Team Federer: How the tennis ace became the world's pre-eminent athlete

[joeybee12]

It's not just the player but the person; it's not just the winning but the manner. It's the ability to remind us how games should be played and how champions should behave. He, Roger Federer, has set a standard, one his legion of fans will be hoping he maintains when Wimbledon starts on 29 June and he attempts to win the title for a record eighth time.

It's a standard no other athlete in any sport has been able to emulate over the past dozen years. For skill and professionalism; for popularity and longevity, this Swiss genius with a South African mother and a broad, inquisitive view of the world has captured the imagination and the loyalty of people all over the globe.

Federer has reached a point in his storied career where he chooses to play tournaments in places he hasn't yet visited simply to sate his curiosity. Last year he went on an exhibition tour of South America and then signed up for the new International Professional Tennis League so that he could visit India. New Delhi went nuts. This year he played the new ATP event in Istanbul and the Turks, bereft of a tennis history of their own, mobbed him at every turn.

http://europe.newsweek.com/team-federer-how-tennis-ace-became-worlds-pre-eminent-athlete-328918

[tishaLA]

1. Federer as Religious Experience--David Foster Wallace's deservedly famous essay

Fed's fans and foes should read it over and over, relishing a writer as skilled as his subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs. <...>

[joeybee12]

2. That's a large part of why people really love Roger's play...

It's incredible skill and agility, not just power which is the way most play nowadays...and we'll probably never see this again because the game has changed so much.