Indian Wells, which is officially called the BNP Paribas Open and is unofficially known as “tennis paradise,” has sometimes seemed made for Roger Federer. In a sense, it was. When Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, bought the tournament and its site, for a hundred million dollars, in 2009, Federer was reshaping tennis, and, purposefully or not, Ellison rebuilt the tournament in Federer’s image. It is laid out like a dream: lush gardens ringed by dry mountains. Picnic tables under palm trees. A jewel box of a stadium, open to the sky. There is a Nobu on site that is only open during the two weeks of the tournament. The suites are tiled with teak. Spectators and players alike walk around the grounds looking slightly blissed, and slightly self-satisfied. You might call the look Federeresque.
Federer rents a house when he comes. He brings the kids. His good friend Tommy Haas is the tournament director. Clearly, Federer feels at home: he has won the tournament five times. On Sunday, he stepped onto the court, serenely seeking a sixth. He is thirty-seven years old now, and no longer the best player in the world. (That title indisputably belongs to Novak Djokovic, despite his stunning loss to Philipp Kohlschreiber last week.) Still, he is comfortably in the top five, and, that week, the draw had very kindly smoothed a path for him to the final. In the quarter-finals, he faced Hubert Hurkacz, a Polish player who had never broken the top fifty. He did not have to play a semifinal at all, after his old nemesis, Rafael Nadal, was forced, by a knee injury, to withdraw.
Federer’s opponent in the final was Dominic Thiem. Thiem was once hailed as a bright star from a rising generation, a group of young players that seemed poised to finally break the grip that the Big Four—Federer, Djokovic, Nadal, and Andy Murray—had had, for years, on grand-slam titles. (For a long time, the only man not in that group to win more than one slam was Stan Wawrinka, who is now thirty-three.) In 2016, at the age of twenty-two, Thiem made his first major semifinal, at Roland-Garros, and two years later he made the final. He also proved his promise by defeating an in-form Nadal on clay—a Herculean task, perhaps the toughest test in tennis. But, on faster surfaces, Thiem struggled. His stamina suffered, as he took on a bafflingly overloaded schedule. And, this year, coming into Indian Wells, he seemed to be fading, with only three match wins in 2019. Instead of leading a changing of the guard, he seemed in danger of epitomizing its failures. In 2018, all four slams were won by either Djokovic, Federer, or Nadal—the same three players who had won all four slams ten years before.
All sports are, by their nature, escapist—a momentary stay against confusion, the embrace of a world governed by strictly defined rules. But tennis nearly demands the actual refusal of ordinary obligations, like sleep and work. Being a tennis fan can mean taking three hours on a Tuesday afternoon to watch a single match, or waking up at 4 A.M., night after night, to watch a tournament in a distant time zone. You often don’t know for sure when your favorite player will have a match, whether he’ll get upset or injured, whether rain will postpone a contest to some later time or date. Over the years, Federer has made things a little simpler. When the sun rises and the weekend rolls around, usually, he is there. The style of his game is pleasing even to the untrained eye, and his sustained success has lent stability, and a global celebrity, to men’s tennis. His continuing, legendary rivalry with Nadal has allowed fans to gush about a long golden age. But Federer is well past the age when most players used to retire, and Nadal, who plays a physically punishing style, is struggling to stay on the court. Their ongoing success is beginning to look like a sign that something is wrong with the sport, rather than an indication of good health.
The stories surrounding the men’s side at this year’s Indian Wells mostly focussed on boardroom controversies and warring factions within the sport, each with their own agendas, not all of them transparent. Tennis paradise had about it a sense of impending doom, which carried over onto the court. Djokovic lost to a solid but unspectacular player in Kohlschreiber. Alexander Zverev, the most successful of the young players, meekly bowed out to his countryman Jan-Lennard Struff, 6–3, 6–1. The electric Frenchman Gaël Monfils withdrew from his quarter-final match. And so on. It was left to Federer to supply the storybook ending—or Thiem to finally change it.
Both men did their part. In the first set, Federer was sublime—hitting his serve with precision, and using his superlative timing and quick hands to rush the Austrian, who prefers to play a big-swinging baseline game. It was Federer who seemed the younger man, moving around the court with incredible quickness and uncanny anticipation, tracking down drop shots, then sprinting back to reach deft lobs. He took the first set.
But Thiem is also fast, and incomparably strong, and his powerful groundstrokes—made heavier by their extreme spin—began to force errors from Federer, or to get by him altogether. There is an earnestness to Thiem’s game. It is stubborn, with a bludgeoning forehand and a one-handed backhand that is more blunt than pretty. He went for the big shots, and, even when Federer was two points away from the title, at 5–4, 30–30, Thiem did not back down. He held serve, broke the next game, and then served out the match.
It is hard to know what to make of Thiem’s victory in the over-all scheme of the tour. Was it a sign of a new turn in his career, or one more flash of the promise he has already shown? Thiem is the nineteenth different champion in nineteen events on the A.T.P. Tour this year, an unprecedented level of volatility. It may be that men’s tennis is nearing a time when the grand narratives begin to unravel—or it may be a time when a young player, whether it’s Thiem or someone else, starts a new story. The most striking thing about the match on Sunday was that none of that seemed to matter. A game was played between two great tennis players. For a moment, that was enough.
