Was Roger Federer a good player on clay?

Now that he is retired, he no longer thinks so much, but years ago, with the arrival of the clay court tourthere were many who asked themselves the following question: is it Roger Federer one of the main candidates from April to June? Possibly, the same ones who also do it with Novak Djokovic, fans who see the board distorted by the huge gap in track records that has existed between Rafael Nadal and his pursuers, at least in terms of success on brick dust.

What is my opinion? That the Swiss was a guy to take into account anywhere, also on a red surface, at least until he began to skip it due to physical reasons. In fact, he grew up playing on clay, although his style was better suited to fast conditions. We will never know how much Roland Garros what he would have in his suitcase if he had not coexisted with the alien from Manacor, but what people probably do not remember – something normal, since we are going to go back twenty years – is how hard Federer’s beginnings were with the clay court in his stage as a professional. Come with me and you will see.

We land in 1998, a season in which Roger bets on the transition between circuits, making one of the toughest decisions of his career: stop working with Peter Carter and start a new stage with Peter Lundgren. That change would really touch the Australian coach, who would follow the progression of his pupil from a distance, accepting resignedly that that swerve was a success. But it wasn’t overnight, it wasn’t in record time, it was all part of a process that, in the case of clay, took longer than on other surfaces. One piece of information will suffice for you to understand: Roger Federer lost the first ELEVEN official matches he played on clay. We review them.

• 1998 / Gstaad – Lucas Arnold Ker (6-4, 6-4)
• 1999 / Monte Carlo – Vincent Spadea (7-6, 6-0)
• 1999 / Roland Garros – Patrick Rafter (5-7, 6-3, 6-0, 6-2)
• 1999 / Gstaad – Younes El Aynaooui (6-2, 6-3)
• 1999 / Copa Davis – Christophe Van Garsse (7-5, 3-6, 1-6, 7-5, 6-1)
• 1999 / Davis Cup – Xavier Malisse (4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-6)
• 2000 / Monaco – Jiri Novak (6-1, 2-6, 7-5)
• 2000 / Barcelona – Sergi Bruguera (6-1, 6-1)
• 2000 / Rome – Andrei Medvedev (3-6, 6-3, 7-5)
• 2000 / Hamburg – Andrei Pavel (6-4, 6-3)
• 2000 / St.Polten – Markus Hantschk (6-2, 6-1)

I know the federistas You are suffering, I’ll stop. This bleeding would close at Roland Garros in the year 2000, where Roger would take revenge by winning three games and stepping on for the first time the round of 16 of a Grand Slam. Yes, it happened on clay. After beating Wayne Arthurs, Jan Michael Gambill and Michael Kratochvil, the figure of Àlex Corretja would stand in his way.

• 2000 / Roland Garros – Wayne Arthurs (7-6, 6-3, 1-6, 6-3)
• 2000 / Roland Garros – Jan Michael Gambill (7-6, 6-3, 6-3)
• 2000 / Roland Garros – Michael Kratochvil (7-6, 6-4, 2-6, 6-7, 8-6)
• 2000 / Roland Garros – Àlex Corretja (7-5, 7-6, 6-2)

“Losing my first eleven matches on clay was very hard. In many of them I was about to win, but eleven is eleven, it is a good number”, commented the Swiss sarcastically in a recent interview. And why this bad start on land? Hard to explain. At 18 years old, Federer arrived at that 2000 Roland Garros with 29 official victories, all of them on hard courts (24 indoors). On grass things were not looking much better either (0-2), although you will agree with me that on grass there is no need to open any debate. Curiously, at Roland Garros 2001 he would go one step further, obtaining his first Grand Slam quarterfinal. Yes, it happened on clay too. So, where are we?

PAINFUL DEFEATS

From that 0-11 list, it is worth stopping at certain chapters to explain what exactly happened. For example, with his Grand Slam debut, when he lost to Patrick Rafter at Roland Garros 1999. The Australian was coming off a two-time US Open win, while Federer, at just 17, was presented with a WC for finishing the season as Junior #1 (and for having a French manager). The game was played at the Suzanne Lenglen in front of 10,000 people, a packed stadium to see the third favorite of the team […] Lie, people went to see the teenager. The point is that at that time the rules said that if a WC defeated a seeded player, he received extra points in the general ranking. This was what made the Swiss nervous.

“If he beat Rafter in a Grand Slam he would get double the points. Instead of 45 points I would have gotten 90. Can you imagine what that would mean to my ranking? All these things go through your head before the game”, recalls the Helvetian, who received a total of ten invitations that season. The potential that he had for his age was brutal, although he lacked many ingredients to achieve the desired cooking. Despite everything, Federer won the first set against Rafter, confirming that if he was there, he was there for a reason… and then added five games in the next three sets. “I have always been a player of big games, but I knew that against Rafter I was going to have a hard time, with his fast serve and my one-handed backhand. After the first set he guessed my game and crushed me, there I still lacked the resources to get out of those quagmires and he was a veteran, he knew exactly what he was doing”, he confessed years later.

Another party that is worth shelling out is that of Roland Garros 2003Just two decades ago. Did you know that Roger Federer only lost in the 1R Grand Slam six times? Well, that day was the last, already being No. 5 in the world and facing Luis Horna, who at the time was No. 88 and had never won a match in a major. And that the season was being good, with the second week at the Australian Open and titles in Marseille, Dubai and Munich, as well as the quarterfinals in Miami or the final in Rome. It was said about Roger that he had come to take over from Yannick Noah, the last attacking player to conquer Paris, although things had not gone well the previous year, where Hicham Arazi brought him down on the ground in his debut. That was a message of how much it would cost him in his career to dominate that tournament..

But let’s go back to 2003 and that defeat against Horna (7-6, 6-2, 7-6). For those who do not place it, this man had been champion of Roland Garros Junior, although nobody could imagine that disaster. Federer was tense, he paid the pressure of the stage, he even wasted a set point to win the first set. That meeting ended with 88 unforeseen errors, many of them with his right. “Maybe I should have screamed or smashed a racket to get it all out.”, declared Lundgren after the game, but the Swiss was in a conversion stage where the objective was to dominate his demons. Rather than destroy himself, he would rather lose.

According to the player himself, the Phillipe Chatrier track became one more rival at that time. “I couldn’t assimilate the dimensions, I noticed it in my field of vision, sometimes it made me feel insecure”, underscores the man who would lose in 2004 to Gustavo Kuerten in the third round, a three-time Roland Garros champion who had come to less at that time. Federer was already No. 1 in the world, he already had two Grand Slams in his backpack, but the dream of winning in Paris by serving and volleying was a magic trick alien to the best magician. What did he need? Many defeats, a lot of learning and a lot of maturity.

“Roger knew that yelling and getting angry was not okay, but the other players aren’t stupid. How were they going to win? He wouldn’t be playing tennis”, points out Peter Lundgren, the coach who accompanied him in his first years as a professional. “They beat him from the mental plane, that’s how he ended up learning it. There was a moment where he became too soft and realized that this was not good either, until one day he found a way.”, solves the Swede.

LAST CONCLUSIONS

Roger Federer failed to make it past Roland Garros debut in three of his first five appearances. In the other two he fell to Corretja, in the round of 16 and in the quarterfinals respectively. Later, between 2005 and 2015, only Ernests Gulbis (2014) was able to leave him out of the group of eight best. Of course we would have to talk about his multiple defeats in the Philippe Chatrier against Rafa Nadal, four in the finals and two in the semifinals. Of course, he deserves special mention of his long-awaited title in 2009 against Robin Soderling, managing to close the prestigious Grand Slam. Or the insane 2011 semifinal duel against a Novak Djokovic who arrived undefeated after five months of the season. And the day he ended Nadal’s 81-0 run in that mythical final in Hamburg? Someone no longer remembered, but yes, it was Roger who was responsible. We could talk long and hard about all this, but today I prefer to focus only on its beginnings on clay.

With the numbers in hand, Roger ended his career with a balance sheet of 73-17 a Roland Garros and of 226-71 (76%) on clay. He played the second 19 times major of the year, leaving champion in 2009, the only time he did not meet Nadal. By the way, he won the last match he played, against Dominik Koepfer in the fourth round of 2021. In his showcase they appear ELEVEN titles on brick dust: Roland Garros, Hamburg (4), Madrid (2), Munich, Bastad, Estoril and the last one in Istanbul 2015. He lost fifteen clay finals, but not to just anyone: one with Félix Mantilla (Rome 2003), one with Jiri Novak (Gstaad 2003), one with Stan Wawrinka (Monte Carlo 2014), one with Novak Djokovic (Rome 2015) and ONCE with Rafa Nadal.

So he was a good player on clay? For me it was not good. For me it was one of the best.