In praise of Roger Federer

Was out of action at work for a few days due to a bad head cold and fever. The advantage of such a thing, if you can actually see one beyond the continual sneezing and sniffling, is that you're asleep most of the day due to sheer exhaustion. Consequently, you're wide awake at odd hours of the night. Which, if you're living in India while the US Open is going on, is a really good thing.

Managed to watch a good bit of Roger Federer's game recently. I'd heard so much about him and seen so little that I wanted to get an idea of why the best tennis players alive are all uniformly rhapsodizing about him. Sure, what I'd seen of him, I'd liked, but why this much hyperbole?

So I watched. The guy seemed mostly half-asleep on court - he'd seemed that way for most of his matches in the tournament, from whatever I'd seen. Sure, he kept racking up the points, but I couldn't yet see what was extraordinary. Although at some level, I could sense that a guy who could win a set without seeming to do much was probably playing at a level where he was too good to be obvious about it, I didn't yet see the full extent of it.

Then Lleyton Hewitt nearly broke him to win the second set but failed and it went to a tie-breaker. For the next seven points in a row, Hewitt didn't seem to be able to do anything at all. Federer took the set 7-0 in the tie-break. He did go on to lose the next set before winning the fourth one and the match, but by the end of the tie-break, I had seen what I wanted to see.

I don't think I know enough tennis to compare him with any other player I've seen, or to comment on his all-time greatness, or potential thereof. But for about five minutes there, in the middle of a mostly sleepy match, it was like peering through a keyhole into the infinite. It makes you wonder what it must be like to be him, to be able to produce something like that on the court.

From whatever I've seen/read of him, he seems to be a quiet, self-effacing kind of guy. Which essentially means that, unless he works on his image, nobody who doesn't follow tennis will know who he is. Sad but true.