SPORT

A summer of sport? Unbeatable

By Rahul Jacob

A colleague who often looks as if he might have stepped off a plane from Krypton after a Friday morning session with his tennis coach seemed downcast recently. He had asked her what to do if your opponent was directing a barrage of looping topspin forehands at your backhand. Her answer had been inconclusive. I knew instantly it was not his backhand that he was worried about, but Roger Federer's. The question, just days before the Swiss maestro lost in the French Open final to Rafael Nadal, had been the talking point of a clay-court season this year that few tennis fans will forget.
For those of us who are obsessive about sport, it sometimes feels as if our summers are defined by them, never more so than this summer perhaps, but I have said that almost every other summer. I remember little of what happened to me in the summer of 1978 other than the fact that a chubby Czech named Martina Navratilova finally conquered her demons and won Wimbledon. This week, more than a decade after I had seen her "retire" at the US Open, I was similarly moved watching the 49-year-old swarm all over the net as she and her partner Liezel Huber trounced the top seeds.
When I left India to go to graduate school in the US in the mid-80s, I became perhaps the only person to have left one country for another largely because I wanted to see John McEnroe play tennis.
A few years later, after I spotted his elegant mother with her page-boy cut white hair and father, the very image of a New York lawyer, arriving at the stadium court of the US Open to sit nearby, I had to be physically restrained by a friend from giving them a standing ovation.
If I were not convinced that to be so obsessed with sport is itself therapeutic, I would seek therapy. All the fuss about how this has been a patchy World Cup misses the point. It really is not always about the winning and losing or even the quality of the football on display, but the sense of community football inspires from one end of the world to the other. "32 Nations, One Religion" screamed a billboard in Bangalore I saw recently. And what does one make of the outburst by a Chinese TV commentator after a very controversial penalty was awarded to Italy in its match with Australia. "The victory belongs . . . to everyone who loves Italian soccer! (Coach) Hiddink . . . lost all his courage faced with Italian history and traditions," the commentator screamed.
The crucial words, I think, are "the victory belongs to everyone", because it is in countries whose players are not serious contenders for the World Cup or Wimbledon that the passion these sports evoke is a cause for wonder. To paraphrase the main character in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, I hate nations - and nationalism in sports. In its most extreme form, it prompts racist slurs, as when the Spaniards played the French, or the kind of hyper-analysis bordering on hysteria of every dribble of the English team.
If sport can make global citizens of us, it is also probably true that the family that plays together stays together. Years ago, my elder brother said he was in a hurry to get married partly because he wanted to be able to play squash with his children as our father did, an unusual twist on the biological clock. A South African acquaintance said he missed his father most on Sunday evenings because that was when they caught up on the week's sport, which seemed a poignant articulation of the impoverishment of our lives brought on by the death of a parent.
There is often a prelapsarian nostalgia with which many of us regard the sportsmen of the 70s and 80s - the subject of a recent book, Ali, Pelé, Lillee and Me - but I have rediscovered that innocent pleasure in sport in the past couple of years at Wimbledon. The All England Club, starting with the similarly unfailing courtesy of its elderly stewards, precisely recalls a Sunday service at Westminster Abbey, the meticulously trained ballboys and ballgirls the older siblings of the schoolboy choristers. This year, the new Ralph Lauren uniforms of its linesmen seemed a Gatsby variant on dressing in your Sunday best. Last Friday, I ended up staying on Centre Court till 9 pm, when it really has the intimacy of a club.
No summer's days are as heaven-sent as those in England, or so it seems on Centre Court. Then there is the classical artistry of Federer, which seems to flow during the fortnight. He still lags behind Navratilova, Laver, Borg and Sampras in the rollcall of the very great, but never was a champion more to this particular manor born. Watching him has been likened to watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel, but that seems, well, like watching paint dry.
Last year, the British player John Lloyd wondered aloud on BBC if Federer was entirely human. On the evidence so far, I'm not sure. The courts and balls are playing slower, which will help his remaining opponents, and he might have a bad day, but that's in the nature of sport. Federer on a perfect sunny day at Wimbledon? It's best described as watching Michelangelo's David dressed in tennis whites, with the feet of Baryshnikov, the flair for geometry of the ancient Greeks, the hands of McEnroe, all under the direction of Mozart. Like those majestic later piano concertos, every stroke seems preordained, unhurried, perfect.
rahul.jacob@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006