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March 2003 Issue
The Artful Roger Federer
By Cindy Shmerler, TENNIS Magazine
Excerpted from the March 2003 issue of TENNIS Magazine
Although it was late August and
sweltering in New York City, the players' dining room at the U.S. Open
looked like a terminal at O'Hare during a blizzard. Bodies and gear
were strewn everywhere, every available seat was taken, and all the
tables were occupied by players, coaches, and camp followers. Everyone
was swept up in the buzz of the last major championship of the 2002
season.
Everyone, that is, but the No. 13 seed,
Roger Federer. The 21-year-old Swiss sensation and Grand Slam
champion-in-waiting sat slumped in an oversized chair at a big wooden
dining table in a remote corner, oblivious to the chaos. All he was
in-waiting for at the moment was the bowl of pasta with which his
Swedish coach, Peter Lundgren, had finally appeared. Lundgren slid it
across the table to his protégé.
Federer, fresh from a post-practice
shower, wore his shoulder-length brown hair pulled into a ponytail,
enhancing the already marked prominence of his nose. He has thick
eyebrows, ŕ la Pete Sampras, and hints of adolescent acne. But his
imperfections seem inconsequential when he smiles. And Federer smiles
often, even as he tried to assess how a year that began with so much
promise-he won an Australian Open tune-up and came within a point of
making the quarterfinals in Melbourne before losing to Tommy Haas 8-6
in the fifth-had spiraled out of control, leaving him winless in his
last two Grand Slam appearances. Once again, pundits had started
questioning if he would ever realize his potential.
"One good thing about me," Federer said,
without a trace of irony, "is that I forget matches, even bad matches,
very quickly. I get sad about not having played well, but I don't
really get pissed off. By the time I get back to the hotel, it's
completely forgotten and I'm fine again."
Unfortunately, neither Federer's fans
nor his critics forget quite so readily. They've been conditioned to
expect the best ever since Federer's striking, silky-smooth game earned
him the International Tennis Federation's No. 1 junior ranking in 1998
and, by extension, billing as the game's next star. Instead, they've
watched Federer's halting progress with frustration, especially in his
native, star-starved Switzerland.
As Rene Stauffer, tennis correspondent for the Zurich-based newspaper Tages Anzeiger,
says, "Roger is different from Martina Hingis [a native of the Slovak
Republic]. He really is ours, he's the guy from next door-he was
even a ball boy at the Basel tournament. Roger can become a national
hero, but not if he just stays in the Top Fifteen [he ended 2002 ranked
No. 6]. They want him to win Grand Slams. And this may be a problem,
because he doesn't have [Lleyton] Hewitt's fighting spirit. We haven't
seen him put his heart down there on the court."
That Federer can be so highly touted and
still trigger so many questions about his competitive makeup is a
tribute to his pure talent. He moves like Sampras and strikes the ball
with comparably clean strokes, seemingly generating power at his
leisure. An inventive all-court player, Federer has every shot in the
book, including a reflex volley reminiscent of John McEnroe at his best.
Federer has shown flashes of greatness.
He almost single-handedly knocked the United States out of the first
round of the Davis Cup in 2001, and almost five months later he snapped
Sampras' 31-match Wimbledon win streak. Early last year, he upset
Hewitt en route to the final at Key Biscayne (where he lost to Andre
Agassi). That May, Federer, who lost his first 11 pro matches on clay,
beat Gustavo Kuerten and Marat Safin on that surface, in the same week,
to win his first Tennis Masters Series title, in Hamburg, Germany.
"This guy is the real deal, and his game
is the whole package," says U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe. "He
can hit from anywhere on the court and he moves with elegance. His
volleys are impressive. He knows every angle out there. Sampras may
have more serving firepower, but Roger strikes the shot in the same
effortless way."
Agassi adds, "He's young and explosive
and has a powerful game. He has some of the best hand speed on the tour
and he knows how to put pressure on you. There are a lot of things he
does well."
Still, Federer has fallen from the high
wire at the Slams (he didn't reach a quarterfinal until the eighth
major of his career), showing an infuriating talent for following up
his biggest successes with inexplicable losses. For instance, the week
after his triumph in Hamburg, he was ushered out of Roland Garros on
opening day by Moroccan journeyman Hicham Arazi. Worse yet, a few weeks
later at Wimbledon, Federer was upset by Mario Ancic-ranked No. 154 in
the world-in straight sets.
"I never really felt I was playing well
on grass," Federer said of that debacle. "I never felt comfortable. I
practiced with Tim Henman the day before and I got my butt kicked.
Maybe that was on my mind a little, too."
Those comments may be more noteworthy
for what they reveal about Federer's fragile psyche than his game. As
Lundgren admits, "Roger just panicked at Wimbledon. For the first time
ever, he started to feel the pressure and he got very uncomfortable on
the court. After, he felt sad and empty."
While in Canada a month later, Federer
had his first brush with a different kind of sadness when he learned
that his mentor, 37-year-old Australian coach and Swiss Davis Cup
Captain Peter Carter, had been killed in a car accident in South
Africa. Federer says, "Peter wasn't my first coach, but he was my real
coach. I made trips with him. He knew me and my game, and he was always
thinking of what was good for me."
The one-two punch of frustration in
tennis and Carter's death bewildered Federer, who still wasn't far
removed from the warm cocoon provided by his family and life in
decidedly low-key Basel.
The first junior match Roger Federer
ever played, in Basel, turned out to be against a fellow named Reto
Schmidli, and it was a 6-0, 6-0 rubout. Federer describes that match as
"special" because it is the only double-bagel of his career. The
remarkable thing about this revelation is that Federer actually lost
the match.
It is typical of the easygoing Federer
to give a rival his due- other top pros would have deleted the word
"Schmidli" from their mental hard drives. But as fellow pro Jonas
Bjorkman, among others, has observed, "Roger, he's a really great guy.
He respects people."
In turn, nearly everyone holds Federer
in high esteem, from his peers to the game's young fans, for whom he
signs nearly every piece of paper or giant tennis ball thrust toward
him. As Rene Stauffer says, "Roger lives that saying, 'It's nice to be
important but it's important to be nice.' This is a guy who buys drinks
for photographers and thanks reporters who show up to his press
conferences."
This sort of thing flies well with the
civil Swiss, for whom Federer is a perfect antidote to the outspoken,
tart Hingis. OK, Federer may have a borderline-alarming passion for
American professional wrestling, and he's neither a teetotaler nor a
shut-in while on the road (on one notable occasion, Dominik Hrbaty and
two hockey-playing buddies, one being L.A. Kings' star Ziggy Palffy,
showed the impressionable Federer the ropes of L.A.'s nightlife). But
in the ways that really matter, Federer is a solid, well-mannered young
man, modest and friendly-a good burgher.
Although Basel is a commercial center
with a rich, 2000-year history, the oldest university in Switzerland,
cathedrals, more than 30 museums, and the internationally renowned
Theater Basel, Federer finds it "nondescript." In fact, he describes
Basel as a place of "no's"-as in "no lakes, no mountains, just a big
river [the Rhine] that flows through the middle of the city."
Federer grew up 10 minutes from Basel
proper, in suburban Münchenstein. His father, Robert, met Roger's
South-African-born mother, Lynette, while on a business trip for
Ciba-Geigy, South Africa (they both still work for the pharmaceutical
giant.) Roger has a 23-year-old sister, Diana, who is a nursing
student.
The only thing about the area that seems
to tug at Federer's heartstrings is his family and friends. While most
people of his age-and financial wherewithal-lust for their own digs,
Federer recently invested fifty-fifty with his parents in a new, bigger
home in the nearby hillside town of Bottmingen. (He also shares an
apartment near the Swiss national training center in Biel.)
"My family is the thing I miss most on
the tour," Federer admits. "Why should I have my own place? Who is
going to clean it for me?"
Given those priorities, it's easy to
understand how Federer ended up dating a fair approximation of the girl
next door, WTA pro Miroslava Vavrinec, who is Swiss (by way of the
Slovak Republic). They met during the opening ceremonies of the 2000
Olympic Games in Sydney. Those Olympics, in which Federer narrowly
missed winning a bronze medal, provide such sweet memories for him that
a lot of wall space in his bedroom is eaten up by a giant framed
photograph of the opening ceremonies. "My parents and girlfriend want
to put up pictures of me in the house, but I'm not ready for that," he
says. "But I do ask photographers for pictures of the nice places I
play, like the U.S. Open. I prefer that."
Federer was introduced to the game by
parents who at best were weekend hackers. His earliest tennis-related
memory is of watching his idol, Boris Becker, battle Stefan Edberg on
television in the 1988 Wimbledon final. When Becker lost, Federer wept.
His boyhood friends encouraged Federer to switch allegiances to Edberg
on the grounds that Becker was "kind of weird," but Federer stayed the
course. "Over time, though," he says, "I learned to appreciate Edberg."
As a youth, Federer was far more like
the fiery German than the cool Swede. "I was hotheaded, always acting
bad on the court, throwing my racquets like ten meters from me, or into
the curtain," Federer says sheepishly. "My parents hated it. When I
acted badly and lost, they would say nothing during the car ride home,
which was the worst. But I just couldn't keep my emotions under
control."
It's hard to imagine the calm,
soft-spoken Federer of today broadcasting his woes and throwing
tantrums. But he remained a brat until Carter and, later, Lundgren
convinced him that emotional outbursts were a waste of energy.
Carter, the Swiss Davis Cup coach at the
time of his death, worked with Federer from ages 10 to 14, and then off
and on until early 1999, when Lundgren took over. At 15, Federer was
tucked under the wing of the Swiss federation and farmed out for two
full years to a national training center, then at Ecublens, near
Lausanne. The facility was more than two hours by train from Basel, and
in the French (as opposed to Basel's German) region of the nation. That
complicated young Roger's life in more ways than one.
"I never liked school to begin with,"
Federer says. "But it was the worst at Ecublens because I couldn't
speak the language and I didn't know anybody. And of course, they were
making fun of me."
But Federer flourished at tennis,
slashing his way through the junior ranks. In 1998, his last year as a
junior, Federer won the Wimbledon singles and doubles and the
prestigious Orange Bowl title. A year later, he had cracked the ATP Top
100, and he won his first title as a pro, at Milan, in 2001. The
FEDERER EXPRESS headlines were too tempting to resist, even though they
didn't exactly represent truth in advertising: Delivery was-and still
is-pending.
Complete article appears in March 2003 issue of TENNIS Magazine.
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