A Display of Greatness on the Biggest Stage

By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of The Times
July 9, 2007

Wimbledon, England

Roger Federer wasn’t just playing pretty tennis this time, or competing with his own exquisite standard. He was only hanging onto the back of a runaway bus named Rafael Nadal.

This was Nadal’s gift to Federer late on the day he would put his name next to Bjorn Borg’s with Borg looking on with a vested interest from the royal box. Nadal gave Federer, never before in a fifth set in a Grand Slam final, never gravely challenged in the claiming of his previous 10 Grand Slam titles, the chance to be more than the world’s best tennis player, pound for pound.

Nadal gave him a stage to demonstrate his championship grit, to make his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title much more than a coronation and a notation in the history book yesterday.

Borg and the other greats at Center Court — among them John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and Boris Becker — knew what they were watching, and how much better it was this way for Federer and Wimbledon and the sport at large.

“This was so good because it was one against two and they brought out the best in each other, and that’s what brings people to the game,” Becker said after Federer survived desperate times early in the fifth set, risen without warning for the right to wind up on his knees, mimicking Borg once more, celebrating a 7-6 (7), 4-6, 7-6 (3), 2-6, 6-2 victory that was more tense and tighter than that fifth-set score could ever say.

Federer feared the match “slipping away,” on two break points in the third game of the last set and two more in the fifth. Nadal had won the fourth set and was looking unbeatable from the baseline, impenetrable on his serve, having only been broken in the second game of the match and not having faced a break point since the first game of the third set.

Bus or bandwagon, Nadal was pulling away, and most people at Center Court, regardless of their rooting interest, had to believe that Federer would settle for a consolation handshake from Borg instead of what he would sheepishly call a Swedish hug.

Nadal deserved one, too, after having come so far from even a year ago when he took a set from Federer here, but was more clay-court overachiever than grass-court contender. Now, everyone seems to think that Nadal, 21, will win Wimbledon before long and, at the rate of his improvement, Federer would be advised not to take his time equaling Pete Sampras’s record 14 Grand Slam titles.

“I’m happy with every one I get now before he takes them all,” a relieved Federer told Sue Barker of the BBC, as Nadal stood behind them, holding a runner-up plate that often seemed headed into Federer’s hands.

It wasn’t that long ago that everything in tennis seemed to be Federer’s for the taking. In 2004, my last trip here, he was working on his second Wimbledon title, but people in and around this sport were already watching in wonderment, acclaiming him as their potential savior, tennis’s indispensable Tiger.

Then Nadal magically appeared to dominate the clay, change the discussion, obstruct what seemed to be Federer’s predestined path to a calendar Grand Slam and much, much more.

Nadal frustrated Federer on the slow, red stuff for the third straight year in Paris last month. The grim reaper with a racket, he seemed to come for Federer at his grass-court palace as purposefully as McEnroe did for Borg here in 1981, one year after Borg held him off to win his fifth in a row.

How could Borg not have been reminded of how McEnroe ended his Wimbledon run, sending him out of the United States Open and the sport soon after, as he watched Nadal, another left-hander with a mane of unruly hair, hammer forehands crosscourt at angles that turned Federer into the duck in a shooting gallery?

It’s a different level from when Borg and McEnroe played, almost another sport considering the enhanced technology and the ferocity of the shotmaking. The mind games of the ebb and flow do not change. After Federer held from 15-40 in the third and fifth games came the suspicion in Federer, if not the belief, that Nadal had missed his chance. And Federer thought, “If I get one, I’ll probably make it.”

On the first point of the sixth game, Nadal hit a forehand that kissed the net cord and fell a few inches wide. Sometimes that’s all it takes — an inch here, a ricochet there. Soon it was 0-40, and on the second break point came a forehand that Federer stepped back and ripped for a winner after Nadal had run down a sliced backhand and done well to float it back crosscourt.

Close now, maybe closer than he thought he was going to get, Federer had only to play out the set, not give the indefatigable Nadal more hope. Not the simplest task, with Borg and all the others in the house, part of the story, what Federer called “a huge occasion for me, huge pressure.”

They saw him at his finest, when the day could have crashed. At the climax of the best Wimbledon final in years — considering, as Becker said, it had the two best players in the sport’s best theater — Federer staged a rally worthy of a rainy-day Wimbledon rewind.

Against the man destined to be his partner in history, in a rivalry already among the most compelling in sports, Federer defended home court when it appeared to be lost.

“You can’t always play five-set-match thrillers,” he said. “I’m happy it happened today. I left as the winner. Was perfect.”

He took the fifth, and there was no more to say. More than a quarter century after Borg, for at least one more year, the Wimbledon trophy remains the Fed Cup.