Roger's New Chapter

For most people, age is the enemy. For a sportswriter, though, it can be a friend, or at least a lifeline. If we’re looking for a crowd-pleasing topic for a column, the touching travails of a champion in decline is hard to beat. Everyone knows what it feels like not to be what they once were, right?

- Stephen Tignor

Roger Federer knows this genre of column all too well. He’s been the subject of hundreds of them since he turned 30 and stopped gathering up Grand Slam titles by the truck full. He read more than his share after Wimbledon last year, when he lost to Milos Raonic in five sets and re-injured his knee in the process; that day it appeared as if the legend was literally on his last legs.

When Federer finally returned in January, and said he hoped to play for two or three more years, part of me cringed at the thought of how many essays with titles like “A Melancholy Meditation on Federer and the Inevitability of Aging” we were going to have to read. Five months later, it’s hard to imagine a less relevant topic in tennis.