Wonder Year

Near the end of a conversation with Roger Federer earlier this month, in a small dining room that had been set aside for us off the lobby of the Mount Stephen Hotel in Montreal, I asked if he happened to catch the final poignant seconds of Usain Bolt’s remarkable career as a solo runner in the 100 meters two days earlier at the World Track and Field Championships. Bolt finished a disappointing third, behind his longtime rival Justin Gatlin and another American sprinter, Christian Coleman. “I meant to, but I missed it,” Federer said. “So I caught it on the highlights.”

What did you think, I asked him.

“Well, you know, it was maybe a pity that he didn’t win,” Federer said of his fellow GOAT (Greatest of All Time). “But at the same time, it doesn’t change anything in my opinion if he won the last race or not. I’m long past the thing that you have to end your career in a fairy tale. Everybody kind of wants this — mostly the press — and if you don’t win, it’s: ‘Ohhh, my God! The fairy tale didn’t happen!’ So for me, yes, it would have been nice, but this way is O.K., too.”

The next day, Federer would turn 36. For his fans — pretty much anyone who has ever seen him hit a ball — 2017 has felt exactly like a fairy tale. Even though he is nearly half a decade older than the age at which Bolt finally lost a step, Federer is in the midst of a late-career resurgence that is rare for any sport. And unlike Bolt’s labored last strides, it has changed everything.

After a six-month layoff in 2016 to rehab a balky knee, he arrived in Melbourne this past January for the Australian Open having played in only a single tuneup tournament and, wielding a remade stroke, won his first Grand Slam title since 2012, beating his archrival, Rafael Nadal, in the final. And then, after proving that that win was anything but a fluke by beating Nadal even more convincingly at Indian Wells, in California, and Miami, he repeated the previous year’s pattern, this time his layoff was the entire clay-court season before he came back to win his record eighth Wimbledon — and 19th major — without dropping a set.

Not only is Federer not acting his tennis age; observers as astute as Rod Laver, the all-time great from Australia, Mats Wilander, the eight-time Grand Slam winner from Sweden, and Brad Gilbert, the coach, commentator and former pro, believe Federer is playing the best tennis of his life. When the U.S. Open begins next week, he will be favored, despite tweaking his back and losing in the final of a warm-up tournament in Montreal, to win his third major of the year, something he last accomplished at 26. Consider: Andre Agassi won his final major at 32, Laver and Pete Sampras won their final majors at 31 and John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg won theirs at 25. When Federer triumphed at Wimbledon in July, he became the event’s oldest champion in the Open Era (which began in 1968), and the oldest to win any Slam since Ken Rosewall’s victory in the Australian Open in 1972.

Federer’s 20-year career has now traced the unlikely path of an inverted parabola: from unbeatable to unbeatable, with a seven-year stretch of eminently beatable in between. In his first bloom, from 2003 to 2010, he won Wimbledon six times (including five in a row), five U.S. Opens (all in a row), four Australian Opens and one French Open. (During that same span, he played in 10 consecutive finals and 23 consecutive semifinals in Grand Slam tournaments, DiMaggio-like records for consistency that are unlikely to be broken.) But after his victory over Andy Murray in the Australian Open final in 2010, his dominance in the slams skidded to a halt. Between the ages of 29 and 35, he won only a single major, beating Murray again at Wimbledon in 2012, in what were ideal conditions for his game after the roof was closed in the third set. Although he continued to reach the occasional final and semifinal, all signs indicated that he was gradually and inevitably succumbing to the forces that fell all athletic superstars: age, injuries and, in one-on-one sports, the cumulative trauma of agonizing losses. But while the world had little doubt Federer was done, Federer himself thought otherwise and plotted his return.

A couple of hours after talking to Federer in his hotel, I watched him practice with David Goffin, a Belgian ranked No. 13, on a back court at Uniprix Stadium, the site of the Rogers Cup tournament. Two bodyguards were present, along with perhaps 500 fans, many of whom were peering through the only somewhat transparent green vinyl that covered the fence on three sides. In many ways, watching Federer practice exceeds the entertainment value of watching him compete. It’s pure play and even more of an improv showcase. Every ball is lathered with gratuitous action, spin for spin’s sake, spin as slapstick, and unlike Nadal, who rips violently upward on his shots to impart an ungodly number of rotations per second to the ball, Federer luxuriantly massages every shot as if to prolong the moment of impact and better feel the racket head moving over the ball, string by string. That day, every fifth shot, give or take, was a trick shot, and although Federer’s attempts at post-match awards-presentation humor have tended to fall flat — on one occasion, he told the spectators to let’s not forget the ball boys, because without the ball boys, there wouldn’t be any balls, and without the ball, we could not play — his on-court sleight of hand expresses a sly wit.

When Goffin fed him lobs, he practiced his overheads by hitting up and around the ball to produce something akin to the game’s most languorous and spin-laden second serve. He hit egregiously undercut and useless drop shots with the trajectory of lobs. He hit little look-away passing shots worthy of an N.B.A. point guard. When Goffin knocked the ball long, ending a rally, Federer casually reached out with his racket and imparted the exact amount of slice, pace and angle to float the ball 18 inches into his left palm, or hit it sideways at one of the many courtside coaches like a rude wake-up call — to be repeated 30 seconds later if the first one hadn’t quite roused his target. At one point, he even tried a two-handed backhand, comically exaggerating its inherent cramped unloveliness and producing the kind of stroke someone might try in a crowded elevator. When the shot found the middle of the net, he flung his racket to the court in mock McEnrovian disgust.

Seeing Federer hit a two-hander makes you feel like a witness to a double felony, a crime against both art and nature. Federer, Nadal, Murray and Novak Djokovic have dominated the second week of majors for a decade, but only Federer seems to take consistent and obvious pleasure in what he is doing on the court. In part that may come from Federer’s not having grown up subjected to the same preadolescent all-or-nothing pressure of his major peers. While Djokovic’s parents gambled what little they had on their oldest son’s tennis future, and while Murray’s mother, Judy, and the Nadals turned tennis into wildly ambitious family quests that made it far more than just a game, Federer’s parents were worried less about their son’s groundstrokes than about his need for a viable route to the middle class. Nevertheless, it’s no coincidence that Federer is the only one of them with a one-hander. Two-handers are easier to hit, especially for youngsters, and dependable as diesel engines. But anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that one-handers bring more joy to a player, if only because they are beautiful, and to hit them well, you have to let them go.

Pete Sampras, whose record seven Wimbledon titles was broken by Federer in July, once told me that when he went from a two-handed to a one-handed backhand, he was transformed from a grinder to a shot maker, and the game became immensely more enjoyable for him. The only top male player who ever hit a two-hander with abandon is Jimmy Connors (and those were hit in anger). But even if the correlation between happiness and a one-handed backhand is impossible to prove, watching Federer practice and make up shots on the fly clearly shows what sort of hand-eye skills and personality are required if, at age 35, you’re going to teach yourself a devastating new backhand.

The practice court in Montreal was my second chance to see Federer play in person in his post-Australia, post-Nadal glow. The first was at Wimbledon on the middle Saturday in a third-round match against Mischa Zverev. As striking as Federer’s athletic talent was the calmness with which he navigated the entire contest in his meticulously curated bubble. In the midst of a frenetic one-on-one conflict — the tennis court is often compared to a boxing ring — Federer was conspicuously (even ostentatiously) relaxed and seemed to have the time and bandwidth to savor every secondary and tertiary aspect of the experience.

When he went from the baseline to his chair during the changeover, he actually seemed to enjoy the walk, like someone who had been cooped up all day. When he reached into his pocket before a second serve, he seemed to appreciate, at least in some small way, that there was a ball there waiting for him. When he sliced a squash shot to the ball boy in the far corner, he gave no indication there was anything more pressing at that moment than sending it off with exactly the proper pace and spin. And he didn’t just toss his towel back at the moving ball boy; he led him.

“I always tell people,” Mats Wilander says, “that when you watch Federer, don’t just watch him play the point. Watch what he does in between points. He’s always fiddling with a tennis ball or with his racket, and he’s hitting an extra shot, trying some crazy drop shot when the point is over, or flicking the ball to a ball kid after a missed serve. Nobody else does that. Nobody has ever done that. And he still does it. Wimbledon final — it doesn’t matter. He just seems to enjoy the feeling of having the ball on his strings.”

Zverev, who upset Murray in Australia, is one of the game’s few effective serve-and-volleyers, and the matchup gave Federer a chance to display his full repertoire. The sets were competitive, and Zverev acquitted himself well, far better than his more-touted younger brother, Alexander, did in losing to Federer in Germany the week before. (The younger Zverev, however, would beat Federer in the final of the Rogers Cup in Montreal.) But Federer kept him off balance throughout, at times deploying the whimsical tactics of the practice court. On one point, when Zverev approached the net behind a deep, well-hit approach, Federer eschewed a passing shot and instead hit an off-speed dink shot directly at his opponent at the net. Zverev, having braced for a drive down the line, was so nonplused that it was all he could do to keep the ball in play, and he was passed two shots later.

Federer has always played loose, but since Australia he has attained spalike levels of relaxation. His long break rejuvenated him and, he said, gave him the chance “to reset my ideas about the game.” At the same time, finally winning another major and breaking his yearslong inferiority to Nadal has unburdened him. “I’ve never seen him play better,” Gilbert says. “Since Australia, he’s playing with house money.”

On the court, Federer is distant and detached, safely tucked away in a Zen zone designed to limit the highs and lows to which he is naturally inclined — “I was an emotional kid,” he says — and to keep him focused and out of his own way. Off the court and in conversation, he is expansive, voluble, prickly (particularly about the press) and opinionated, a bon vivant and seeker of new experiences and repeater of old ones he likes. On his birthday, Federer, who was in Montreal without his wife, Mirka, their two pairs of identical twins or their multiple nannies, went to see Coldplay. He liked the concert so much that he saw the band again the next night.

‘Changing rackets is a tricky thing,” Federer was saying, “a mental thing, particularly when that old racket gave me 17 Slams.” A new racket inevitably represents some sort of trade-off. With a smaller head, you can feel the slice more; with the bigger one, you can feel the topspin more. But over all, a more extensive surface area generates pop and provides a larger, more forgiving sweet spot. It just makes life easier — not to mention serving, volleying and reacting to heavy topspin and the irregular bounces on grass and clay. The slightly expanded margin of error is particularly helpful for a one-handed backhand drive, the most technically demanding shot in the game, and one that requires great racket speed and complete commitment. Federer’s rivals had been taking advantage of the latest racket technology for years, while he seemed to eschew it with the disdain some kids show for training wheels; he finally upgraded to the larger racket for good in early 2014.

At the start of last year he made another change, hiring Ivan Ljubicic to be his coach. Ljubicic, who reached No. 3 in the world and by all accounts got the very most out of his own talent, became Federer’s first coach who had competed against him as a player. So he had hard-won ideas about Federer’s strengths and weaknesses. Having coached Milos Raonic, one of Federer’s would-be rivals, Ljubicic also presumably knew what current players thought they could do against Federer. Another potential boon, although it has yet to pay dividends, is that Ljubicic and Djokovic are neighbors in Monte Carlo, which one day might just allow the coach to share some competitive insights into playing a rival who, like Nadal, has a winning record against Federer, thanks especially to Djokovic’s head-to-head dominance over the last half-dozen years.

But before Ljubicic could prove his worth, in January 2016 Federer slipped and fell in the bathroom while drawing a bath for one of his sets of twins. He went through meniscus surgery, returned to competition too early and then, after losing to Raonic in the Wimbledon semifinals last year, decided to pull out of the professional tour for the rest of the season. While rehabbing his knee and getting more and more comfortable with his larger racket, Federer surely had to notice that the two players at the very top of the sport, Djokovic and Murray, were struggling. (Winning a major becomes much more feasible when it requires beating only one of the Top 4 instead of two or three.) The chief antagonists of Federer’s career are essentially grinders, defenders and counterpunchers, and in the process of wearing down their competition, they have also worn down themselves. Federer’s free flowing shot-making exacts much less of a toll, and his fluid movement has enabled him to sidestep serious injury to a remarkable degree, at least on the court.

None of this might have mattered, however, if not for Federer’s unquenchable optimism. The international talent pool on the men’s tour is so deep that everyone in the Top 100 qualifies as an athletic freak. What separates the long-lasting stars from the rest is maintaining a good attitude. Set by set, game by game, sometimes even point by point, matches are strewn with frustrations — break points and game points frittered away, set and match points squandered, matches that seemed over all but ripped from your grip — and somehow you have to see the big picture, recognize how good your life is compared with the average civilian’s and not go dark. It’s harder than it looks. McEnroe couldn’t do it. The immensely talented Nick Kyrgios can’t do it for two weeks in a row. It’s always been a challenge for Murray, and lately it seems too much for even Djokovic.

Not only does Federer have the most multifaceted game; he also has one of the best dispositions for the game. His effortless grace makes it easy to forget that he has suffered his share of heartbreaking defeats. Like the five-setter to Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008, when, down in the fourth-set tiebreaker, he hit one of the most beautiful and clutch running passing shots anyone has ever seen yet still lost. Or the two Grand Slam matches in consecutive years when he held match points against Djokovic, including one in which Djokovic appeared to give up and whaled on a forehand as hard as he could and then, when it hit the line for a winner, decided not to give up anymore. Most punishing, though, have been the losses to Nadal, against whom Federer’s record is 14-23 overall — but much worse in the matches that matter most, Grand Slam finals, where before this year in Australia, Nadal’s advantage was 6-2. Almost without exception, Federer has managed to keep the pain to himself, and to some extent from himself, but after yet another five-set loss to Nadal in the 2009 Australian Final, the “emotional kid” re-emerged, and he wept openly afterward at the trophy presentation and said, “God, it’s killing me.”

Still, even when Nadal was beating him four times a year, Federer never seemed to take it personally. In fact, he likes and admires Nadal, and early this year traveled to Majorca to help Nadal open his new tennis academy. “In the end it’s just a tennis match, and you’re supposed to get over it,” Federer told me. “I don’t want to be the kind of father who comes home and his kids are asking, ‘What’s wrong with dad?’ Or that kind of husband.” That doesn’t mean those losses didn’t hurt, and when one of my questions implied otherwise, he was quick to confirm that there was “scar tissue.” “Let’s be honest,” he said. “I’m sure there was.”

The changes that led to Federer’s triumph over Nadal in January echoed, to an uncanny degree, a spur-of-the-moment decision made 22 years earlier. When Federer was 13, he and his parents drove from their home in Basel to the Swiss national tennis center in Ecublens, a suburb of Lausanne, so he could take part in a three-day tryout for an elite, live-in program for promising juniors called Tennis Etudes. The audition was held on a speedy indoor court. “It’s called Indoor Supreme,” Federer told me, “very fast and very shiny. In the light, it almost looks like a handball court, and there was no way you could slice off it on the half volley.” At this point, Federer relied exclusively on a slice backhand, but for his tryout he decided to hit a topspin backhand, to hit over the ball, despite the fact that he had barely worked on the shot, let alone mastered it. He wanted to show the judges, he said, “that I can come over the ball, even though I don’t like it, in case you were not sure.” At this critical early juncture, Federer put his faith in his hand-eye coordination and was accepted into the program.

By his own estimation, Federer had a horrible backhand as a young junior. Darren Cahill, the coach and former player from Australia, first saw Federer play when the latter was in his early teens. “You could drive a truck through his backhand side,” Cahill says in “Roger Federer: The Greatest,” a biography by Chris Bowers. “He was always really good about stepping to the left and getting around his backhand and hitting the forehand, but if you got it to his backhand, you were in pretty good shape.” According to Rod Laver, the backhand was still an issue when Federer became the best player in the world. “In ’07 and ’08,” Laver told me recently, “he wasn’t hitting his backhand very well, not mishitting it, but not really middling it clean, but he could get away with it because he had so many other shots.”

Long before Australia, his coaches and even his father had been urging Federer to hit over the ball more often on his backhand side — “but it’s easier said than done,” he said, particularly with a smaller racket head, and especially against Nadal’s vicious topspin. “After the fifth shank in a row, it’s very hard to keep telling yourself, yeah, yeah, keep coming over the ball.”

After seeing all those winners flying off his matte black racket in the Australian final, I figured that the backhand drive had been the focus of his six-month break from the tour last year. Federer insisted that that wasn’t the case and that the primary focus during his layoff was a much humbler backhand, a subtle little block return of serve, hit as early as possible and with just a touch of topspin, that enabled him to start return points more advantageously than his chip or slice and that could be used against anyone except the biggest of servers.

Federer also acknowledged, however, that in the last half of 2016 he had the luxury of more unbroken time on the practice courts than he had had in a decade, and every part of his game benefited. “Once we could see that all the rehab and strength work was paying off and that the knee was going to hold up, I was able to spend six weeks straight on the court in Dubai and then another two weeks in Switzerland. That is just huge.”

The first two weeks were spent doing two-on-one drills with a pair of young Americans, Mackenzie McDonald and Ernesto Escobedo, flown in to be the sparring partners. During the next four weeks, he progressed to playing points and eventually sets, many of them against Lucas Pouille, the young French star who beat Nadal at last year’s U.S. Open. Over the course of a week, the sets morphed into an epic 20-set match like the kind Federer recalls playing with his friends as a junior, where the loser always called for the match to be extended, from two out of three to three out of five, to six out of 11, and so on. During those sessions, Federer estimates, he hit thousands of backhands with very little regard for where they landed. After all those stress-free reps, he grew more and more comfortable letting them fly. Wilander suspects that in the process he also made some technical improvement in the stroke — but, he says, “Federer is so late in his backswing, and so quick going through the ball, that it’s hard to see.”

Because he was facing right-handers and the focus on him wasn’t as great, given the lower expectations, casual observers didn’t notice the new backhand until the Australian Open final, but beat reporters and insiders sensed something was up soon after Federer got off the plane. “I saw him in a couple of early practices,” Gilbert says, “where he was really ripping it.” After Federer eked out five-set wins against Kei Nishikori and Stan Wawrinka, Nadal, himself only recently recovered from a prolonged crisis of confidence, was waiting in the final. (Djokovic lost early to Denis Istomin; Mischa Zverev defeated Murray.) To Federer fans, who often seem more battered by Nadal’s forehands than Federer himself, this seemed like the cruelest twist of fate. The one constant in Federer’s career in great times and lesser times was that Nadal got the better of him.

Federer says that in the day and a half before the final, he and Ljubicic and his other longtime coach, Severin Luthi, talked so much about strategy and about Nadal’s tendencies that he was afraid his brain would be overloaded. “Sometimes you can overtalk the match, go into too much detail, and you make it like a chess match,” he says. “But I felt like everything we talked about pretty much happened.” Before he took the court, Federer made a fateful decision very much like the one he made all those years before in Ecublens: He was going to take the ball early, before Nadal’s topspin forehands jumped over his shoulder, and if that led to more errors, so be it. He wasn’t going to let Nadal get in a groove. For someone communicating in his third or fourth language, Federer came up with an evocative expression of what he intended to avoid: “I didn’t want to go down just making shots, seeing forehands rain down on me from Rafa.”

Federer’s decision to play much more aggressively was informed and reinforced by Nadal’s semifinal against Grigor Dimitrov, a player whose strokes so closely resemble Federer’s that he has been saddled with the moniker Baby Fed. Federer and his team stayed up late Friday night and watched the entire five-set match. “It was like watching myself play, to some extent,” Federer says. And when he saw how much success Dimitrov was having, particularly with his backhand, and how close he came to beating Nadal, he saw no reason he couldn’t do a little better.

After a decade-long topspin siege from Nadal, he had had enough, and when fans saw him pouncing on backhands and hitting winners off that wing to an uncommon degree — Federer had 14 backhand winners against Nadal in this year’s final, compared with only four in a four-set semifinal loss on the same court in 2012 — and when they saw the surprise in Nadal’s eyes, it was as satisfying as seeing someone finally stand up to a bully. For Wilander, it was simply a pragmatic tactical decision. “Against the top players, you can’t play the game you want to play,” he says. “You have to play the game they don’t like.”

Federer’s win against Nadal, however, was about more than technique and tactics. It was also a psychological breakthrough. Despite Federer’s backhand drive, Nadal still won the fourth set and went up a break and 3-1 in the fifth. Though Federer had squandered break point after break point, he never lost his resolve, and never lost another game, which is why both Gilbert and Paul Annacone, a former pro who once coached Federer, consider them among the most important five games of Federer’s career.

“I call that a legacy match,” Gilbert says. “If Rafa wins that match, there was no way you could say Federer’s career was better than Rafa’s. It would have been 17-15 in majors, and he [Nadal] has owned him in career finals, and Rafa would have the career double slam. This made it 18-14 for Roger, stopped the double slam and now it’s 19-15. That match did a lot for Roger.”

As satisfying as the win was for Federer, the praise for his grit rubs up against a touchy subject. “For me,” he says, “it’s always a fine line between winning and losing and trying and not trying.” He says that that when he wins, people think it was a cakewalk, and that when he loses, people think he phoned it in. “Because I don’t sweat as much as others, or grunt as much as others, or make faces when I hit the ball, and it’s easier on the eye, it’s harder for people to see that I’m actually really trying,” Federer says. “Australia gave me a chance to show my fighting spirit.”

Perhaps the best proof of how much the championship meant to Federer is the degree to which it set him free, and how he has played since. Federer was quick to point out that he has now beaten Nadal four times in a row. “These are good times,” he told me.

According to Gilbert, who sat courtside at both of those last two matches, at Indian Wells and Miami, they represent the best tennis Federer has ever played and demonstrated that the benefits of his new backhand have rippled throughout his game. The improved backhand has strengthened his return of serve; because he doesn’t have to protect the backhand, his footwork is now more efficient, and because he’s more inclined to stay put, he’s in better position to hit his forehand as well.

For all their exalted Grand Slam encounters, Federer and Nadal have never faced off in the U.S. Open, and with last year’s finalists, Wawrinka and Djokovic, out with injuries, hopes are high that this will be the year it finally happens. The last time such a prospect was this enticing was in 2008, when Nike hyped the possibility like a heavyweight bout, complete with a faux weigh-in, flexed biceps and an appearance by Don King. In Montreal, Federer laughed at the memory and bellowed in his best P.A. voice: “The grapple in the Apple!”

But Nadal lost in the semis to Murray that year. And because Nadal is ranked No. 2 and Federer No. 3, their possible matchup might happen in the semis rather than the final, depending on the draw. In any case, Wilander believes Federer will be ready. Though he says that to be thoroughly convinced he’d like to see Federer come through one more time, on the slower courts at Flushing Meadows in Queens, he is convinced that Federer has finally discovered the right way to play Nadal. “Tactically,” he says, “he has broken the code.”