If it's July then it must be Wimbledon (well, except last year!) and on my Wednesday off work, I settled down to watch the quarterfinal between Roger Federer and Hubert Hurkacz, on Center Court. Not the festival of tennis I was hoping for, it was over as quickly as it begun, Hurkacz demolishing the Swiss superstar in three sets - including a six-love wipe-out in the third. You have to say that on the day, Hurkacz was as brilliant and Federer was poor.
Game, set, match Hurkacz, and as the Pole soaked up the deserved applause of the Wimbledon crowd, Roger Federer left Centre Court, the cameras just catching a glimpse of him raising his hand to his eyes as he rounded the corner towards his dressing room. If he was about to shed a tear, it's understandable - the stress and emotion put into a match at such a high level must be huge, and is amplified in singles tennis, where everything is on you to perform.
But perhaps there was another reason for Federer's emotional exit, and Centre Court felt it too. It felt it when, at 5-0 down in the third set and serving for his life, the crowd erupted into a spontaneous standing ovation for the great player, as if they knew that they would never see him grace the turf again. You see, even a great player like Federer is unable to halt the march of time. It's a sad reality that we all have to face, aging, and for me the sadness of watching Fed's straight sets exit hit home not just for him, but because it made me consider my life too. I realised that I watched Federer lift his first Wimbledon title in 2003, the year I started university - and so with an acknowledgement that he's getting old, I also realise that I'm getting old too, and that the end of the Federer era also marks an end of an era for me, as we both segue into middle age. Change has been in the air for a while now for me, punctuated in a single moment when a midwife passed me my new baby, and I stepped very quickly into a different bracket of life.
I'll be sad to hear that Federer has retired, sad not to see him float across the Centre Court grass for years to come, and yet if he comes to that decision this summer, I certainly think it's the right one. He is, in my opinion, the greatest single sportsman of my lifetime - not only ridiculously talented in his sport, but so respectful of the game, a great winner, a good loser, generous towards his opposition, welcoming to the fans, and without any of the petulance of some others. Maybe that's another reason to be tinged with sadness at his inevitable decline - he's a one-of-a-kind embodiment of sportsmanship, of which we all need to see much more.
