Federer is king but tennis has a new crown prince in Djokovic

In Summary

LASTING POWER. Even in this era when Federer is supposed to be on his last knees, it is only him that can give Djokovic a challenge.

This column was penned a day before an epic semi-final battle at the Australian Open, between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. Regardless of the outcome, I still needed to say this.

Five years ago, following a rather humbling exit from a Wimbledon semi-final at the hands of Wilfred Tsonga, I argued in this column that for Federer, the time to blow everyone a kiss and go off with the setting sun, had arrived.

It appeared to me that the motivation was gone and I just did not want to see my hero whipped about the circuit like a rag doll.
What followed after that piece is the heaviest feedback I have received for any of my columns. There was one from a lady whose name I forget, but whose sting ensured her message would neither be forgotten nor reproduced in a family paper.

I do acknowledge, however, that she was right to claim I was quick to write off the greatest tennis player of our generation, just as I was correct in saying, even back then, that in Djokovic, tennis had found a new crown prince.

If he was starting to enter numbers of the entire men’s professional circuit in his phone book back then, he now has them on speed-dial. All of them.

In fact, by the time you read this, Djokovic might well have already disposed of Federer in yet another Grand Slam. After all, he has done it five times over the last four years- twice at both Wimbledon and the US Open, and once in the French Open.
But even then, since 2011, Federer has never really gone away. On top of winning Wimbledon in 2012 to take his tally to 17 Grand Slams, he has been to two quarter-finals, five semi-finals and four finals.

If that is not a clear indication that he is still mixing it at the top, then nothing is. Lest we forget, and even if Djokovic has always come out on top when it matters – Grand Slams – Federer is the only man to have checked his incessant run 2015 – in Dubai and Cincinnati.

Let me just say that even if he does not win the Australian Open or go on to claim another slam in the year or two he has left at the top (there I go again writing off the man), Federer is still such an excellent example of longevity. The master is 34 but playing the sharpest I have seen him in recent years, as Tomas Berdych, his Australian Open quarterfinal victim, will attest.

The bus never left him stranded at the bus stop like I said in 2011. Yes, at 34, his physical prowess is surely on the wane, but his game was always more brain than brawn, and in sports it is said your brain deserts you last.

Federer still delivers the kind of top-quality thinking game that endeared us to him. And his kind have this tendency to outlast all types of premature obituaries.