This fall, it’s great to be old — or at least, older. Across a number of fields, star performers who are over the traditional retirement age are showing they can still compete with young upstarts. Below, a sampling of this season’s “old” masters:
The 33-year-old tennis stars
Odds are long, but Roger Federer, nearly ancient by men’s tennis standards, is flirting with capturing the No. 1 ranking this year.
Novak Djokovic is likely to remain at the top spot, but for Federer, just having a shot is itself a vindication. He began the year ranked at No. 8, according to The Guardian, and “boasts a 66-10 win/loss ratio this season — the best on the tour. Already the record holder for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1 with 302, the 33-year-old has come through a serious back injury and the birth of second set of twins but would usurp Andre Agassi as the oldest world No1 in history if he manages it in Paris.”
Federer is not the only 33-year-old to strive for a No. 1 ranking in tennis: Serena Williams will finish No. 1 on the women’s tour, reports Tom Perrotta for The Wall Street Journal.
“Before they ultimately lose the battle against age, injuries, and waning desire, tennis champions usually succumb to a successor,” Mr. Perrotta writes. “Williams, it seems, is going to be the rare player who escapes this fate. No one has fully figured her out.”
Not even Williams, though, has remained at such an elevated ranking as Federer throughout his career.
“Federer is no alternate, no superstar reduced to a scrappy sideshow like Lleyton Hewitt, his former rival who is also 33,” says Christopher Clarey at The New York Times. “After a humbling 2013, Federer put himself front and center again in 2014, even if he could not win another Grand Slam title after losing to Djokovic in a five-set Wimbledon final.”
And that surprised many observers, according to Mr. Clarey. He quotes Darren Cahill, who coached Agassi, the oldest player to rank No. 1: “I think Roger has done a wonderful job of holding onto his youth,” Cahill said. “He’s a young 33-year-old, and he still moves beautifully.”
Greg Rusedski, a former pro writing at The Telegraph, highlights two critical adjustments that Federer has made this year: Using a larger racket, the Swiss star has shortened his forehand to give himself extra power, and he has altered “his footwork, which has become faster and more precise at cutting off the angles.”
Paul Annacone, who coached Federer from July 2010 until October last year, spoke with Joshua Eagle, Australia’s Davis Cup coach, about Federer’s training sessions with the Australian teenager Nick Kyrgios earlier this season. As Mr. Clarey reports, “‘Josh could not believe the spring in Roger’s step,’ Annacone said. ‘It’s like he was 20 years old, still bouncing around, laughing, doing drills with soccer balls and sprints and just totally enjoying it and embracing it.’”
The New Waver
“Godard: The youngest filmmaker at work today.” So writes the movie scholar David Bordwell of Jean-Luc Godard, who’s soon to turn 84.
Many observers say that in his new film, “Goodbye to Language” (“Adieu au Langage”), Godard has all but invented a new way of seeing — at least at the movies, in 3-D.
What this film shows “is that 3D is a legitimate creative frontier,” Mr. Bordwell writes.
Godard has been making formally audacious films since Eisenhower was president, but this film is his first in 3-D.
“I always like it when new techniques are introduced,” Godard said in an interview. “Because it doesn’t have any rules yet. And one can do everything.”
“It’s unlike any major 3-D movie, in that it’s not made like a major movie,” writes Richard Brody at The New Yorker. “Usually, 3-D implies great technical sophistication and a very high budget. (For instance, in making ‘Hugo,’ Martin Scorsese employed a full-time ‘stenographer,’ who did nothing but regulate the distance between the two cameras.) Godard, by contrast, treated 3-D as a device of independent filmmaking; he used simple equipment and homemade contrivances (and a crew of just three, including himself) to achieve the effect. With that simplicity, he opens the art form up to yet another, virtual dimension. His use of 3-D is itself the film’s big idea.”
For Lesley Chow at Bright Lights film journal, it opens up more formal possibilities than perhaps any other Godard film: “In the way that David Hockney has been inspired by the iPad to come up with works that are bigger than life, Godard seems exhilarated over the new technology, keen to show that pixelation can be made to dance in 3D and textures can be put right in your face.”
“It’s easily the most imaginative use of 3-D I’ve seen,” says Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The A.V. Club. A few moments in the film, he adds, “marked the first times in my adult life that I’ve seen something on screen and couldn’t immediately figure out how it worked.”
“The use of 3-D here — and Godard’s 3-D is not the smoothly seductive machinery of big-budget blockbusters but a home-made variety whose joins are often ragged — has a continuous shock effect,” says Geoffrey O’Brien at The New York Review of Books. “3-D is an exclamation point on top of an exclamation point. What ‘Goodbye to Language’ restores is the primordial shock before 3-D, before movies, before even cave paintings. Tree! Fire! Water! Eyes! The colors of spring and autumn! It restores, too, the shock of not quite seeing, not recognizing. The bafflement of appearances, when one plane detaches from another: a man remains seated while a woman walks away from him out of the frame while we continue to follow her into a new frame, and then come back.”
The icing on the cake? The film “is doing better in the U.S. than any of his films have done in the last thirty-some years,” Mr. Bordwell says.
The quarterbacks
Tom Brady and Peyton Manning: Brian Phillips at Grantland calls them “the NFL’s least mortal quarterbacks” — “both in their late thirties, both categorical locks for any pantheon you’d care to put them in, both still absurdly good.”
They have set the modern standard for excellence at their position, as Mr. Phillips explains: “fifteen prior meetings, three in AFC Championship Games; seven total MVP awards (including a stretch from 2007 to 2010 when they collectively won for four straight seasons); four total Super Bowl championships (and three Super Bowl MVPs); 22 combined Pro Bowl appearances (!); multiple great games, weird endings, and improbable comebacks against each other.”
And their stratospheric level of play continues in 2014. Bill Simmons, also at Grantland, while noting that league rule changes have made their jobs a little easier, still marvels at their statistics (eight starts for Brady, seven for Manning):
“2014 Manning: 2,134 yards, 22-3 TD-INT, 8.47 YPA, 119.0 rating, 90.1 QBR
2014 Brady: 2,059 yards, 18-2 TD-INT, 7.33 YPA, 104.7 rating, 75.4 QBR”
The beat reporters in their respective home cities — Manning now in Denver, Brady in Boston — have it good, and they write like they know it. Mike Klis at The Denver Post says of Manning: “Father Time never surrenders. In fact, this relentless character never has been beaten. But in Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, Father Time seems as confused as defensive coordinators who are trying to read the quarterback’s tendencies.”
“Yet, at 38, an age when Father Time has delivered his share of knockout blows to even the greatest of passers, Manning has become a better quarterback. Check that, Omaha. Manning is playing the best football of his professional life.”
In The Boston Globe, Sean Leahy writes that Brady is the season’s first-half M.V.P.: “He has transformed the Patriots from a team that had questionable playoff hopes to the front-runner in the AFC.” And, he adds, “his performance in the Patriots’ five-game win streak is one of the best of his career.”
A secret to Brady’s success? He goes to bed at 8:30.
And if you had to pick just one of the quarterbacks to lead your team? “They’re both terrific,” Mr. Leahy writes elsewhere in The Globe. “It’s futile to try to untangle them. If you give me one area where Manning outshines Brady, I can give you another where Brady outperforms his longtime rival.”
It may seem crazy to think about the future of two quarterbacks looking at a short step to 40, but Bill Simmons does: “If Brady played into his early forties, that would mean he was cheating — and by ‘cheating,’ I mean ‘cheating Father Time.’ Could a quarterback really play at an All-Pro level at 40 and beyond? Seems insane. Absolutely insane. But with the current rules, why not? Why couldn’t Manning AND Brady knock down that 40-and-over door?”