Tag Archives: sports

What’s Happened to Roger Federer

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lossIt was no surprise that Roger Federer breezed through the first three rounds of the 2013 US Open.  Even though his ranking has faltered, dropping now to number seven after his amazing resurgence in 2012 that saw him briefly regain the number one ranking, we still expect him to win.  He’s Roger Federer.  Watching Federer is, as David Foster Wallace described, a religious experience.  After his loss to Tommy Robredo in the fourth round of the US Open and his early exit at Wimbledon, we are now wondering, what’s happened to Roger?

Is Age Catching Up to Him?

The logical answer is that he is simply getting old.  Age eventually brings down our greatest sports icons.  Yet Federer is only 32.  Michael Jordan was just beginning his second run of domination at 32.  Watching Federer against Robredo, it appeared that Federer was the better player.  His grace on the court is still evident.  His agility is there as his incredible shot making ability.  He still shows that he is the most technically proficient tennis player in the history of tennis.  So where is the drop off?

Is it Something Physical?

Physical concerns are always an issue with age, especially with tennis players.  The game is violent on the joints.  Think of this.  A tennis player goes from a near sprint to a complete stop, applying an enormous amount of pressure on the knees, hips, and back.  It’s one thing to do this on grass or clay where the softer surface provides more give, but on the hard courts, the body takes a beating.  Every tennis player is eventually going to limp off the court.

But Federer has avoided most of these physical ailments.  He has never missed an extended amount of playing time.  Why?  Probably because he is the most relaxed tennis player we’ve ever seen.  Compare a still shot of Federer striking a ball with one of Nadal.
495035-roger-federer Australian Open TennisTension causes more injuries than athletes tend to realize.  Federer has remained healthy because of his ability to relax. I’m sure he’s employed some form of autogenic training along with meditation to achieve this level of calmness on the court. Despite a sore back in the early summer, Federer went into the US Open claiming to be completely healthy.  He certainly looked physically healthy.

So why is Roger losing?

I’ve always argued that the difference between the number 1 player in the world and the number 100 is actually quite small.  Let’s look first at why Roger was winning.  When he was at his peak, he was about 1 point per game better than the lower ranked opponents.  1 point per game doesn’t seem like that much separation, but it will get you results like 6-2, 6-1.  Why was Roger better?  Of course there’s his technical proficiency.  Secondly, he had superior shot making ability from defensive positions (i.e. his squash shot).

Thirdly, for ten years he has been mentally dominant.  This is where he gained separation from the top players.  Against top 40 players, he was probably about 0.5 points better per game and against top ten players, a little less than that.  Compared to the top tier of players who all had similar technical proficiency and shot making ability, Federer maintained a consistent edge because he believed he had an edge and because he did everything in his power to ensure that his opponents would not have the belief.  This is mental dominance.

It reminds me of a scene in Orson Card’s Ender’s Game when Ender explains why he continued to beat up a bully even after he’d knocked him down.

“Knocking him down won the first fight.  I wanted to win all the next ones, too.”

Federer had to win just about all his matches to maintain his aura of invincibility and plant a seed in every opponent’s mind that they could not beat him.  With the exception of Nadal, he succeeded in this.  There was no saving it for just the big tournaments.  He brought it every tournament, playing with the fear that if lost just once to somebody, maybe, just maybe they might begin to believe they could beat him. One of the most dangerous weapons an opponent can have is belief.

Then Nadal beat him on grass.  Then Djokovic and Murray, which shouldn’t have been that farfetched because in ability they were equals.  The only thing that had previously prevented them from beating Federer was the lack of belief they could beat Federer.

With others knowing he could be beaten, he lost the mental edge he had held over his  opponents for so many years.

But losing to Robredo?  And then Igor Stakhovsky?  How could this happen?  Federer blamed his losses on confidence, but this is only part of the bigger picture.

Where has he slipped?

I remember a comment Pete Sampras made shortly after he retired from tennis.  He said that the biggest deterioration with age is not physical.  It’s mental.

It’s mentally exhausting being the best.  Physically, Federer feels fine which is why it’s so hard for him to understand why he’s losing and why he legitimately seems baffled when he does lose.  He still strikes the ball as solidly as he ever has.  He has not lost a step as some analysts maintain.  He just gives up a few more free points than he used to.  Tiny slips in concentration.  A fraction worse than before.  But when the margins are so small, especially with the top players, wins turn to losses.

Mental slippage?  Really?

As brutal as tennis is on the body, it may be more brutal on the mind, at least for people blessed/cursed with the compulsive desire to be the best.  Training the mind to concentrate for extended periods of time takes practice.  An interesting bi-product of this intense concentration is the seemingly absurd but true anomaly that when a top competitive tennis player comes off the court, he can recall every point in a match.  They’re not consciously memorizing points; it’s just their level of focus is so high and they are so in tune with what’s going on that this notion becomes possible.

Thanks to mental toughness pioneers such as Dr. Jim Loehr, the techniques for staying focused and relaxed has advanced in tennis as much as the technology in equipment and the understanding of biomechanics.  Free points are harder to come by and top players no longer have the luxury of being able to slip in and out of focus like McEnroe and Connors did when they had their outbursts or interactions with the crowd.  It used to be that “being in the zone” was a rare achievement.  Now, it’s a daily necessity.  There are those who argue that tennis has become more boring because the personalities have become much more subdued.  But I prefer watching the mental giants like Federer because simply because it’s incredible what they’re doing out there, sustaining excellence point after point.  Mental giants can be intimidating in a quiet way.

A male tennis player has to sustain focus for three to four hours (sometimes even more) in a closely contested three-out-of-five set match.  The normal amount of time the human mind can maintain uninterrupted concentration is about two hours.  (However, with the vast number of diversions available to us, we are probably evolving—or devolving—to the point where even two hours is a stretch.)  This is why movies typically do not run much longer than two hours and when they do, the audience begins to feel fatigued.  This is why professional poker players immediately stop playing when they feel mentally fatigued.

In competition, or when the stakes really matter (in a war zone perhaps), we can push our minds to do a little more.  But pushing the mind like this is impossible to sustain forever.  Even chess players retire.  Federer has done this week in and week out for over ten years, not just staying atop the rankings, but pummeling his opponents.  Because of his success, he has played more matches than anyone else.  But now the mental strain is beginning to show even before the physical deterioration.  During his fourth round loss against Robredo, the shots were there, but there were a few more loose points than we would expect to see from Federer.

What to Expect from Federer Looking Forward

There’s no doubt Federer continues to have the competitive desire to be the best, and I disagree completely with those who suggest Federer should retire or that he’s even lost a step.  Physically, he should be able to compete with the best for the next three or for years.  If he rests and refreshes mentally, he should be able to put together a run like he did to end the 2012 season.  But the days of dominating day after day, week after week, year after year are over.  Unfortunately, the human mind can be pushed only so far.

I Confess. I Cheated.

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You’re in school taking the most important and hardest class you’ll ever take.  There’s a lot of pressure because if you make an A you’ll be guaranteed a job.  A B might get you the job depending on how everyone else in the class does.  But you’re pretty confident because you’ve worked harder than your classmates.

First test you make a B.  A few of your classmates make Cs and Ds but the majority make As, and you wonder how they did that.  Soon, you hear that one of your classmates has a copy of all the semester’s tests, obtained perhaps by cleverly hacking into the professor’s computer.  The ones who are cheating ask if you’d like to come over and “study” with them for the next test.  You decline because you don’t want to be a cheater.

You study more than you did for the last test because you know you have to just to keep up.  You end up with a B plus.  They make As again.  They’re contacted by job recruiters.  You are not.  Even some of the ones who made Cs and Ds on the first test are now making As, moving you closer to the bottom of the pack.  You’d like to tell on them, but you have no proof.  Besides, that would really tick off the whole group, and they pretty much detest you anyway for your goody-two-shoes routine.

You do what you have to.  You join them.  You make your A.  You get the job.  You’re financially independent and so happy about that.  You get married and have kids, whose piano and tennis lessons you can pay for thanks to that good job.  Your family is happy.  No regrets.  You and your college buddies laugh about that class years later.

Now you’ve got this great job in a tight economy.  Again, you’re working your butt off, eating lunches at your desk, never taking sick days or personal days, yet the productivity of your co-workers is surpassing your own.  You know they’re cutting corners, backdating documents, shredding customer complaints and doing what they can to stay a step ahead of the curve.  One misstep and they could be fired.  They know that.  You know that.  At the same time, you know that management tacitly condones this behavior as long as they don’t make an obvious blunder that forces management’s hand.  You have a family and hate taking risks especially when it comes down to your livelihood.  However, you wonder that if you can’t keep up with the pack and their inflated numbers, you might lose your job.   You give up vacations, work on holidays, extend your work week to eighty hours just to do what your co-workers claim they do in a forty hour week.  You have your integrity.  You keep up this pace for twenty years, put your kids through college, watch them have families of their own, and finally you retire.

When you look back, you wonder what it would have been like to spend just a little more time with your kids?  You regret not spending more, because when it comes down to it, isn’t the family the most important thing?  You feel bitter at the rest of the world who seems happier than you with fewer wrinkles around the eyes.  They never faced the consequences of their misdeeds.  Or were they really misdeeds?  You wonder if making three follow up calls and fibbing on the required fourth would have made that much of a difference.

We face these kinds of tough decisions every day, sometimes without even considering the moral and ethical significance.  Cheating and getting ahead is the easy decision.  Choosing not to cheat is the tough one.  However, cheating does, after all, imply getting a competitive advantage.  What if you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t cheat because everybody else is?  It’s easy to justify it in our own heads when we are pursuing our goals to be successful and respected.

Let’s be honest.  What we all want is to be successful.  Society puts pressure on us to be successful.  In our culture, success is measured by the acquisition of things.  A businessman who nets one million dollars is more successful than one who nets a hundred thousand dollars.  No one asks to compare their bookkeeping or business practices.  An NBA superstar who has five championship rings is more successful than one who doesn’t have any.  Even successful parents are ones who produce successful children, children who are able to obtain a lot of things and money.  Sometimes we need to see ourselves as successful.

It’s time for me to come clean.  I am a Scrabble cheater when it comes to games played on my mobile device.  At first I just played against a friend at work against whom I racked up a record of twenty wins and no losses.  I branched out and began playing other players online.  I’d lose a few games here and there, but I was much more serious about the game than ninety-five percent of the other people that I played, so that in itself gave me an advantage.  There was one guy I liked to play.  We’d have close games but I’d win about eighty percent of the time.  Then his average score suddenly shot up by sixty points.  I’d been playing long enough to know the difference between making good use of the board and pulling insane words out of nowhere, and not just crazy two or three-letter goofy words like ZO and ZA that every Scrabble player with a hundred games under his belt begins to know.  These were words like ALUNITES or HODJAS or ORIGAN (no, not “origin” or “Oregon” but “origan”, in botany, another name for marjoram).  I didn’t want to directly accuse him of cheating but I sent him a message that said, “Are you a Muslim botanist and chemist?” to which he replied, “No.  Someone just played these words against me once, and I remembered them.”

Whatever.  I knew he was cheating.  It’s easy to hop onto the internet and use an anagram solver, and no one on the other side can ever prove it.  He started beating me.  It made me mad.  I watched my win/loss record fall below ninety percent, not that it really matters since no one but me ever looks at it.

So then, I started doing it, using the anagram solvers.  I started to beat him again.  And it felt good.   I didn’t feel guilty about it.  If that’s the way he wants to play, that’s the way I’ll play, I told myself.

The point of all this is not to suggest that cheating is the proper way to go but merely how easy it is to justify to ourselves that not only is cheating the better way but also the vital way.  There is an insane pressure placed on us from birth to succeed, and although many of us are brought up in the Christian tradition of humility and charity, we all know that piety and moral purity are not the main criteria society considers when labeling a person a success.

Since we are social beings, how others see us is so important to how we define and view ourselves.  We want others to like us and we naturally hide our flaws.

So now we come to Lance Armstrong.  Of course I had to watch his interview with Oprah.  I genuinely feel bad for him not because I sympathize with what he did but because I can only imagine how painful the fall from the top to the thorny pit of despair must be.  The truth is, we’ve all been in his situation.  You might say my Scrabble example is nothing like Lance Armstrong because there was nothing really at stake.  But really, that makes my actions even more preposterous.  The only thing at stake was my own vanity.

I’ve talked to some who might understand why he cheated, but cannot tolerate the way he viciously went after the people who accused him of cheating.  Anyone who has had an affair and is trying to hide it will scorch the earth before they reveal their lie.  It’s not noble or right.  It’s just a desperate attempt to stay above everything and scrape and claw at whatever might catch before the inevitable avalanche sends us tumbling down the mountain.  The deeper and more important the lie, the more people we are willing to hurt to protect it.  The way I see it, a man at his worst is usually no worse than most men.

To be clear, I’m not excusing Lance Armstrong’s behavior.  His titles should be stripped, a ban implemented, and his legend in the sport of racing tarnished.  But I don’t hate him either.  I’m just considering the reality that Lance Armstrong, like us all, is human.  Perhaps that is the biggest disappointment.

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