RF Tennis News 2017

Cromar wrote:Thank you, CAP, for your compassion and offer to help!... But I just noticed that my all charts and images have come back! It's a miracle!  

I went back and read Photobucket latest update carefully and it appears, if I understand correctly, that those who had a paid account (any type) before June 30 will keep their '3rd party hosting' privilege until the end of 2018, providing we renew our subscription, which I did.

All my images had disappeared when I checked on July 11, but it was the day of my subscription renewal and maybe it took a while for their system to adjust. Anyway, I am happy that I don't have to redo all this work right now. I eventually will have to do it, but at least I now have more time to plan for an alternative.
Happy day!

Wimbledon: Roger Federer Shapes Up as Man to Beat in Semifinals


By BEN ROTHENBERG - JULY 12, 2017



Roger Federer, who is seeking his 19th major title, during his quarterfinal victory over Milos Raonic on Wednesday. He will face Tomas Berdych next, on Friday. Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


WIMBLEDON, England — At a stage in his career at which he could expect to be merely a sentimental favorite, Roger Federer instead enters the Wimbledon semifinals as a prohibitive pick to win the title.

By avenging his semifinal loss to Milos Raonic here last year with a 6-4, 6-2, 7-6 (4) victory on Wednesday, Federer, who turns 36 next month, became the oldest Wimbledon men’s semifinalist since Ken Rosewall reached the final at 39 in 1974.

“I’m just very happy that I’m still doing so well,” Federer said. “Am I surprised? Maybe a little bit. But the plan was always to hopefully be strong also later on in my career.”

Federer, who has won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, has gone from strength to strength this year. After missing the last five months of last season, he won his first major championship in six years at the Australian Open in January, and continued his dominance with titles at Indian Wells, Calif., and Key Biscayne, Fla.

After those wins, Federer stepped away from the tour as it shifted to clay, allowing for Rafael Nadal to dominate and for his own body to rest and recharge.

Federer returned to the tour on the grass courts of Stuttgart, Germany, and lost his first match, to the semiretired Tommy Haas. But Federer regained his form a week later in Halle, Germany, and has continued to improve throughout this tournament.

“That was the idea, that the second week of Wimbledon is that I would feel my best,” he said. “I feel like it’s coming along nicely, to be quite honest.”



Marin Cilic as he advanced to the semifinals with a win over Gilles Müller. Cilic will meet Sam Querrey of the United States. Alastair Grant/Associated Press


The third-seeded Federer’s remaining path to the title wends through giants — in stature, if not accomplishments. He will next face the 6-foot-5 Tomas Berdych, the No. 11 seed, who advanced when
second-seeded Novak Djokovic retired while trailing, 7-6 (2), 2-0, in their quarterfinal. A pair of 6-6 players — seventh-seeded Marin Cilic and 24th-seeded Sam Querrey — meet in the other semifinal Friday.

Berdych, a Wimbledon finalist in 2010 and a semifinalist last year, has not beaten Federer since 2013.

“They will have their word to say of the outcome of the matches,” Federer said. “They’ve got big serves, big forehands — big hitters, really. All three guys are taller and stronger than I am. I’ve got to figure out a different way — carve my way through the draw somehow with my slice, my spins, my consistency, maybe. I’m looking forward to doing that.”

The last time Federer’s road to a major championship appeared this clear on paper was before his semifinal at the 2014 United States Open, where all that stood between him and the title was a semifinal against Cilic and a final against Kei Nishikori. But Cilic blitzed Federer, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, and went on to win his only Grand Slam title in similarly dominant fashion over Nishikori.

Cilic, who beat Gilles Müller, 3-6, 7-6 (6), 7-5, 5-7, 6-1, on Wednesday, said his experience winning in New York had stayed with him as he again competes in the closing phases of a major.

“I believe, when coming at these stages of the tournament, I’m going to still be able to play great tennis,” said Cilic, a 28-year-old Croat. “I know I have it in me that I can win.”

On Friday, Cilic will have to beat Querrey, which could be an arduous task. The last time they faced each other at Wimbledon, in 2012, Cilic won the fifth set, 17-15.


Continue reading about Querrey and Murray here

Friday, 14 July 2017 20:38 PM BST

Relaxed Roger ready to make history

Swiss star hopes to play 'inspired and creative tennis' in 11th Wimbledon final

By Alix Ramsay


He makes it sound so simple. Roger Federer was heading home to prepare for his 11th (yes, you did read that right: 11th) Wimbledon final in the hope that on Sunday afternoon he could beat Marin Cilic and become the first man in history to win an eighth Gentlemen’s Singles title.




What would he do? Would he be nervous? Would he be able to sleep? How would he spend the next couple of days? As it turns out, Federer would do what Federer usually does – and when he does that, he usually wins (not that he would be so forward as to suggest that it was a given he was going to beat Cilic).

“I guess you do the routine you've been doing here during this fortnight,” he said simply. “That's what you're probably going to be looking forward to do.

“I just got to try to rest the maximum now. Just make sure I sleep well, even just tonight and tomorrow, really take it easy, so when I do come out on court on Sunday, I have all the energy and all the resources in my mind to play inspired and creative tennis. That's what I've got to do.”

Ah, the simple business of being creative and inspired at the same time while dealing with the weight of history leaning on your shoulders. What could possibly go wrong? But the man with 18 Grand Slam trophies sitting on his mantelpiece has no other formula to follow: he has been doing this since his first title here in 2003 and it seems to have served him well so far.

There was one word of caution for any Cilic fans in the room, though. The mighty Swiss may be a matter of weeks away from his 36th birthday, but he is feeling fitter than he has in years thanks to skipping the whole of the clay court season. Free of injury and full of running, he is eager to get started on the final but he knows how to keep himself calm and unflustered between now and the first ball.

"It's a big deal. I love this tournament. All my dreams came true here as a player. To have another chance to go for number eight now, be kind of so close now at this stage, is a great feeling"

- Roger Federer

“But I think in the past Grand Slam finals, the semi to final days helps me, is just to stay calm throughout the process,” he said. “The good thing is that I'm not carrying an injury like I did a little bit in Australia, where I had a hamstring problem, or in other years, I don't know what I was having. But this year I'm feeling good, so that really relaxes you in a major way.”

That must make Cilic feel confident: Federer is fit, he is calm and he has been here so many times before that nothing can faze him. That will make Cilic sleep easy, then.

But the very fact that the history is there to be made makes Federer happy. Other players may be crushed by the moment – the dreaded “don’t-muck-this-up-it-is-your-only-chance” jitters – but Federer revels in it.

One inquisitive soul asked him how it felt to be going into his 11th final.

“It's nice,” Federer said, beaming with that Cheshire cat smile that suggested his interrogator might want to check back with him on Sunday night. There might be another record to discuss then.

“It makes me really happy, marking history here at Wimbledon,” he said. “It's a big deal. I love this tournament. All my dreams came true here as a player. To have another chance to go for number eight now, be kind of so close now at this stage, is a great feeling.

“Yeah, unbelievably excited. I hope I can play one more good match. Eleven finals here, all these records, it's great. But it doesn't give me the title quite yet. That's why I came here this year. I'm so close now, so I just got to stay focused.”

Happy, relaxed and playing out of his skin – the mighty Federer makes it all look so easy.

The General Joy of Roger Federer, Wimbledon Champion Once Again

By Louisa Thomas
July 16, 2017



Roger Federer won the 2017 Wimbledon tournament, his nineteenth Grand Slam title, in a 6–3, 6–1, 6–4 victory over Marin Cilic. Photograph by Daniel Leal-Olivas / AFP / Getty


A few minutes after I arrived at Wimbledon, walking through the grounds, I felt a flutter in the air, a quickening. Heads were turning, looking up. A murmur rippled through the throng, and then a cry: “Roger!” I looked up. Roger Federer was crossing the bridge connecting Centre Court with the players’ area, trim in a navy polo. He paused at the shouts and looked down. The crowd below was at a standstill, necks craning, phones out to record the moment. He raised his hand in a wave, acknowledging his adoring subjects. The shouting turned to a roar. I—who have never had trouble cheering for his rivals—felt the silent cry in my own heart. Long live the King!

Roger Federer won a tennis tournament today. Perhaps you’ve heard: Wimbledon, his eighth. His nineteenth Grand Slam title. The final match, a 6–3, 6–1, 6–4 victory over Marin Cilic, was entirely forgettable. Cilic showed only flashes of the impressive serving, aggressive baseline play, and quick reflexes that brought him this far. After the first few games, Federer was never tested. It was unlike the tense and brilliant match that Cilic and Federer played in the semifinals at the 2014 U.S. Open, or the tight contest between the two in the quarter-finals of Wimbledon last year, when Cilic held match points but Federer went on to win. There was only one memorable moment this time, when Cilic was down a set and a break and began to cry. He was struggling with a bad blister on his foot, and with the moment. “It was just that feeling that I wasn’t able to give the best,” he later explained. He sat in his chair during the changeover, surrounded by the physician and trainer, and sobbed.

Tennis is a game that tortures souls. It is the loneliest sport, a contest not only of player against opponent but mind against body, mind against self. Everything about it is brutal, on and off the court: the pace and the weight of the ball, the pressure, the travel, the redundancy, the expectations, the carping press. It is not uncommon for players—including many of the greatest champions—to show their nerves and their temper during a bad patch, to crack.

Federer is different. Yes, he was once a kid with frosted hair and a habit of wrecking racquets. (The first time his wife, Mirka, saw him, he once recounted, he was on the court in Switzerland screaming and smashing his stick. As he told the Guardian, his voice adopting a mocking tone, “she was like . . . ‘Yeah! Great player, he seems really good! What’s wrong with this guy?’ ”) But he long ago became the paragon—even a parody—of gentility, calm and regal.

It can be hard to see past the legend, even on the court, if only because his play is so beautiful. Whether you’re religious or not, watching him is an aesthetic experience. I realized that I had lost whatever credibility I had as an analyst of his game, if I ever had any, during the 2015 U.S. Open, when he hit a squash shot instead of running two feet to his right to hit a routine forehand. It was a lazy shot, but, as his racquet scythed the air, I thought it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen.

Still, what he has done in the past six months, since taking the second half of last year to recover from a knee injury and to give his aging body time to refresh, is amazing by any measure. At the age of almost thirty-six, he has kept improving. He has changed his backhand, driving it more emphatically; he’s recalibrated the balance between his net and baseline play; he’s hit serves with perfect accuracy. He has used his preternatural timing and reflexes to unsettle the game of grinders, shot-making his way to win after win. “I’ve never felt more pressure playing against another player as I did against Roger when he’s on, where you feel like you have no room to breathe,” Tommy Haas, who is thirty-nine, told me at Indian Wells in March, which Federer went on to win. (Haas, as it happens, became the last man to beat Federer, when he did it in Stuttgart in June.) “You’re on your toes. You don’t know—is the ball going there? Is it going here? And the court is so big. You can play really good tennis, and you feel like you have chances, but you lose 6–4, 6–4, you’re not close.”

Against Cilic, Federer played a startlingly clean match. He won eighty-one per cent of his first serves and seventy-one per cent of his second ones, and had twenty-three winners to only eight unforced errors. An underrated returner, he also easily handled Cilic’s big serve. Federer won Wimbledon, his second major of the year, without dropping a set.

When it was over, he sat in his chair and also cried. The title meant a lot to him, you could tell. Still, the victories are not the most extraordinary thing about Federer to me these days. Winning seems like a natural consequence of a more general joy.

He loves tennis. Not just the titles, not just the competing, though he loves those, too. He loves the travel. He loves practicing. He loves the fans. He loves the press conferences. He loves the tradition, the history. He loves making history. He even appreciates anxiety. (“I always say when I’m nervous, I care, which is a great thing,” he said, earlier in the tournament.) When asked what he had missed during his time off, he said his fellow tennis players, the fans, even the tournament organizers. Half an hour after I saw him on the bridge, I was in the press center, standing outside of tiny Interview Room 2—a room I doubt he has ever stepped inside—when I saw him down the hall. He spotted Yuichi Sugita, a twenty-eight-year-old Japanese player who had just notched his first match win in the main draw of a Grand Slam. Federer turned and came down the hall toward us, then congratulated Sugita on the excellent win. It was a small moment, easy for Federer; still, it was something to see. Federer seemed to enjoy the encounter as much as Sugita did.

Every court that Federer plays on, everywhere in the world, is a home court for him. People travel from China, Australia, Egypt to witness him win. “It’s always a joy to see you play,” a reporter began a question after Federer’s first-round match. “Thank you,” he serenely replied. It is good to be Roger Federer. Yesterday, Venus Williams declared it “kind of uncool” not to be a Federer fan. For a long time, I might have disagreed. Now, why not? He takes pleasure in his life. He gives me pleasure in mine. Long live the King.


Louisa Thomas is a contributing writer for newyorker.com. She is the author of “Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams,” a biography of the wife of John Quincy Adams.

Hungover Roger Federer tells tennis’s next generation to attack old order


www.theguardian.com
17 July 2017

• Wimbledon champion celebrated title in bar until 5am
• Swiss calls on young players to play more attacking tennis





Roger Federer, hungover after partying until 5am to celebrate his eighth Wimbledon title, had enough lucidity on Monday morning to throw down a challenge to the next generation to play more attacking tennis if they want to dislodge the old order.

The 35-year-old Swiss could easily return to No1 in the world and win his third slam of the season in New York in early September after coming through Wimbledon without losing a set. He won in Melbourne, too, in vastly different circumstances, and he looks and sounds as content as when he was dominating the game alongside Rafael Nadal, then, in recent years, competing with Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray for supremacy.

“Yeah, my head’s ringing,” he said with a smile. “I don’t know what I did last night [after the Champions’ dinner at the Guildhall in central London]. I drank too many types of drinks, I guess. After the ball we went to – what would you call it? I guess it’s a bar – and there were almost 30 to 40 friends that were there. We had a great time. Got to bed at five, then woke up, and just didn’t feel good. The last hour or so I’m somewhat OK again. I’m happy with that.”

He is happy, too, with his game, which has returned to its stunning best since he came back on the Tour in January. Federer can fairly be regarded as the best player in the world right now and maybe for a while to come, regardless of sitting behind Murray and Nadal in the rankings – and three places ahead of Marin Cilic, whom he defeated 6-3, 6-1, 6-4 in the final on Sunday.

But Federer is less content with the mindset of the younger contenders, who still have not been able to remove the 30-plus elite from the top of the pile. “I know you can easily get sucked into that [attritional] mode when you don’t want to attack but, if you can’t volley, you are not going to go to the net. Almost every player I played here wouldn’t serve and volley. It’s frightening to me, to see that at this level.

“I look at the stats and, whatever round it is, I see that the guy I’m going to face is playing 2% of serve and volley throughout the championship. I’m going, OK, I know he’s not going to serve and volley – which is great for me. And the grass was playing fast this week. I wish that we would see more coaches, more players taking chances up at the net, because good things do happen there.

“I do believe the depth in the men’s game is as great as it’s ever been but, because of the way they play, maybe not super-fast like they used to back in the 80s, the margins are bigger because of the surface speed, the ball speed and the racket technology. You have to hit a lot of good shots to come through a Murray or a Djokovic. Over five sets, it catches up with you and it’s favourable for the top guys.”

Federer also thinks the points system does not favour younger players. “Since my generation and Rafa’s generation, yes, the next one hasn’t been strong enough to push all of us out. A young guy, if he wants to make a breakthrough, he can beat me or any top player, but, if he doesn’t make a run to the final or win the tournament, he’s not making any move in the rankings.

“It’s not so easy to win five straight matches [in Masters and lower tournaments]. The consistency that’s required by the young generation is quite complex. Because of our different playing styles at the top – put Stan [Wawrinka] in there, put Cilic in there and then the big four – it’s hard for young guys to make a run through that.”

He added: “I grew up with bonus points, believe it or not, back in the 90s. I remember playing Pat Rafter on Suzanne Lenglen in Paris and I was playing for double points in grand slams. I think it was 45 to beat a player [ranked] between two and five. It was like 90 points just to beat Pat and then take the points of the round.

“Of course sometimes you couldn’t defend those points the following year, so it was complex. But it was great for a big-court player to play a big guy and beat him there.

“What I feel is a bit wrong in the rankings system is, if you have a great run and play a quarters, like Andy did, for instance, fought, loses in five sets, walks away with 360 points. I walk away with 2,000 points. I feel the gap’s too big. It’s only been like this since a few years. To win eight 250s to make up for a Slam, I find it too much.

“That’s why, by playing little and making so many points at slam level, it puts me in a totally different situation. I can really start picking and choosing my moments when to attack [the rankings].

“But it is how it is. The good thing is that the best player in the world should be the one winning the biggest tournaments. That’s an aspect I understand: that we have a lot of points in Masters 1000s, slams and then the World Tour Finals.”

Graceful Roger Federer transcends statistics to rebuild mystical aura

www.theguardian.com
17 July 2017


The numbers may be impressive but they do not reveal the full story behind the brilliant and balletic Swiss who demonstrates such poise under pressure


Roger Federer returns to Marin Cilic during his straight-sets victory in the Wimbledon men’s singles final. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian


Roger Federer is one of those rare champions for whom numbers cannot gild genius. He loves to win, and strives for it more convincingly in the autumn of his career than scores of young contenders, as he proved for the eighth time on Centre Court on Sunday. Yet it is as if victory follows art, not the other way round.

For the record, these are the bare statistics that will go into the history books to embellish his achievement, after he had spent just an hour and 41 minutes beating a wounded Marin Cilic 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.

In his 102nd match at Wimbledon, he scored his 91st win, more than anyone in modern times, to win a title he first lifted in 2003, the year he defeated Mark Philippoussis in three sets. The Australian, five years older than Federer and long retired, was swept away with all the big guns of that time: Marat Safin in Melbourne, Andy Roddick here, twice; Lleyton Hewitt in New York, Andre Agassi there too.

Those victories, however, were only precursors to his rivalry with Rafael Nadal, a dual dominance that lingered for a decade, until the arrival of Novak Djokovic and then, to a lesser extent, Andy Murray.

Yet they have all fallen. All of them. Roger Federer is not just a survivor – the oldest man in the Open era to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon. If he were an actor, this would be his lifetime achievement Oscar, to keep forever. His 19th grand slam title puts him alongside Helen Wills Moody in fourth place on the all-time list, behind Margaret Court (24), Serena Williams (23) and Steffi Graf (22). Will he be so uncouth as to move past the ladies? If so, he will do it with a smile.

What the numbers cannot describe are the star-struck cheers that greeted him in a fleeting appearance later on the gangway near Centre Court. Nor can they adequately make sense of how his every whipped backhand, with that one, brown and perfectly muscled right arm, brings sighs of devotion from the stands.

They love, too, the fluidity, grace and balance of his movement as he glides over the turf; they marvel at his uncanny anticipation and almost palpable tennis intelligence, moving silkily to cut off what would quite often be clear winners with one downward swish of his racket to propel the offending ball back with interest. They are not just sports fans or tennis enthusiasts, they are lovers of ballet and theatre. They come not to see just a tennis match, but a performance that transcends sport.

Yet this was so one-sided a story, so predictable a narrative, that it lacked any dramatic impact. It was hugely anti‑climactic, despite the best efforts of the antagonists. There was no tension, just ennui for the loser, relief for the winner.

It is easy to disregard Federer’s fighting spirit because he has what only a few human beings, let alone athletes, have: poise under pressure. If he were president of the world and we were being invaded by Mars, Federer would calmly turn them back with a smile.

Muhammad Ali had this almost supernatural ability to hover above the rest of humanity, and did it in the toughest sporting arena of them all. Sachin Tendulkar (who came to worship in the Royal Box this year) had it on the cricket field. Zinedine Zidane was rarely buffeted from his purpose with a football at his feet, and nobody has yet made Federer lose his composure on the tennis court – especially this one, where victory is considered almost inevitable. It is his personal battlefield, although there was not much fighting on Sunday.

It was regrettable – for Cilic and the crowd – that the Croat was hobbled after the first set. He had not moved well from the start and, 0-3 down in the second, called for the trainer to look at his left foot. From that point until the end he was in almost tearful anguish. He desperately wanted to be a worthy part of the big occasion, but could not compete. He will probably never know – nor will we – how much better a show he could have put on had he been fit.

But that is the price they pay. They are all hurting at some point. Murray and Djokovic suffered to the point here where the Scot was reduced to immobility at the end of his quarter‑final against Sam Querrey, and the Serb had to quit early in the second set against Tomas Berdych.

And there at the top of the mountain, for the 19th time, stood the man who has largely eluded the grief of injury in his long career. He has been inconvenienced here and there – most seriously last year when undergoing an operation on his knee that forced him off the Tour for six months – but generally he has been blessed.

He returned better than ever from last year’s setback. It was nothing short of amazing that he could win the Australian Open. And there is little left to say about his performance here. He admits he did not expect to win in Melbourne; indeed, he did not think he would get beyond the quarters. But he had realistic ambitions at his favourite tournament. This is where Federer has always felt most comfortable, even when forced to fight. Not on Sunday. Maybe not next year, either. And there is every chance he can win at Flushing Meadows next month.

None of that seemed remotely possible seven months ago. Nobody discussed the possibility of Federer so completely rebuilding his aura that, regardless of what the rankings say on Monday morning, he is the best player in the world again. And by some distance.

There Is No Hiding From Roger Federer

Giri Nathan - Deadspin.com
July 17, 2017



David Ramos/Getty Images


Among the many aspects of Roger Federer that defy comprehension, most of them having to do with the possibilities of the human body, one puzzle has been stuck in my head lately. That is: his plain likability in spite of what looks, on paper, like so much countervailing evidence.

A dispassionate survey of his resumé would peg him as blandly regal, maybe unctuously luxe at worst. When he wears Wimbledon all-white it reads less like dress-code adherence and more like self-actualization. In an already genteel sport Federer has found a new apex, a new cloud to lounge on. His appeal never had much to do with relatability, and his roster of endorsements does him no favors here: Rolex, Mercedes-Benz, Moët & Chandon, Credit Suisse. If he is in your commercial break or in the pages of your magazine, he is peddling things outside the realm of almost every viewer’s means. If he is on the tennis broadcast, he is doing things outside the realm of almost every peer’s physicality. Nor is he particularly bashful about any of this. His personal monogram, a precious little gilt alloy of his initials, could inspire a world of resentment, but, somehow—no, this makes a weird sort of sense, even when it appears on corny cream blazers or cardigans. Maybe this is the most direct way of framing the issue: I see a man walk onto court caked up in all this, as Federer did in 2009—


Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

—and not only do I not loathe this man or cheer for his humbling, I even hope for him to win, and want him to keep winning even after he’s already won more than any other man ever has. And I want him to rack up those wins with dramatic backhanded death blows, too, without much regard for a bright young aspirant getting crushed underfoot. But that feeling could not last forever. (Even if his ageless game could apparently hold up its end of the deal.) As a longtime fan I always wondered where the limits of my greed lay. At what point does the appeal of Goliath, already a little counterintuitive and unseemly on its face, fade out altogether? When does it feel like excess?

Yesterday’s Wimbledon men’s final, in which No. 3 seed Federer thrashed No. 7 Marin Cilic, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4, forced me up against that border between rabid loyalty and “Hmm, maybe this is enough.” More than once I winced as Roger knifed a perfect backhand return deep into the court; more than once I sensed relief when the Croat simply landed a first serve in the box. That is not what the first four games of the match foretold: Cilic, a player of devastating power, came out swinging those heavy groundstrokes that had Federer scrambling and looking pregnable. What undid all the promise of this match was a blister on the bottom of Cilic’s right foot that had bloomed during his four-set semifinal against Sam Querrey. Before the final, medical staff drained it of fluid, had even injected it with anesthetics, but it forced itself into the match nevertheless, an unwelcome third competitor. (See the grisly scene for yourself.) When you are walking on something like that, a game of elite grass court tennis—which demands so much twitchy, lateral movement, so much friction between man and shoe and shoe and turf—becomes an exercise in masochism. “My mind was all the time blocked with the pain,” Cilic said later. That kind of pain dulls your reaction. It doesn’t matter if you’ve grooved your shots into perfection if you’re getting to every ball late, and reeling.

This crisis reached its public climax at 3-0 in the blowout second set, when Cilic sat down for a changeover and left nothing inside. Under a towel and ringed by medical staff, he sobbed. As Cilic tells it, those tears had to do not with the pain itself but rather with the gulf between what his mind wanted to do and what his body would permit. At his 11th Wimbledon, Cilic had finally made a final, and he could not play it the way he knew he could: “It was the worst moment I could have experienced. It didn’t hurt so much that it was putting me in tears. It was just that feeling that I wasn’t able to give the best on the court, that I cannot give my best game and my best tennis, especially at this stage of my career, at such a big match,” he said in the postmortem.


Alastair Grant/AP Images

This is not a common sight in the middle of a sporting event. Live commentators, not exactly the people equipped to treat the finer points of human emotion, largely stuck to hushed silence and disbelief here, but Boris Becker did drop an evocative phrase: “There is no hiding place,” he said, referring to the merciless exposure that comes with competing on the most famous court in tennis, for the highest stakes. Becker’s words left me envisioning such a Hiding Place, not a broom closet, but a simple booth of soundproof black velvet, in the corner of the court and available once a match, where a beleaguered athlete could get some catharsis—could scream or pray or puke in peace, banish an unsightly itch or excavate a problem booger without the scrutiny of millions. Watching Cilic red-faced and despondent with only a towel as defense, you wished he could find such a place, because the cameras felt like a startling intrusion.

If the moment was difficult to watch it was not because it broke some kind of code of sporting machismo, as our most craven bloviators would have it, but because of the raw intimacy—an ego flayed in public. When people talk about the drama of sports they’re generally referring to the action of the game itself—a story told through feats on the court—and yet here was a match functionally over within an hour, a lackluster on-court product, but one that nevertheless had the resonance of an elegy, enough to cast a pall over a room of stans.

Roger, for his part, handled all this with respect and grace. As Cilic lingered in his chair well past the umpire’s signal that time was up and play was to continue, Federer took to the court and stayed warm. For the rest of the match he did his job, which was to win, and without too much deference to his opponent’s weakness. All the formidable weapons he has showcased over the 15 years and over the last two weeks held up yesterday. Early on he hit Cilic with the coldest drop shot:

Drop shots are hard at the best of times, players so often use them in desperation. This completely froze Cilic. pic.twitter.com/wNqyzdJ3ES

— Adam Joseph (@AdamJosephSport) July 16, 2017

His delivery was pitiless throughout: Federer won an otherworldly 78 percent of points on serve, compared to Cilic’s 54. On this early exchange, the only real highlight-reel fodder in the whole match, Cilic scrambles to the net to find a gorgeous angle, lands on his butt, only to realize Federer right there waiting for it with a rubber wrist, coolly flicking it back over the net with an inch of clearance.



Federer was always there, going nowhere, even as Cilic crumbled. He got his breaks of serve and coasted. Early in the match he might emit the occasional Swiss German exclamation, but both of the first two set points he converted without any fanfare or gesture—the first off a Cilic double-fault, the second off an ace—just a walk to the chairs in mute triumph. Only after he won that championship point, an ace down the T identical to the one that handed him the second set, did he unveil the familiar Federer 2017 victory posture: arms up and right-angled, pre-weepy face. The rout was smooth enough that for once—an unfamiliar feeling for me—you might be tempted to root for Federer’s perfection to crack, just to restore some element of competition to the match, to make it feel earned.

That perfection has its many charms: there’s the transcendence on court, his overall decency off of it, and, more recently, the late-empire dad appeal. (He takes goofy vacation selfies; his two sets of twins played with their own faces as he hoisted his trophy.) But after seeing Federer skewer a man seven years his junior, a man literally weeping for how much he wanted something that Roger had seven times over, maybe you start to question the whole enterprise. In tennis, a game of individuals, the zero-sum nature of sport feels starker still. There is no pre-retirement tour of duty with the Spurs to put a ring on your finger: Either you will yourself to it, or you don’t. For the players trapped in a post-Federer, post-Nadal generation—players like Marin Cilic, Milos Raonic, Grigor Dimitrov, all 20-somethings that Federer wrecked en route to the title—the window for anything major is closing fast. A new generation of talent is waking up and the old legends are in no hurry to leave.

Just like fellow lovable juggernaut Rafael Nadal ran through the French Open, Roger Federer won Wimbledon without dropping a set, becoming the first man to do that since Björn Borg in 1976. By claiming this eighth title he broke his tie with Pete Sampras in Wimbledon, and holds that record alone; he extended his lead over the rest of the entire men’s field to 19 majors. Roger Federer is nearly 36 and there is no more territory left for him to conquer. For the better part of my life, my mood has hung on his play, and now I can finally foresee a future me that is totally indifferent to Federer’s tournament results, that watches with contented detachment. It’s one thing to say that now, while freshly sated with a title, albeit a title won in mild anticlimax. It’ll be a much harder pose to sustain in the second week of a major when he has yet to drop a set. Twenty, you know, is a pretty round number.