A Common Fan’s Sports Diary

Even the great Michael Phelps can't master all the swimming events - there are so many of them

One of the great sporting discussions of our times is to compare Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. This discussion inevitably spills over into a comparison of the sport of golf with tennis – so as to understand how the feats in one sport compare with another.

Someone who has a decent knowledge of both sports can make a reasonable comparison but most people don’t and that leads to some vague assessments

A lot of Federer supporters claim that the Swiss has now won majors on all surfaces whereas Tiger hasn’t won on all the golf courses that he’s played on.

Another often heard argument is that Fedex usually ends up in the top 4 or top 2 of any tournament that he plays but Tiger often ends up way down the leader board.

Anyone who knows both sports will tell you that comparisons between them are not so straightforward.

I have often tried to explain the same to people; reasoning that the two sports require vastly different levels of versatility. Mostly I have not managed to get my point across for lack of a good analogy.

Finally I think I have a decent one.

Golf is like the sport of swimming. There are four different styles and races involve different distances. There are races which even involve a combination of all the four styles. All combine to create more than 20 events with a different challenge for each race. Fundamentally you are doing the same thing (swimming) in each race but each one of them requires a different kind of physical conditioning, training, preparation and tactics. There is no one who has managed to master every kind of race over his or her lifetime.  The greatest of them all, Michael Phelps, has managed to win six individual events at one event. If we wanted to and gave it his all, he could master any race but thanks to the time and effort it will take, he won’t be able to master all of them in a single life.  It is impossible and that is how it will forever be.

Tiger Woods could also master any golf course if he wanted to – he could make alterations in his game and gain familiarity for the course through regular practise. But to master all of them, it will take more than one life.

Scherbo and Federer mastered every challenge that their sport had to offer

Tennis on the other hand is like gymnastics. There are six routines and then there is the all round event. Again the basic requirements for all are the same but each is different in terms of the preparation, practise and planning it takes achieve mastery over it. But the fact that there are only six of them ensures that a really talented gymnast can master all of them. Vitaly Scherbo won a world or an Olympic title in each of the six events and won the all round too. It’s not easy and it takes a special talent but it can be done.

Roger Federer has also done a Scherbo, winning major titles on every surface. But like the gymnast he too had a lesser challenge in terms of the number of variables he needed to master.

Vitaly Scherbo’s complete mastery over gymnastics doesn’t make him a greater champion than Michael Phelps, who hasn’t conquered everything in swimming.  And that is exactly what we need to understand whenever we are engaged in a Federer- Woods discussion.

A lot of people seem to think so, including Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras.

But if being the winner of the maximum number of grand slam titles was the criterion of all time greatness, then Margret Court Smith should be the greatest women’s player of all time. And we all know that she is not even guaranteed a position in the top five.

If being the winner of the maximum number of grand slam titles coupled with the distinction of having completed a career grand slam puts Federer above the likes of Sampras and Laver, then why wasn’t Roy Emerson anointed as the greatest player of all time when he held the same distinction; he happened to complete the career grand slam twice and held the distinction of having won the maximum number of titles for a long time.

Federer’s case is also weakened by the standard of competition in his era. His only contemporary who will qualify as an all time great is Rafael Nadal. The likes of Sampras, Laver and Borg had to compete against a larger group of well accomplished adversaries.
And the clincher against Federer is his haplessness against Rafael Nadal. No other claimant to the title of ‘greatest player of all time’ has been subject to such humiliation at the hands of a fellow player as has Federer against Nadal. Sampras and Laver had positive records against all their peers.

This fallibility becomes all the more important in judging Roger’s greatness because Nadal is the only great player whose career overlaps significantly with that of Federer.

The title of best men’s tennis player of all time is still open to debate. Roger has a strong case but his imperfections are significant enough to delay his coronation.

Doesn't this rivalry look similar to the one below. If not for the stabbing there would have been crying at some point.

Luckily for Nadal, there's no lunatic like Parche to end Federer's misery

Guess which tennis players we are talking about

A sublime and graceful champion with a complete stranglehold on the game, worthy of being called the greatest ever. Was most dominant on the Wimbledon grass and most uncomfortable on the Parisian red clay. Ended the Wimbledon reign of the player with the maximum All-England titles. Blessed with an all-round game based on a splendid forehand and a practitioner of the single-handed backhand.

The player’s reign at the top was ended by a feisty baseliner with a double handed backhand -someone who had become a French Open champion while still a teenager. The two players had a storied rivalry giving tennis fans many memorable matches. The old champion held sway on grass whereas the new one was at their best on clay and getting better on grass. The younger player seemed to have his celebrated opponent’s number, enjoying a substantial edge in their rivalry. A lot of it had to do with the player’s supreme mental strength. The older champion, having conquered everything before running into the young conqueror, was almost driven to despair by his repeated failures.

Current tennis fans would identify the players as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. But go back to the early nineties and the story will remind you of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. Although it has never been mentioned or written about, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the two rivalries are remarkably similar in almost every aspect.

The players seem to have followed almost the same career paths. They share the same strengths and weaknesses and had comparable playing styles. And to add to that their rivalries followed identical paths. The first one started with Seles’ win over Graf at the 1990 French Open – Similar to the way Nadal and Federer kicked off at the 2005 French Open. Seles first established herself as the queen of clay before she conquered the hard courts. While Graf continued to dominate the former Yugoslavian on grass, Seles was improving rapidly on her least favourite surface, making the finals in 1992.

The Fedex-Rafa rivalry has also played out similarly. Nadal has gone on from the 2005 triumph at Paris to become arguably the best player on clay, ever. He has also improved by leaps and bounds on other surfaces and holds grand slam titles on three surfaces at the time of writing. Roger dominated him on grass initially but Nadal improved enough to break through that bastion as well –winning Wimbledon in 2008.

Seles had a vice like grip over Graf, grinding her into submission time and time again. Rafa enjoys the same dominance over Federer. He plays memorable matches with the Swiss where he almost always comes out on top, thanks to his indomitable spirit. Both Steffi Graf and Roger Federer seemed totally powerless against an opponent who had fewer tennis gifts but far more in terms of desire. Both rivalries came down to a battle of the mind and each time the older player crumbled in the face of their relentless rival.

In addition to the mental warfare, there is another key common component to both rivalries. It is the fact that Seles and Nadal were both left handed and had double handed backhands. On the other hand, Graf and Federer were righties who employed a single handed backhand. To understand the full implication of this dynamic, please read Paul Fein’s brilliant analysis of the same in the Sportstar (the second week issue of February 2009).

Although Fein is referring just to Federer and Nadal, his arguments are universal and holds true for the Seles –Graf rivalry as well. In brief, Fein proves that a left hander enjoys an inherent advantage over a righty when serving and receiving serve. More importantly, he disproves the long held notion that the lack of power in the single handed backhanded is compensated for by its better reach. He also argues and proves through examples that the single handed backhand is less reliable and more prone to errors, especially when under pressure. That is primarily the reason why Federer’s game has often cracked in key situations whereas Nadal’s has held firm. In another time, the same paradigm would have explained why Seles made fewer errors to regularly beat Steffi Graf.

With so much in common it is difficult to understand why no one pointed out the obvious similarities?

One possible reason could be the fact that the first rivalry was cut short by Gunther Parche. The stabbing in Hamburg changed the trajectory of the Seles – Graf rivalry and it never played out in full. Monica was never the same player again and Steffi Graf re-established herself as the undisputed number one player in the world. Because of its short duration, Seles-Graf is not even mentioned as one of the great tennis rivalries. The lasting memory is the stabbing and the tennis that preceded it is generally a blur. Had it lasted for two more years, then things would have been very different. Comparing the Graf-Seles rivalry with Federer -Nadal would have been far more obvious.

Somebody seems to have knocked some sense into Roger Federer’s head. He is finally getting himself a coach. And not just any coach. He’s a getting a specialist clay-court coach – one Mr Jose Higueras – who has guided Michael Chang and Jim Courier to the French Open title in the past. Very smart choice!

We have been chiding Roger to get himself a coach for some time and now that he has gone ahead and got one, we have every reason to be happy about it. We want Fedex to beat Sampras’ grand slam record and also dethrone Nadal as the French Open Champion. Hiring Higueras will give him a great shot at both.

Fedex needs to learn from the guy on the right

Nadal on Clay vs Federer on Grass

In a unique experiment to determine the best men’s tennis player in the world; Rafael Nadal – the king of clay, with a 72 match unbeaten run on the surface, squared off against Roger Federer; the champion on grass, with a 48 match streak of his own. They played on a half -clay, half-grass court – thereby creating a neutral ground for a fair contest. The critics’ weren’t too impressed and the match, which was won by Nadal in a third-set tiebreaker, did little to settle the original debate. Well, damn the critics. This was a dream come true for fans like me, who always cook up such fantasy exercises (although we rarely get to see them), and I well and truly believe that they make the game richer and so much more fun.

Another such attempt, which immediately comes to mind was the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ matches, in tennis again. In part III, Jimmy Connors played Martina Navratilova with the handicap of being allowed just one serve per point and having to cover a larger court widened by half of each doubles alley. Just for the record, the ‘man’ still won.

Tinkering comes naturally to us. I remember trying to improvise the rules in the playground, when, as kids we struggled to form two decent well matched sides; the group consisting of friends and cousins of different age groups. Such variations brought the game alive and made it fun for all involved.

The mother of all such fantasies would be bringing players of different ages together. Just imagine, if the advancement of modern science can pit Bjorn Borg against Rafael Nadal, or have Brett Lee bowl to Vivian Richards, or have Maradona play against Pele.

The purists and traditionalists will call for a ban on such events and label them as ‘gimmicks’. But after the ‘traditional’ fare we witnessed in the football and cricket world cups, I’d still settle for the ‘gimmicks’.