The following is from the Daily Telegraph from London. For more information, go
to www.rogerfedererbook.com
Sportsbooks: The making of Super Roger
By Andrew Baker
Last Updated: 1:32am BST 05/07/2007

We have not seen much of Roger Federer at Wimbledon this year. Under normal
circumstances, if a defending champion has not played at The Championships for
five days on the trot, or, to put it another way, from one month to the next,
it would be fair to assume that he or she has been knocked out of the
tournament. But normal circumstances have hardly applied in SW19 this summer.
Indeed, so extreme have the conditions been that it would have been no
surprise at all to look up from one's heavily diluted Pimm's to see an ark
floating past down Church Road.
As if Federer did not have enough going his way, his projected opponent in the
fourth round, Germany's Tommy Haas, withdrew. So for the last few days, Federer
has been having a gentle hit on the practice courts (the indoor ones,
naturally), conducting the odd interview and generally taking things easy.
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Meanwhile his rivals have been undergoing the water torture, which involves
warming up in the locker room 10 to 15 times a day, venturing on to court for a
knock-up and a few games (or in some cases, just an abbreviated knock-up) and
then scampering back to the locker-room to escape the next incoming
cyclone/deluge/Wagnerian thunderstorm.
It is not only the players who suffer. Spectators retreat to the rain shelters
which have been prophetically included in the partially rebuilt Centre Court,
there to shiver, consult damp programmes and discuss what they will do with
their wet-weather refund. Journalists, meanwhile, press their noses to the
streaming windows of the press room in the Millennium Building and wonder what
the hell they are going to write about now that they have done the
strawberries, Serena Williams' jewellery and "Where Next For British Tennis?"
half a dozen times already.
One of the more desperate topics we consider at such junctures is "What do the
players do during rain breaks?" The answer is that they play on their
PlayStations or Game Boys, listen to their iPods or text their mates. In the
old days, of course, they would have been curled up with books, but the modern
player seems not to have the necessary attention span.
Which is a shame, because they could be doing some useful homework. Released
this week, and selling, I am assured, like hot cakes (or, indeed, cold prawn
sandwiches) in Wimbledon High Street is The Roger Federer Story by Rene
Stauffer (New Chapter Press, £21.50 or thereabouts), which purports to be the
definitive tale of the man who may be, and almost certainly will become, the
greatest tennis player the world has known.
The book is subtitled Quest for Perfection, although in the original German it
was Das Tennis-Genie, which needs little translation. Genius, perfection, these
are words regularly bandied around when Federer is in action at Wimbledon. What
we want to know, and what Stauffer sets out to tell us, is how the player's
prodigious gifts were developed. Not just from idle curiosity, of course,
because we want to know how we can get hold of a British version.
The first point that emerges is that it was all Roger's idea. He is not the
product of Tennis Parents From Hell, pushing their reluctant offspring to ever
greater efforts on the court. When the teenage Roger was miserable and homesick
during his first lengthy training spell away from home at the Swiss Academy,
he would telephone his mother, Lynette, for an hour every evening. She would
make it clear that he could quit any time he wanted.
But Roger did not want to quit. When he was not the best player in his town,
he wanted to be. When he was not the best player in his canton, he wanted to
be. When he was not the best player in Switzerland, he wanted to be. And when
his gifted contemporaries stated that their ambition was to make it into the
world's top 100, young Roger always said that he wanted to be the best. He
wanted to be the world's No 1.
This took patience and application, qualities that did not come easily. The
young Roger was a stark contrast to his urbane, articulate and sporting adult
self. He was a serial racket-buster and umpire-abuser, and his language was so
persistently foul that at one stage his parents refused to come and watch him
play. What is more, his backhand, that thing of rare beauty, was for many years
the weakest element in his game.
There is much here for his opponents to ponder on if they can tear themselves
away from Super Mario long enough to consider the tale of Super Roger.


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