Sports Articals

BY DAVID WALDSTEIN

The last man that Roger Federer passed on the all-time Grand Slam list has now seen enough. After waking up at 6:00 a.m. from his home in California on Sunday to witness history, Roy Emerson had only one reasonable conclusion.

Federer had already passed him in the career grand slam list, but yesterday he joined him on another one – becoming only the sixth player to win all four major events.That puts Federer right back on track to be considered the best of all time.

“He’s right there,” Emerson said during a telephone interview Sunday, just a couple of hours after Federer had won his first French Open. “Yeah, I believe he is. Now that he’s won a major on all surfaces, you can’t really argue with it.

By defeating Robin Soderling in straight sets Sunday in Paris, Federer also recorded his 14th overall major title, tying him with Pete Sampras for the most of all time.

But not even Sampras won on the crushed red brick of Roland Garros. In fact, he never even made it to the finals there. His best performance in Paris was a semifinal, once in 1996.

“At first it was very foreign to me,” said Emerson, a regular visitor every year at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, “but I ended up liking it a lot.”

In 1964, when he won Wimbledon, Emerson completed the career Grand Slam and no one did it again until Andre Agassi in 1999. Federer became the sixth player ever to do it, following Fred Perry, Don Budge, Rod Laver, Emerson and Agassi.

“It means that now you can say he’s a complete player,” Emerson said. “I always thought he was before, but now no one can say he isn’t.”

Emerson, one of the most underrated players in history, is third on the all-time grand slam list with 12, a career mark Federer passed last September when he won the U.S. Open for his 13th major title. Emerson, like everyone else who has seen Federer match and then pass him, said it is an honor that the Swiss master was the one to have done it.

“I couldn’t think of anyone better to pass me,” he said. “He’s such a great player and such a gentleman, too. He’s a real ambassador for the game.”

Part of the reason people sometimes neglect Emerson for the all-time greatest list is because he played before the open era. Toward the end of that era, in the late 1960s, some great players like Laver and Ken Rosewall played professionally and weren’t allowed to compete in the four major tournaments. In 1962, before turning pro, Laver won the Grand Slam (The Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. championships in one calendar year), then watched from the sidelines for five years.

When tournaments finally allowed professionals to play in 1968, Laver was a runner up at the newly named French Open, and then won Wimbledon. The next year, he won the Grand Slam again. So it’s fair to say that Emerson had a distinct advantage without having to tangle with his Australian compatriot for five years, but he was still a great player – certainly good enough to be given a biography in the ATP media guide Instead, he’s left out while players like Andres Gomez, Goran Ivanisovic and Jan Kodes have their own bios. We’ll call it an oversight rather than an intentional omission.

Emerson, meanwhile, is far too gracious to make a stink about how he is seen in the history of tennis. All he cared about yesterday was getting up early enough to see Federer close the deal, and it didn’t matter that Federer did it without beating his arch-nemesis on the clay, Rafael Nadal.

Federer may have waited a long time to finally raise the weighty trophy, and may have lost four consecutive years to Nadal, including three times in the final. But at least it took arguably the best clay court player of all time to knock him out. It wasn’t like Federer was losing to Nicolas Almagro and Vince Spadea.

“Sometimes you have to have a little bit of luck along the way,” Emerson said. “That’s part of tournament play, you never know who you will be playing. He certainly got a break when Nadal lost, but he lived up to it.”

At the end of the conversation Sunday, Emerson had only one request. He and his wife Joy, who also woke up early to watch, wanted to know how they could send a message along to Federer.

“We’d like to congratulate him,” Emerson said. “He’s well on his way now, and I think he’s got to be the favorite at Wimbledon. I always thought he would pass me and then Pete at some point, and there isn’t a more deserving guy.”

That comes from someone who knows a lot of about winning – and winning graciously.