But traveling with him and his team on a plane was the highest level of access I’d been granted to date, and a sign of how eager Federer and Godsick were for their brainchild to succeed. In Paris, I once enjoyed a ridiculously good view of the Place de la Concorde from Federer’s suite at the Hôtel de Crillon while his future wife, Mirka Vavrinec, tried on designer clothes. Our meetings have taken place everywhere from a back court at Wimbledon to the back seat of a chauffeured car in Buenos Aires from Times Square to the shores of Lake Zurich. Federer did not collaborate with me on the book from which this article is adapted, but I have followed him on six continents (the Antarctic tennis scene has yet to take off) and interviewed him more than 20 times over two decades for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. I was along for the four-hour ride: a chance to get an extended look at a day in his business life as he toured the next venue for the nascent Laver Cup, a pet project of Federer and his longtime agent, Tony Godsick. He was soon cleared to board the private jet that would take him to Chicago. He was far from grumpy as he chatted and yawned in the cool of the early morning on too little sleep. The guy should be at 30 Grand Slam tournaments if you’re talking about del Potro, Djokovic, Nadal and all these matches he lost where he was clearly ahead.”Īnd yet as we talked on the tarmac, Federer, with his long-horizon perspective and preternatural ability to compartmentalize, seemed well equipped to cope with the letdown. “I know it’s bad to say this,” said Günter Bresnik, one of tennis’s top coaches, who has known and respected Federer since his teenage years, “but I sometimes call Federer an underachiever in tennis, considering all the matches in big tournaments he lost being already up. He has lost more than 20 times after holding match point, while Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have lost fewer than 10 such matches. It was the sort of reversal of fortune that happened rarely - but more often to Federer than to his rivals at the top of the game. He served for the title against del Potro at 5-4 in the third set and failed to finish him off despite holding three match points. But Indian Wells was a rather disappointing sequel. At 36, he was the oldest player to hold the spot since the A.T.P. 1 ranking for the first time in more than five years. Just the previous month, Federer had capped his remarkable late-career surge by reclaiming the No. We met on the tarmac in Thermal, a short drive from Indian Wells, where Federer had lost the day before in the final of the 2018 BNP Paribas Open to Juan Martín del Potro. It was moving day in the California desert, and Roger Federer was up before dawn.
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