Talking Tennis with… William Skidelsky - author of ‘Federer and Me’
The author of Federer and Me: An Obsession talks to us about Roger’s retirement and his own turbulent relationship with the game of tennis…
“…Exactly why I play is a difficult question to answer, but I guess what it’s ultimately about for me is that there’s something incredibly satisfying about the basic motions of tennis: the sensation of being able to manipulate that little fluffy ball, seeing it come towards you and then sending it back…”
William Skidelsky has been literary editor of the Observer and New Statesman, as well as deputy editor of Prospect magazine. He’s also a tennis nut, being a very handy player and former junior county player. His 2015 memoir Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession is a paean to the Swiss great, but also a brilliantly entertaining and personal look at fandom, beauty in sport, and the peculiarities of tennis itself. Here’s our Q&A…
Now that Roger Federer has definitively retired, how do you feel about it? And is Roger still an obsession for you?
I do, of course, feel very sad about his retirement, but I’m also somewhat relieved: it would have been awful if he had come back after all this time and been nothing like the player he was. Seeing Federer – the player who most embodied perfection – reduced is not a pretty sight. We got an intimation of that at last year’s Wimbledon, with his undignified capitulation in the quarters to Hubert Hurkacz.
It’s really quite obvious, in retrospect, that at the age of 41, with two and a half years mostly out of the game (not to mention several surgeries), he just wouldn’t have been able to compete. I mean, think of Carlos Alcaraz at the US Open, bounding tirelessly across the court for five hours straight (and repeating the feat two days later), and then think of Federer, with his no-longer-sturdy knee. The two things just can’t really be squared, and it’s good that Federer has acknowledged this.
And to answer the second part: no, I no longer am so obsessed. The obsession for me was very much tied to the regular excitement of watching him play, seeing his latest astonishing rally, willing him to win. I’m as susceptible as the next fan to the odd bit of nostalgia-surfing on YouTube, but I don’t like wallowing too much in the past.
Sport is brutal like that: you just have to move on.
When did you first start playing tennis… and what was your most recent game?
I became obsessed by tennis – and I mean really obsessed – when I was about eight or nine. I played to a decent junior standard (I competed in tournaments and played a few county matches) and I was a great scholar of the game’s history: I could recite in full the scores of five-set matches that had taken place decades earlier.
As I explained in my book, I then fell out of love with tennis (and indeed with pretty much all sport) in my teens and didn’t really play again till my late twenties, when I got back into it in a big way – largely because of Federer. Though I was very rusty when I came back to it (tennis is a hard game to pick up after a long time away: apart from anything else, your body seems to lose the shape for it, and you get injured a lot), through perseverance I became quite good again.
I still play quite a lot today. I play for the first team at my local club in Kent (I previously played for a club in south east London) and in fact I played in three matches at my club last Saturday: the final of the over 40s singles (which I narrowly won: it took three hours), the final of the over 40s doubles (which my partner and I won), and the final of the men’s doubles (we lost). As that tally shows, I’m a strong player for my age at club level – but like Federer, I’m finding it increasingly hard, at the age of 46, to compete with the young, strong and agile!
”…I’m not a racket smasher, but nor do I play with Roger-like serenity. I’m a pretty relentless shout-at-my-selfer. My wife has said, seeing me in full-on self-berating mode, that I resemble a person who is severely deranged…”
What role has tennis played in your life? Why do you play?
It has played an extremely significant role in my adult life – both as a fan, and as a player. Exactly why I play is a difficult question to answer, but I guess what it’s ultimately about for me is that there’s something incredibly satisfying about the basic motions of tennis: the sensation of being able to manipulate that little fluffy ball, seeing it come towards you and then sending it back, hopefully with interest.
I like the fact that tennis is on the one hand really quite simple (a back and forth, and it’s not at all hard to make contact with the ball), but on the other hand extremely technically demanding. I can’t think of another sport where there are so many technical variations. Take a backhand, for instance: you can play it topspin (either single- or double-handed), slice, or as a volley – and with each of those three a completely different technique is required.
So there’s a lot of really quite fiendish technical mastery in tennis, but when you put it all together – when you are hitting the ball well, with a high degree of control - it feels, and indeed looks (if you’re lucky), elegant and simple.
I could cite lots of other things here – the particular psychological demands of tennis; the unusual scoring system (which I have a section on in my book); the court’s geometry, and how this affects how you think about angles and spins – but all those, I think, are secondary to what I’ve singled out here: that basic, satisfying sensation of manipulating the ball.
There are many ways to play tennis… from the semi-collaborative ‘hit’ with a friend to the brutally combative singles match; then there are doubles and mixed doubles with their unique sporting and social dynamics. What’s your preferred form of playing?
I used to mainly play singles, but these days, to be honest, I prefer doubles. Singles is really quite brutal. There’s the fact that it’s far more physically demanding than doubles, but also, I find, to maintain a good standard at singles (let alone improve) you really do need to practice quite a bit.
If I had an unencumbered life (if, say, I didn’t have a wife and three young children), I might put in the effort of playing a LOT and getting my singles as good as it possibly could be. I can’t do that, and so inevitably when I play singles, and play someone decent, I spend a lot of time thinking: why can’t I do this better? I find with doubles my play is much more consistent, and much less affected by how much I’m practising. And I like the collaborative aspect - the fact that you’re working with someone, and have to take account of their particular skills and abilities. Doubles is a warmer, cosier form of tennis than singles, and nowadays I appreciate that aspect of it. The trade-off is that it’s more predictable than singles – but that, too, is something that these days I rather like.
For most players, tennis involves some winning but also an awful lot of losing. How are you with losing?
I’m not a great loser. For one thing, I’m extremely competitive. But actually, I don’t particularly mind losing a close match in which I feel I’ve competed well. Yes, I might be annoyed for about 10 minutes, but the disappointment quickly fades.
What I find stings far more is losing a match by a big margin. Generally, I play with people I’m fairly closely matched to – they’re the people you arrange to hit with, or they’re in the same league as you, or whatever. But sometimes, if you play tennis competitively, you meet someone just comfortably better than you. And I don’t cope with that particularly well.
I just find it’s not very nice to be reminded that you don’t have to go all that far up the tennis ladder to find someone who can hand you a severe beating. And that brings all sorts of uncomfortable questions into play: you start looking at results, and see that the guy who thrashed you actually can’t be so very good, because he himself was thrashed only the previous week by such and such a player. And so what does that say about your own level?
It’s been said many times before, but there's something really quite vertiginous about the way that the levels of tennis work. This is connected to its scoring system, which accentuates relatively small differences. The result is that you can have two very good players – players who are way better than the vast majority – and yet the gulf between them, as reflected in the scoring system, will still be very large. A good way to think about this is to consider the fact that a player in the 97th percentiles (ie who is better than 97 out of a hundred players) will himself be thrashed by someone in the 99th percentile. And that player, in turn, will be thrashed by the guy in the 99.9th percentile.
I don’t know if thinking about things this way is depressing or reassuring – but what I do know is that it’s never fun to lose 6-1 6-0.
Are you a racquet-smasher or do you play with a Roger-like serenity?
I’m not a racket smasher, but nor do I play with Roger-like serenity. I’m a pretty relentless shout-at-my-selfer.
My wife has said, seeing me in full-on self-berating mode, that I resemble a person who is severely deranged. And in fact, it is madness, because shouting at myself never improves my game. I play far, far better when I keep a check on my emotions, don’t over-analyse, and try not to judge myself – all those Inner Game of Tennis things that owe something to Buddhist tradition.
When I’ve got a match I really want to win, I’m generally better at staying positive and calm, but it doesn’t always work. One thing, though, that has noticeably improved over the years is that even in spite of my shouting-at-myself tendencies, I’ve become much better at handling tight situations. Like a lot of players, I used to get really nervous when matches were tight – towards the end of sets, in tie-breaks etc – and start pushing the ball. These days I’m much calmer, and actually find I can usually raise my game when things are tight. I don’t know why that is – it’s just hard-won experience, I guess.
Do you have a favourite tennis-related book?
I do think David Foster Wallace is hard to beat as a tennis writer (not that he wrote all that much about it), and so my favourite book about tennis – though it wasn’t conceived as a book – would have to be his collection of tennis essays, String Theory.
People know about his Federer essay, but the first essay in that book, “Derivative Tennis” (or “Tennis, Trigonometry and Tornadoes”, as it was titled when first published in Harper’s magazine), is also a remarkable piece of writing.
Are you still in love with tennis?
My love for it has diminished a bit over the past year or two - and I find it hard not to connect that with Federer’s absence from the sport.
For a long time no other sport has come close to challenging tennis in my affections, but this summer, for the first time in ages, I found myself becoming almost more interested in cricket – the other big passion from my boyhood. I started playing again (for a local village side), and that piqued my interest in how England were doing, and I started watching the Tests; and my 10 -year-old son also began playing, which added another level to my interest. So I don’t know: my love for tennis has had a bit of a pause.
But that said, I found the US Open pretty exciting, and I’ve very much enjoyed the recent matches I’ve played, so I don’t think I’ll be abandoning tennis any time soon.
Roger Federer: A Story of Obsession (2015) is published by Penguin
