A bumpy ride, but still worth it

Let’s lap up what little that is still on offer from Federer, writes Nirmal Shekar

Mortality in sport is a familiar yet deeply unsettling phenomenon. Not a day passes without one iconic athlete or the other getting some kind of intimation of its existence.

On the other hand, no day is complete without a valiant attempt by one sportsperson or the other to try to ward off its seemingly evil intent.

This is precisely why sporting mortality can be so easily used and abused as a trope to explain away larger existential questions.

The 48 hours in which Roger Federer defiantly fought off the Big M from his doorstep, before finding it settled comfortably on his drawing room couch, have offered us yet another reminder about the inevitability of mortality and its utter disregard for status hierarchies.

Well, it can’t happen to Roger, can it? How can something as banal, as quotidian as the Big M strike the great man?

Of course it can, and it will — if not this year, then a year on, or two or three years down the line.

No way out

It is one fact from which nobody has ever found a way out, in sport as in life. There are some who are lucky enough to pre-empt its body-blow and go out in style. But this is as much due to chance as it is perhaps the result of deep, rational thought and action.

Pete Sampras, having shaken off its rude intimations time and again over two years, finally won his 14th and last major title by beating Andre Agassi in the 2002 U.S. Open final. Although he officially retired only a year later, that turned out to be the last time he picked up a racquet as a professional.

For every Lucky Pete there are a hundred Sad Sams.

Before he was outplayed by an inspired Marin Cilic in the semifinals of the U.S. Open last Saturday, Federer had put on show passages of near-flawless, ethereal tennis — the sort of athletic magic that fools you into believing that you had at last spotted a real immortal as opposed to the metaphorical ones.

These were occasions when the devout once again undistractedly paid attention to the great man’s game in a manner that might have eluded them when they were part of almost any other sporting experience in their lives.

“Great athletes catalyse our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, [and] interact with matter,” wrote the late American novelist David Foster Wallace in an essay in the  The New York Times in 2006.

Wallace’s memorable piece, titled  Federer as Religious Experience , famously introduced into the tennis lexicon in the new millennium its conjoined twins — Federer Moments.

But even then, American literature’s tortured soul saw through all the beauty and hinted at its mortality.

“Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even to just see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way)  reconciled.’’

Those were the last two sentences of Wallace’s masterly piece, the equivalent of anything any great writer may have ever written on sport, including perhaps Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer.

From the time he won the first of his record 17 Grand Slam titles at Wimbledon in the summer of 2003, the Federer masterclass has fed the soul of sports-lovers as nothing ever did in the 21st century.

Matchless beauty

Reporting his matches, there were times when you became urgently aware of the sheer inadequacy of language itself in the face of the matchless beauty. I would sit at the keyboard for long moments, only to realise my own smallness, my own limitations as a purveyor of sporting truths.

But then, to try to understand how Federer accomplished what he did on court was — I eventually came to believe — to dilute and violate the pure experience of what one had luckily been part of.

Once, at the Australian Open in Melbourne on an unforgettable night, after Federer had won a point with a breathtakingly impossible shot, a German scribe turned to me with a look on his face that had the question, Did You See That, written all over it.

It was exactly what Wallace was talking about when he wrote of the Federer Moments — times when a great athlete reshaped our perceptions of the possible and the impossible.

My own experience of watching other sports, and gladiators and icons who elevated them, might have, at times, come close to the way one felt when witnessing the Federer magic.

But the chances of a professional sports hack getting to be part of such heightened moments of life — ones that philosophers from the time of Aristotle have celebrated and spent considerable time pondering — on a weekly basis are vanishingly small.

This is precisely why mere numbers and records should form no part of our consciousness when Federer is still around — even if he is not winning Majors anymore, even if he is unable to reproduce his special sorcery week after week, match after match.

Let us lap up what little that is still on offer.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the larger context of life itself. But to many of us sportlovers, Federer Moments might well come to represent that brief crack of light.