Putting a Zero on Federer Is a Rare Achievement
Reto Schmidli, a police officer and part-time student in Arlesheim, Switzerland, is the only person who has “double-bageled Federer"
There may be only one tennis player in the world who wishes he had taken it a bit easier on Roger Federer. Reto Schmidli, 31, a police officer and part-time psychology student in Arlesheim, Switzerland, is the only person who has “double-bageled” Federer, that is, beaten him, 6-0, 6-0.
Schmidli is now a recreational player ranked No. 715 in Switzerland.
The fact that the drubbing occurred in Federer’s first tournament match, when he was just 10 years old, is not lost on Schmidli.
“I was just thinking about winning the match,” remembered Schmidli, who is now a recreational player ranked No. 715 in Switzerland. “I wasn’t thinking about being nice to him, but if I had to do it over again, I should have given Roger a game.”
The beating took place at the Grüssenhölzli tennis center in Pratteln, Switzerland, in August 1991. Federer was scheduled to compete in the 10-and-under tournament, but there weren’t enough entrants, so he was forced to square off against Schmidli, who was nearly 13. Schmidli had a significant size advantage and quickly overpowered Federer without dropping a game.
The match remains memorable for Federer. After notching a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Gastón Gaudio in Shanghai in November 2005, he was asked if he had ever blanked an opponent before. “No, but I lost, 6-0, 6-0, in juniors once,” he told reporters, adding, “I didn’t think I played that badly.” Federer later told Chris Bowers of the BBC: “I actually played pretty good. I lost, 6-0, 6-0. I left the court and I wasn’t even disappointed.”
Give Federer credit for having a sense of humor, but his account of being untroubled by the loss does not square with reports of his hypercompetitive on-court personality in his early years. “He was a really bad loser,” said Madeleine Bärlocher, Federer’s first coach at the Old Boys Tennis Club in Basel. “After he’d lose a match, he’d sit under the umpire’s chair and cry for half an hour sometimes. The other players would already be in the clubhouse eating sandwiches, and he’d still be crying on the court.”
Bärlocher recalled her joy in seeing her beloved protégé cry after he won Wimbledon for the first time. “I laughed because it reminded me of how he used to cry as a child,” she said. “Then he cried when he lost, now he cries when he wins.”
But victories have been hard to come by for Federer since his triumph at the Australian Open in January. For the first time in a decade, Federer has failed to win a tournament between the Australian and French Opens. Early departures at Indian Wells, Miami, Rome and Estoril, along with Sunday’s loss in Madrid against his rival, Rafael Nadal, have raised doubts about his ability to defend his title at Roland Garros this month. And yet, even during his spring “slump,” he has managed to extend two little-known streaks, both of which bolster his claim to being tennis’s greatest player.
In 864 professional matches, spanning 2,117 sets, Federer has been shut out in a set just four times, and three of those occasions came within a two-month span in 1999, when he was 17 years old. He then went nearly a decade without being bageled before losing the 2008 French Open final to Nadal, 1-6, 3-6, 0-6.
Federer has avoided a shutout in 99.9 percent of the sets and in 99.6 percent of the matches he has contested. He has not come close to being double-bageled since the Schmidli loss in 1991, and for a two-year stretch from 2003 to 2005 he not only avoided shutouts, but also avoided 6-1 losses, which are known as breadsticks.
What makes those statistics even more remarkable is that Federer has never retired from a match during his professional career.
By comparison, Andre Agassi was bageled 25 times and retired from 11 matches, and Jimmy Connors was bageled 15 times while retiring on 14 occasions. Even big servers like Pete Sampras and Boris Becker were shut out more frequently.
Players sometimes tank in a set to conserve energy for the rest of the match, or retire with injuries real or imagined when things look bleak, but Federer does neither. (The only time Federer has been accused of tanking a set came in 1998, when he was fined $100 by a tournament referee in Küblis, Switzerland, for lack of effort.)
“The idea of trying to conserve energy for the next set never arises because he’s never really that tired,” said Chris Bowers, author of “Roger Federer: Spirit of a Champion” and the forthcoming “Roger Federer: The Greatest.” “If he’s leading, 6-0, 5-0, 30-40, he’ll be desperate not to lose that one game. That’s why you find so few bagels with Federer. For him, every point is competition.”
Tennis is known as a gentleman’s game and serving up bagels, or bicycles, as a 6-0, 6-0 result is called in Switzerland, was once viewed as bad sportsmanship. Players occasionally gave an opponent a game during a rout. “I don’t think it happens anymore, ever,” said Cliff Drysdale, a former player who is a commentator for ESPN. “In my era, sometimes we’d throw a guy a bone. We didn’t have the hangers-on, the psychologists, coaches, trainers and stringers that players have now. We just had each other. That’s why we were more likely to have some compassion on an opponent.”
When Schmidli had the chance to bicycle the boy who became the greatest champion in tennis history, he took it. If the two played again, Federer would certainly return the favor.
If Schmidli pulled Federer over for speeding, there would be no gift for Federer, either.
“As much as I admire Roger, I would have to give him the ticket,” Schmidli said. “In Switzerland there are no free passes.”
A motto Roger Federer has lived by.
by jayl0ve » Tue, 11 May 2010 09:19 
You sound sooo familiar!
