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June 24, 2007
Mr. Roger's neighborhood
In Federer's hometown, don't mistake understatement for ambivalence. His compatriots savor his tennis success but value a restrained approach.
By Chuck Culpepper, Los Angeles Times
BASEL, SWITZERLAND This might sound almost extraterrestrial to
Americans and especially Angelenos, but Roger Federer's hometown seems
to boast no outward images of, well, Roger Federer.
Billboards large and small include an anonymous happy couple alongside
wedges of Gruyere cheese, anonymous men on a boat drinking sparkling
water, an anonymous couple lying on a beach in the surf, two
hairdressers of possible local prominence and an anonymous burgundy
Fiat, but no visible Federer.
On sidewalks, on buses, on the extensive tram system, there's no sign of Federer but plenty of Jasper Johns,
the American painter who never won Wimbledon but whose "Target With
Four Faces" (1953), now showing at the Kunstmuseum, appears on posters
all over town.
A soda ad in the train station features
three Swiss soccer players.
If you wonder how a person could hog the No. 1 spot in tennis for 177
weeks with a striking lack of imperiousness, here might lie a clue.
If you wonder how somebody can hoard 10 of the last 16 tennis majors,
stockpile the last four Wimbledon men's singles titles, begin the 2007
Wimbledon on Monday up against the field but also against Bjorn Borg
and his record five straight, yet maintain popularity among peers while
refusing to reside at the intersection of prima and donna
Basel helps explain.
"Idolizing heroes the Swiss, they're not so comfortable with that,"
said Hans-Dieter Gerber, the Swiss collection manager for a Basel
sports museum specializing in soccer, adding, "I think it's more
difficult for Swiss people to express publicly their feelings in such a
way."
Madeleine Barlocher has heard it before.
"You know, I mean, at the beginning, a lot of people said, 'Why don't
you make more out of Roger here in Switzerland?' " said Barlocher of
Tennis Club Old Boys, which Federer began to frequent at age 8 or 9. "I
guess here we are a little bit different. We don't want to make money
out of someone
. We don't think in this way."
"People are not very euphoric," said Emmanuel Marmillod, who teaches
tennis to kids at the club, adding that they're not nationalistic and
"keep everything in the head."
"Something is special here," he said. "I don't know what it is."
"They're very proud of him, especially the German Swiss," said Lynette
Federer, the champion's mother. "They're really proud, but they don't
speak it out loud."
Then the native South African who married a Swiss guy and gave birth to
the most gorgeous tennis anybody ever saw affects a whisper and
impersonates the locals: " 'Oh, yeah, he's a great guy, but don't tell
anybody!' "
Besides, she reels off by heart, Tina Turner lives in Zurich, Phil
Collins lives on Lake Geneva, Charlie Chaplin lived in the
French-speaking part of this four-language country. It's a respite for
celebrities. It's perhaps the inverse of that case in India where the
cricketer and model Mahendra Singh Dhoni went for a haircut and the
police had to contain the crowd outside.
"People don't get carried away," Lynette said.
Wait for October, Roger Brennwald said, and you'll see plenty of Federer, but that's not because of Federer.
That's to promote the Swiss Indoors, the tournament Brennwald hatched
in 1975 and which once featured the specter of Jimmy Connors playing
tennis while little Roger Federer worked as ball boy. Where once
Brennwald traveled the world seeking Borg or Boris Becker or Andre
Agassi to play his tournament, now his North Star sits up the road.
"Now we have the world's best player," Brennwald said. "It's strange we
have so many people in the world, but the best player in the world
would be born in Basel. Sometimes I think I'm dreaming because I cannot
understand what's going on."
You hear that wonder often in Basel.
What's Basel? It's a city of 170,000 in a country of 7.5 million. The
Rhine River runs through it. It's gorgeous, especially in the narrow
streets near the river. It's astonishingly quiet. It's not mountainous
in the Swiss-postcard mode, but it's hilly, especially around Federer's
childhood home.
It's wildly international because it abuts the borders of both France
and Germany and because it harbors the Swiss chemical/pharmaceutical
industry, which is how Robert Federer happened to meet Lynette Federer
in a fate twist Wimbledon draws would come to rue.
It's a city where you always run into somebody you know, Gerber said. It's a casual place where, he said, even the Basler Tieg
the old money "dress very simply" and "don't flaunt their wealth."
It's where you might hear somebody say that their friend lives near
Federer in suburban Oberwil and sees him hauling down his laundry
basket. Where Barlocher's daughter came home one day a few years back
and said, Oh, I saw Roger in town today just walking around, unimpeded.
"He is not like a god," said Esther Roth, who works at the tourist
office in the train station. She appreciates Federer nonetheless.
The hard search for Federer's face can run to Munchenstein, the hilly
suburb with thriving trees and amok green where he grew up in a tall
and somewhat narrow house, beige with brown thatched roof and awnings,
close to nearby houses.
It can lead back into the city to a sporting goods store with five
floors and no sign of Federer until you reach the "racket sports"
section at the top, where the racket he endorses sits next to the James
Blake/Maria Sharapova racket, no favoritism, as if we're in, oh, Los
Angeles.
It can lead to Tennis Club Old Boys, in a pristine neighborhood where
the trees completely shade the sidewalks. It's an unpretentious
facility with a hut, a bar and restaurant, seven clay courts. On a
Wednesday midday, people play cards and drink wine while a black
Labrador retriever naps.
There, about 17 years ago, Lynette Federer held a membership still
does and had an indomitable tennis game and knew Barlocher, who'd
played in the 1959 Wimbledon girls' draw and who directed the club. One
day, Lynette said to Madeleine, "I have Roger here. Could you train
him?"
Federer spent four years riding there on his bicycle as Barlocher
remembers it and, when asked for snapshot memories of that time, she
said, "You know, if I would have known how it would come out, I would
have paid more attention."
She said that anything the coaches suggested, Roger could do
immediately. She rhapsodized about that backhand and remembered how he
once lost a match on Court No. 1, and while all the other children
finished their matches and began eating, Roger remained under the
umpire's chair, crying.
He was also "full of fun and nonsense in the head like a lot of young
people," Barlocher said, and when it came time to play they once had to
fetch him from atop a tree.
She showed photos from the 80-year-old club's 75th-anniversary book
with its multiple pictures of the sprite Federer plus Martina Hingis
and Patty Schnyder, who played here as juniors and she said it's all
fairly surreal.
Marmillod, the tennis teacher, said, "You cannot compare him to Borg
and McEnroe and Sampras and Agassi," because their auras differed from
Federer's and, "If you see Roger Federer, you are, 'Hey, he's a buddy.'
"
The Swiss love that, evidenced by the three autographed Federer
photographs in the club, and the Federer cardboard cutout, and the
unpretentious little sign high on the fence outside that reads "Roger
Federer Centre Court."
There's something about those homages, and it's this: They might be the
first images you spot in the whole city of the No. 1 tennis player, of
whom Brennwald says, "It's a miracle that we have this ball boy years
ago named Roger Federer."
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