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June 20, 2005
The making of a champion
By Mark Hodgkinson, Telegraph
It
was at the Old Boys Tennis Club in Basle that Roger Federer first
received proper instruction on how to apply pace and spin to a tennis
ball. And it was also on the club's red clay courts, and not on
Wimbledon's Centre Court two years ago, that the Swiss first cried over
the result of a tennis match.
"It was so funny when Roger won Wimbledon for the first time and then
started crying," recalls Madeleine Barlocher, one of his first coaches.
"I remember when he was little and lost a match, and he would try to
hide behind the umpire's chair and would not stop crying for more than
10 minutes. The next time I saw Roger after that I said to him, 'You
used to cry when you lost a match, and now you cry when you have won a
match.' Roger laughed when I reminded him of that." It
may be strange to recall now, given his calm and measured exterior,
but, as a pre-teen and young teenager, Federer found it difficult to
control his emotions. There were more to his tantrums than sniffles and
games of hide-and-seek behind the umpire's chair. He often threw and
kicked his racket around the court, yelped like an alley cat, and
occasionally swore. Federer has said that there
were times when his parents would watch from the balcony of the Old
Boys club, calling out for him to be quiet, and he would respond by
shouting at them to, "Go and have a drink, leave me alone". Federer
said that the family would then drive home "in a quiet car, with no one
speaking". "I would carry on like an idiot," he has admitted. "This
stage was part of his growing up," his mother, Lynette, said. "But when
his behaviour was bad, we told him that it was bad and that it upset
us. We used to say, 'Come on, Roger, get control of yourself, pull
yourself together'. He says that he can't remember crying when he
played tennis, but he also cried when he played football. I remember
saying to him once, 'Is it such a catastrophe if you lose a match?' But
the tears just showed how ambitious Roger was, how determined he was to
succeed." A couple of days spent in Basle, his
home city, provided plenty of insight into the making of Roger Federer.
His balanced and well-mannered outlook on life is said to be typical of
Switzerland's second city, which is polite, overly-ordered and
introduced to tourists as the place where a local scientist became the
first man ever to take an LSD 'trip'. Federer, who
was born on Aug 8 1981, spent his childhood in the suburb of
Munchenstein, with the family home just a short walk from the football
and tennis stadiums. His early life was dominated by sport and he was
four when he first picked up a tennis racket, having watched his
parents on the local courts. The earliest surviving photograph of
Federer playing tennis, borrowed from the family's private album, shows
him swinging at a forehand with great enthusiasm and no little skill.
"We would go to play tennis, and Roger just picked up the racket and
started playing. He loved the sport from the beginning," his mother
said. His first strokes were played at the Ciba
Tennis Club, a private venue for the employees of a chemical company,
where his parents were both working at the time (Robert and Lynette met
on a business trip to South Africa for Ciba). Both are avid social
players, and his father still plays regularly at the club, but his
mother is said to have been the more accomplished of the two, with a
smoother and more stylish game. The club is
suburban, friendly and unassuming. The courts are surrounded by
greenery, with tree branches overhanging the red clay, ferocious games
of volleyball on the lawns, and men drinking beer at the tables on the
terrace. The club has apparently not changed much, but Federer's first
racket, given to a friend but never returned, has vanished. Federer,
whose boyhood hero was Boris Becker, spent countless hours at home
walloping the ball against the garage door, determined in his pursuit
of perfection. "I remember always loving to play against the garage
door, or against the cupboard doors inside, with any kind of ball. My
mum got fed up because it was bang, bang, bang all day," he said. His
parents quickly saw how gifted Federer was with a racket in hand, and
when he was eight he started playing at the Old Boys club, surrounded
by blossoms and suburbia. Barlocher was then running the junior
programme, as she still does now in her sixties. She remembers Federer
as one of the more talented players in his age group, as a fast learner
on the club's seven clay courts, but she would never have predicted
what her pupil would go on to achieve in the sport. Federer's
first individual lessons were with Seppli Kacovsky, a Czech coach who
also still works at the club. They trained on Court Five, the furthest
from the wooden-slatted clubhouse. "Roger didn't always concentrate
during the sessions - sometimes he would hit some shots and then shout,
'Whack! Pow! With this shot I win Wimbledon!' Some of those shots would
hit the back fence on the full. Roger remembers those times, and we
still speak about it," Kacovsky said. "Roger
always had dreams of being a professional tennis player. He would tell
me that he was going to become the world No 1. A lot of other kids
would say that, but it was like Roger was born with a racket in his
hand. He had such natural talent. I've coached for over 40 years and
never seen such a gifted player. I would tell him how to hit a shot and
he would get it straight away. Other kids might take several hours.
Roger was exceptional even then." Federer had a
natural eye for a ball, and as well as his precocious skill as a tennis
player, he won skiing trophies, impressed on the basketball court, and
fancied himself as a striker on the football field. At the age of 12,
he had to decide between tennis and football. "He enjoyed all sports at
that time, and probably liked football as much as he liked tennis.
Roger was into anything that was outdoors and sporty," his mother said.
Barlocher said that Federer was impeccably
behaved off the court at the Old Boys club. Only once did he cause any
trouble, when she was waiting for him to play a club match and he had
seemingly gone missing. The future world No 1 found the confusion and
panic beneath him absolutely hilarious: he had climbed a tree and was
sitting proudly on one of the branches. "Roger was laughing so much.
That was one of his favourite jokes," Barlocher said. Federer
was well liked, both at the tennis club and his primary school, the
Schulhaus Neue Welt (the New World School). One of his teachers,
Theresa Fischbacher, recalls: "The only problem was that he was in a
classroom with a good view, so it was tempting just to look out of the
window and start daydreaming." He would often work
as a ball-boy at the club. One of the coaches produced a fading and
crumpled photograph which showed him on duty during a girls' singles
match, fetching the stray balls and folding the towels for Martina
Hingis. She would go on to become the youngest women's world No 1 in
history, reaching the top of the rankings at the age of 16. At
14, Federer's parents were shocked to discover through a tennis
magazine article that he might be prepared to leave home and join the
Swiss national centre at Ecublens, near Lausanne. They were surprised
because they knew that Federer did not like being away from his family,
and sensed that he would be homesick in Ecublens, which is in the
French-speaking part of Switzerland and a long drive from his
German-speaking friends and family in Basle. His
mother emphasised that she and Federer's father did not force the
decision on him. "We are a close family, but Roger took the decision at
a very early age that he wanted to play tennis away from home. We never
forced him to do anything, we let him develop on his own," said his
mother. "He made a lot of important decisions himself when he was
younger and that was key to his success because he had to learn how to
do things for himself. He learned to be very independent." As
his parents had predicted, Federer was not always happy in Ecublens. He
struggled with his broken French and has recalled other pupils being
"mean" to him. His frustration would often manifest itself in bad
behaviour, such as more racket-hurling, and it has been said that when
they installed a new backdrop on one of the courts, Federer was the
first to put a hole in it. He was punished by being made to sweep the
courts at 7am. But Federer's mother said that he
quickly matured at Ecublens. "It was a great lesson in life for him -
that things don't always go your own way, and that you don't get
anywhere in life with talent alone. You have to work at things," she
said. "I know that that it wasn't always fun and games for Roger there,
and that many days he wasn't that happy. But those struggles were good
for him. Overcoming those ups and downs was a challenge for him, and it
helped him to develop as a person." Federer, who
combined tennis and schoolwork, spent two years at Ecublens and also at
Biel when the Swiss national centre moved there. He was starting to
form a close working relationship with Peter Carter, an Australian
coach whom he had originally met at the Old Boys Tennis Club. Carter
taught Federer to use his emotional energies more wisely, and to think
through exactly what he was doing on court. He was ranked the world's
top junior in 1998, winning Junior Wimbledon in the same year, though
sadly Carter would never witness his protege's Wimbledon singles
triumphs, as he died in a car accident in 2002. The
only visible sign of teenage rebellion for Federer was the peroxide
stage he went through. He turned his hair an unflattering yellow-white,
which amused Barlocher. "He came back to see us once at the Old Boys
Tennis Club and at first refused to take his hat off to show me his
hair. But we have the photos of it, so he will not be able to forget
that particular hairstyle," she said. Federer has
not forgotten his early years, and still lives in Basle, in the suburb
of Oberwil, occasionally training at the Ciba Tennis Club. He is
usually left alone in a city that does not have a fawning obsession
with celebrities, and he feels able to mingle with the amateur players
in between training sessions at the club. He still
visits the Old Boys club and has been known to return to the small bar,
which has a colour painting of him hanging on the wall, to play cards
with his friends. He is still in contact with Barlocher and Kacovsky,
sending them text messages with updates of his progress around the
tennis globe. "Roger used to send me a telegram whenever he won a
title," Barlocher said. "It was a real pity when they stopped doing
telegrams." A few weeks ago Federer returned to
the club for a fund-raising exhibition match. He was delighted when,
just before the match started, a sign was unveiled showing that the old
Court One had been renamed 'Roger Federer Centre Court', a tribute to
his two Wimbledon titles. "It was a lovely surprise for Roger,"
Barlocher said. "It is our little joke at the club, that there is now a
Centre Court where it all started for Roger." Federer's
friends and old coaches watched the 2003 Wimbledon final on the
clubhouse television. "I was so nervous that I could hardly watch that
match, so nervous that I popped the champagne cork too early," Kacovsky
said. "It was his first match point, and suddenly there was champagne
everywhere, and then Roger didn't win the point. Everyone was laughing
at me. Luckily Roger finished the match a little later. That was a
great day at the club. We were so proud. We drank champagne and we
cried." More tears may be expected over the next fortnight, from both Federer and the city of Basle.
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