner of a health food store start fumbling through his desk drawer for a long-lost pack of cigarettes.”
Case closed, it seems. Federer, he of the warm smile and perfect love affair with Mirka Vavrinec, is indeed human. He rages, he cries, he gets sick, he has back aches and doubts, and occasionally he just can’t take it any more.
Unless, of course, all this is only further proof of the devious genius of Federer’s cyber-creators, who imbued him with a touch of human vulnerability in order to lull young upstarts like Murray and Djokovic and Nadal into thinking he was past his peak, and so open the way for the French and Wimbledon triumphs this year.
Perhaps I’m over-suspicious, or undergoing a severe case of obsessive envy, but when Vavrinec gives birth in the next few weeks, I’d say there’s a case for the Association of Tennis Professionals ordering a quick examination of what flows in the baby’s veins.
And then of course, as a last resort, we can ask the masterful, charming and irresistible Federer to take the red pill and reveal all to the human world.
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