Opinion - Editorials

Re-igniting the debate

The Roger Federer era is far from over. Facing a Grand Slam shutout towards the end of a long and difficult season, the Swiss maestro proved at Flushing Meadows on Monday that he still has what it takes to dominate major championships. Federer’s emphatic victory over the talented 21-year-old Briton, Andy Murray, which gave him his fifth straight U.S. Open title — only Bill Tilden who won six in a row from 1920 to 1925 has done better — should at once sile nce his critics and reignite the debate on whether he is the greatest player of all time. Even in a year marked by his vulnerability rather than invincibility, it seemed inevitable that Federer would reinvent himself as a world-beater before the end of the Grand Slam season. If the great man’s brushstrokes on the manicured lawns of the All England Lawn Tennis Club are familiar to tennis lovers, Federer has been equally dominant in the Big Apple. The 27-year-old Swiss, who lost his No.1 ranking to Rafael Nadal on August 18, faced tremendous pressure going into the year’s last Slam event. Enfeebled by illness early in the year, Federer was outplayed by Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals of the Australian Open and his hopes of winning his first clay court Grand Slam were blown away by the Spanish tornado, Nadal, in the French final. But the toughest loss came in what might go down as one of the greatest Grand Slam finals in history as Nadal outlasted the Swiss in five sets at Wimbledon.

Federer knew he had to come up with something special at the U.S. Open to put his career back on track; he did exactly that, as only the greatest champions can. He becomes the only man in the history of Grand Slam championships to have won two different majors five times in a row. Great athletes make schoolboy fantasies come true. As they constantly push barriers and seek to erase the line between the possible and the impossible, they also inevitably set off debates about their place in the sports pantheon. Federer, who now has 13 Grand Slam titles — the all-time leader Pete Sampras has 14 — is incontestably the best all-round player of his generation. But is the man with such an achievement the greatest of all time? If he had beaten Nadal in one of the three French Open finals they have contested, the arguments in Federer’s favour might have been stronger. Across generations, sport is played in vastly different conditions with surfaces, equipment and the field of competitors varying widely and there can never be a truly objective judgment on who is the greatest. But there can be little doubt that the man who has evoked such panegyrical prose in the normally sceptical sports media has had a closer brush with perfection than most other great athletes.

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