The French Open has a history of treating the world's number one players badly. In my lifetime only Borg and Lendl have fared well from the top spot. This year, Roger Federer, perhaps the best male tennis player in the game's history, will again attempt to conquer the surface that is so uncompromising to tennis's best all court players by defeating his young nemesis, Rafael Nadal, the two-time defending French Open champion and undoubtedly the world's best clay court player.
The slow red clay of Roland Garros ultimately rewards strength, endurance, and mental fortitude over shot-making, strategy, and hand-speed. Nadal seems to be genetically designed to win on red clay. He is Spanish, which means he grew up playing it, but so did the Swiss Federer.
In Europe, red clay is the court for the common man. But the world of professional international tennis exists, for 10 months of the year, on various types of hard surface, an American invention. And Federer, the world's number one, thrives on the quickness of hard courts, on the trueness of the bounce they produce, on the sticky grip that enables a player to stop on a dime. He is able, in some matches, to play nearly perfect tennis. Not a shot or a decision or a reaction out of place for two sets running so that his opponents never even enter into the equation until they shake his hand at the net.
Rafael Nadal, conversely, loves red clay because he is an imposing physical specimen, the fastest player on two feet, and because his mental game is that of a stubborn teenager. He will literally run through fences to keep the ball in play, and he somehow manages a trick other players who have mastered the teenage mindset (like Lleyton Hewitt for instance) cannot: he stays positive no matter how poorly he is playing. The result is that Rafael Nadal plays each point the same way, as if it will never end until his opponent misses. On red clay, over the course of five sets, the mental and physical effort required to beat a player like Nadal is nearly unsupportable. Witness his record 81-match win streak on clay that ended with a loss last Sunday in Hamburg to the aforementioned Roger Federer.
Tennis is an individual sport. One against another. And as such the game is equal parts physical prowess, technique, and philosophy. Players who have a firm grasp of two of those components can make the top 20 of the world. To be the best, you must have all three. Only Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, in today's game, possess all three.
The fact that Federer and Nadal are yin and yang in their philosophical approaches to the game makes their head to head match-up in this year's French Open the most interesting the game of tennis has seen since McEnroe and Lendl battled one another between 1983 and 1985.
A Grand Slam, and in particular the French Open and Wimbledon, can make or break a great player's career. Borg quit after losing to McEnroe at Wimbledon twice in a row. He had won the tournament five times and could not bear to lose there. McEnroe quit at the top of his game after losing at the French to Lendl, realizing he would never win there. Lendl quit after failing to win Wimbledon, having spent the last five years of his career desperately trying to re-design his game for grass.
Roger Federer has done everything in tennis except win the Grand Slam. I believe that if he doesn't accomplish the Slam in the next two years that he will quit. Only Rafael Nadal and the French Open stand in his way.
