Idea and Format: Courtesy U.S.
It is not a game of inches.
It is one of micro-inches...
Even the tiniest of imprecisions in orienting your racket and aiming your shot matters in this game of nets, rackets, and yellow fuzzy balls called Tennis.
Sports' first beautiful game.
In the modern version of the game, where brute force and fitness are supreme weapons, there are players who stretch and lunge to extents not envisionable to the normal spectator.
They trade blows and produce unreachable winners...
But those are the ordinary moments in this context.
For here we recall the most exquisite shot-making moments of perhaps the most beautiful Tennis player of our times...
Shots which aren't usually just unreachable. Shots which are more likely unthinkable.
Shots which are Moments.
We can recall one such magnificent moment back in Federer's tussle with world No. 3 Novak Djokovic in the 2008 US Open semi-final.
The appreciative American crowd sat in stunned silence for a split-second as though disbelieving their eyes before bursting into sustained applause...for it was another of those moments in which he had made an outrageously impossible shot appear nonchalantly easy .
(Funny isnt it? Federer almost always happens to produce some of his best moments against the Serb.)
The man is more than a Tennis Champion.
He is an absolute spectator's delight.
There is a purity in his game which is uniquely appealing. And very rare in modern-day tennis.
The late David Foster Wallace in his much-acclaimed piece 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience ' said "Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros who’ve ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that’s said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant...like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert."
And if anyone is capable of having his Mozart heard in this bedlam of hard-rock, it is this ever-smiling magician from Oberwil, Switzerland.
Federer Moments series:
| Federer Moment | Description | Submitter | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| V. 001 |
The No Look Flick Lob | Backhand lob over Agassi's head |
Gil | Watch |
| V.002 | The Greatest Shot of his life |
Between the legs cross court passing winner against Djokovic |
U.S |
Watch |
| V.003 | "That shot" against Roddick in Basel |
Flying overhead passing shot off an overhead from the back court |
Rajat Jain |
Watch |
| V.004 |
The touch of a genius |
Leaping overhead smash-lob from the baseline against Djokovic |
Gil |
Watch |
| V.005 | |
|||
| V.006 | |
|||
| V.007 | ||||
| V.008 | ||||
| V.009 | ||||
| V.0010 |
If interested, please submit your "Federer Moments" here .
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