Timeless Classics

On a kind of music that survives age

On June 19 this year, Wimbledon’s official Instagram account posted a reel celebrating Roger Federer. His backhand, specifically. The video stacks five shots from different seasons, slightly slowed and set to a three-decade old Bollywood ballad, Pehla Nasha. The clips are so placed that the sound of racquet meeting ball lands as accented percussion with the fluttering raindrops of the piano intro. It’s a 22-second video, endlessly loopable, and yet not nearly enough.

Pehla Nasha literally translates to “first intoxication,” though in practice it means first love. The first verse starts with a line about floating in the air, the next about fever dreams. The two protagonists in the song are students in the north Indian valley town of Dehradun, experiencing the giddiness of love. The baroque, sensual qualities of the song and Federer’s tennis were maybe destined to meet in some digital form.

I watched the reel, on loop, when it came out. I’ve been watching it again this week, because it has been a week of remembering.

On August 29, at Newport, Rhode Island, Federer was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. He was inducted, fittingly, by Mirka, his wife and once a professional player herself, who spoke with wit and warmth about the man, the partner, the father, and the tennis player. Roger’s own speech ran to 27 minutes, and he spent most of it talking about other people—Mirka, their children, his team, opponents, court staff, and ball boys. It made me remember Rohit Brijnath’s line, “Federer wears his fame like a lightweight jacket.” Slight tangent: if you want to read about Roger Federer, you won’t find more evocative words than those written by Brijnath.

I smiled through the speech, perhaps misty-eyed at times, but as soon as it got over, I was back on YouTube, sampling another video from Newport.

A day before the ceremony, Federer played an exhibition match alongside other Hall of Fame-rs, John McEnroe et al. The court, obviously, was grass, the clothes all white. Federer turned up in his typical bandana, ankle-height socks, and shoes without a spot of dirt. As he bounced the ball on the court, leaning into his left leg, loading for a serve, a stillness took over the frame. It could’ve been an acrylic painting of Federer at his purest.

The match was semi-serious, but the tennis was stunning anyway. Federer’s backhand came out early. The racquet drew a semicircle around his shoulder and torso, the ball came off his racquet with a soft tap and slid through the far court before anyone could move. Later, McEnroe served him a volley, which he returned with a flick from behind his body. From the baseline he sent crosscourt forehands. The ball drew the familiar curved, cursive lines through the air; the sound did not carry power—just clicks and taps that you hear in a table-tennis room, impossible to translate on a tennis court unless it’s Roger Federer.

The week before that, he had been at Flushing Meadows in New York, playing an exhibition match against Andy Roddick in the lead-up to the US Open. He wore different colours there, less Pehla Nasha and more Careless Whisper, but the ball left the strings the same way. Roddick fed one on his backhand, Federer opened up his torso and smoked a winner down the line.

Federer has been retired four years and away from the regular tennis circuit for five, maybe six. He’s 45 years old. He looks like he’s never left the court.

The clips from Newport and New York took me to the nearby shelves of YouTube, where his career sits distilled in hours of footage. Condensed match highlights, collages of his most awesome shots, zoomed-in compilations of a specific shot—it’s a full collection. Tennis TV has a ten-minute video of just his backhands. On the recommendations pane of that video is another, from the evening when Federer took that backhand to a whole new level and beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final.

YouTube must’ve clocked abnormally heavy traffic for sport highlights this week. Two days after Federer’s induction, completely unrelated, Lionel Messi announced his international retirement. He had been considering leaving since the World Cup final, the handwritten note said, but his father’s passing last month removed any doubts. He was done. After twenty years and six World Cups of carrying a nation’s outsized dreams, there was nothing left to give.

An induction and a retirement are hardly the same thing, but they leave a similar effect on the audience. Both cast an athlete into history—a museum exhibit; an artefact, like Federer said in his speech. So you begin walking around them, looking for angles. Messi still plays club football, which made it easy to go backwards and arrive, eventually, at a gangly boy with floppy hair twisting burly 30-year-old defenders into knots.

The day before his announcement, Messi scored four goals for Inter Miami against a hapless CF Montreal. The goals cover the range from fortuitous to extraordinary, but do you ever listen to music just for the big chord landings? In the 48th minute, Messi ambled through the midfield, leaned right, and threaded a pass through two lines of Montreal’s defence. Nobody on the pitch saw it coming other than Messi and his runner. The visual effect of the play is quite something—Messi, by holding the ball for two extra seconds, draws the entire defence and midfield to him, and they can only watch, off-balance, as the ball goes past them onto an opponent now free in acres of space. The move didn’t end with a goal, but it was so quintessentially Messi.

This summer’s World Cup is still vivid. Argentina, let’s have it straight, rode to the final on Messi’s back. The team had been designed to ease the load on Messi, to let him chill out and play part-time magician. And yet, match after match, Argentina found themselves in a pit and craned upwards at their saviour. Messi pulled them out. He scored, passed, created. He found gaps where others found walls. The quarter-final and semi-final comebacks were almost entirely composed by Messi.

Somewhere in there, maybe as Argentina were clawing back from two goals down against Egypt, it struck me how far this Messi is from the one we grew up with. That Messi zigzagged through whole teams and then chose, at leisure, between passing to a teammate and scoring himself. This one, stripped of some pace and some strength, runs on wizardry alone.

Which is a strange thing to say about either of them. Messi and Federer are amongst the greatest athletes across history, in possession of athletic gifts you will not find in 99% of the world. At their peaks, they covered yards of grass in a blink. Their quadriceps generated power most Olympians would find unfathomable. Pick any collection from Messi’s best goals and you find a tableau of long mazy dribbles with short, staccato touches to change directions, sometimes touching the ball twice with the toe still in the air. In Federer’s highlights you find him gliding across the court, ready for a return while his opponents are still scrambling from their follow-through. Both were able to inject a velocity on a ball that the quickest found too quick.

Slow-motion is a genre now, especially on short-form video platforms, but it does not flatter everyone. Watch, say, Carlos Alcaraz or Kylian Mbappe at half speed and their movement stutters, as though frames are dropping. Watch Cristiano Ronaldo and Rafael Nadal in their primes and your attention goes straight to the physique, to what a human body can be allowed to become. This is, obviously, not a slight. Sport does not get too much more thrilling than Alcaraz or Mbappe, more of a visceral experience than Nadal. But their athletic ability is part of the show. They look incredible sped up—superhuman bodies travelling at superhuman speeds doing superhuman things.

But, Messi and Federer you enjoy a little slower. The effect elevates them. Digital slowing brings you to the beauty of the human form, their liquid movements, the harmony between torso and limbs. Then there’s the real thing—them as themselves, wrinkles and a couple of extra inches around the waist, untouched by editing software. While everyone around them is sprinting into a blur, their movements are shorter and more deliberate. The camera lingers, not having to play catch-up anymore, relaying their genius in full.

Why does their tempo feel just right? Perhaps it’s personal taste. I like art that breathes. I’ve sampled the breathless stuff: I had a metal phase in college, when I wore thick black t-shirts embossed with band names and album art stickers; at college fests, I’ve sweated through afternoons headbanging at basic 4/4 riffs; I played keyboards for a metal band (they were more Prog Rock, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them); and I’ve pretended that Lamb of God is actual music. But, tugging at me all this time was a homesickness for Pink Floyd, Yanni, and Ludovico Einaudi. Often, Bach. I couldn’t help it. One of my favourite songs to play—another candidate, actually, for a Federer background score—is Bach’s Prelude in C Major, where you hear every phrase inhale and exhale.

Or, maybe sport at a tranquil pace feels soothing because so much of it is frantic. Especially football and tennis where, in theory, there should be space for all tempos and styles. Instead, in much of that world, speed and power have become default denominators. Clubs in the best leagues pay a premium for athletic prowess; all top coaches deploy tactics that require hundreds of short high-velocity sprints a match and demand verticality in possession. It’s unlikely that a young footballer, anywhere in the world, is being taught to push and pull at the game’s tempo, or nurture their instincts without worrying about the scoreline. Think of it—how many players did you spot at the World Cup with Messi’s short, slender body-type? Argentina’s number 10 before Messi, Juan Roman Riquelme, a man of jawdropping poetry but limited athleticism, would struggle to find a top gig today.

Tennis is on a similar journey. Courts have slowed down across the world, handing a disproportionate leverage to power. At last year’s Laver’s Cup, Roger Federer confessed to sitting in committees that agreed on uniform speeds across surfaces. The single-handed backhand has nearly disappeared from men’s tennis; it’s a substantially tougher and riskier shot than the double-hander. Scroll through the semi-finals and finals of men’s Grand Slam singles for the last two years, and you’ll find three names everywhere: Alcaraz, Sinner, Zverev. Fantastic tennis players, but also the hardest hitters of a ball and the quickest movers on a court.

Amidst all of this, in a world moving rapidly towards a brutalist future, Messi and Federer remained oases of beauty. In them, you found an endless thirst for creativity and imagination. Writing coaches tell you about using descriptive verbs for better sentences. The verbs coming to mind for Messi and Federer are more crafty than violent. They did not pummel opponents, but sliced them open; they brought wands where others brought guns.

We were fortunate to watch both careers from beginning to end, and more fortunate to hold, in one palm, the technology for rewinding to any point in either. I have watched Federer’s dismantling of Roddick in 2005 probably a hundred times, Messi against Real Madrid in 2009 ditto.

The induction and retirement, actually, was just an excuse to have such a week; I do these rewinds more frequently than I’d like to admit. The awe and wonder never wears off. Some days, it is ten minutes of backhand winners; other days, a loop of five set to a Bollywood classic.