by Agostino Nigro
The last image of Pete Sampras was a triumph. Roger’s was a public statement. The mirror of a fragile champion, not a robot as Borg and Lendl were. Federer may have stammered after victories, but he did not change tennis: that’s just fake news! And there is also a time when he told a lie…
They say that Mithridates, king of Pontus, was so daunted by the idea of being murdered by someone of his court, that he ingested small doses of poison daily.
As a result, when Mithridates tried to kill himself, swallowing a whole phial, he failed, since by then he had become immune. The term mithridatism is named after him. It means getting used to a huge pain in advance through little and constant sorrows. A homeopathy of feelings, spreading all over, often involuntary.
It will be said that 2000 years after Mithridates millions of people worldwide went on ingesting, day after day, tweet after tweet, news after interviews, through many little doses of harsh reality, the same poison. Through small doses, in these three years, everybody has been ingesting the poison that was announcing the end of Roger Federer’s tennis career, meaning that the Swiss tennis player would abandon his athlete’s body, tormented by all the surgeries, by 1500 matches, by 41 years of worldly life and by four children, who for sure had insisted on piggyback rides with their dad.
Today, looking around in this valley of tears, we can say that Mithridates was only a mythological bragger.
Nobody expected Federer to be Federer again. Many had understood that the Swiss was no more the player he once was. Those who still believed in him, had looked at his last match, at the 6-0 inflicted on him by Hurkacz on the Centre Court of Wimbledon, as a bad dream one can easily escape from. Those who still believed had wanted him to go on playing, with a little insolence and a courteous indifference towards his persona. Those who still believed had maybe wanted a last win against Nadal or against Djokovic, a last match in which he would be shedding pieces after pieces on court, losing a knee in a lightening run, an elbow during a volley, his back while serving, till nothing would be left but remains, cannibalized by limitless love.
Those who indeed do know what years mean, had already figured out that Roger Federer would not leave tennis holding a trophy, as it happened to Sampras who quit tennis throwing up his arms. Those who were there still remember. Sampras lifted the trophy, bid farewell, and forever everybody would remember him as the best, as the invictus. Pete Sampras’ last image was a triumph. Roger’s was a public statement. Maybe an echography.
Three years ago it was revealed that the great ending was not meant to be, when in the Wimbledon 2019 final, he got to the most famous 40-15 in history. That match is going to be talked about forever, by everybody, so I’d rather not. Actually Roger suffered many other defeats throughout his career, but it’s very complicated to explain why. The poison we’re not yet immune to is still producing its effects: it would have been better to expel it before writing, because my thoughts about what is happening in the sport I love still seem to be confounding me.
Certainly some still remember the Australian Open 2006 trophy presentation. Seventh Slam in his pocket, a worriless final against Baghdatis. Everyday routine. Nevertheless, during the ceremony, emotion played a monologue that no one was expecting. Federer just wasn’t able to talk. He started stammering, he blurted out confused words people even laughed at. Then he burst out crying, out of the blue. The Rod Laver Arena was shocked by the winner’s tears and began wondering if that Slam, by many considered the least important of the four, was concealing a secret. When Rod Laver gave him the trophy, he was hugged by our Roger the way someone hugs you when they feel lonely, but before 20,000 people. The scene was so emotional that the public ceremony was transfigured in a story of his persona, in an intimate manifestation of the self.
At that time, I just used to appreciate very much Roger the tennis player, who could elegantly perform any shot allowed by laws of physics, but in that precise moment I walked through the mirror that led toward the Roger Federer persona. And I never came back.
Since then, every match I was so lucky to watch ceased to be just a sport affair and started to become an exploration of the inner self. “What is he feeling right now after winning? What was he thinking before missing that shot? What is he feeling, playing so damn well, and what is he feeling now that the other one is playing better than him?”.
While watching him playing I was jotting down mental notes. I had been enriching with posthumous details the champion I wanted to be when I was 10 years old, when another me, in his childhood bedroom, waving his racquet about, was winning against everything and everybody, bringing home a Slam, made up of dim hopes and May afternoons.
Once you’re through the mirror, many observations seem trivial and stereotypical.
Some wrote, years ago, that Federer was a cold tennis player, a tennis player who, since he had repressed his youthful outbursts, had been turned into a robot, or, even worse, into a frustrated person. There is no need to prove the contrary, which has been under everyone’s eyes ever since. It’s more helpful to explain that this idea started haunting those who could not accept that a person, who had been revealed as so fragile and emotional, could win so much, in a robot-like way as Lendl or Borg. This idea was born from the minds of those that could not accept the normality of a never-seen-before talent, from the minds of those who still today cannot accept that an individual blessed by the gods can be close to you.
There will be an eternal debate whether he is the best ever, as if, in tennis, time could be employed as an objective unit of measurement. As if numbers could tell the only true story in a sport made of countless variables, of changing surfaces, of expanding tennis balls, and which indeed are less objective than the eyes of who’s watching and expressing their opinion.
Still today do they write, yet another fake, that Roger Federer has changed tennis. Just look at our tennis, today. And tell me how Federer changed it or tell me what remains of this change and can be seen today. Federer has been the tip of a compass that stretched out till it collapsed. Federer’s claws have bonded one era with another. A 24-year long bridge has been the last noble ground we’ve been allowed to walk on before landing on an anonymous land, where everything is the same. It is impressive if we think that Roger bid farewell one minute after a 19-year-old who claims to be his fan, but is only the prince of clones, rose to the throne.
Forgive me, and please, may Carlos Alcaraz forgive me. It’s because of the poison, which can arouse anger even in the most innocent.
During a press conference in Paris I asked him if he was aware that after him nobody would ever be playing his shots. Shyness prevented me from asking him what I really meant, if he knew that he was simply the last. I hoped he would scream, in his native language, “Kameraden, ich bin der Letzte!” (Comrades! I am the last!), as the last rebel prisoner of Auschwitz did in front of a disenchanted Primo Levi. Instead, he just looked at me sternly, replying that it was not true, that there would be new tennis players worth following, that he would watch the new generations with interest. Then he turned away. The question bothered him, and maybe his answer bothered him as well. “Liar”, I thought. Liar even now that you’re leaving.
Cleansing every form of emotion, what’s the point of grieving over about a rich Swiss sportsman who will never again hit a felt and rubber ball with the goal of winning a tournament? Why suffer about it? Why transfigure these days in a laic 5th of May, in a secular grief, everyone reading out “He is no more” (TN: from the ode The 5th of May by Alessandro Manzoni), while our problems persist? How can a passion for sport, for what is nothing but a game, for a tennis player or for a football team, grow into something so akin to love?
Walking through the mirror that separates the public image of a sportsman from the private dimension of a man that you have never had the chance to know is a personal journey. As an embarrassing hug with Rod Laver could be as well. Just like suddenly being halted at 40-15 of a London final, turning the engines off to fly like a glider, so as to better inhale the stress.
It’s a journey that no one can explain because no one is able to explain to us why we like a certain thing, why we are so different, why we love.
Perhaps it’s because we all need something, and I hope that some may see themselves in these words. We strive for something we understand is missing because we never had it, or because we lost it. Something belonging to the past, something which a bit of elementary psychoanalysis could exhume from our childhood, concealed amid those dreams of glory that never came true. It’s quite similar to Mithridates’ poison, but it works reversely.
A friend of mine wrote to me saying that once you have read some news you feel older. It’s the opposite. These episodes act differently. They pick out from the sand the silver threads which had been hidden for years, they stretch them out, they shake the dust off and they connect us back to when we were kids. They reactivate the umbilical cords with ages where the soul used to be pervaded by dreams, and if one of these dreams vanishes, a ripple crosses time and makes the children we were sad.
Sport means being a child, when everything is a challenge, when you’re convinced to eat a dish of vegetables only because another child has already done the same, when in the one hundred meters that you run with your father, you can imagine running at least six Olympic finals.
Roger Federer, for us who have loved him, has been the avatar of our sport dreams. The tangible representation that, even through an interposed person, our dreams were true. And now that we are compelled to put away that avatar away in the basement, now that a physical form dreaming for us no longer exists, we have discovered we are no longer able to dream. We feel lonely, on the other side of the mirror, and we cannot afford to remain trapped there.
Before breaking free, however, it would be beautiful if we could be lulled by the vanishing dreams. Before becoming adults with no way of escape, before the silver thread is buried once again, before Roger Federer disappears, I ask you, Roger, to throw that child up in the air, and then catch him. Throw him up again, higher and higher, so high that he can barely see your arms, so that he will slowly get used to the farewell. Throw me up again Roger, for my glider flight, and again, one last time, dad, and then let me go away.
Translated from Italian to English by Massimiliano Trenti
