Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession

by William Skidelsky, 2015

This book is written by a huge Roger Federer fan, and it’s about life as a Federer fan: the joy of his victories, the agony of his defeats, and despising Rafael Nadal. Being a Roger Federer fan brought him through a dark period of his life. I wonder how he feels about Rafael Nadal now, and how he feels about Novak Djokovic. In 2015, Novak was far from Roger’s records, and now he has overtaken them. In 2015, it wasn’t widely known how much Roger likes and respects Rafael, and vice versa. I bet he now despises Novak Djokovic and doesn’t mind Rafael Nadal. I say that because he mirrors my own feelings.

Chapter 2, Section 9: “Roger Federer made tennis beautiful again.”

Chapter 2, Section 10: “Federer’s forehand is the most beautiful shot in the history of tennis. And it may also be the most effective.”

Chapter 3: The Curse of Nadal: “Like most diehard Federer fans, I loathe Rafael Nadal. I cannot stand the man or his tennis. In my more reflective moments, I am capable of admitting that this attitude falls short of perfect objectivity. Nadal, I am prepared to concede, may not be a wholly despicable human being. But no amount of ordinary decency can make up for the grave offense that he has committed, and continues to commit, simbly by existing. This alone is enough to make him loathsome, unforgivable.”

“In the entire history of sport, has there ever been an athlete more flagrantly OCD than Nadal, one more neurotically in thrall to his rituals and compulsions? … Before each coin toss, he undertakes the exact same sequence of actions involving the meticulous laying down of his personal effects (tournament ID placed faceup next to his bag, which is positioned on a towel), the removal of his jacket (always facing the crowd, always accompanied by jumping), and the ingestion of a packet of energy gel (always in four squeezes). While walking around the court, he scrupulously avoids the lines, stepping over them right foot first. At changeovers, he unfailingly waits for his opponent before rounding the net post, and is never the first to leave his chair. He positions his two water bottles (one warm, one chilled) in exactly the same place, labels pointing towards the end he’s about to play from…”

“In the first place, he was born in Mallorca on June 3, 1986. Couldn’t his parents have delayed the event by a few years?”

“There have been a number of outstanding–that is, top ten or twenty–players with single-handers in recent years, and Nadal’s record against them makes for painful reading. Against Richard Gasquet–possessor of perhaps the finest backhand in the game–Nadal is 13-1 (the solitary defeat coming in a 2003 Challenger when Nadal retired). Against Stanislas Wawrinka (Gasquet’s main rival for that title), he’s 14-3 (and one of those losses was in the 2014 Australian Open final, when Nadal’s back went into spasm). He leads Tommy Robredo 7-0, Tommy Haas 5-0, Grigor Dimitrov 6-0, Nicolas Almagro 13-1, Philipp Kohlschreiber 12-1.”

Describing his therapy sessions:

“Above all, it felt like a process of reconnection. I was delving down through the accreted layers of my being, scrabbling around in search of something authentic.”

“I spent a long time in therapy–about eight years in all. (And I still go back to it occasionally: when denial of emotion is stitched so intricately into one’s being, unpicking the damage is the work of a lifetime.)”

He got down on himself pretty badly while playing tennis, until he read Timothy Gallwey’s, The Inner Game of Tennis. Let Self 2 rule while playing the game because Self 1 is the conscious, rational, critical self and there isn’t time for it to work while playing tennis.

In “Halle, Thursday, June 12, 2014:”

“If you’re a Federer fan–indeed, any kind of tennis fan–my advice would be this: get yourslef to Halle…Yes, the Gerry Weber Open–to give the event its proper title–is the Big Rock Candy Mountain of tennis tournaments.”

In Chapter 5: The Greatest Match: “All this relates to something often noted about tennis, which is that not all stages of a match are equally important. The sense of pressure continually shifts.”

He and a fellow fan/journalist have a disagreement about how speed guns work: Skidelsky says there is one camera and Dinesh says there are two. “The argument never did get resolved–although I was relieved to discover subsequently, on checking, that I had been right.” His position was stated earlier: “Speed guns, I pointed out, surely measured the ball’s speed at just a single point on its journey, presumably right after being hit.”

He interviewed Dustin Brown in Halle, Sunday, June 15, 2014.

After the final, in which Federer beats Alejandro Falla, he gets to interview Federer again and asks a question that angers Federer: “When are you going to come to Queen’s instead” “You will never see me at Queen’s,” he said in a flat voice. “I have a lifetime contract to play at Halle. So long as the two tournaments are played at the same time, I will always be at Halle, not London.”

Last paragraph of the book:

“Federer once told an interviewer that he never looks back, doesn’t dwell on past mistakes and misfortunes, only ever looks forward. No doubt, that’s a useful–probably essential–mindset for a top athlete. But for me, Federer has always been a backward-facing figure, someone defined by his relationship with the past. Thanks to him, I have sometimes felt as if I’ve been able to live my life over, to make sense of all that went wrong, and, as a result, to be a happier, freer adult. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my obsession with Federer saved me, but it has certainly brought me a tremendous amount of happiness.”