Chapter 5 Chapter 2 The Boy Who Loved Tennis

(A Boy Discovers Tennis) Roger Federer's first idol was Boris Becker, when Becker won his first Wimbledon title in 1985 and sent Germany into a collective frenzy over their son's historic victory. Roger was just a four-year-old when he was tennis-crazed.Becker lost two Wimbledon finals to Stefan Edberg in 1988 and 1990, and Roger wept bitterly.Little boy Federer can watch tennis matches for hours on end in front of the TV, and his mother is amazed at how many details he can remember. "Tennis was my favorite sport," Roger recalled. "The game was always exciting, and I was always in control of winning or losing." After entering the school, he quickly became the top player in his age group and were allowed to attend special training sessions three times a week at the loosely knit tennis clubs in and around Basel.It was during these special training sessions that he met Marco Chiudinelli, another talented kid who was a month younger than Federer and also from Muhenstein.The two became good friends and spent a lot of time together outside the tennis court.

After practice, the boys play pelota with their tennis rackets and sometimes play ping pong and football together while their parents jog and bike.Although the two children played at different clubs - Federer at the Old Boys Tennis Club, which had better training conditions than the Ciba Tennis Club in Oshville, and Chiudinelli at the Basel Lawn Tennis Club; When a top-level regional tennis organization was formed, Roger and Marco, both 8 years old, became members. "When we were training it was always loud," recalls Chiudinelli. "We talked more than training. Training didn't seem important to us, we just wanted to have fun; we messed up. There was quite a bit of chaos and one of us was often thrown off the training ground."

Federer and Chiudinelli quickly became the black sheep of the team, and their parents were outraged to find that one of the two children was often punished for infractions and sat on the sidelines to watch the second half of the training session. The two eight-year-olds met for the first time in an official game at the "Kids Cup" in Arlesheim. "At that time we only played nine-inning long games," Chiudinelli explained. "I got off to a bad start, I was 2-5 behind and started crying. At that time, even if we kids were playing I used to cry a lot. When we switched sides, Roger came up to me and tried to comfort me; he told me things were going to get better, and they did. Not only did I catch up to a 7-6 lead, And I found that I had taken control of the game. Then he started crying, and I ran to encourage him, and he felt better. That was the only time I beat him."

Roger was trained by Adolf Kacovsky, the coach of the Old Boys Tennis Club, known as "Seppli".Like many of his fellow Czechs caught up in "Prague Spring" in 1968, Kakovsky fled Czechoslovakia when Soviet tanks rolled over the Czech capital to quell riots.A year later, he came to Basel via Tunisia, and until 1996 he was the club's top professional player. "I immediately realized that this little guy is a great genius," Kakovsky said of Federer: "He just came to the world with a racket in his hand." Federer only accepted group training at first, but soon he got One-to-one special care. "The club and I noticed very quickly that he was incredibly talented," Kakowski said. "We started giving him private training sessions, partly funded by the club. Roger learns very quickly and when you teach him something new When , he mastered it in three or four tries, while other children often took weeks."

This star student is not only talented and loves to hit the ball, but also has great ambitions.Kakowski recalls Federer always saying he wanted to be the best tennis player in the world. "People always laugh it off, including me," he said. "I think he might be the best player in Switzerland or Europe, but not number one in the world. put effort into it.” However, Roger's club career began with a disastrous defeat.In his first tournament in the eight-year-old group, he lost the opening game 0-6, 0-6, although he didn't think he played all that badly in hindsight.Not surprisingly, Federer cried again after losing.

"His opponent was much stronger than him," Kakowski said. "It was his first game after all, and he was very nervous in the crucial moments of the game." Roger was constantly looking for all kinds of people to practice with him, and if he couldn't find anyone, he would hit the ball against the wall for hours on end.The Swiss tennis magazine Smash first took an interest in him when he was 11 years old.When he reached the semifinals in October 1992 at the Basel Junior Cup, the entry-level tournament for competitive tennis, the magazine ran a small piece about the teenage Federer.Although Roger improved rapidly, he still suffered a lot of painful and embarrassing losses.Danny Schnyder, the younger brother of Patty Schnyder, who would become a top women's player, became his arch rival and the biggest pain in his teenage tennis career. "I tried everything and it didn't make a difference," Federer recalls. "I always lost, and it was hopeless."

Schneider also confirmed at the same time that Federer did not take the training match as seriously as he did the official match. "When the big moments came, he always took his chances," he said.Roger himself realized that his performance in training games was not enough to dispel all doubts. "I was actually serious at the time, but I just didn't like training," he said years later. "My parents always told me to 'practice better,' but I still often lacked motivation. I was a player." He is also often unable to get rid of the control of negative emotions on the field. "When things didn't go his way, he would swear and beat the beat," Karkowski explained. "Sometimes his behavior was so egregious that I had to intervene."

"I was cursing and slapping my racket," Federer said. "It was really bad. My parents were embarrassed and told me not to do it or they would never play tournaments with me again. I had to Calm down, but it was an extremely long process. I think I started chasing perfection too early." Roger won his first Swiss national championship in 1993 when he was 11, beating Chiudinelli in the final of the Swiss Under-12 Indoor Championship in Lucerne.Six months later, he won the Swiss Under-12 Outdoor Championship in Bellinzona, beating Schneider in the final.The laurels of these two events are of great significance to Federer's growth. "I thought, 'Ha, I can win, too,'" he said. "I actually could."

After his ninth birthday, Federer sometimes trained at the Old Boys Tennis Club with a young assistant coach named Peter Carter.The Australian always gets people to call him Pete, whether it's a housewife or a bank president.He was a sympathetic, conscientious young man, with straight, unshaven blond hair that always fell over his forehead, large eyes, and a rather soft voice.He was born in 1964 in Nuriootpa, a town of 40 wine producers in the Barossa Valley in South Australia.As a member of the Australian Institute of Sport, he became a professional tennis player, but he was not even a second-rate player, only achieving the highest career ranking of 173rd.

The idea of ​​sending Roger to the Swiss National Tennis Center in Ecubrand came about during the winter of 1994 and 1995. His parents were satisfied with Pete Carter's work and the training conditions provided, but the National Tennis Center Federer's Tennis Etudes program is funded by the Swiss Tennis Association, which is very attractive to the Federer family from a financial point of view. Eight boys and four girls are trained by experienced coaches at the National Tennis Center on the shores of Lake Geneva. The students can choose whether to live in local homes, and can continue their studies in public schools, but some courses are exempted.One of the key figures in this plan is Pierre Paganini, who, like Pete Carter, will play a key role in Federer's tennis career going forward.A former decathlete and college-educated physical education teacher, Paganini is EcoBrown's strength coach and administrator.

When Roger's parents asked if he'd be interested in going to Eco Brown, he said no.Afterwards, they were even more shocked to read in a tennis magazine that their son's intention was to at least graduate from school first. In March 1995, Federer came to Lake Geneva as one of 15 candidates for the entrance test, which included a 12-minute run, an endurance test, a demonstration of tennis skills and a test match.Federer quickly convinced Pierre Paganini and national team coach Christophe Freyss that he was well-qualified.They gave advance notice that he had passed the test when he was still at Ecubran.