Roger Federer , livre ebook

Eyewear Publishing - Christopher Jackson

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103 pages

English

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BestsellerChris Jackson has written a thoughtful and brilliant study of Federer as a man, player, and aesthetic and moral figure of our times. It outplays even Foster Wallace's magisterial writing on this greatest of all tennis champions.Here is the one of the most profound, insightful and elegant books ever written about sports.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Eyewear Publishing
Date de parution	10 juillet 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839780349
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in 2017
by Eyewear Publishing Ltd
Suite 38, 19-21 Crawford Street
London, W1H 1PJ
United Kingdom
Graphic design by Edwin Smet
Author photograph by Tim Jackson
Printed in England by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved
2020 Christopher Jackson
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Eyewear wishes to thank Jonathan Wonham for his generous patronage of our press.
ISBN: 9781839780349
Set in Bembo 12 / 15 pt
WWW.EYEWEARPUBLISHING.COM

For my mother,
Lacrosse and netball champion, longstanding Wimbledon aficionado - with apologies that this book constitutes the height of her son s sporting achievements.
CONTENTS
Author s Note
Chapter One - Federer and History
Chapter Two - Federer and Beauty
Chapter Three - Federer and Morality
Chapter Four - Federer and Power
Chapter Five - Federer and Time
Chapter Six - Federer and Meaning
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
AUTHOR S NOTE
It has been my instinct to circle him. Though the text has a chronological element, it doesn t tell the strict story of Federer s life, match by match, year by year. Federer s life, in any case, is simply told. Like all his fellow players he committed to tennis very young. Over time he proved himself equal to the task of becoming a professional sportsman. Eventually he became the best in the world and then, on and off, the world s second-best. During that period he married, and became a father to two sets of twins. He amassed endorsements. He became exceedingly wealthy and started a foundation in his own name. All these things are referenced in the text. But I have also felt the need to zoom out, to approach him from other angles. In my first chapter I have sought to place his sport - his art - in context. Even an apparently modern phenomenon like Federer is caught up in history, and needs to be understood in relation to it. The remaining chapters look at Federer in connection with beauty, morality, power, time, and meaning. They are riffs - circlings.
A word about the title. It is already a clich that Federer is in some sense an artist. I am aware that it is dangerous to conflate two distinct terms - no one would seriously argue that, say, Michelangelo was a cricketer or that Wayne Rooney is painting a picture when he scores a goal. On the one hand, this book aims to unpick that confusion, and to discover how it has arisen. But it also takes the aesthetic pleasures that can be derived from sport seriously. The case of Federer becomes in these pages an investigation into wider questions. What role should sport play in our lives? What kind of attention should we give to it? So the book veers deliberately - into other sports, and areas of life, and into history - but the discussions always derive from Federer and always return to him. There is plenty of Federer here, but other things as well.
C.J., London, May 2017

Federer at Wimbledon in 2009 1
CHAPTER ONE - FEDERER AND HISTORY
Roger is just the greatest player of all time.
- John McEnroe
Federer is the best player in history, no other player has ever had such quality.
- Rafael Nadal
Looked at with certain eyes, is this not strange?
On a sunny day in 2012, twenty thousand people file into a huge room with a retractable roof in a leafy suburb of London. They are excitable, even raucous. In its environs, a glass of beer or champagne costs roughly double what you d expect, and so do the strawberries, which for some reason are ubiquitous. Nobody minds these costs: some have already paid thousands of pounds to be here, and will not ruin their day by lamenting the additional expenditure. Television is here too - tens of millions of pairs of eyes are trained on what is about to unfold. But the cameras do not focus on the human interactions of the day, the friendships and the flirtations in the overpriced caf s and restaurants that surround the huge room. Instead interest centres on the room s contents: a green rectangle of grass, with white geometric lines painted on it. The nearer people get to this grassy patch, the giddier they become. Meanwhile, a large number of people go to a hill behind the big room to look at an image of this green rectangle on a hoisted screen, seemingly for the privilege of being physically nearby, though they cannot see the room s interior directly, and could easily get the same images at home.
At the appointed time, the crowd - inside and outside the big room - starts going berserk. Two tall confident-looking men, dressed in angelic white, walk out onto the green rectangle. One is Scottish, the other Swiss. Each carries a large pear-shaped bag. Normal in most respects - of average looks and normal intelligence - they nevertheless create pandemonium in their vicinity. Amid speculative murmur, the players produce rackets from their bags, and begin to hit a yellow ball over a net 0.914 metres in height. Throughout this, the crowd continues to chatter. The TV cameras concentrate on two suited men - in build, rather like the people on the rectangle of grass - being interviewed by a woman in a cream pantsuit. Then, apropos of nothing, a man in a high chair solemnly intones the word Time into a microphone. At this, the crowd is whipped into hysteria. Some scream the name of the Scottish person. Others shout the name of the Swiss man as if they desperately needed something from him. A few moments ago, when they were hitting the ball over the 0.914-metre net, the process of hitting the ball could elicit no emotion from the crowd or the players. Now, everything that occurs causes outsized reactions in everyone assembled.
If a player hits a ball 78 feet, he reacts by punching the air. But if the same action goes 78 feet and a quarter of an inch, he will tear at his hair, or look as baffled as a man who has mislaid his credit card, or just missed his train.
As for the crowd, sometimes they wail with despair if the yellow ball hits the net. But if it hits the net and jumps over they all let out a large ooh . If the ball travels at a sharp angle past a player s racket, the crowd emits a gigantic scandalised laugh. But if a very similar shot is hit more or less straight, the crowd will clap politely and nod as if at some expected pleasantry. As the afternoon progresses emotions increase: the crowd pleads more and more urgently with the players but never specifies its needs. Eventually, the Scottish man hits a shot over one of the white lines, and the Swiss man collapses in relief. The Scottish man walks towards the net with the demeanour of someone being led to his own execution. The Swiss man starts crying, and shakes the hand of the Scot and of the man who has been calling out the words Time and Love , as well as the numbers 15, 30 and 40 throughout the afternoon, like some monotonous philosopher-cum-mathematician. The Swiss man seems happy and understandably so: after the match, he is given enough money not to have to work for a decade. The Scot, who is sad, is given about the same amount. Both then talk about what they have just done for the next five hours to people from most countries in the world. Then everyone goes home and begins the process of forgetting what they have seen.
The occasion, of course, is the Wimbledon final in 2012. The players are Andy Murray and Roger Federer.
How did all this come to be?
THE ORIGINS OF TENNIS
History is often silent about its pleasant inspirations: the sport Roger Federer plays has murky origins. We don t know who built the first racket or made the first court. There was no chronicler on hand to record the invention of the tramline or the net. No poet celebrated the tautening of the first strings.
Instead it rises out of a medieval mist, but we do at least have an inkling of where it comes from. In the modern game, the French Open is sometimes considered the least prestigious of tennis four major tournaments. Many modern greats have found it embarrassingly difficult to win at Roland Garros (Federer) or have been forced to end superlative careers without that title (John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Pete Sampras). Nevertheless the historical record is insistent. The game originates in northern France in the 1100s, as jeu de paume - or game of the palm. Rackets didn t come in until the sixteenth century. Even so, the red clay which has hosted several unlikely champions from Gast n Gaudio to Thomas Muster, and denied such a roll call of greats is, after a fashion, home turf for the sport. Its origins provide another historical parallel. Federer s great rival Rafael Nadal might be known now as the King of Clay, but his sport s ancestor real tennis was associated with actual kings. Louis XII, that adventurous but inconsequential monarch, died of pneumonia after a particularly vigorous game. James I of Scotland and Henry VIII were also avid players. Federer s seven coronations at Wimbledon have their precursors in true kingship. In today s tennis, commentators talk of players striving for glory, but it has always been played by the glorious.
It might be a glitzy game, but it has paradoxically been considered thoughtful - a game of guile as well as power. When the game spread to England during the medieval period, it first shows up on the record as played in monasteries. But then even today the sport attracts the meditative and the philosophically-minded. Roger Federer has been written about by a slew of well-known writers from David Foster Wallace and JM Coetzee to Julian Barnes and Clive James. There might be more continuity about that than we know. The ruin