I refuse to go along with the romantic cult of Roger Federer. During the men’s singles final at Wimbledon last weekend a majority of the crowd clearly wanted him to win — not because he was the better player, but because he had around him an aura that was as much about his supposed good looks as his tennis. It’s true his tennis has been outstanding over the last decade and more, and he’s still won Wimbledon far more times than last Sunday’s victor, Novak Djokovic. But Djokovic was throughout the match clearly the stronger player, even in the second set which Federer was very lucky to win after a long tie-break. Yet the crowd howled for Roger. And now we have a book that, without a trace of skepticism, collects together the cliches of this Federer cult, adding to them a series of dubiously relevant parallels with the author’s, by his own admission, often directionless life.
William Skidelsky is a journalist, and he’s fond of quoting an article on Federer by the US novelist David Foster Wallace (as well as in this book he did it in a Guardian article on the Federer-Andy Murray semi-final). There Wallace said Federer was both Mozart and the heavy metal band Metallica, and that the combination was wonderful. Skidelsky’s whole book is effectively an elaboration on this idea, culminating with a description of himself sitting in the second row at Wimbledon and realizing (as if he hadn’t come to the conclusion long ago) that Federer was sublimely graceful, and also ferociously aggressive underneath.
The title may sound as if the two are well-acquainted, but at the time he wrote this book Skidelsky’s only contact with his idol were two press conference questions at the tennis festival in Halle, Germany, where Federer plays regularly, tickets are cheap and there are few other Englishmen in sight.
Skidelsky’s irrational obsession with Federer produces an equally irrational hatred — for Rafael Nadal. “Like most diehard Federer fans,” he writes, “I loathe Rafael Nadal.” He goes on to itemize Nadal’s ticks, his rituals and his compulsions. He delineates his attritional style which, combined with “a psychological need to assume the role of the underdog,” makes him, in Skidelsky’s view, Federer’s exact and lethal opposite.
Skidelsky sees Federer as a natural aristocrat, poised and lithe, whereas Nadal is a stress-filled, muscle-bound enfant terrible. Yet Nadal has beaten Federer 23 times in their 33 face-to-face contests. They first met in 2004, when Federer was 24 and Nadal 17. Nadal won. And it’s interesting to note that the only players who’ve beaten Nadal more often than he’s beaten them are three presumably chancily lucky players who’ve only played him once.
As Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession unfolds, so does the account of the author’s life. After studying at a British comprehensive (state-run) school till he was 16, Skidelsky was encouraged by his intellectual father to apply for a scholarship for students from just such backgrounds to the top UK public (ie, private) school, Eton. He got in, and from there proceeded to Oxford, where he read first English, then history. But an unaccountable lethargy began to possess him, so he took a year off (he’d earlier taken a gap-year in India), went on antidepressants, then returned to get what he calls an averagely good degree.
After trying his hand working as a chef, he landed a job on the books page of a political weekly magazine in London. He also took up tennis again, and developed an interest in the professional game. Soon he was hooked, and in 2003 watched the men’s final at Wimbledon with a ticket bought from a tout an hour before the match for ￡850 (NT$41,000).
Needless to say, to pad out a book like this, various other topics are covered — the author’s childhood sporting achievements, Federer’s predecessors in the sequence of his sporting enthusiasms, the history of graphite rackets and the symbolism contained within tennis’s scoring system.
Then there’s Djokovic. “A human spider, insubstantial of torso,” writes Skidelsky. “All the force, the emphasis, of his body resides in those sprawling, tentacular limbs.” But he remains a bit-player in this story, even though the book ends with Federer’s loss to him in the Wimbledon men’s singles final last year, a result destined to be repeated this year.
An unexpected chapter is on “The Pursuit of Beauty” — beauty in tennis, that is, and especially the beauty in Federer’s tennis. The inner truth of these concepts lies in beauty’s combination of order and disorder, Skidelsky attests, unexpectedly citing the English Romantic poets as his theoretical precursors.
Then Skidelsky finally goes over the top. Federer, he concludes, is a saint, a caring modern husband and a creative genius. He’s in addition someone who helped Skidelsky out of his depression-dominated years, and proved successful therapy for his and his wife’s loss of an unborn child, aborted following the discovery of serious abnormalities. This crediting a romantic cult figure for a role in a very serious real-life situation is simply embarrassing.
The Federer material in this book contains no surprises, and the autobiographical part is of questionable interest from the start. Federer is praised for going on after his greatest years, and for continuing to embody the ideal of supreme tennis artist. Skidelsky, you feel, hopes that he too will be able to limp on into middle-age now the prime of his youth has also passed.
The author scarcely mentions female tennis giants, no profound truths, either about himself or Federer, appear, and the book thus remains a meandering and rather pointless read at best.
The truth is that Federer is a professional sportsman, clocking up over US$50 million (NT$1.55 billion) a year in commercial endorsements. Individual players in several sports become popular icons, but it’s no great credit to Skidelsky to offer himself as the literary representative of what is in essence a relatively mindless mass movement, nice guy though Roger Federer as a person indeed very probably is.
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