Chapter 1: Empires CHAPTER 1 Empires In the beginning, there was Roger Federer. He was lean and composed, and seemed never to sweat. His feet moved over the court as do the feet of a water bug on the surface of a pond. His style was arty and aggressive. He always struck the ball a fraction of a second earlier than I expected. As a viewer, I was constantly taken aback by this, like a clap that landed just ahead of the beat, over and over. His opponents had no time to appreciate this quality, because the ball had already arrived at their feet. Many fans enjoyed seeing a hard game made to look so easy.
But even Roger, at the outset of his career, was not yet so interested in toil. "Grit," as he''d later describe it, was something he had to learn. So he did. By his early twenties, the man from Switzerland was dominating the professional tour in a way few ever had. Ponytailed for a while, then with floppy locks tucked into a headband. Somewhat supercilious, keenly aware of his distance from the rest of the pack, Roger was aloft on his own cloud. He was the first one at the party. Next to arrive was Rafael Nadal.
A strange chimera, who seemed ancient, yet terribly modern. Feral, but also quite polite. Long hair, long shorts, no sleeves, big muscles. He applied spin to the ball with a fury not yet seen. His shots sailed high over the net and plunged back to earth with urgency. He was also curiously damp. On the island of Mallorca, the lefty Rafa was raised on clay, one of three main surfaces on which tennis is played, and he ruled it from the moment he set foot on tour. Tennis players are oddly fond of the term "fighting spirit," and Rafa was its living embodiment, a man who did not grasp surrender.
Though he seemed impossibly full of life, he also grappled with injuries all over his body, causing many to question his longevity, which, in the end, would be no problem at all. He and Roger played indelible epics. Nadal unwound Federer''s poise and forced the Swiss to evolve beyond his instinctive style. For a while it seemed it would be just these two, locked in permanent struggle, carving one another into genius as great rivals do. Maybe it would have been so if not for Novak Djokovic. To call him "limber" was too mild. He seemed to be composed of something other than flesh, some taffy-like substance that let him elongate and coil his body into confounding positions. He had short-cropped hair and close-set eyes that would widen as if in terror when he was about to return serve, which he did better than anyone ever had.
His genius was less showy than the others, more attritional, but just as keen. And where the other two had grown up well-off in western Europe, he had emerged from Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars. His path to the high life of pro tennis had been more perilous. A wall he used to hit tennis balls against as a child had been struck by NATO bombs. He spoke of his family''s experience with loan sharks. Early on, he would wilt in long or hot matches, which was funny in retrospect, because raw stamina became a defining trait. He liked to do silly impressions of his peers, eager to perturb the sport''s sterile atmosphere. Sometimes he sparred with crowds.
In time he relished his role as interloper. With his talent as crowbar, he pried his way into the Roger-Rafa duopoly. Where there had been one rivalry, now there were three, each of them distinct. After him came--well, no one. For two decades, aside from the occasional guest stopping by for a cocktail and then getting shooed away, it would be just the three of them at the party, and a lot of people banging at the door. The professional tennis tour runs all year long, across dozens of tournaments. The most important are the four majors. If you''ve heard of any, you''ve heard of these: the Australian Open, Roland-Garros (colloquially, the French Open), Wimbledon, and the U.
S. Open. At the outset of each tournament, there are 128 players. Two weeks later, there is only one champion, who has won seven consecutive matches. A victory pays a few million dollars, assures a place in history, and improves or reaffirms a player''s ranking. At any given time, a tennis player knows precisely where he ranks among his peers. He lives every day in a bare hierarchy that anyone can look up. Winning a match rewards a player with "ranking points.
" To get a sense of the relative importance of the tournaments, all you need to do is look at the points. A major is worth 2000 points. Beneath those are the Masters 1000 tournaments, which are unsurprisingly worth 1000 points. Beneath those, 500-level tournaments, then 250-level tournaments. You can imagine this as the pyramid that makes up the top professional division of men''s tennis, also known as the ATP Tour. Beneath it are lower levels of competition--the Challenger Tour, Futures--that can be thought of as the minor leagues. Perhaps I have given you an emotionally impoverished version of the story. No child drifts to sleep thinking of winning 2000 ranking points--they dream of winning a major.
These four tournaments are the stuff of legacy, the currency in tedious debates about who is better than whom. For some fans, the simplest shorthand for a player''s historic significance is the number of majors they won. There are many, many worthy feats in tennis outside of winning those tournaments, but in the popular imagination, and to hear many players tell it themselves, these four are untouchable. If given a chance, a player would trade any number of smaller trophies for just one of them. The exchange rate is infinite. The tennis major is one of the hardest feats to pull off in contemporary sport. Winning seven best-of-five-set tennis matches is a profound physical and psychic ordeal, a truth that has only deepened as the sport''s athletic demands have increased. To win those matches requires an alignment of circumstances: the tactical know-how to adapt to seven different opponents, the ability to recover from the wear-and-tear of each match, the mental acuity to play each point in isolation without getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the whole task.
I have always thought about a major as a marathon run while engaged in hand-to-hand combat. For roughly two decades, from 2004 to 2023, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic won almost all the majors. As a result, they came to be known as a collective unit--the Big Three--like some cabal conspiring to hoard all the joy and prestige for themselves. It is not as though they were the only good tennis players born between the years 1981 and 1987. They had brilliant peers, players who would have won a major or two in other eras but had the blunt misfortune of being born at the same time as the three best ever to play. In any attempt to win a major, inevitably, a player would have to muscle their way past one member of the Big Three. Sometimes they''d beat one of them only to be evicted by another. Tomás Berdych, the flinty, powerful Czech, once beat two of them in a row only to be eliminated by the third in the Wimbledon final.
It was too much to ask of any one mortal. Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams. You would hear the most extraordinary admissions of inadequacy. In pro sports, particularly individual sports, militant self-belief is a prerequisite for the job. And yet here these gifted competitors were, their confidence cracked, openly explaining to the press that their best efforts weren''t remotely enough against these three adversaries. And that was only what they were willing to say in public. Who knows what macabre doubts went stalking through their heads as they took their post-match showers or car rides to the airport. Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief.
First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege--what''s that about a major?--no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude. The players whose talent most closely approached the Big Three were the ones to most clearly see the chasm that still separated them.
Often, these players would explain just how unpleasant their matches had been. Andy Roddick, a funny and frank American with one of history''s great serves, who actually did win the U.S. Open in 2003, shortly before the Big Three shut the door behind them, battled with Federer too many times not to see the situation clearly. Once after a defeat in 2005: "I was bringing heat, too. I was going at him, trying different things. You just have to sit back and say ''too good'' sometimes. Hope he gets bored or something.
I don''t know." Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a barrel-chested Frenchman who looked a little like a young Muhammad Ali and had a pugilistic play style to match, was totally out of idea.