Nothing could happen at Brisbane or Dubai that would have been worth the exertion. The seeds were already set for the Australian Open. Federer’s seeding would match his rank: seventeenth. If everyone held to form in the Melbourne draw, he would play two qualifiers in the first two rounds … and then play the tenth-ranked player in the world in the third … and then if he made it past him he’d face the fifth … and then Murray in the quarterfinals. Federer never felt he needed much practice to round into shape the way Rafa does, and there was little to be gained from throwing himself right back into the middle of the Murray-Djokovic rivalry at Doha. So why not do something different and return to the Hopman, have some fun, play some doubles with Belinda Bencic, spend some time with the kids on the circuit? Life’s short. We have the time we have. He was a kid here once, too: with acne, some leftover teenage grumpiness, and thick shoulder-length hair. Who knows how many opportunities were left to do something like this, when there’s no pressure behind you and no expectations ahead? Nostalgie in German, nostalgie in French, nostalgia in English, they all sprout from the same exposed root: the Greek nostos—a journey homeward, specifically Odysseus’s long voyage home after the end of the Trojan War as told in the Odyssey.
Whatever it was, whether it spread from the others there to Federer or from Federer to the others, the atmosphere at the Hopman was unusually amicable. And not just for that night, but something about that night on that dance floor encapsulated the feeling that was in the air. Everyone got up to dance, the players and the folks in the crowd moving in one murmuration. Nick Kyrgios played it cool before another year betwixt and between the surreal and the sublime. Sascha Zverev, still baby-faced and not yet in the top twenty, played the kid before cracking the top five and picking up a practiced strut along the way. Bencic and Kristina Mladenovic played best friends forever before both of their years flew off the rails as soon as they tasted newfound success. They and the others were going to ring in 2017 right. No hesitation this time, for some reason; they were all in. All of them. Even Dad.
Many of the men had already taken off their jackets and loosened their ties, and Dad Roger Federer was good to go. He looked curated: still dressed in his black tux, his black bow tie still perfectly placed, his jacket still buttoned at the navel, white shirt still perfectly pressed as he moved, the DJ working the room, and the clock counting down the last few minutes of the year. Federer loved the Dad vibe he was giving off, like he was chaperoning the kids on a night at the dance. The players formed an improvised circle around him, shielding him from the bevy of fans who wanted pictures with him, not for his sake—as usual, he was cool with it—but because they thought it was fun to hem him in. And that’s when, alone for a moment with the music, he began.
Arms pinned to his sides, elbows slightly bent, stiff in the torso, shoulders back, neck extended as high as it could go—it was a pretty good rendition of the robot. For a few seconds he went off somewhere with the rhythm.
There’s a picture you can no doubt find on the Internet that captures this moment. As things circulate across the void they often lose their author, especially now when it’s so common that someone takes a picture with someone else’s phone and then hands it back to them. Moments are linked now to their subjects rather than their authors. Mona Lisa would be an influencer. Daria Gavrilova, Zverev, and Mladenovic are off-center to the right, Zverev and Mladenovic leaning into the frame as though they’re sneaking into the shot, the shorter Gavrilova standing tall in the center flashing a peace sign with Zverev. Deep in the background on a slight elevation, is the DJ, accompanied, his head down in work, his worktable covered over by a bespectacled man in the middle, jacketless and wearing a red tie, the flash has caught his attention but he doesn’t quite know whether to bomb the picture and smile or ignore it, so he just stands there, his indecision leaving behind a pained look on his face. And just ahead of him, to the left of the frame, neither in the foreground nor in the background, Federer is getting his groove on. There’s something about it, how everyone is seen and being seen, that still feels fresh and, to be honest, strange. Then again, how could it not be strange: it’s a picture of Roger Federer doing the robot framed by people clearly celebrating that they’re in a picture in which Roger Federer does the robot. I said it was a pretty good rendition of the robot, but I have to take that back now. It’s because of his face. The mouth is wide open and seems as if it has something important to say. And his eyes. Those aren’t a robot’s eyes. They have too much life in them. He’s having too much fun.
Roger Federer, unknown, Daria Gavrilova, Alexander “Sascha” Zverev, Kristina “Kiki” Mladenovic. Hopman Cup New Year’s Eve Gala, Perth, Australia, December 31, 2016. (Photograph taken by Andrea Petkovic with Daria Gavrilova’s phone; courtesy of Andrea Petkovic)
FEDERER XVII
Federer’s first official match of the year, on the first day of the Australian Open, was unfamiliar territory not only due to the amount of time he had missed but also due to his seeding.
Don’t think of a ranking as purely a cosmetic compilation of who’s doing well in the circuit and who’s not. Rankings also position players in a tournament like pieces on a chessboard. Your ranking has to be high enough to enter a tournament directly, and if you just miss the cut, you get to compete in qualifiers. If you make it through qualifiers, you start from scratch with the rest of the already-qualified field, but having played additional matches and having to play a seeded player.
If you automatically qualify for a tournament but your ranking isn’t high enough to receive a seed, then your fate is in the hands of the random draw. Some unseeded players are drawn against other unseeded players, some unseeded players are drawn against a wild card, some unseeded players play a seed. A Grand Slam has a field of 128 players. The first 32 are seeded. So, picture a chart made up of eight sections, and in each of those eight sections picture sixteen players paired up in eight matchups.
Now imagine the top half of the chart being sections 1–4.
And the bottom half of the chart being sections 5–8.
All the matchups in the top half will whittle down the competition until there’s only one matchup left. This will be one semifinal. The same thing will happen in the bottom half, yielding one last game in that section: the other semifinal. The winner of the top half of the draw (sections 1–4) will play the winner of the second half of the draw (sections 5–8) in the tournament final. Therefore, certain players can only play each other if they both arrive at the final.
The top two seeds of a tournament are always drawn into separate halves, one in the top and one in the bottom. The idea being that, if everything holds to form, these two players will play in the final. Further, the third seed is put into the other side of the half of the draw that the second seed is in. And the fourth seed is put into the other side of the half of the draw that the first seed is in. The seeding anticipates, again, that if everything holds to form, the third and fourth seeds will be the other semifinalists. The third seed is expected to beat everyone in his or her half of the draw until reaching the second seed. The fourth seed is expected to beat everyone in his or her half of the draw until reaching the first seed. Note that the first seed, as a benefit of being the first seed, is scheduled to play the fourth seed, not the third.
These sections are like ecosystems. The seeding in a section is like the gravity of expectation. When a top seed loses early, all hell breaks loose in a section because a top seed’s section consists of players with low seedings, no seedings, wild cards, and qualifiers. Things we call a “Cinderella run” on one side of the coin and “shit shows” on the other occur largely because certain seeds, usually the very top ones, get knocked out of their section early. Sometimes, though, an unseeded player or a wild card could mean trouble for everyone else in a section of the entire draw. In 2007, Serena Williams returned to tennis after some time away engaging in other pursuits. She entered the Australian Open ranked eighty-first in the world and therefore unseed
ed. She landed in a section of the draw in which the top dog was fifth-seeded Nadia Petrova. Unlucky, Nadia. The top seed was Maria Sharapova. Suffice it to say, Serena won that tournament.
You can easily see how all this gets turned on its head, but the general idea is that as the pairings reduce in number, the higher seeds survive. It goes by quickly: a section of one half of the draw of a Grand Slam begins with sixteen players, by the second round it’s down to eight, by the third round four, and by the fourth round only two players are left. The winner of a fourth-round match is the winner of that section. The winner of that section is what a quarterfinalist is. The top eight seeds are the heads of the tables of the eight sections of the tournament and therefore the players, by logic of their seeding, who are expected to make it to the quarterfinals. How they are paired up is a matter of the random chance of the draw.
Simple enough. I just wanted to lay this all out so we can keep in mind how screwed Roger Federer was at the start of the Australian Open as the seventeenth seed. Simply by looking at the draw again, you see Scylla and Charybdis waiting all over the place. He was going to have to get past Tomáš Berdych, the tenth seed and tenth-ranked player in the world, just for the pleasure of playing the fifth seed and fifth-ranked Nishikori. Beating Nishikori after beating Berdych would win him the section and leave him with, in theory, a quarterfinal matchup with Murray. If he beat Berdych, Nishikori, and world number one Murray, who was 28–1 in his last 29 matches, he would play Wawrinka, who just won the last U.S. Open over Djokovic and beat Nadal in 2014 in Melbourne. And if he beat Berdych, Nishikori, Murray, and Wawrinka, he would get for his troubles a final against Djokovic, whom he hadn’t beaten in a Grand Slam match since the 2012 Wimbledon semifinal.
Add to this the fact that you can’t even assume as the seventeenth seed making it past the qualifier in the first round. A qualifier may not be as good as a seed, and is all but guaranteed to run out of gas if lucky enough to win a few rounds. But in the first round a qualifier can be an extremely tricky opponent, because by the time a qualifier arrives at the first round of a tournament that player is game-ready, battle-tested, and on a winning streak. While the seeded player was going through the motions at practice or a promotional event, the qualifier was scrapping on the court for prize money that to him actually matters. And sometimes a wild card shows up who’s completely off the radar and throws a player out of whack.
In the first round of the 2016 Australian Open, the seventeenth seed in the men’s singles field was Benoît Paire. He played a nineteen-year-old wild card from Long Island named Noah Rubin, a small and scrappy player who had recently turned pro after playing a year of college tennis at Wake Forest and was ranked 328th in the world. Rubin scraped and clawed his way through the first set by winning the tiebreak, 7–4. Then he batted enough balls back at a bemused Paire to win the second set in a tiebreak, 8–6. It was Benoît-breaks-racket time. He lost the third set in another tiebreak, 7–5. “Not much to say except it was a catastrophe,” Paire said after the match. That and that Rubin was “not a very good player.”
Rubin went on to lose his next match in Melbourne in straight sets to qualifier Pierre-Hugues Herbert of France, who breezed past him in the first two sets before bageling him in the third and final set. Herbert went on to lose in the third round to his countryman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the ninth seed, in three close sets, including tight tiebreakers in the final two. Tsonga then went on to lose in the fourth round to the seventh-seed Nishikori in straight sets, who then lost to Djokovic in the quarterfinals in straight sets. The chain of losing set off by seventeenth-seeded Paire in section two of the top half of the draw was finally put to pasture by Djokovic in the semifinals gliding by the third seed, Roger Federer.
Of course, Roger Federer isn’t Benoît Paire, an exquisite talent capable of losing the plot at any moment and, that not being sufficient for someone so skilled at losing the plot, who can then proceed to lose the plot of having lost the plot. The fact remained, though, that to be seeded seventeen was to be dropped down into the middle of a dark woods. Seventeen was going to have to be good to him. Then again, it already had been, hadn’t it? It was exactly the number of Grand Slam titles he’d won.
REBIRTH: ROUND ONE
Playing in a Grand Slam at thirty-five, after a long layoff and with his top-ten ranking a thing of the past, Federer seemed to take the first-round draw he received in stride. Everyone on the circuit is younger than him, or at least it feels that way. Okay, Feliciano López isn’t younger than him. They go all the way back to juniors: the Orange Bowl in 1998—they were there, Andy Roddick, David Nalbandian, and Guillermo “El Mago” Coria, too. Those last three are already retired. And have been for a while.
Now, sometimes what comes with hearing “1998” isn’t a flashback to that tournament in Florida for the best-of-the-best juniors, but rather a wide-eyed wild card or qualifier saying to him now, “Oh, wow, 1998: that was the year I was born.”
At some point Federer started to take for granted that, in order to keep competing at this level, he was going to have to think of his age. Play quick, attack, attack some more, keep the points short, stay as fresh as possible this way. At his age and coming off an injury layoff, there wasn’t going to be a Plan B. All of that rehabilitation and the long preparation of the body and mind for a moment in Melbourne that could be ruefully short or unexpectedly long, a Cinderella run. The last time they played, he won. And in straight sets, no less. They were in Monte Carlo that day, on red clay in the quarterfinals. That was six seasons ago, though. The plan was straightforward, as at his age and with so much rust on the legs it needed to be. The plan wasn’t going to be a surprise; he’d been around for so long it wasn’t going to be a secret how he would want to play. He reminded himself: play fast; be as aggressive as possible on the backhand; hit it with bad intentions, always; and find his backhand, especially on the key points. They had played before on big stages, all in one flash—Wimbledon, 2010 round of sixteen; New York, 2010 round of sixteen; the quarters of the indoor Masters 1000 in Paris, also in 2010—each match an improvement before the triumph in Monte Carlo. He could hang the baseball cap he played in on that. Plus, the fact that at least for this match he took away from him the mantle of old soul. Jürgen Melzer was born in May 1981, ten weeks before Roger Federer.
The first set would slip away from him 5–7, but he was solidly in the match. As they warmed up before the match, hitting balls casually back and forth to each other, Federer hit four balls in a row with the frame instead of the strings. They’d known each other for a long time, the thirty-five-year-old Austrian and the thirty-five-year-old Swiss, and had hit balls back and forth to each other going all the way back to that Orange Bowl in the last millennium. By this point in their careers they knew both nervousness and rust when they saw them. And they saw it in each other—easy shots sailing long due to surges of adrenaline; the body too refreshed and chipper to be properly game-ready. What were they going to do about it?
For Melzer’s part, he used his lefty two-handed backhand, which he hits with tremendous body torque, to hustle the ball deep into the corners, the idea being that such balls would push his opponent back. But Federer, for better and for worse, refused. He stayed on the baseline and flicked those shots back, taking them on the short hop, quickly and with minimal swing. He missed some, but kept going after them, and he hit enough of them to throw Melzer’s timing off when he’d thought he’d hit a winner or set himself up to win the point with one more stroke but instead would see a winner fly past him. Still, Melzer held course, sensed an opening in Federer’s high-risk approach, and pushed hard when he had made some headway in Federer’s service games. Melzer won the second set 6–3. Federer won the next two sets by identical scores of 6–2.
Melzer played craftily, letting his left-handedness mix and match with Federer’s patterns for playing points. The push and pull of a left-handed topspin forehand followed by an extremely flat, lefty two-handed backhand, that type of
inside-out game Melzer put on display, reminded me a little bit of Nadal, though there’s no comparison, as Nadal is incomparable. And besides, the days were long gone of the two of them looking over the draw to see who was in the way of the inevitable. Still, Nadal was on the other side of the draw, though—the ninth seed, in Gaël Monfils’s section of the draw—which meant that the only way they would play would be if both reached the … Never mind. The next match in two days’ time would be with none other than Rubin, who qualified this time around and beat another qualifier to book his place in the second round. Rest was what was important now, and the rest was silence. After the match, Federer wondered aloud how many times the first round has not been easy—almost every time, he said. I couldn’t help but notice how he phrased the sentence: he left out the hard words, the ones that spread their roots in the mind—difficult, hard—no, the first round has a habit of not being easy. In the beginning, the mind paints layer after layer of possible futures. The present scrubs all of them and leaves one. The words we use, then, to speak of it become so important. And so choosing your words wisely is a way of saying to that painter in your head, Let there be light.
The Circuit Page 7