Roger Federer: Indeed ‘Greatest Of All Time’

A key to understanding the men’s tennis circuit of the past decade or so, is to review Wimbledon 2017. It was to see what we always knew was inevitable – the greatness of Roger Federer.
The history we can trace back to 2003, when Federer washed upon a men’s circuit stuffed with all the big guns of that time:
Andre Agassi, Marat Safin, Leyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick; all trying to squeeze into the vacuum created by the waning of Pete Sampras’ powers.
Not only did he carry them all out of the way, he went on to develop a hidden program for suppressing competition so much so that in the last decade, only Rafael Nadal and to a lesser extent Novak Djokovic would be flattered to be considered his peers.

Six-month sabbatical
Then only recently he took a six-month sabbatical to attend to a troublesome knee and returned to demonstrate no one had taken advantage of his absence.
It turns out the obituaries were premature and Wimbledon swiftly followed the Australian Open. By the way, I wouldn’t bet against him for the US open next month, either.
Any way, we are now at a stage where his story has become so predictable it risks carrying little dramatic impact.
This is not to say his opponents don’t try. They just get blown away like a sniveling and injured Marin Cilic will attest.
It does not help either that Federer possesses the serenity of a highly trained assassin at the centre of a fire-fight.
If he were a footballer, he would be Zinedine Zidane and even then, nobody has yet made Federer lose his composure on the tennis court.
And in what must be an annoying reminder to his competition, his powers are showing very minimal signs of fading. He still glides rather than moves over the court and his anticipation is kinetic opportunistic intelligence. The backhand that always felt like it could do with some improvements, now draws sighs of disbelief from those gored to his brilliance. Tactfully, there is none better. Still.

Top of the lot
He is clearly top of the pile and seeing him get there felt like a de-misting of the window through which we see how marble legacies come about. The 19 grand slams , the hundreds of millions that pour in through prize money and sponsorship fees, and out through charity work, the mass colonisation of tennis fans and the lethally effective rebuttal against all challenges and challengers: all of this follows the script on how a legacy must be built.
In one respect, those who say he has been lucky with injuries, would have a point. But that blessing does not negate his will to win, or how he bloody-mindedly strives for it, even now in his mid-thirties and with all he has achieved, than those whose age should make them more ambitious.
Yet he continues to march on ruthlessly amassing one Grand Slam after another. Like me, be blessed to have lived in his times. He is the greatest, and by some distance.

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MBanturaki