The Master by Christopher Clarey

The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer
By Christopher Clarey
Twelve, 2021

It’s a toss-up which is more unlikely: that the New York Times would still have a tennis correspondent, or that said correspondent would ever under any circumstances write a completely honest book about a tennis superstar. Sports coverage is all about access, and sports correspondents learn while they’re still in their nativity creches that the only way to guarantee future access is to stick more or less exactly to the publicity patter of superstar management. This accounts for the tedium of most sports biographies. 

Hence, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer by New York Times tennis correspondent Christopher Clarey, which gives away its apparatchik intentions right there in the title: Federer has indeed had a long run - his career as one of the best tennis players in the world today began when he won his first Grand Slam event back in 2003 at the age of 21 - but in that entire time, and for nearly ten years before it (Federer has been playing competitive tennis since he left infancy), not for one single instant has his personal game been beautiful. Even on his most energetic days, he’s a grunting, flat-footed hacker. He owes his primacy to unflagging tensile strength and machine-shop efficiency - the combination of which has decimated the ranks of his opponents, particularly the ones who bothered to add any beauty to their own games. 

All but one: Rafael Nadal, the Spanish-born prodigy who’s something of a theological counterpoint to Federer throughout much of Clarey’s book. “From a distance, he looked like a full-grown man,” Clarey writes when Nadal first enters his narrative. “It was only up close that you realized he was so young. His angular features did not yet seem fully defined. His cheeks were chubby. Shaving was clearly optional.”

Tennis biographies - most especially those written by anybody approaching correspondent status - typically end up having the same kind of stultifying metronomic quality as the sport itself; they tend to come down to descriptions of matches interspersed with descriptions of crusty older relatives. Clarey upholds the tradition, alas, but his story regularly comes alive when his subject is contrasted with some odd figure like Nadal, here characterized as an anti-Federer, a one-dimensional charmer whose lack of inner turmoil would probably make him an even more boring biographical study than Federer himself. About Nadal, for example, Clarey writes, “What was most noticeable then is the same thing that is most striking now: his relentlessly focused and positive approach to competition.” Thinking of his subject, he adds: “Federer had spent years training himself to manage his mind and, above all, his expectations. Nadal seemed to have the knack from the start: no sports psychologists, no smashed rackets.” 

There are plenty of smashed rackets in The Master, and plenty of spoiled, boorish behavior that can only be rationalized or excused so far by the establishment of some tax-shelter “foundation” dedicated mainly to giving the superstar in question a day job once the knees give out. By the book’s final pages, the portrait it presents has curlded into an extended sheet of indictments. Clarey quotes one of Federer’s long-term fitness trainers:

The Federer we see on court today is a manufactured product, a manufactured product of Nike’s marketing that represents the values we want to give tennis: the gentleman and all that … But deep inside, Federer was never a gentleman. He’s a fighter. When he extends the hand with a smile to Nadal, I’m not at all convinced.

No readers of this book will be convinced either, and maybe not quite in the way either that trainer or Clarey intends. This need not be a detriment, of course: only a brat would expect to like the subject of an biography. The problem arises when the biography fairly openly wants you to like its subject. Clarey may or may not want his readers to like Roger Federer - but he certainly has to act like he does, 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.