Extremely, excessively harsh, especially in relation to a law. The word comes from Draco, an Athenian legislator who passed cruel legislation. It was eventually repealed but his legacy lives on. Modern equivalents aren't too hard to find.
Roger Federer is the 2017 Australian Open Men's Singles champion. Roger Federer is 35. These two facts seem incompatible but then again, Roger Federer himself seems incompatible. In an era of power baseline tennis, Federer has thrived with a fluid, all-around game that is often described as sublime, beautiful, and awe-inspiring.
The best explanation of Federer, his game, and his impact on tennis comes from David Foster Wallace's 2006 article about Federer. Wallace played tennis in his youth (well, in fact) and wrote about it frequently; this piece on Federer is as good a match of genius to genius as could've been asked for:
A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.
One thing it is not is televisable. At least not entirely. TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy. Television’s slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we’re not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what’s lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. This loss is simple to explain. TV’s priority, during a point, is coverage of the whole court, a comprehensive view, so that viewers can see both players and the overall geometry of the exchange. Television therefore chooses a specular vantage that is overhead and behind one baseline. You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court. This perspective, as any art student will tell you, “foreshortens” the court. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen’s image is only 2-D. The dimension that’s lost (or rather distorted) on the screen is the real court’s length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot’s pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold. That may sound abstract or overblown, in which case by all means go in person to some professional tournament — especially to the outer courts in early rounds, where you can sit 20 feet from the sideline — and sample the difference for yourself. If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover. And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.
We'd suggest reading Wallace's opus and then watching the highlights of Federer–Nadal yesterday (yep, once again) but we won't begrudge you if you want to watch some high-quality tennis first.
WritingTennisRoger FedererBeautyDavid Foster WallaceA liquid whipGOATWinning in a land down under