A lived, shared experience
There is a lovely little video that I keep receiving from time to time, thanks to the ways of Indian uncles and WhatsApp groups. It is a cosy 2.5-minute video that tugs at your heartstrings instantly. Especially, if you have ever learned and practiced music- any music, over a considerable period, and even more so if you were serious in that pursuit.
In the video, the late legendary sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar is on stage, on oxygen support, for his valedictory public performance in California at the ripe age of 92, a month before his demise in December 2012. The music doesn’t need oxygen support, however, as it is spotless and carries a youthful gait to it. After the last pluck off his instrument, the maestro instantly recognizes the poignancy of this moment. With a smile on his face, the nonagenarian gently places his instrument on the stage, and immerses himself in the atmosphere. The concert hall is up on its feet, clapping long and hard and you even hear a whistle or two as the maestro waves them goodbye and starts crying. His cohort of co-artistes, that also includes his daughter, come forward to console him. He blesses them and waves a final round of goodbye to his fans, as he is carefully escorted backstage on a wheelchair by his caretakers.
23 September 2022: another arena, this time in London, the Laver Cup was happening. But the Laver Cup was only a footnote. Because all that mattered was the fact that it was the night where the world would last witness Roger Federer play his last tennis match on the professional tour after 24 years on the circuit. Although the writing on the wall was imminent, the announcement a week prior caught the whole world unawares. For Achilles, it may have been his heel. But, for Federer, it was his knees. They had wilted to the wear and tear and even surgeries couldn’t salvage them for one last ride in the ATP Tour. And this meant he could only play doubles in his last dance.
The match was an eventful one. When it is London, be rest assured that Federer will do Federer things- be it around, over or through the net. And you’ll find a vocal John McEnroe near the chair umpire.
There were winners, volleys, mishits, Fedal bromance, good tennis, rusty tennis, a set tiebreaker and finally a match tiebreaker with Team World winning the match on what one of the commentators pointed out was effectively a “career point” for Federer. The loss didn’t matter because the whole game was just a rite of passage for Federer. And then, the tennis world rose to their feet to thank the man for one final time as a professional. There were words of gratitude uttered and then came the tears- from Federer, from Mirka and the kids, his parents, and his coaching staff, from Rafa, from the Tennis.com crew post-game, from all the fans who tuned in from different corners of the globe. An epoch in tennis concluded and the world will have to wait for exhibition games to see Federer play again.
I say epoch because it was truly that. I sometimes wonder if it was just a numbers game. Because, when Pete Sampras retired with 14 Slams under his belt, pundits felt that his record was unsurmountable. Within 7 years, Federer moved past Sampras’ tally. Akin to how the other Roger (Bannister) showed the world that a sub-4-minute mile was possible (once deemed medically impossible) and was bettered by his rival in just 46 days, Federer reached the 20 Slam mark in 2018, only to see it breached by Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic within the next 3–4 years.
Nothing can be a greater testament to his greatness other than the fact that modern day tennis can only be viewed as pre-Federer and post-Federer. Numbers sometimes fail to capture the consummate ease and clinical precision with which he went about doing his job. They most definitely don’t capture the psychological impact his dominance had on the rest of the draw, as Toni Nadal went on record recently to call Federer the “greatest icon in tennis history”, while also touching upon the debilitating impact that prime Federer’s game could have on the psyche of the opponent, even if it were Rafa.
Outside of the realm of numbers, this was a guy who made the sport truly international. It didn’t matter where he went, the crowds always turned up. Even in terrains with negligible tennis pedigree (like South America in December 2012), he was greeted with full stadia after going there to play exhibition games after a year of grind on the Tour.
The memory of Federer often comes with a distinct stamp of time and space associated to it. Federer won Slams when I was in school, he won when I was in college in a different city, and most remarkably, he won Slams when I was a grad student in a different country. When you have consumed so much of Federer since childhood, the whole journey might seem to be a blur, only for some inconsequential moments to stick out for no good reason. Something as obscure as a long game at deuce against Mario Ancic in Wimbledon 2006 (Federer had last lost on grass to Ancic in Wimbledon 2002) in a scintillating display of trademark Federer tennis. Or something as fascinating as using Federer’s serves from his 2003 Wimbledon campaign as the index to graphically compare how the Center Court had slowed down over the years!
While the world always basked in the peak tennis artistry of an extremely successful player over the years, the most forgotten Federer truth is the fact that he lost often too and was very much fallible and human. Some were either first week upsets (Stakhovsky, Wimbledon 2013) as a defending champion, or some at the very brink, despite serving with two Championship points (Djokovic, Wimbledon 2019). Sometimes hot and cold in successive matches: like besting a rampaging Djokovic (on a 41-match streak) in the semi-finals (Roland Garros, 2011) but meekly surrendering to Rafa in yet another final on Parisian clay. Or winning Wimbledon in 2012 and losing to the same opponent in the same court a month later in the gold medal match of the London Olympics. (Oh, and, while we are still discussing losses, the last set of his singles career was a humiliating 6–0 beatdown at the hands of Hurkacz; some sort of a cruel joke about life coming a full circle, after having dished out so many bagels over the years).
I recall some of my sophomoric scribblings from 2013 (grad school training teaches you to not be ashamed of citing your previous work) where I dreaded over the retirements of the Sachin Tendulkar of tennis and Roger Federer of cricket thus:
“the tears saved for the future when they shall no longer be around to make the ball grace every blade of grass on the playing field”
Now that the sprinkler systems in our eyes (aka tears) have earned their well-deserved rest after a night of intense activity and having stepped into day 1 of the post-Federer era, it can safely be said that one word that will stand out is grace. On the court, he was as graceful as a supercomputer charting the impossible, fitted within a gear-train whose parts are moving in unison with one another, achieving maximum economy of motion. And off it, he was a man of great poise and deportment; instantly liked by anyone anywhere, a far cry from the hot-headed teenager that he used to be. After all, this is Federer valedictory week, and the verdict happens to be unanimous (“His legacy is grace”).
The composure with which he carried himself in victory and defeat, is perhaps why he remains the most popular player even while being injured, and arguably the most iconic tennis player, even after being eclipsed on the trophy column.
The last acts of Pandit Ravi Shankar and Roger Federer set the wheels of my brain in motion, and I started to think: Why do retirements of some famous celebrities feel personal? Why do they elicit the same kind of response as death? What are we truly grieving over? Perhaps, it is a natural resistance towards an upheaval in the order of things and a propensity for more of the same (nice) experiences, the ones that are lived for by individuals and shared by an entire fraternity.
The legacies of people like Federer and Ravi Shankar are marked by the fact that they presented new vistas in their craft that were hitherto unseen. In other words, they emerge as a portal that takes a viewer from the banality of what is to a completely new world of what can be. For the fans, the last acts of their icons are like the final chance to replicate a lived, shared experience- something that was plentiful in supply and taken for granted in the past.
It is just not about the act of leaving itself (because everybody eventually does!) or what you leave behind, but about how you do it. And celebrity retirements leave us with choked emotions, to put it mildly, because of how they did it, despite us never having met/interacted with them.
Because once the sun sets, the memories of how they made us feel are all that we will have left to carry with us. The how of Roger Federer is certainly a memory that I will carry with me forever.
