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Climbing Mount Improbable

In the world of sport, pigs can fly. When they take wing, so do our spirits. There is something heart-warming about the spectacular rise of the underdog, the metamorphosis of a nobody (Marcos Who?) into a somebody (Marcos Baghdatis, the new star in town). Yet for all the heroics of the talented young man from Cyprus, the story of the men's championship at the Australian Open turned out to be just another milestone in the march of the most gifted tennis champion of the era. The triumph in Melbourne Park last Sunday was Roger Federer's third in succession in Grand Slams and it gave him his seventh career major. Both feats invoke memories of one of the greatest men to have tossed a ball to serve, a man whose footsteps 24-year-old Roger is following with almost eerie precision. Pete Sampras, the immensely likeable American, whose sporting spirit fully matched his game, was the last man to win three successive Grand Slams. Roger's seventh major is the halfway mark to Sampras' major title tally. Born ten years and four days apart, Pete at 24 had seven Slams. "So far my career has followed Pete's almost in parallel," noted Roger. "It's kind of scary." Seldom does it happen in any field (it happened of course in western classical music) that one great master is followed almost immediately by another. Even perfection, it seems, has its variations and contrasts.

The Swiss master's tearful embrace of Rod Laver, perhaps the greatest of them all, after winning his second Australian Open was both poignant and telling. For a man so elegantly in control of his on-court emotions, who has won every Grand Slam final he has entered, the release of emotions was indicative of history about to be made. "I was so happy. Then I had to go up on stage and speak," he explained. "This is really too much for me sometimes. It's just a dream come true every time I win a Grand Slam. I can't block it out — I'm also human." Lesser mortals quail at the quest of a major; Federer chases history. Refreshingly, unlike other inhabitants of the I-me generation, this 24-year-old is kind and gracious. A student of the game's history with a fine sense of legacies champions leave behind, Federer plays a brand of tennis that seems powered by the Keats principle: `Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.' The French Open, the one Slam that has eluded him, beckons. Sampras never won it, clay being contra-indicated for his all-court tennis dominated by a huge serve and impeccable volleying. A triumph on clay at Roland Garros will make Federer the first man since Laver to hold all four major titles simultaneously, and put him on course for the calendar year Grand Slam — achieved by Laver twice, in 1962 and 1969, and, before that, by Don Budge in 1938. Roger has made the climb up Mount Improbable seem like a jog in the park. That is the illusionist's greatest illusion.

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