Wimbledon 2016: Roger Federer and the tale of his dodgy back

Roger Federer was being compared to Anna Kournikova. This was not a compliment. He was 21. Anxious. Emotional. Soft.

Roger Federer holds the runners-up plate after losing last year’s Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic.

Roger Federer was being compared to Anna Kournikova. This was not a compliment. He was 21. Anxious. Emotional. Soft.

Three years had passed since he was the No 1 junior in the world. He had become a serial underachiever at the majors, more likely to bawl than play hardball.

In the round of 16 at the All ­England Club, he hit a serve in the warm-up against Feliciano Lopez and prepared to retire hurt. “I thought, ‘My God, what’s this?’ I couldn’t move,” he said in The Roger Federer Story, Quest For Perfection.

Federer’s back had seized up. The pain was excruciating. He played two games against Lopez and called for the trainer. He received treatment on the graveyard court at Wimbledon, staring at the clouds, readying himself to quit. Another loss or withdrawal would have been a disaster. ­Previous defeats at majors had brought him to tears.

He found the grunt to fight past Lopez in one of the most ­pivotal and underrated moments of his career. He beat Mark Philippoussis in the final and never looked back.

Instead of limping out of London with an ongoing psycho­logical blockage, Federer marched out of The Championships in 2003 with the pressure valve released and the freedom to commence his 17-major waltz with the record books.

Federer has nursed his back ever since. Nursed it pretty well, you would have to say. Apart from shanking forehands over mid-wicket when he’s holding break points in a thriller against Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal, his back has always been his weakness. It rarely flared to a serious degree during his golden years of 2004-2009 but just as it teased him at his breakthrough Wimbledon, it has come back to haunt him for what may be his final visit to one of the most lush and beautiful arenas in sport. Sneeze on ­centre court and someone will whisper, Bless you”.

“Look, this back has won me 88 titles, so I’m OK with that back,” Federer grinned at reporters in London ahead of his opening match tonight against Argentina’s world No 51 Guido Pella. “It’s OK if it messes around with me sometimes. It’s frustrating because it shakes the whole mechanics of the body and what you can work on. Maybe if it hits you in bad times, it’s not funny. I think particularly difficult has just been looking ahead of what was to come: Paris, Wimbledon, Olympics, US Open.

“It’s different than if it happens at the end of the season, let’s just say Davis Cup, 2014, where you know ‘OK, I have another week or two to play, then you go on ­vacation’. Then you have plenty of time. This has been different. That’s why the decision of not playing Paris, for instance, was very easy to be taken because it was for Wimbledon, it was for the rest of the season, it was for my life, it was for the rest of my career. That’s more important than one or two or three tournaments ­really.”

Federer is chasing his eighth Wimbledon and 18th major. He could play it with a harp. The All England Club’s main enclosure is where he has been at his most beautiful. His recent back pain, forcing him out of the French Open and ending his incredible 17-year streak of 65 consecutive majors, came after his post-­Australian Open season was ­ruined by a slip in a Melbourne bathroom that caused a serious knee injury and forced him to face the surgeon’s knife for the first time in his career.

“I was very, very sad, just because I thought I was going to be lucky not having to do surgery in my career,” the 34-year-old said. “I was doing so well for all of last year. I was great at the Australian Open, felt good throughout … then Novak just played this great semi-final. I hung in there, maybe could have pushed a fifth set, but didn’t. After that, everything changed.

“The next day, one stupid move, the season’s been completely different than what I expected it to be. So when I heard that I had to do surgery, I took it, accepted it. But then going into surgery was difficult. That’s when it hit me. I just got really ­dis­appointed and sad about it ­because that’s when I really understood what the road was going to look like.”

Given a bath by Djokovic at Melbourne Park, Federer was running one for his twin daughters the following day when he went down like a pensioner and tore his meniscus.

“I’ve always tried to avoid ­surgeries as much as possible just because I always felt like it was definitely not the thing you want to do as a professional athlete,” he said.

“I really don’t want to go into the details of what it was … it was a simple operation. My recovery ­actually was very quick and very good. Then I felt like I got unlucky throughout the process with hurting my back again before Madrid, getting sick in Miami and so forth.

“I got into a tough spell there. I just felt I had to stop everything by not playing Paris and reset. I don’t want to say ‘start from zero’, but I just had to reset from there and make another push for Wimbledon. I’ve had five or six really good weeks from then.”