Following Fed - A tale of eventually watching Roger Federer play

Okay, I am not a tennis fan or follower. Last time I followed a tennis match seriously, it was India playing France in the quarter final of the Davis cup in 1993. Ramesh Krishnan won the match which had to be extended to the next day.

Why did I follow it?

DD was supposed to show cricket but they kept showing Davis Cup in the name of “cricket broadcast will resume shortly”, I remained glued to the TV in hope of seeing some cricket action, got interested in tennis and was glad to see Krishnan winning the match.

UNITED KINGDOM – JULY 05: Tennis: Wimbledon, Andre Agassi in action vs Goran Ivanisevic during final at All England Club, London, GBR 7/5/1992

I liked the way Boris Becker used to place his volleys. I liked the way Andre Agassi returned the serves, always. The 1992 Wimbledon final between Agassi and Goran Ivaniševi was the last Wimbledon match I followed with complete seriousness. What a match it was!

What. A. Match.

Then came Pete Sampras who started winning everything. Everything. Every time I saw him winning a point, it was either an ace or an impossible return. I didn’t see opponents get a chance to succeed against him. Maybe there were many other aspects of his game but this is what I noticed. In short, I found him boring, extremely boring.

For a sportsperson to generate interest either his game has to be extremely stylish or his matches have to be constantly interesting. Copybook play generating one-sided matches are more likely to kill the interest; that’s what Sampras did to my interest.

I gave up on tennis.

Another reason was that by the late 90s, cricket broadcasting had changed. Reliance on DD was gone, I had ample supply of cricket on TV and forcibly following tennis like that Davis Cup incident was out of question. Oh yes, we had started doing well in cricket as well by the time 2001 arrived, I didn’t really need an alternate option. I never took it.

Ashes 2005 arrived, one of the best Test series ever. I got totally engulfed in the quality of cricket in that series. Sometime during that series, a friend posed a question to me “Have you seen Federer play?”

“Nope. Who is he? Some batsman playing in County?”

“Tennis. Tennis is what I am talking about.”

“No. I don’t follow tennis.”

“You must.”

It started a series of discussions.

While every evening I used to go on and on about Simon Jones’ swing, Matthew Hayden’s swagger, Ricky Ponting’s authority and Andrew Flintoff’s audacity as a bowler, he would enlighten me about Federer’s play. While my friend got always involved with me in cricket discussions, his talk about Federer always remained monologues.

I kept hearing about Federer after that. People kept going on and on about him. It never interested me. It reached a point where I started thinking – if you follow tennis, you have to be a Federer fan else you are not following tennis. It reached a point where I started to wonder if people followed tennis or they followed the game because someone named Federer played it.

My first project was about the Basel II accord. First thing my manager told me about the Basel II accord was, “You know what Basel is? It is a small village in Switzerland. Roger Federer was born there.”

‘What the hell do I do?’ is what I thought.

One fine day, I heard another name – Rafael Nadal. I started hearing it more and more. I was told that Nadal was Federer’s biggest nemesis.

A friend went to the extent of saying, “They are quite like Batman and Joker, like Sherlock and James Moriarty. Nadal the David is challenging Federer the Goliath and he will bring him down”. He was surely a Nadal fan.

I wasn’t sure of any of these stories. I asked, “Who are they?”

“Oh my bad. You are too rustic, aren’t you? They are like Veer Singh and Rajeshwar Singh of Saudagar. Get it now?”

All I could understand was that some tennis great was being challenged by an upcoming player. That’s the normal life-cycle of sport, isn’t it? What was so great about it?

“Oh, like Tendulkar and McGrath you mean?” I asked back.

Soon it became like – either you are a Federer fan or a Nadal fan. If you didn’t belong to any of these categories, you were a tennis moron like yours truly.

Every time I happened to ask a Nadal fan, “I have heard Federer is the greatest tennis player ever”, I was told, “He would have been had Nadal not exposed him.”

Every time I happened to ask a Federer fan, “I heard Nadal is giving a really tough time to Federer”, I was told, “Nadal is nothing but a worker ant. He thrives on his fitness but lacks the charisma Federer possesses.”

I still didn’t follow the game or watch them play.

But soon, the cycle turned on me.