Federer: Off the Mat
by Pete Bodo
Q: Do we have a right or good reason to expect another installment in the Roger vs. Rafa rivalry to cap the Australian Open?
A: We certainly do, given the most recent twists and turns in this rivalry for the ages. In fact, we may have more right to expect a showdown between No. 1 Nadal and No. 2 Federer in Melbourne than we ever had before. That's partly because Rafa added to his all-surface expertise (and confidence) considerably when he completed his career Grand Slam at the U.S. Open last September. Although he's won the Australian Open before—with a championship match win over his great rival in 2009—his lack of ultimate success in New York always cast some doubt on his hard court proficiency.
Nadal retired with a right knee injury during his quarterfinal match with Andy Murray in Melbourne last year, which certainly aided Federer's drive to the title (the Swiss handled Murray with ease in the title round). More important, the win represented Federer's 16th Grand Slam title and immediately guaranteed that whatever happened the rest of the year, he could consider 2010 an overall success. When a player tells you that any year in which he wins a major is a huge success, believe him.
But then the wheels came loose, if not entirely off. Federer really struggled through the late winter hard-court season in the U.S., and beyond. More surprising, he often seemed frazzled and frayed, losing matches he was in a position to win. He was lucky to have that Australian Open title in his back pocket; had Nadal triumphed back in Melbourne, Federer's problems would have been magnified, and by the end of Wimbledon (Federer was knocked out there and at Roland Garros a few weeks earlier) he could have been said to be in crisis. It doesn't take much to run a player, even a Federer, off the rails. And given Federer's age, record and depth of experience, it's hard to say how he would have reacted to that set of conditions.
There's no reason to get carried away here; it would be insulting to imagine that somehow a Nadal win in Australia last year would have driven Federer to his competitive knees. But when you look at how Nadal ripped through the subsequent spring and summer, and ended up winning three majors after he had to quit in the first one, you must concede that the bum knee played an enormous role in denying Nadal a chance to become the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to perform the ultimate feat in tennis—bagging a calendar-year Grand Slam. Rafa is positioned to accomplish the next best thing in that regard starting next week. If he wins the Australian Open, he will be the first man since Laver to hold all for majors at once.
This is all pure speculation; had Nadal won in Australia and positioned himself to accomplish a calendar-year Grand Slam, the pressure at the final three slams would been of a different sort, and probably a different order of magnitude. Nadal isn't crazy enough to set out to earn a calendar year Grand Slam; nobody is that loopy. But it must occur to him—and to Federer as well—that with their multi-surface skills, the Australian Open takes on special significance, because winning it creates the possibility of a Grand Slam, even if it remains a speck on a horizon littered with massive obstacles. The one thing everyone can be sure of is that if you don't win in Melbourne, you won't accomplish a Grand Slam. Duh!
I raise this issue partly because of something I wrote the other day for ESPN, on how the paradigms in tennis can shift surprisingly swiftly. The emergence of the "Golden Girls" theme in the WTA is one example. A more relevant one is the way nobody really thought that anyone in the Open era had a chance to break Roy Emerson's Grand Slam singles title record. Nobody, at least, until Pete Sampras seemed to declare, "Why not?" Since then, Federer has shattered Sampras's mark of 14 majors. So let me throw it out there—why not a Grand Slam, by Federer or Nadal?
The early portion of this analysis unavoidably cast Federer in a lesser light than he deserves, but let's face it, he was legitimately in trouble—his decision to hire Paul Annacone, the man who shepherded Sampras through his greatest years attests to it, as did his results. And give Federer all the credit in the world for taking a proactive attitude, as well as for taking advantage of his opportunity to take the Australian Open title last year. Depending on how things go this year and for at least one more, that win in Melbourne last year may stand out prominently as a critically important one—the affirmative result that helped keep Federer's confidence and motivation on a simmer despite the rough sledding he would face. It certainly was an achievement that he could turn to for consolation when things went awry. It would not have been fun for Federer, denied in Melbourne, to have to watch Nadal run the table in the three subsequent majors.
There were two main themes to the Federer-Nadal rivalry in 2010. One was the maturation of Nadal as a 12-month contender and dominant force. The other was Federer's late-season surge, as he sloughed off whatever temptation he might have had to hit the reset button. Federer finished strong, avenging his U.S. Open loss to Novak Djokovic (on his home turf at Basel). He nosed in front of his pal Pete Sampras in the career title count with win No. 65 (also in Basel), and later he joined Sampras and Ivan Lendl as the only men who have won the year-end championships five times. That he ended his year at that event with a command performance against his nemesis Nadal (Federer won, 6-3, 3-6, 6-1) only made the triumph more poignant.
Seen from high enough above the smoke and din of the battlefield, 2010 seems like a year when Federer approached the brink of submission to Nadal, but managed to pull his chestnuts out of the fire in time to reassert a general—and for us, marvelous—sense of parity. If he benefitted from Nadal's January injury, he also showed great resilience and competitive courage to finish the way he did. But this is how it's always been with these two. What seems a certain knockout either way tends to bring the seemingly beaten man popping back up off the mat, stung but reinvigorated. We saw it most recently at the ATP World Tour Finals.
Yesterday, I speculated that WTA No. 2 Vera Zvonareva's eye-catching 6-1, 6-0 win over No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki in a Hong Kong exhibition may bear upon the events of the coming weeks in Melbourne. Much the same can be said for Federer's performance last week in Doha, where an ill (as opposed to injured) Nadal swooned and staggered out in the semifinal stage, beaten by the man Federer would crush in the final, Nikolay Davydenko. There are more similarities than differences in the comparison, starting with the most conspicuous one of them all: the No. 2s seem to be doing all they can to seize the high ground as the Australia Open bears down on us. They are ready.