Nathaniel

Shockey

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January 28, 2008

Roger Federer: In Hemingway Fashion, My Hero Lets Me Down

In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” the old man, Santiago, and a young boy named Manolin are friends, and they like to talk about baseball. One of the things I like is when Santiago says “The Yankees of New York” and “The Reds of Cincinnati,” instead of saying the New York Yankees, or the Cincinnati Reds. Between the two, there is a mixture of both a master-apprentice and a grandfather-grandson relationship. Everything Santiago says, the boy considers pure gold, and one part that always sticks out to me is when Santiago talks about “the great DiMaggio.” He talks about him as though he was a superhuman among unworthy mimics, or at least that’s how I picture it.

“The Yankees lost today,” the boy told him.

“That means nothing. The great DiMaggio is himself again.” Later, he thinks to himself, “I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.”

There is something incredibly charming and endearing about an elderly person telling stories to a younger person about their own personal heroes. The beauty of the situation, as is the case in “The Old Man and the Sea,” is that as the elder talks of his heroes, he is similarly the hero of the one with whom he is sharing.

I bring this up because, at this very special moment in history, we are all lucky enough to witness 26-year-old Roger Federer, who has already won 12 grand slams and is chasing down Pete Sampras’s 14.

For the last five-or-so-odd years, Roger Federer has developed into a hero of mine. He’s plowed through all the world’s best in a way that makes them all look incredibly average, regardless of the number of digits in their world ranking. In fact, the only one who has managed to remind us, once a year, that Federer is indeed human, is Raphael Nadal, who consistently beats him on the clay courts of France.

Federer had recently won 72 out of 74 grand slam matches, eight out of the last 10 grand slam finals, and has been atop the tennis rankings for a record 208 straight weeks.

He is not an overpowering giant, but he still consistently out-aces his opponents. He’s not known for the quickness of a Raphael Nadal, and yet there are very few balls he can’t chase down. He has a graceful one-handed backhand, he is wonderfully quick at the net and he can just as easily beat you with incredible ground strokes. His style has been aptly compared to a symphony.

But what I truly admire about him is the grace that he carries both on and off the tennis court.

He is quiet both in victory and defeat. He knows he is the best, just like everyone else, but he has never developed the kind of arrogance that seems to almost inevitably accompany athletic greatness. Tears rolled down his face as he received the championship trophy from Rod Laver, a former Australian tennis great, at the 2006 Australian Open. It was the type of humility and reverence that is incredibly absent in today’s world of professional sports. Federer has never painted himself as anything more than a great tennis player, even though it would be easy to do so in a world that specializes in turning its sports stars into gods. Although my loyalties remain to my countrymen, Roddick and Blake (through every defeat), Federer is my hero.

At 3:30 a.m. last Friday, I watched Federer lose to Novak Djokovic of Serbia in the Australian Open semifinals.

It’s the first time he’s lost a match in a grand slam final other than the French Open since his epic five-set loss to Marat Safin in the Aussie Open three years ago. It made me feel shockingly hollow inside, but it wasn’t just because he lost. Losses happen, even to Federer, but this time, there was no joy in his play. There was something distinctly missing as he battled the 20-year-old Serb. He didn’t have the spark he usually employs as he conjures ridiculous shots that no one else can even imagine. I really felt like Federer let me down. I know it’s not fair to say, and I also know that as a sports commentator, it’s incredibly unprofessional. But that’s how it felt. It was the same sort of feeling Manolin experienced when his hero brought nothing home from his infamous three-day voyage but the skeleton of a giant marlin.

Regardless of how spectacular our heroes become to us, it’s usually only a matter of time before we’re painfully reminded of their humanity.

One day, I hope to tell my grandkids about the great Federer, the quiet champion he was, and the day he let me down. I’ll remember to tell them that even the greatest heroes are still human. And if I’m ever lucky enough to actually be someone’s hero, I hope I set an example worth watching, as human as I may be.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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