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It has been almost a year since Roger Federer announced his retirement. It was a Friday evening in September, it was the first day of the Laver Cup: a doubles match with his friend and rival Rafael Nadal was the last match played by the Swiss champion after more than twenty years of career.
Roger embodies the perfect prototype of the tennis player. Winning, elegant, with a tennis that has reached levels of unattainable beauty. Roger agreed on the court to everything an athlete can embody. Victories, defeats, joy and tears, the man who is the god of tennis, but who, in the toughest moments of his career, becomes humanly human.
Grace in defeats, the aura and character of infinite class, the point of connection between the old and the new. A glamorous life off the court, a love story with Mirka that is worthy of a romantic film. Money as if there were no tomorrow, charity, and, in a single, symbolic sentence: pure poetry slow to tennis.
He is like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Elvis, Freddy Mercury or William Shakespeare, he marked history. A pop icon of our Era. When a fan thinks of tennis an image comes before the court, before the ball, the racket or the net: it is the image of Roger Federer.
Present at an event for Uniqlo and interviewed by the New York Times, the twenty-time Grand Slam champion returned to the sensations he experienced after saying goodbye to tennis He explained: "Life without the game, life without the fans and life without the show that has dominated my life for 25 years was definitely something I didn't know how I was going to take.
For a long time I tried to go back and give myself another chance, to leave this sport healthy, but it just wasn't feasible. But the good and bad thing about Covid and with my knee surgery, is that everything has started to slow down in the last three years, so it's not like I come in after playing 100 games and then boom, it's over.
In the end, I was relieved, I think, and happy to retire. It ended perfectly at the Laver Cup. I was surrounded by my biggest rivals, and my family and friends were there. For me it was like: OK, I'm fine now." Retirement allowed Roger Federer to expand his horizons.
From the co-chair at the Met Gala to the presence in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, passing through his appearance on stage at the Coldplay concert in Zurich, a new life has begun for the Swiss tennis player. He said: "I've always been strict and serious about being a professional athlete, but I would eat hamburgers, I would eat desserts, I would drink a glass of wine.
For me, eating a hamburger was nothing out of the ordinary, but this one looked perfect, so I I had to post a picture of it. I'm doing things that weren't feasible when I was playing because it took too long."