Roger Federer's Legacy

Pondering your legacy is usually only for those too far up themselves to realise they are unlikely ever to have one anyway. As for getting into a sweat about someone else’s, the only saving grace against accusations of having already disappeared past the point of no-return is at least it isn’t a first-person lather. But even allowing for all that, and wholly irrational as it might be, here’s hoping Roger Federer’s declaration after his Wimbledon second-round defeat that he intends to play for years to come doesn’t occur

As one of millions around the globe who for the last decade has thrilled to the great man’s virtuosity, that sounds a bit like arguing McCartney should have hung up the guitar after Abbey Road, or that Hemingway should have hung everything up after the war. We’d have missed out on some great stuff. But that doesn’t disguise how it’s still strictly down-slope stuff. And there doesn’t seem any doubt now that Federer is on a remorseless slide from the Alpine peaks that have made him a benchmark figure in the history of sport.

Fearing for the impact on Federer’s sporting legacy should he continue to incrementally slip towards also-ran status is a luxury that bears no relation to the individual’s need to get up in the morning with a purpose beyond the preservation of a fortune that makes ever working for a living again irrelevant.

There is also the not-insignificant factor that the Swiss kinda likes playing tennis. And there’s always statistical proof already in the book of an incomparably successful Grand Slam career, the true barometer of tennis greatness. 

Style and substance
But even after winning . 17 Grand Slam titles don’t quite cover up what Federer has come to represent to sport in general and tennis in particular. In the sphere of sporting competition, no one has ever better amalgamated the principles of style and substance. With Federer, they really are two sides of the same coin. And the effect has been intoxicating.

Debating  about whether or not he’s the best ever to walk on court is futile since such things are immune to definitiveness anyway; and it’s doubly hard to argue in the face of head-to-head evidence that Rafa Nadal holds an undeniable edge over his great rival. But great a player as he is, the Spaniard holds no claims to any kind of aestheticism on court, embodying instead a bludgeoning, near-manic desire to win. It’s mesmerising in its own way, but no one is ever going to mistake it for beauty.

There have been times though in the past decade when Federer has effortlessly criss-crossed the bridge between performing and performance, all the while blending an incomparable array of natural gifts into a ruthlessly focused desire to win. If the substance is a pre-
requisite, the style has been a glorious bonus that only those chronically short of imagination can fail to warm to.

Source:Other Sports