Watching the Wimbledon 2015 finals this weekend, I was struck by the strange hydraulics of what makes you root for one tennis player over another. Of course, it goes without saying that Serena Williams—women’s champion at 33 years old—is a titan astride this paltry planet, one of the greatest, most inspirational athletes ever to draw breath. But the men’s final offered an interesting emotional topspin on tennis partisanship, because it presented the curious spectacle of Roger Federer—subject of the greatest sports profile in recent memory, in which David Foster Wallace described his court prowess as a religious experience—as underdog.
How horrible Federer used to seem, especially as he started mowing down one giant after another on his path to effortless-seeming dominance. Watching Rafael Nadal beat him by dint of brute endurance in the five-hour long Wimbledon 2008 final was one of the greatest sports moments of all time—to have rooted against Rafa in that match, or any other match, would have been to be against life). But watching Federer get beat by Novak Djokovic this weekend was agonizing (though Djokovic is clearly no djoke). Time has a way of ennobling tennis players. So many of the true giants of the men’s game’s past 40 years arrived as insufferably arrogant monsters, only to stick around long enough to become beloved, indispensable sages. This was true of Connors, McEnroe, Becker, Sampras, and even Chang (though his extreme youth forgave a lot), and it will surely become true of Roddick and Murray. It was truest of Andre Agassi, whose fluorescent togs and supermullet made him impossible to root for. But when he came back, bald and thick and becalmed by a rictus of melancholy, it was like being introduced to the brother you never knew you had.
And now Federer, by any measure one of the couple greatest of all time, has joined that team. At 33, he was an eminence gris on the grass, but he came so close. As the NY Times story captured very well, you could feel the crowd straining at their British reserve, willing him to prevail over Djokovic—who is only a few years younger (28), but seems to be made of Terminator 2 magma—strawberries and cream be damned. And yet, the energy generated by that force of will seems like it must be enough to nudge Federer into at least one more round of Grand Slams before he fades into lucrative posterity. He doesn’t seem like the kind of champion who will be satisfied to retire having only tied Pete Sampras’s record of seven Wimbledon championships.
He says he'll be back and there's no reason not to believe him.
