My Federer Obsession:
Tennis in My Youth

William Skidelsky

By 2003 when I first saw Roger Federer, tennis didn't mean much to me but this hadn't always been the case. As a boy I loved the sport with an all-consuming passion. Between the ages of about five and eleven, it was--by some distance--the most important thing in my life.

I first played it--or a version of it--in the south of France. My parents owned a house in a village called La Garde-Freinet, a treacherous hour's drive from Saint-Tropez. We used to stay there in the holidays, but in 1981, when I was five, we decamped there for a whole year as my father, a historian, had taken a sabbatical from his university job in order to write the first volume of his biography of the econ¬omist John Maynard Keynes.

My eight-year-old brother and I attended the local school, where we learned idiosyncratic French (in my case, a tortuously ungrammatical Franglais) and formed tentative friendships with other kids from the village. Our younger sister was born in December that year--the first home birth in the village, as the local paper noted, for more than half a century.

It was, I think, an unsettling period for us both. My brother, who never had a good relationship with authority as a child, narrowly avoided being expelled, while I was so alarmed by the school's unbarricaded row of sit-down toilets that I refused to use them. On a few occasions, this stance met with predictably dire consequences. Eventually a special concession was granted whereby I alone, of all the children at the school, was allowed to use the staff facility.

At the back of our house was a small walled patio, and in this my father devised a game, played with bats and a foam ball, which I suppose was a cross between tennis, squash, and fives. I think the scoring was based on squash, with games the first to nine.

We played this endlessly--there wasn't much to do in the village--and it was during this period, accord¬ing to my father, that I developed the foundations of what would become my most potent weapon (when I was a child anyway): my single-handed backhand. In fact, my father gave me a nickname that reflected this: "Bumbledon of the backhand."

A year or so after we returned to England, my mother started taking me to short tennis classes at our local leisure center in North London. Short tennis--played on a bad-minton court with a lowered net, plastic rackets, and a foam ball-was then a popular way to introduce children to the sport. Our coach, Bill, was a mustached man of about forty who bore a striking resemblance to the Canadian snooker player Cliff Thorburn. Short tennis has now been replaced by mini-tennis, which is similar, but played on a specially marked-our section of a full-size court with different rackets.

Bill was a patient teacher, and had a knack for demystifying the game's more abstruse aspects. I particularly remember his method for illustrating the value of spin.

From his pocket he would produce a rubber ball, which he would dispatch from his wrist with savage reverse rotation, instructing us to chase after it. Off we would set, but as soon as the ball hit the ground, it would jag violently back towards him. Helplessly, we'd watch it loop back over us and into the safety of Bill's outstretched palm. At which point he would smile and say: "That's why you need spin."

Aided, no doubt, by my head start in France, I took to short tennis and was identified by Bill as having talent. After a few months, I got the chance to put my skill to the test in the Middlesex Short Tennis Championship--an event that took place at the same leisure center where our weekly classes were held. Father and I entered the parent-and-child doubles, and I en¬tered the under-10 singles.

My father and I easily won the doubles, and in the singles I made it through to the final, where my opponent was a stick-thin boy with a handicap: one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other. The match took place in front of what I remember to be a huge crowd (a makeshift grandstand had been erected along one side of the hall) and was a tense, drawn-out affair.

My opponent's disability meant that he moved with a limp, but he covered the court with surprising agility, and was particularly good at running round his (weak) backhand and pummeling my own backhand with his (vicious) forehand. This became the pattern of the match: his forehand to my backhand, point after point. Although my single-hander was my best shot, it eventually faltered in the face of this Nadal-like onslaught, and he ended up a narrow victor.

There is a photograph of me after the match, clutching my plastic runner-up trophy, my eyes flecked with tears. It was my first serious taste of defeat on a tennis court, and I still remember the anguish it caused me, the mix of disbelief and desolation.

At school the next day I got to stand up in front of the class and show off my trophy, but it was scant consolation. I felt--for a few days at least--empty inside, as if all meaning had drained from my life. Looking back, I can see that, in many ways, it was for the best that I lost. A year or so later, I encountered my conqueror again, this time on a full-sized court. His disability meant that he was never going to be a good tennis player, and I beat him comfortably. Short tennis had been his one shot at glory.

It was during this period that I saw my first live pro¬fessional tennis. In November 1984, my mother took my brother and me to the semifinals of the Benson and Hedges Championship, a now-defunct tournament held at the Wem¬bley Arena. I can't remember much about the singles, but I do remember a remarkable doubles featuring a sixteen-year¬-old Boris Becker and his partner, Emilio Sanchez (brother of Arantxa), up against Ivan Lendl and the Ecuadorian left-hander Andres Gomez.

Becker, who'd only turned pro a few months earlier, was at this point unknown, but his performance that night--a combination of colt like energy and blazing muscularity--was enthralling. He dominated proceedings, outbludgeoning Lendl from the back, chasing down seemingly impossible balls, firing down countless aces and booming smashes.

The crowd, I remember, got more and more excited as the match wore on, not just because the tennis was so thrilling, but because what we were witnessing scarcely seemed credible.

Who was this blue-eyed wunder¬kind? How could he be this good? Of course, it wasn't long before Becker's gifts gained wider recognition. The following summer, he rematerialized on the grass, and, to my delight, won Queen's (his first title) and then, three weeks later, be¬came, at seventeen years and 227 days, the youngest-ever men's Wimbledon champion.

I had by this point abandoned short tennis, and moved to the full version of the game. Each week, my brother and I would go for a lesson with Bill at our local public courts. My brother was a good player. Like me, he had natural hand¬ eye coordination--but it was becoming clear that he didn't have any real enthusiasm for the sport.

From an early age, he had shown signs of being, as my father liked to put it, "an intellectual." He read serious books, and knew about things like architecture, philosophy, and art. Tennis was something he was prepared to play under sufferance, but he basically regarded all sport--with the exception of table tennis--as a waste of time.

My father would often say, with a mixture of ruefulness and pride, that my brother could have been the "first intellectual tennis player." Looking back, I realize that those lessons my brother and I had with Bill were the last point in our childhoods when our interests intersected sufficiently to make any kind of shared activity possible.

We were rapidly moving in different directions. Our roles had become defined--he was the "intellectual," I was the "sporty one"--and it wasn't until quite a bit later, when we were both teenagers, that we discovered that we had things in common.

It's certainly true that, by the age of eight or nine, I was a tennis nut. Not only did I play as often as I could, tennis had become the focus of my internal life. Inspired by that first, thrilling glimpse of Becker, I became an avid student of the game, scouring newspaper sports sections and devouring books on its history. To this enterprise I applied a scholar's rigor. No detail was too trivial to escape my attention.

I could identify the rackets that different ex-pros used. I could recite the scores of three decades' worth of Wimbledon finals. I knew precisely how many titles long-forgotten players like Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen had won, and whom they had beaten to get them.

Inevitably, too, my fantasies for my own future revolved around a glittering tennis career. At home, we had a ping pong table, and I would stand beside it for hours on end, knocking a ball back and forth against the wall, constructing elaborate make-believe matches. In these, I would accomplish every manner of astonishing feat - winning Wimbledon aged sixteen, racking up more Grand Slams than Laver, spending an entire decade at No 1. In my dreams, my achievements were limitless.

The reality of my tennis career was more prosaic. Based on my success in short tennis, I became a member of the Middlesex Under 10 Squad. This meant that I went off for training sessions at an indoor center in west London.

I played a few marches for the county. I also started entering tournaments, with titles like the Paddington Open and the Middlesex County Closed. I would usually get through a few rounds, before coming up against someone better than me. My particular nemesis at this time was a boy named Gary Le Pla, who was not only the best player for his age in Middlesex, but was ranked number one in the whole southeast region. The first time I played him he beat me, humiliatingly, 6-0, 6-0. The next time I got a few games.

However, it was clear that Gary Le Pla existed on a different plane from the likes of me. I have occasionally wondered what became of him. Aged ten, he seemed impossibly good, unquestionably destined for future greatness. Yet to judge from the fact that I never heard of him again, he--like the overwhelming majority of tennis prodigies--never made it.

During this period, I adored watching tennis. But my affection was of a particular kind. It focused more on the game itself—its history, its facts and figures—than on the fortunes of individual players.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have my preferences; some players appealed to me more than others. Lendl for example I never warmed to (too abrasive). Nor did I much care for Chris Evert (too bland). I liked Hana Mandlikova (sumptuous groundstrokes) and Stefan Edberg (peerless volleys), and I also had a predictable soft spot for Gabriela Sabatini.

Becker was probably my favorite male player—at least early before he started ranting incessantly. But even in his case, I’m not sure I would describe myself as ever being his fan. I was happy enough when he won, but his defeats didn’t cut me to the quick. When he lost to an unknown Australian named Peter Doohan in the second round at Wimbledon in 1987, I don’t remember feeling too upset.

Much the same was the case with my favorite female player, Steffi Graf. She came along a year or two after Becker, just as precocious and, astonishingly, even better than him.

I loved watching her. There was something mesmerizing about the sight of her gliding around the court. I was also fascinated by her deadly forehand and by the fact that she hardly ever used her topspin backhand, except when her opponent came to net. But once again there wasn’t much emotional connection. I didn’t identify with her plight. The whole concept of being a fan—that is caring about one player to the exclusion of others, of seeing them almost as an extension of oneself—was at this point alien to me.