RF Tennis News 2019

Federer puts on “tactical” display in win over Shapovalov at Miami

It wasn’t all just dry Xs and Os from Federer; he also brought his usual athletic dazzle to this night session.


By Steve Tignor | Tennis.com
March 29, 2019




Normally, we don’t learn much from a pre-match interview, beyond the fact that a player is going to play his game, and that the match is going to be a tough one. What else can we expect from an athlete who is just about to walk on court to compete in front of thousands of people?

In his pre-match interview with ESPN’s Brad Gilbert on Friday in Miami, Denis Shapovalov mouthed the usual bromides. He said his semifinal with Roger Federer was going to be difficult, and that that he would play his game and see how it went. But while his words weren’t especially revealing, the 19-year-old Canadian’s body language was: He looked, as Gilbert would point out later, like he was having trouble breathing.

As Shapo said the day before, this was a milestone moment for him. He was facing the man whom he referred to multiple times as “my idol” for the first time, in a Masters 1000 semifinal. If his interview beforehand didn’t let you know how tight he was, his opening service game should have. Shapovalov made eight unforced errors in that game alone, and threw in a double fault before finally eking out a hold.

In this case, though, the victory really was Pyrrhic. As Federer said afterward, that long game gave the Swiss a chance to get a read on all of the various serves that Shapovalov, a lefty who generates a lot of spin, would throw at him. When Federer ripped through one of his traditional 60-second holds in the next game, the pressure was immediately back on Shapovalov’s shoulders. This time he buckled under it and was broken. Federer was off to the races, while Shapovalov remained stuck at the gate. He would finish the first set with four winners against 20 unforced errors. And while Federer would make just 40 percent of his first serves, he wouldn’t face a break point.

Federer called this a “tactical” performance, and said he was happy to play with “variation,” because Shapovalov “obviously has the power.” While he had never faced Shapo before, Federer seemed to have him sized up perfectly. On his return, he stepped forward and made sure he got the ball into Shapovalov’s weaker backhand side. The same was true on his serve; on the very few occasions when he found himself in any trouble, Federer got out of it by serving and volleying into Shapovalov’s chip backhand return. Shapovalov’s one-hander is one of the most spectacular shots in the game, but it’s also a place where his opponents can go when they need a point.

Of course, it wasn’t all just dry Xs and Os from Federer; he also brought his usual athletic dazzle to this night session. He dug out a brilliant Shapovalov backhand pass with an even more brilliant drop volley. He blocked a return from in front of his face and somehow placed the ball just over the net, where Shapovalov couldn’t do anything with it. He ended a side-to-side, 30-shot rally with a forehand winner. And he kept coming up with surprises until the very end. Serving for the match at 5-4 in the second set, up 30-15, Federer fooled Shapovalov by slicing his second serve sharply down the T; it was a shot he hadn’t hit for much of the evening, and Shapo missed the return badly.

With his 6-2, 6-4 win, Federer is now into his third straight final, and his second straight at a Masters 1000. None of the young players who have been making noise in recent months—Shapovalov, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Frances Tiafoe—are still around. Despite the fact that Shapovalov had been watching Federer for much longer than Federer had been watching Shapovalov, it was the older man who came up with shots that the younger never saw coming. That’s what idols do.

Roger Federer Demonstrates His Mastery, Yet Again, at the Miami Open

By Gerald Marzorati - newyorker.com
April 1, 2019


Those who came to see Roger Federer play against John Isner in the final of the Miami Open got their money’s worth. He was in full, flowing form. Photograph by TPN / Getty


Roger Federer, who is now thirty-seven years old, continues to reveal what he means to tennis. At the Miami Open, for the past two weeks, he was the only player who could bring the Stadium Court to life. The tournament moved from Key Biscayne to Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, the home of the Miami Dolphins, this year; for now, the Stadium Court, where the biggest matches are played, is a fourteen-thousand-seat arena constructed within the sixty-five-thousand-seat football mega-complex. I’m sure that Dolphins fans, and fans of the University of Miami’s football team, which also plays there, love the place: football is a game that can legitimately be watched from high up and far away, not least because feeling like a part of the crowd, roaring continuously with your fellow-fans, wherever your seat happens to be, is a big part of the experience. Tennis? Not so much. Besides, who wants to be inside in Miami? Especially during the first week of the tournament, a lot of fans who had stadium tickets joined folks with ground passes to sit in the bleachers on the outer courts, which were set up on and around the stadium’s parking areas. There, they got closeup views of the players, and they could repair to nearby salsa-pulsing tented lounges for margaritas or mojitos. This was tennis Miami-style, a Latin Open.

But when Federer played—once in the afternoon, once in the evening, once a day late, because of rain, and, at last, in the men’s final, on Sunday—people went to the stadium. On Sunday, there were few empty seats as Federer dispatched John Isner easily enough, 6–1, 6–4. Most people, as was clear from the cheers as the players entered, were there to see Federer, even though his opponent was not only an American but a Southerner (born in Greensboro, North Carolina) and the reigning Miami Open champion. There were a lot of tennis devotees on hand, it was clear, but there were plenty of casual sports fans, too, people who wanted to get a live glimpse of Federer, the same way that people with only a passing interest in basketball go to see LeBron James when he’s in town. The Miami Open is not Wimbledon, but seeing a Roger Federer final is a bucket-list item, like a dinner at Noma.

And those who came got their money’s worth. Federer was in full, flowing form in the final, as he’d been throughout the tournament. He got in twenty first serves and did not lose a point on any of them. He approached the net more sparingly than he has of late, but it worked almost every time that he did. He seldom backed off the baseline during rallies, taking both his forehand and his backhand early, on the rise, but hardly ever appearing rushed. When he exhibits that kind of languid elegance, especially on the backhand, finishing with that arms-wide, Winged Victory of Samothrace extension of his, you know he’s brought his game.

His most effective shot against Isner, though, the one that assured his hundred-and-first tour championship—putting him second on the all-time list, after Jimmy Connors, who won a hundred and nine—was his chipped service return, mostly from the backhand side. Isner, who is N.B.A.-center tall, wins with his serve, period. He hits aces and service winners, flat serves that get as much as a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour and kick serves that can bound over the head of a returner. He doesn’t break many opposing servers—his own return game is unremarkable—but he holds serve and forces a lot of tiebreaks, where his serving prevails.

Federer’s short-swing chip return essentially blocks the serve, the ball floating off his racquet with backspin and little pace. It’s easier to time than taking a big cut at a rocket-launch serve. It also tends to fall short on the other side of the net, with next to no bounce. If you are a six-foot-ten-inch server, it’s a form of torture. You have to rush the net, bend deeply, and reach low to get under the ball enough to get it back up over the net. And, if you do get it back, now you are stranded near the net and open to being passed. Federer won three points with chips in the first game of the match, passing Isner twice and watching one of Isner’s backhands off a short return sail long. And so it went. The first set lasted all of twenty-four minutes. In the course of the match, Federer broke Isner four times. Isner injured his left foot late in the second set and was limping badly as it ended. But the afternoon’s outcome, from the first game of the match, really, was never in question.

After the match, I asked Federer about his chip return, a shot that pretty much he alone, among the players on the men’s tour, can use as a weapon. He explained that it was something he had felt he needed to develop when he was coming up, in the late nineties, to face a generation of veteran serve-and-volley-style players, among them his childhood hero, Pete Sampras, who had a very big serve. “I just think the slice was always the more natural shot for me, the safety shot, to some extent, you know, because, when you’re younger and you’re lacking power to come over, the slice is the go-to play,” he said. It makes it easier to keep the ball lower, he went on. “And then whenever the serve, I guess, is a little bit faster, it helps me a lot just to keep a lot of balls in play.” He made it sound so simple, I found myself thinking, so straightforward. Like the rest of us, after all these years, he can’t quite put into words just how good he still can be and just how beautifully he continues to play.

Gerald Marzorati writes regularly about tennis for newyorker.com. He is at work on a book about Serena Williams.

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The Winged Victory of Samothrace is a marble Hellenistic sculpture of Nike, that was created in about the 2nd century BC. Nike, the goddess of Victory in Greek mythology, shown in the form of a winged woman standing on the prow of a ship, overlooked the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace. Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world.


The Louvre

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