Roger and the writers: Why are so many literary types obsessed with Roger Federer?
Last week Roger Federer announced his retirement with his customary classiness — and the eulogies haven't stopped flowing. But why do so many writers — including novelists and Nobel Laureates — feel the urge to pen love letters to the Swiss tennis legend?
Roger Federer has been extracting superlatives from journalists for a long time. As far back as 2009, at which point he’d only won about half of his twenty grand slams, he was already being described by one as “the best athlete in the history of sports and it’s not even close.”
Plenty of this week’s sports page headlines tag him as the ‘GOAT’, but there are three women with more grand slam titles, and both of his contemporary rivals Nadal and Djokovic have surpassed his record. So there are solid grounds for arguing that Roger is not ‘the best athlete in the history of sports’, nor even the best in his own sport. Nor even of his own gender in his own era in his own sport.
However, one thing we can say with some confidence is that no athlete in history has had male writers more eager to reach for their purplest ink and to parade their man-crushes in fulsome, thesaurus-busting eulogies.
The Telegraph’s Oliver Brown recently called Federer “an art installation in human form” and claimed that watching him play “was to savour a particular aesthetic, a glimpse of sport at its most idealised, in which a technically fiendish game became a spectacle of the purest artistry. Sometimes, parallels were drawn between Federer on Centre Court to Nureyev at the Bolshoi.”
Ballet dancers and fencing masters are probably the most common analogies, but Simon Barnes, the lyrical former Times chief sportswriter, has gone much further, asserting that watching Roger play was like “a moment of artistic revelation: when you see the point of a Magritte painting or realise where a labyrinthine sentence from Proust has taken you; when you grasp the point of a Japanese haiku, or a piece of music takes you to a place that is at the same time surprising and inevitable.”
This stuff is par for the course.
The Times’ Ed Smith was so moved by watching Federer play that he wept. Nobel prize-winning author JM Coetzee confessed that his experience of seeing Federer play was “very much like my response to masterworks of art” and called the Swiss “something like the human ideal made visible”.
Geoff Dyer, a great and idiosyncratic writer, recently published a book about the late-in-life achievements of cultural giants like Beethoven, JMW Turner, John Coltrane and Bob Dylan… but he titled the collection The Last Days of Roger Federer. And manly Fed-worship possibly peaked with the wonderfully strange memoir Federer and Me - A Story of Obsession by former literary editor of the Observer, William Skidelsky, which explicitly argues that even when losing to Nadal the sheer beauty of Federer’s style makes him the ethically superior player.
What is it about Roger that so sets writerly hearts a-thumping?
The founding document of Roger Lit is a celebrated 2006 essay by David Foster Wallace, published in the New York Times under the make-no-bones-about-it title Federer as Religious Experience.
Wallace was a cult literary novelist and a depressive. He died by suicide in 2008 and in the years since the veracity of much of his nonfiction writing has been questioned. Indeed, Federer as Religious Experience opens with a lengthy description of a point played between Federer and Agassi that Wallace seems to have made up – or, more generously, misremembered. Nonetheless, it is a terrific article, and even if some of the details are dubious it is full of universal Truths.
All the essential elements of what we’d now recognise as Roger Lit are present. Wondering praise for his zen-like grace both off and on the court. Evocative descriptions of his strokes (“Federer’s forehand is a liquid whip”). An armchair analysis of why he wins so much (“Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision”). An explanation of why he is a Before-and-After player, someone who single-handedly changed the sport of tennis (short version: by proving that subtlety, intelligence and touch can triumph in an age of composite rackets and power-baseline hitting). An explanation of why he transcends his sport, like Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali (“Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws… a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar”).
And a lot about Federer’s beauty: “The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
Wallace’s brilliant – and brilliantly-worded – insights have long since become cliché. You can tick off the above checklist in virtually every article written about Roger’s retirement. Not that the points are wrong (I agree with every word - Roger is my favourite player too), just very familiar.
So why do so many writers feel the urge to keep rewriting and re-stating the same points? And not just sports writers, who have to fill column inches, but heavyweight novelists, who could write about anything they chose? What is it about the man?
But perhaps that’s the wrong question, and we’re looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope.
Perhaps instead of looking at Roger Federer, we should be looking at the writers, and what turns them on.
Federer embodies beautiful tennis, but he didn’t invent it. In his seminal 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis, W Timothy Gallwey observed that many club players are not really playing tennis at all, but ‘Perfecto-Tennis’: a subconscious attempt to achieve flawless grace in every shot, and that this desire actually supersedes the desire to win. (Hence Brad Gilbert’s equally seminal book Winning Ugly is a corrective to this way of thinking).
The wish to be effortlessly graceful is a deep strain running through the amateur sporting psyche. Tennis particularly lends itself to it — but think also of swimming, and how a lovely, languid front crawl stroke is preferable for many to the ability to swim fast; or cricket, and the yearning for the perfect, Gower-esque cover drive.
It stands to reason that writerly, poetic-minded types are particularly attracted to beauty – in sport as in anything else. So naturally they’re attracted to the most beautiful sportspeople.
A lot of the literary Federer fans are keen tennis players themselves. If they know they can never achieve his physical grace and perfection on the court, it’s little wonder that they try to recreate it in a medium at which they really do excel: they use words.
Andrew Nixon is a writer and keen club tennis player from Bristol. Get in touch via editor@talkingtennis.co.uk
