This is an item that may reveal how “cool” Roger is the night before a
Wimbledon final….an excerpt from The Roger Federer Story, Quest for
Perfection, a newly-released biography of Federer written by Swiss journalist
Rene Stauffer (seat143 in the press room)…for more information on the book, go
to www.rogerfedererbook.com



Everybody Wants Him

The Everyday Media Routine

It was July 3, 2004—the evening before the Wimbledon final between Roger
Federer and Andy Roddick. Our reports for the Sonntags Zeitung had already
been sent off to Zurich and my colleague Simon Graf and I were gathering
our stuff in the press room at the All England Club when my cell phone rang.
The name “Vavrinec” was illuminated in the display but it was not Mirka on
the line, but Roger himself. I was surprised because it was rather unusual for
him to call personally, especially the night before a Wimbledon final. Our
paper was printing a major story on his girlfriend for the following day and
had sent an electronic courtesy copy of the article to her via email. The fact
that Roger was calling me did not seem to be a good sign.

It was known that Federer was reluctant to see anybody in his camp become
too closely examined in the media spotlight and he felt obligated to
protect them. After many attempts to convince Mirka to sit down for an in-
depth personal interview, she finally spoke candidly about her daily routine,
her relationship to Roger, about children and about marriage. The thought
occurred to me that Roger now wanted to pull the emergency brake and stop
the publication of the interview—which was impossible to do at such a late
hour. In any case, it must have been something important if he were on the
line personally the evening before one of the biggest matches of his career.

He seemed to have anticipated my thoughts, but also seemed amused and
quickly dispelled my misgivings. His only concern about the interview was
that the answer to the question about his friend Reto Staubli’s role in his
camp needed to be more exactly defined. Staubli, a former professional tennis
player from Switzerland, accompanied Federer to tournaments at the time after
Federer’s separation from Peter Lundgren. He sometimes trained with him
and appeared to have assumed the role of coach. Federer’s reason for calling
was to have this part of the story more concretely portrayed in order to save
any trouble for his friend, who still held a job as a banker back in
Switzerland.
“Reto doesn’t want to risk losing his job at the bank and so far he has used
all his vacation time to work with us,” Federer explained over the phone.
“Thanks to the generosity of his employers in complying with his wishes, he
has now received unpaid vacation time.”

This small incident illustrates three of Federer’s character traits—his
willingness
to help friends, his effort to keep all the collateral consequences of
his career under control, and his ability to just act naturally. He always had
a
relaxed relationship with the media and he was always a very social person.
Even as a junior, he was not afraid to talk to journalists about an article
that he didn’t agree with. As the No. 1 player in the world, Forbes magazine
counted 24,396 stories about Federer over a 12-month period making the
task of keeping track of his press virtually impossible.



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