No Pork Salad

Iwas​ a competent name-caller and a precocious smoker, but my schoolboy talents stopped short of anything that involved a ball. Catering to my eight-year-old son’s tennis abilities has involved a serious learning curve. The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up exercises and footwork drills. The moment they step on court most of them become nervous wrecks. They lie about line calls and bicker over the score; if they lose, they fall howling to the ground and beat the tarmac with their little fists. You don’t have to look far to find the source of their angst. I’ve seen grown men and women bellowing at their weeping children for botching their ball toss or being too static at the net. It’s an unattractive spectacle, but I’m mainly bewildered by how much they care. The biggest constraint on my son’s prospects may be that, as a tennis parent, I don’t have what it takes.

When Roger Federer was eight, his parents moved him to a new club, Old Boys Basel, which had the best juniors programme in the city. ‘You could tell he had some talent,’ the head coach, Madeleine Barlocher, told his biographer Christopher Clarey, ‘but I had a good group with a lot of young boys with talent … I would never have guessed he would become what he would become.’ The opening chapters of The Master, Clarey’s book on Federer, are full of cautious early assessments of his potential.* His junior career peaked at the 1998 Wimbledon Championships, where he won the singles and the doubles. ‘So is Federer a future Wimbledon champion?’ the Independent asked. ‘Probably not.’ Hardly any junior slam winners go on to triumph at senior level (Marin Čilić, who won the French Open boys’ title in 2005, is the most recent). Federer turned pro the next day, playing the Swiss Open in Gstaad, where he was defeated in straight sets by the Argentine veteran Lucas Arnold Ker. ‘It never crossed my mind that “This guy is going to be great,”’ Arnold Ker said. Three years later, in 2001, Federer hit the big time: in his second appearance in the main draw at Wimbledon he beat Pete Sampras, the world number one and seven-time champion, in a thrilling fourth-round match. Even that wasn’t enough to convince people he was destined for greatness. ‘I knew he had talent and was going to be around for a while,’ Sampras told Clarey, ‘but I don’t think anyone could have predicted he was going to dominate for the next twenty years and do all the things he would do. It’s not like Tiger Woods or LeBron James, where since they were twelve you knew they were going to be superstars … It’s not so clear-cut in tennis. It takes time to evolve.’ Federer lost his next match to Tim Henman.

‘Every successful player compromises their entire childhood to make it,’ the former Irish number one Conor Niland writes in The Racket, his memoir of life as a journeyman pro. ‘But so does every unsuccessful player too.’ Niland, like his more famous contemporaries, ‘was forced to grow up with a quasi-professional career forever bleeding into my evenings, weekends and friendships. Zoo trips, beach days and playgrounds weren’t going to further my game and so they weren’t entertained.’ In 1994, when they were both twelve, he beat Federer in straight sets at the Winter Cup, one of the big junior tournaments. But he never won any titles at that level – he attributes this partly to living in Ireland, a country with next to no tennis history or infrastructure – and instead of turning pro accepted a tennis scholarship to Berkeley, which he describes as ‘a plausible each-way bet in a zero-sum world’. Four years later, in 2005, he started playing on the lowest tier of professional tennis, then known as the Futures Tour, now renamed the ITF World Tennis Tour (‘the “Futures” title was an irony too far,’ he writes, ‘even for tennis’).

By then, Federer had won six slams. Nobody doubted his calibre now. His game had always been visually pleasing – his one-handed backhand, with its arabesque follow-through, is the most balletic stroke the sport has ever seen – but in an era dominated by power baseliners, some commentators thought it insufficiently muscular. In 2003, he claimed his first Wimbledon title, losing only a single set over the entire tournament. Two years later (when Niland was playing matches on the Futures tour with ‘literally nobody watching’ and washing his own kit with a bar of soap to save on hotel laundry costs), Federer was one of the most famous athletes on the planet. No one seemed capable of presenting much of a challenge to him until the arrival of the teenage Rafael Nadal, with his pugnacious energy and whip-crack forehand. In June 2005, on his nineteenth birthday, Nadal beat Federer in the semi-final of the French Open, and went on to win the title.

Nadal triumphed in their next few encounters and beat Federer in three successive French Open finals between 2006 and 2008 – the only grand slam trophy Federer hadn’t already won. But Federer maintained his dominance at the other three slams and overcame Nadal in the Wimbledon finals of 2006 and 2007. Like all the best rivalries, it was a clash of contrasting styles. Federer cut an aristocratic figure on court, elegant and seemingly relaxed even at the most pressurised moments; Nadal, with his bulging muscles (displayed by the sleeveless T-shirts he then wore) and dripping sweat, was a picture of stress. At the 2008 Wimbledon final, an epic five-setter often described as the greatest match of all time (‘their mutual masterpiece’, Clarey calls it in The Warrior), Nadal eventually came out on top. He won five of the next ten slams, with Federer taking four (the tenth was won by Juan Martín del Potro, a six-foot-five Argentinian with a spectacularly powerful forehand whose career was eventually curtailed by wrist and knee injuries – another reason it’s hard to be confident about a player’s long-term prospects). The only problem with the Federer-Nadal rivalry, in dramatic terms, was that they were both so courteous and well-behaved. Nadal never smashed a racket on court in his whole career; Federer only rarely. They were both occasionally shirty with umpires (Nadal tried to ban one from his matches for not being respectful enough), but most of the time kept their feelings well hidden. You might root for one over the other – I always thought Federer was a bit too suave, and relied on Nadal to take him down a peg or two – but the choice was largely a matter of aesthetics and it was hard to begrudge either of them when they won.

Enter Novak Djokovic. At the end of 2010, the elastic-limbed Serb was already a force in tennis – he’d won the Australian Open at the age of twenty in 2008 – but few would have put him in the same category as Federer and Nadal. His sudden rise to their level has been attributed (at least by him) to an increase in stamina after he cut gluten out of his diet. He won three of the four slams in 2011 – a feat he repeated in 2015, 2021 and 2023 – and at the 2016 French Open became the first player since Rod Laver in 1969 to hold all four titles simultaneously. Djokovic is given to displays of petulance: screaming at his own team, yelling at ball kids, taking frustrated swings between points – he was disqualified from the 2020 US Open for hitting a female line judge in the throat with a whacked-away ball – and blowing sarcastic kisses to the crowd when he doesn’t feel sufficiently loved. During the fourth round of Wimbledon last year, he interpreted the chants from fans of his opponent Holger Rune – ‘Rooooon-ah’ – as boos directed at him. In the on-court interview after the match, he came out with a menacing soundbite: ‘To all those who have chosen to disrespect the player – in this case, me – have a goooood night.’ Djokovic has legions of diehard fans – they call themselves ‘NoleFam’ – who treat any supposed slight to their hero as racism against someone from a small Balkan state. It’s not clear whether Djokovic agrees with them, but he does seem to resent being less popular than Federer and Nadal.

‘Djokovic is the greatest tennis player in history,’ Mark Hodgkinson writes in Searching for Novak. ‘He’s the GOAT, the greatest of all time.’ Craig O’Shannessy, a strategy analyst who worked with Djokovic for three years, isn’t so sure. ‘For him, there are three GOATS,’ Simon Cambers and Simon Graf, the authors of The Roger Federer Effect, report. Unsurprisingly, they describe Federer as ‘arguably the greatest male player the world has ever seen’. Clarey doesn’t offer an opinion, but in The Warrior he quotes a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, the US player John Isner, who says that Nadal is ‘the greatest competitor in any sport in the history of the world’. In a field stratified by the hard evidence of rankings and results, how can value judgments be so hard to prove? There’s broad consensus about the greatness of the Big Three, but since they didn’t play all their matches against one another, and didn’t peak at the same time, their relative greatness remains open to debate. Besides, there are various ways of measuring these things. Djokovic has won the most slams (24 to Nadal’s 22 and Federer’s 20) and held the number one ranking for the longest period (428 weeks in total). He also has a leading head-to-head record against the other two. But Federer has the most titles overall (103 to Djokovic’s 100 and Nadal’s 92) and the most at Wimbledon, the tournament widely viewed as the pinnacle of the sport (eight to Djokovic’s seven and Nadal’s two). Nadal clocked up the longest winning streak on a particular surface (81 consecutive matches on clay) and the most wins at a single slam (an astonishing fourteen titles at the French Open). Nadal and Djokovic have Olympic gold medals in singles; Federer only has a silver. Djokovic has taken the most prize money ($187,870,986 to date), but Federer’s off-court earnings have made him the first tennis billionaire. The GOAT debate is good for the popularity – and thus the profitability – of tennis, and a colossal PR machine keeps it ticking over.

A great deal of PR effort has gone into buffing the players’ personal brands. Federer and Nadal like to present themselves as straight arrows: everymen who happen to be blessed with transcendent gifts. ‘I consider myself really like a regular guy with a fascinating life as a tennis player,’ Federer told Clarey. ‘I feel super privileged to have made one of my hobbies into my career,’ Nadal told him. Yeah, right. I’m sure they’re both basically decent, but there are clear signs that they’re not as easy-going as they like to make out: Nadal’s obsessive-compulsive tics (lining up his water bottles in a precise order by the side of the court, pulling at his shorts and then touching his hair, nose and cheeks in a set sequence before serving); Federer’s peacocking entrances to Centre Court (at the 2009 championships he wore a white and gold monogrammed safari suit to every match). Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it would be surprising if the players at the top were perfectly well adjusted. Being motivated by an insatiable desire to win, no matter the physical or emotional cost, is more like a pathology than healthy competitive spirit. It’s striking that Djokovic and Andy Murray, the fourth best player of the era, survived, respectively, a Nato bombing campaign and a school shooting before they reached their teens. Tennis wasn’t so much a hobby as a safe space.

Niland, who eventually graduated to the Challengers Tour and sometimes managed to qualify for main ATP Tour events, offers a few tantalising snapshots of the top players. Federer ‘had more swagger and appeared less playful behind the scenes … he was the alpha dog.’ Nadal ‘hit every third ball into the corner for a winner, rather than back up the middle as usual practice etiquette demanded’. You would hope that their biographies would provide fuller portraits, but Clarey seems more concerned with maintaining his subjects’ aura than achieving intimacy. Nadal’s wife, Mery, makes such brief and scattered appearances in The Warrior that every time she gets a mention Clarey has to remind us who she is. He doesn’t seem to know how to bring his subjects to life without puncturing their bland public images. Some of the anecdotes he includes are so lame – ‘Barlocher remembers searching for [Federer] when it was his turn to play and not being able to find him. It turned out that he was hiding in a tree that he had climbed’ – that it’s almost a relief when he goes back to listing scores and discussing training regimes. Hodgkinson pushes the attempt to make drama out of nothing even further:

Waking early, often before sunrise, Djokovic starts his day with prayer, gratitude and a couple of long, deep breaths before hugging his wife and running off to see his children. Contrast with Murray, who when discussing his morning routine with Djokovic, plainly stated what he does first: ‘I go for a pee.’ Murray is part of the tennis orthodoxy, in many ways a conformist … The orthodoxy doesn’t interest Djokovic.

It’s unclear from Hodgkinson’s account how far Djokovic takes this maverick approach. How long does he hold it in? Unlike Federer and Nadal, Djokovic has proved largely PR-proof, and Searching for Novak is full of material that shows why. Despite Hodgkinson’s best efforts – phrases like ‘original mind’ do a lot of heavy lifting – Djokovic, as portrayed in his book, seems batshit. His anti-scientific tendencies made headlines when his refusal to take the Covid vaccine led to his exclusion from the 2022 Australian Open and deportation from Melbourne, but there’s a lot more New Age flannel where that came from. He believes that our souls come preprogrammed with life-goals and that we choose for ourselves the parents best placed to help us achieve them; that it’s possible to purify polluted water by talking to it and that negative feelings turn it green; and that eating in front of the TV contaminates the food, resulting in allergies. His social circle includes Semir (‘Sam’) Osmanagić, who suggested in a 2003 book that Hitler survived the Second World War by escaping to an underground base in Antarctica. Djokovic and Osmanagić make regular trips to the ‘Valley of the Pyramids’, a range of pointy hills in Bosnia that Osmanagić claims are man-made structures once used by ancient astronauts and Djokovic reckons are among ‘the most energetically powerful places on the planet’. Hodgkinson’s account of the reason Djokovic changed his diet in 2010 is jaw-dropping. He was approached by a ‘specialist in energetic medicine’ called Igor Četojević who suspected a gluten intolerance (having seen Djokovic struggling with endurance on TV) and tested the hypothesis using a single slice of white bread:

Četojević firstly pressed down on Djokovic’s right arm, with the player pushing back. Next … Četojević put the bread against Djokovic’s stomach and again pressed down on his right arm; Djokovic sensed he was weaker. Djokovic wanted to be sure that he was definitely weaker when exposed to the bread so Četojević did the test again. Once more, Djokovic could feel how gluten was weakening him.

‘Some have doubted the bread test,’ Hodgkinson admits. It isn’t easy to square any of this with his descriptions of Djokovic as an ‘analytical man’, a ‘great thinker’ and a ‘big reader’. Then again, the bar is pretty low. There’s a dismal YouTube video from 2009 in which top players are asked to name their favourite book. Tommy Haas (briefly world number two) opts for ‘the one with Lance Armstrong’. Federer says he mainly reads magazines. Murray says he hasn’t read a book since the second Harry Potter: ‘I don’t enjoy it.’ In this company, Djokovic – who chooses Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling ‘guide to spiritual enlightenment’, The Power of Now – might pass as an intellectual.

The extravagant praise these men inspire can be a little creepy. David Foster Wallace described watching Federer as a ‘near-religious experience’, but even he couldn’t have anticipated the levels of idolatry in The Roger Federer Effect. The book brings together interviews with friends, fans and nodding acquaintances – from the concert violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter to the former speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow. Nobody says anything less than adulatory, though a lot of the comments involve wishful thinking (‘I have always felt that he understands it’s not easy for me to travel the world to watch him and manage the expenses,’ one fan says) or generous marking (‘Roger is pretty good at multitasking. He would sign autographs as he listened and answered questions’). The most commonplace personal details (‘He likes to eat chocolate’) are disclosed in solemn tones. Routine professional duties are interpreted as charitable deeds. Eric Butorac, a former doubles player and current tournament director who served alongside Federer on the ATP Player Council for six years, says that when Federer was involved in discussions about increasing the prize money at the slams, he argued that not all of the gains should flow to the winners. ‘It was a selfless act,’ according to Butorac:

For instance, in the 2021 US Open, first-round prize money was $75,000. If we looked back ten years ago, it was $20,000. That’s an incredible jump for those players. And frankly, they’re not the ones driving the business. The players like Roger are driving the business but it takes people like him to help the lower-ranked players. And Rafa and Novak have a similar mentality.

Not so selfless really: after all, the Big Three played in the first rounds too, and the spoils of ultimate victory have continued to rise – the singles winners at last year’s US Open received $3.6 million, double the amount awarded in 2011.

Federer and Murray always supported equal prize money for women; Nadal and Djokovic have been less sure. As Butorac says, at least the prize money for lower-ranked players has risen: the ATP recently introduced a programme called Baseline, which gives a minimum guaranteed annual income of $300,000 to players in the top 100, $150,000 to those ranked from 101-175 and $75,000 to those ranked from 176 to 250. Tennis players still complain that with very few exceptions they’re paid much less than footballers or golfers. Some of them attribute this in part to the fact that the ATP represents both players and tournaments, meaning that they’re ‘stuck in a rigged game’, as the Professional Tennis Players Association, which Djokovic co-founded in 2021, put it in a lawsuit filed in March.

The changes​ came a little late for Conor Niland. For a while he was the second-best player in the British Isles behind Murray – a phenomenal achievement by any ordinary standard – but his world ranking peaked at number 129. That meant he never gained automatic entry to the slams and had to criss-cross the world at his own expense, playing nugatory tournaments in empty conference centres and tennis academies. In 2011 he qualified for Wimbledon (serving at 4-1 up in the final set of his first-round match against the erratic Frenchman Adrian Mannarino, he choked, and lost all the remaining games; if he’d won, he would have faced Federer on Centre Court in the next round) and the US Open (where he threw in the towel in the second set of his first-round match against Djokovic, having eaten a dodgy pork salad the night before). He retired the following year, at the age of thirty, his body in tatters. His total career earnings came to $247,686. ‘Spread it across seven years, tax it, and deduct the flights, the trains, the hotels, the coaching …’ There was no big farewell: ‘I just stopped turning up.’

Nadal, of course, had a lengthy farewell ceremony at the French Open last month, where he was joined on court by Federer, Djokovic and Murray. What did they have going for them that Niland lacked? Much of it comes down to raw talent: natural disparities in hand-eye co-ordination, tactical intelligence, processing speed. ‘Playing guys of that standard is like being lost in a hall of mirrors,’ he reports. ‘There were times Djokovic had the ball back in front of me as I was still coming out of my service motion.’ Another factor was Niland’s technique. He didn’t attend a tennis academy and received little elite coaching before arriving at Berkeley. Looking back, he reckons that he ‘fell behind the world’s future top fifty between the ages of twelve and sixteen’. And then there’s the psychological element: he comes across as too rounded a personality to win titles at the highest level. His dry wit and rueful sense of his own shortcomings are welcome on the page, but on court humourless intensity and arrogant determination tend to win out. Whatever the explanation for his limitations, Niland experienced them as rotten luck. ‘Agassi hated tennis,’ he writes towards the end of his book. ‘I felt like maybe tennis hated me.’