Summing up Federer, the Hall of Famer

An excerpt from my book The Master

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With another US Open upon us, it is Roger Federer’s time again even though he is long retired and has not played in the Open in seven years:

Exhibition matches in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Interviews and media appearances in Manhattan, and on Saturday in Newport, induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame with his family and friends in attendance.

Federer’s place in Newport was never in doubt with 20 Grand Slam titles, 83 other singles titles and a beautiful game and winning personality that connected with those inside and outside the sport.

I was fortunate to have a courtside seat for much of it, and I will be in Newport on Saturday. To mark the moment, I’m publishing an excerpt from my biography The Master.

It’s from the first of the book’s 18 chapters, and it focuses on a late-night conversation Federer and I had in a limousine in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2012 after he played an exhibition match against Juan Martin del Potro.

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As the Argentines shouted and pressed toward the car, Federer did not shrink from the window. He drew closer to it.

I asked him if he knew the English word “jaded.”

“A little bit,” he said, sounding hesitant.

“In French, it basically means ‘blasé,’” I said. “You’ve been through it all before, things no longer give you the same rush. It’s kind of how you imagine Björn Borg in the car leaving the US Open, never to return.”

Borg was twenty-five then.

Federer considered that for a moment.

“It happens very quickly,” he said. “You’re just, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m tired of it all.’ And really, that’s what I try to avoid by having the proper schedule and the proper fun and the proper change, because, like you mentioned, if you do the same thing, it doesn’t matter what you do, too many times, all the time, too often you get bored of it. It doesn’t matter how extraordinary your life might be, so that’s where I think these kinds of trips, or a good buildup practice session or a great vacation or some amazing tournaments in a row, toughing it out, whatever it might be, it’s in the mix that I find the resources for more, the energy for more. Really, it’s pretty simple in a way.”

Watching Federer stay fresh and eager deep into his thirties, against logic and against tennis precedent, it was intriguing to realize that his ability to remain in the moment was in fact about forethought. If he was relaxed and accommodating despite all the forces pulling at him, it was because he knew himself and his microcosm well enough to avoid the pitfalls that would likely snuff out his pilot light.

But then such intentionality is very much in harmony with his career as a whole.

He has often made the game look astonishingly easy through the decades: hitting aces, gliding to forehands, and, in his most gravity- defying act, remaining high above the waterline in a world right- fully flooded with icon cynicism. But his path from temperamental, bleached-blond teenager with dubious style sense to one of the most elegant and self-possessed great athletes has been a long-running act of will, not destiny.

Federer is widely perceived as a natural, and yet he is a meticulous planner who has learned to embrace routine and self-discipline, plotting out his schedule well in advance and in considerable detail.

“I usually have an idea of the next one and a half years, and a very good idea about the next nine months,” he said in Argentina. “I can tell you what I’ll be doing on Monday before Rotterdam or what I’m doing Saturday before Indian Wells. I mean, not hour by hour, but I pretty much talk it through day by day.”

Though it is rare to see Federer sweat, there has been tremendous toil and ample self-doubt behind the scenes. He has played in pain far more than most of us realize. There has also been no shortage of bruising setbacks in the spotlight. One could easily argue that the two greatest matches in which he has played were the 2008 Wimbledon final against Rafael Nadal and the 2019 Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic. Both ended in bitter defeats in tight fifth sets that extended past regulation.

He has been a big winner, racking up more than a hundred tour titles and twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semifinals, but also a big loser.

That has no doubt contributed to his everyman appeal, helping to humanize him. To his credit, Federer has absorbed the blows, both public and private, and rebounded with the accent on positive energy and the long run.

He has transcended tennis, not by using it as a platform for higher or edgier causes but by remaining largely within the confines of the game. That is no small achievement for a sport with a dwindling and aging fan base in Europe and North America.

It is an old-school approach: low on controversy and on glimpses into his personal life, long on bonhomie and Corinthian spirit.

Boring? Hardly. How can anyone who unites in a divided world be a source of ennui? He has long had the beautiful game: balletic, often airborne as he leaps to strike a serve or groundstroke with his eyes on the contact point for a moment longer than any player I have watched in my more than thirty years of covering tennis. That ability to finish, truly finish, the stroke can make him appear nonchalant, but it is also integral to what makes him magnetic to the gaze. It is the equivalent of Michael Jordan hovering a little longer than everyone else in flight to the basket, of a dancer holding a pose for emphasis.

“He is the most beautiful and balletic player I’ve ever seen,” Billie Jean King told me. “His kinetic chain stays very connected. That’s where the elegance comes from.”

Professional tennis has been put into a particle accelerator during the last quarter century, with more powerful rackets and polyester strings and with taller, more explosive athletes. Stroke technique and footwork have had to be adjusted to deal with the speed, but Federer still seems to have the time he needs to put a final coat of paint on his shots. How can he play this way and still recover before hitting the next polished stroke? Because of rare vision, mobility, and agility but also because of relatively compact strokes and the confidence that comes with knowing that while others must plan and grind and press, he can conjure solutions on the run or full stretch that others simply lack the tool kit—or Swiss army knife—to create.

Marc Rosset, the best Swiss men’s player before Federer moved the goalposts to a faraway place, likes to talk about Federer’s “processing speed.”

Rosset remembers doing a drill in which someone would throw five balls of different colors into the air and ask players to catch the five balls in order according to color. “The maximum I ever did was four,” Rosset said. “It was really tough for me. Rog, you gave him five balls, and he caught all five.”

In Rosset’s view, “People focus a lot on an athlete’s talent with his hands or his feet. But there’s a talent we don’t talk about enough and that’s reactivity, the ability of their brain to interpret what their eyes are seeing. When you look at the great champions, a football player like [Zinedine] Zidane or [Diego] Maradona, or you look at Federer, Djokovic, or Nadal in tennis, you have the impression sometimes that they are in the Matrix, that everything is going so fast, too fast for you and me, but they pick up on things so quickly that it is as if they have more time for their brains to process it all.

“Zidane, when he dribbled, there were four people around him, but he was calm. It’s all in slow motion for him. These great champions are a fraction of a second ahead of everybody else, and that allows them to be more relaxed, because when you see some of the incredible shots that Roger could hit in his career, those are not shots you can practice.”

To watch Federer on his finer days is to be swept away by the flow of his movement but also to be put on edge by the sense that legerdemain is surely on the way, but when? It is a double dose of intoxication: intensified by how little he has deviated from the challenge at hand for most of his career. Without tirades or banter and with his inner journey rarely reflected in his deeply set eyes on court, the focus has remained on the physical act of him practicing his craft.

“He plays the ball, but he also plays with the ball,” his friend and longtime coach Severin Lüthi once told me.

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It is a quality that appeals to insiders as well as outsiders. “Fed is the guy that probably more than anybody else still astounds other players,” said Brad Stine, a longtime coach who worked with Kevin Anderson and No. 1 Jim Courier. “They watch him and they honestly say, ‘How does he do that? I mean, really, how do you make that shot?’ ”

John McEnroe was an artist with a racket, too, but a tormented one. If Johnny Mac were Jackson Pollock, splattering paint in an attempt to express some internal struggle, Federer would be much closer to Peter Paul Rubens: prolific, well-adjusted, enduring, and perfectly accessible to mainstream tastes yet capable of giving chills to the experts with his brushwork and composition, too.

It is quite a school of performance art but also one that leaves ample white space on the canvas for others to find their own meaning in his work. Federer would rather not overthink the formula—“it’s pretty simple in a way,” he says—but he accepts that others will have at it, like a writer whose novels get parsed to the nth degree in a graduate seminar.

I remember talking with Federer about this before we boarded that private jet in the California desert in 2018 (it was my first and probably last ride in a private jet). He had played the final of the BNP Paribas Open the previous day against del Potro, blowing three match points on his own serve and losing in a third-set tiebreaker: his first defeat of the season. The margins had been so slim, the reaction time so compressed, even for him.

“Tactics? People talk about tactics,” Federer said. “But a lot of the time at this level it just comes down to instinct. It happens so fast that you have to hit the shot almost without thinking. There’s of course some luck involved.”

Fortune has indeed played a role for Federer. He might not have become a champion, at least not a tennis champion, if an Australian journeyman pro named Peter Carter had not decided to take a coaching job in, of all places, a small club in Basel, Switzerland. Federer might not have had the staying power if he had not met a cerebral, sensitive, and gifted fitness trainer named Pierre Paganini or crossed career paths with Mirka Vavrinec, an older Swiss player who eventually became his wife, part-time press agent, and organizer in chief. There is no way he would have played on so long and so convincingly without her full support and her own ambition.

“She has a desire to succeed that is just as strong as Federer, perhaps stronger,” said Paul Dorochenko, the French fitness trainer who worked with Vavrinec and Federer in their early years in Switzerland.

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But in life and certainly in pro tennis it is really about what you do with your good fortune, what you make of your opportunities, and Federer built on many of them rather than squander them.

Federer is not as debonair as his marketers can make him appear. He is intelligent and intuitive but no master of the Bondian bon mot. He did, after all, stop school at sixteen and was not a particularly serious student. But he approached adulthood and the tour with much more rigor.

“I consider this life school,” he said in Argentina of his nomadic life on tour.

Though Federer was undeniably gifted, one of the things that differentiated him from some of the other great talents of his generation was that he had both an abiding love of the game and the drive to demand more of himself. He believed that maintaining the same level in pro tennis was actually losing ground, a belief that rubbed off on his younger rivals.

“The number one requirement to succeed at this level is I think the constant desire and open-mindedness to master and improve and evolve yourself in every aspect,” Djokovic told me recently. “I know Roger has talked about this a lot, and I think it’s something most top athletes in all sports can agree on. Stagnation is regression.”

Federer understood, or came to understand, his weaknesses and addressed them: anger management, mental toughness, concentration, endurance, a chronically sore back, and his single-handed backhand drive. He switched tactics, attacking more from the baseline than the net. He switched to a larger-headed racket to increase his chances of thriving in extended rallies and switched coaches repeatedly—but not impulsively—to get a fresh perspective and sometimes went without a coach at all. Throughout his life he has sought out people who could serve as mentors, even role models for his next phase: from Sampras to prelapsarian Tiger Woods to, more recently, Bill Gates, whose philan- thropic approach Federer hopes to emulate in his later years.

His tennis skills have been the main ingredient in his success, but his people skills are also part of the recipe. Tennis superstars get a lot of free footwear, but it is rarer that they are able to put themselves in others’ shoes. Federer is an empath, constantly registering the feelings and energy in the stadium, the street, the room, the backseat.

“He’s extremely socially intelligent, and I think that’s a huge reason why he’s so popular,” said Andy Roddick, the American star who became his friend. “He’s a chameleon. He can work in kind of any room, and it’s a genuine emotion. It’s not like he’s fitting the mold in a calculated sense.”

Federer’s finely tuned antennae are part of the explanation for his postmatch tears, much less frequent now but still inseparably part of his persona. They seem to be not just an expression of joy or disappointment but a release after all the input he has absorbed on court.

It is not just about what he has invested emotionally in a match or a tournament; it is about what everyone has invested emotionally in a match or a tournament.

Argentina was an unexpectedly meaningful stop on the journey, and as we approached his hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, Federer, winner of a record seventeen Grand Slam singles titles at that stage, was emphasizing how much he still wanted to improve.

“I’m going to take a vacation after this, rest and just get away from it all, because the last few years have been extremely intense,” he said. “I feel if I keep on pushing at this pace I might lose interest like you mentioned, just get jaded.”

Federer laughed.

“ ‘Jaded.’ That’s the new word I have in my vocabulary, and that’s the last thing I want happening,” he said. “Hopefully next year is going to be a platform for many more years. That’s the opportunity I want to give myself.”

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P.S. I also got the chance earlier this year to discuss Federer’s evolution in depth with Patrick McEnroe for TennisWorthy, a podcast presented by the Hall of Fame.

You can find the latest edition of The Master here, and it’s on sale for a limited time, so I hope you’ll enjoy the savings and, above all, the book. I look forward to reconnecting with many of you as I write about the US Open.

Thank you!