There was a moment in the third set when I realised that Guillermo García-López wasn't an idiot. He just looked like one. But it really wasn't his fault. I understood this when he had a run of two or three points in a row, and it suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable that he was ranked No 42 in the world. Trouble is, he was playing Roger Federer.

It is hard to look like anything other than an idiot when you are playing Federer at his serene and seraphic best, when he picks you apart for the quiet amusement of it all, then slaps you down with the power that he simply hadn't been bothering to use before. Federer won 6-2, 6-2, 6-4, and García-López gave us his best tennis on the rare occasions he got near the ball.

When you watch Federer play like this, you cannot believe that anybody could ever beat him or that you would ever want them to. Yet cast your mind back just a few weeks. Federer was awful, then. I know - I saw him play the semi-final at the French Open. Dreadful.

Worst I've ever seen him play. Bag of nerves, unforced errors, expression of complete bafflement.

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He looked like a man who had lost it. The touch, the confidence, the magic, the mojo. Mr Cool had lost his cool and didn't know where to find it. He was oppressed, hagridden by doubt, and with a tendency to produce a gross error on big points. There were times when you wanted to turn your face away: far from being just like watching Brazil, it was just like watching Tim.

Something has happened to him since then. Only a small thing, but it has made all the difference. He has become the greatest player of all time. And that really does make a difference to a chap. After he won the final of the French - at times sublime, at times vulnerable, ultimately unstoppable - he tied with Pete Sampras as the winner of 14 grand-slam tournaments, and he tied with Andre Agassi in winning on all four surfaces of the modern game.

This double achievement leaves him statistically the greatest. As a result of this, he has come to Wimbledon like a man set free. Cricket lovers will recall Mark Ramprakash's agonising wait between century No99 and No100. These big numbers can weigh on a man's mind. Federer suffered a pair of traumatic defeats, at Wimbledon last year and in the Australian Open in January, and he lost his No1 ranking, all to Rafael Nadal.

There were times when he looked almost a broken man, certainly a damaged one. But Nadal showed fallibilities of his own and Federer found the French Open opening before him. He has missed out the prep tournaments, come fresh to Wimbledon, and in his first two matches he looks as good and as confident as he has ever done on these lawns.

It must be sheer bloody hell to play him when he is like this. There was one point he won not so much with serenity as insolence, playing four or five successive slices just for the love of his own shot-making, before hitting a kill-shot with a flat forehand that burnt the grass. All the time a faint smile on his face, that bloody serenity of his cutting you apart like a razor.

It looks like beauty to us in the stands, it must have felt like cruelty of a peculiarly savage kind to García-López. It is not the wanton cruelty of a small boy pulling the legs off a daddy-longlegs: it's much worse. It is the almost disinterested cruelty of a vivisectionist, carving up the living specimen before him in the name of some higher cause that his victim could not possibly understand.

Federer took García-López apart, breaking him five times, his own serve only once even threatened. His serve has all the old spite to it. He has the Wimbledon winner's knack of serving an ace at need. And he treated his opponent yesterday with every courtesy and not a shred of compassion.

Every victory in sport is gained by the wilful infliction of pain: that's probably truer in tennis than in any other sport.

When he plays like this, Federer's opponent becomes an almost unreal figure, cowed, submissive, subservient, accepting of pain. The match reports of such occasions are probably better penned by the Marquis de Sade than by myself. Roger in Furs?

But Federer takes no sadistic pleasure in it himself, for his mind is on a higher goal. The cruelty is not vindictive: nothing personal, but it's you, personally, that must suffer. That's what makes it so awful for his opponents: for him, they seem to be nothing more than the leathers on which the razor of his craft can be stropped. We all know it is a long hard old tournament, but Federer could not possibly have started it better.

Federer has broken his shackles, broken the statistical ropes that bound him, passed beyond all reckoning, gone to a place where only he has trodden. The fourteenth title has helped to take him there, the career grand slam has helped to take him there, and - though it is not gentlemanly to say so - the defeat and subsequent injury to Nadal has helped to take him there. Meet the new Rodge: same as the old Rodge. Look on his game, ye mighty, and despair.