Is Roger Federer the best player ever?
It’s the way he wins, as much as the fact that he keeps on doing it, which has earned Federer the awed respect he currently commands. At 23 his shot-making is flawless: his game has no obvious weaknesses. Coincidentally or not, he is the only ranking player who doesn’t use a coach, having fired Peter Lundgren in Dec 03, just before he won the Australian Open.
Federer’s is not a power game: he can’t match Roddick’s 150mph serve, he doesn’t bother with double-handed ground strokes and he says he feels a lack of killer instinct at the net. But as anybody who watched him obliterate Roddick in the Wimbledon final knows, Federer is the most gracefully aggressive player on the international circuit today.
His “inner game” has drawn as much praise recently as his precision stroke play. Big crowds, big matches, big points—nothing seems to faze the guy.
In GQ Sport he says, “The mental aspect of my game is a huge advantage and it used to be a huge disadvantage, because I used to be very impulsive on court, screaming, shouting, throwing the racquet. I had to figure that out. My low was very low. I knew I was losing too much energy acting that way. I had to take time, you know. Become a man.”
Screw it
I heard in a forum that was aimed towards educating first-time voters yesterday that one should vote for the Government and if not satisfied, march against it. They call it the big antiwar demo “democracy in action”—as if voting were not. But the truth is that both demonstrations and elections are definitive of modern democracy in that millions of people say what they want, and are ignored.
Everything now seems a long way from the dawn of democracy, when the heads of every Athenian household would walk down the marketplace to debate whether or not to build a theatre or go to war with Sparta. If they’d known that within 3,000 years the process would have been reduced to a system by which people vote for shit they don’t want and then grumble about it, I doubt they’d have bothered.
To be honest, I just wouldn’t vote. Not because there’s no one good out there, but because democracy is a lot of bollocks. Altruists whinge that it’s our duty to vote ‘cause most people aren’t lucky enough to live in a democracy and we have to support it, but that’s crap.
Democracy is a culturally loaded construct in whose name the worst evils have perpetrated. It is something America wants to foist on other countries against their will so as to implant friendly administrations that will provide cheap oil. Iraq doesn’t want democracy. It doesn’t know what it wants. That’s why 111 parties stood in its general election. The Sunnis, who didn’t bother to vote, are ahead of us in political thought because they knew they were a minority and couldn’t win—so why be implicated in a Shia hegemony that wants to slaughter them? They have no interest in our stupid system of elected dictatorships.
Communism is routinely assumed to have failed. But democracy has also failed, if a bit less spectacularly. As the man said (I forgot which man), “Marxism was too good an idea to be wasted on a lot of drunken Russians”—and democracy was too good an idea to be wasted on us.
It’s the way he wins, as much as the fact that he keeps on doing it, which has earned Federer the awed respect he currently commands. At 23 his shot-making is flawless: his game has no obvious weaknesses. Coincidentally or not, he is the only ranking player who doesn’t use a coach, having fired Peter Lundgren in Dec 03, just before he won the Australian Open.
Federer’s is not a power game: he can’t match Roddick’s 150mph serve, he doesn’t bother with double-handed ground strokes and he says he feels a lack of killer instinct at the net. But as anybody who watched him obliterate Roddick in the Wimbledon final knows, Federer is the most gracefully aggressive player on the international circuit today.
His “inner game” has drawn as much praise recently as his precision stroke play. Big crowds, big matches, big points—nothing seems to faze the guy.
In GQ Sport he says, “The mental aspect of my game is a huge advantage and it used to be a huge disadvantage, because I used to be very impulsive on court, screaming, shouting, throwing the racquet. I had to figure that out. My low was very low. I knew I was losing too much energy acting that way. I had to take time, you know. Become a man.”
Screw it
I heard in a forum that was aimed towards educating first-time voters yesterday that one should vote for the Government and if not satisfied, march against it. They call it the big antiwar demo “democracy in action”—as if voting were not. But the truth is that both demonstrations and elections are definitive of modern democracy in that millions of people say what they want, and are ignored.
Everything now seems a long way from the dawn of democracy, when the heads of every Athenian household would walk down the marketplace to debate whether or not to build a theatre or go to war with Sparta. If they’d known that within 3,000 years the process would have been reduced to a system by which people vote for shit they don’t want and then grumble about it, I doubt they’d have bothered.
To be honest, I just wouldn’t vote. Not because there’s no one good out there, but because democracy is a lot of bollocks. Altruists whinge that it’s our duty to vote ‘cause most people aren’t lucky enough to live in a democracy and we have to support it, but that’s crap.
Democracy is a culturally loaded construct in whose name the worst evils have perpetrated. It is something America wants to foist on other countries against their will so as to implant friendly administrations that will provide cheap oil. Iraq doesn’t want democracy. It doesn’t know what it wants. That’s why 111 parties stood in its general election. The Sunnis, who didn’t bother to vote, are ahead of us in political thought because they knew they were a minority and couldn’t win—so why be implicated in a Shia hegemony that wants to slaughter them? They have no interest in our stupid system of elected dictatorships.
Communism is routinely assumed to have failed. But democracy has also failed, if a bit less spectacularly. As the man said (I forgot which man), “Marxism was too good an idea to be wasted on a lot of drunken Russians”—and democracy was too good an idea to be wasted on us.
