Not all good things make us feel lucky. For example, we enjoy sports with an unspoken sense of entitlement. We have given so much of our lives and so much emotion to it that we feel we deserve the joy of it all. Some athletes are just as good as they are. This moment makes me feel lucky to be living in this era. That’s what Roger Federer did for millions when he ruled. On Thursday he announced our luck had run out. He had quit playing professional tennis.
How lucky was he to have played for us? How lucky was he to us? Federer as a matter of generational luck is in the same category as the internet, vaccinations and free speech. Especially for many of us who were tired of watching professional tennis by the turn of the 2000s when Roger Federer arrived and simultaneously played the game in old and new ways. I felt lucky to see him lose because it’s so beautiful to watch. It has always been of a tragic nature. Not only because he cried, but also because his decline was proof and an inevitable omen of our own death. Filled so mark the time with their own feats. The sadness we feel when Federer’s days are over is not for his sake, but for our own decline.
Today, the world is said to be “polarized,” but the world is mostly fighting over facts because facts tend to come out of unreliable mouths. We all agree on beauty. is not beautiful, because we agree on actual beauty. On many abstract things, we always agree. Beauty is not disputed by rational people.He was great of course.Like Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman of cricket, and Roger Federer, the six greats in sports of every generation You can be a nice person, but not much of it is aesthetically pleasing.
But what’s the point about sports aesthetics? In all other professions, aesthetics are marginal, unloved, and sometimes even starving. But that’s why people go crazy when they see the artistic beauty of sports. Most people are not used to it outside of sports. Sport is a public spectacle, and it doesn’t punish artists who happen to come across it.
When you hear Federer talk about his craft, he doesn’t sound as esoteric as writers, including myself, who try to describe his beauty. Reading him, listening to him, I never felt that he deliberately tried to look aesthetically pleasing during his formative years. He just trained to play the game in the most efficient way for his muscle placement, and it turned out to be a beautiful thing.
Style in sports is strange. It’s not a rebellion against game conventions. Convention. Beautiful sprinters, swimmers and batsmen, for example, are often performing the best the sport’s theory has predicted. And Federer was the triumph of theory on the tennis court. But his rival was also technically perfect. Without technical perfection, you wouldn’t be able to play that level of sport, but they never looked as good as they did when they did. Rafael Nadal’s two-handed forehand His stroke didn’t have the grace of Federer’s moment, but it was very effective. Every muscle in Nadal worked correctly to help him achieve that stroke. To achieve that end, he did not need the inconvenience of beauty.
Elegance has nothing to do with sport’s insipid purpose, and perhaps not even a responsibility. All of Federer’s beauty on the court stems from the fact that he never holds his tennis racket with both hands. Many, if not all, others do so because it is more efficient. In his prime as a player, Federer’s one-handed strokes weren’t a handicap, but if Federer had some ugly efficiencies in the game, he would have been an even better player. I don’t think so.
In public perception, Federer’s artistry often overshadowed other important aspects of his game. For example, he had a lot of power and served fast. But all his power was wrapped in grace.
What are our obligations to Roger Federer? He will probably say that we’ve done enough and can’t ask for more. His net worth at the time of his retirement he exceeds 500 million euros. But is he still obligated to return Federer’s gift, after all, he’s the privilege of his life.
I think it’s a shame to let Federer down when the science is glorious. In his goodbye note, what he said was that he tried to fix his 41-year-old body. He tried to fix it with surgery and other modern medicine. But there was nothing he could do. The millions of euros he would have happily spent could not have healed the injuries he had accumulated and put him in good enough shape to compete with young athletes at the highest level of the sport. I think it’s another failure of science to be unable to cure Roger Federer’s disease, even though science has a stellar reputation as our crowning achievement in 2022.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and creator of the Netflix series ‘Decoupled’.
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