The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

Product Information

Rafa/Fed rivalry - different from Fed/Sampras because Rafa was only a few years younger and hadn’t idolized Fed, nor was Fed the unquestioned future #1 during Rafa’s childhood. Lots of commonalities leading to mutual respect and a form of friendship - strong families, education by coaches with shortcomings as players, egalitarian streaks in coaching/upbringing, innovative fitness regimens, choosing tennis over soccer in similar fashion, respect for history of game. Clarey emphasizes Nadal’s love of process - not about kill but love of hunt; putting Fed on pedestal even while moving toward surpassing him (09 Aus).

Roger Federer: Die Biografie was first published in 2019 in German, but now the publisher, Polaris, has translated the book into English, and some minor updates have brought it up to date for 2021. This is a book about endings. As Dyer contemplates his own aging and mortality, he looks at the ends of the lives of a wide variety of well-known (and less well-known) from all walks of life: Dylan, Federer, Nietzsche, British painter J.M.W. Turner, Beethoven, and many more. The book also includes great photographs, the majority given by the interviewees, showing the Federer they knew, the “goofy”, fun-loving Federer who turned himself into one of the greatest players in history.Nietzsche and Wagner had a falling out around the time Wagner suggested Nietzsche's poor eyesight was a result of excessive masturbation haha By turns educational, witty, self-indulgent, boring and fascinating, the book is a sampler of the author’s interests, likely to only connect sporadically with the reader’s. If you’re into Beethoven, Nietzsche, Dylan, Turner, jazz, psychedelics and tennis, you’re sorted. one explanation for the dearth of topflight American men’s tennis players in the 2010s was that the Europeans had a developmental advantage growing up on clay. He maintained that too many young Americans were adept at striking the ball but not at playing the game itself. Clay was perhaps the best classroom, blunting raw power and encouraging point construction I still feel Roger lost this slam in the semi’s. For me the winner still is open- book on Aggasi followed by Rafa- book on Nadal. Have not read novaks biography and it could be the wild card - who knows .

Nicolas Mahut tells how he was so nervous to play the man he calls “James Bond”; Pat Rafter discusses his 3-0 record against Federer; Stefanos Tsitsipas and Matteo Berrettini reveal how they were inspired to play by Federer; Coco Gauff and Ons Jabeur share their feelings about a man who transcended tennis and there’s also a chapter from Craig O’Shannessy, who shares a secret behind Federer’s stunning 2017 Australian Open triumph. I used to believe that this fascination on my part was derived more from a curiosity about death, but I now better understand it's more the way we end things — whether it's the end of our days or the end of our profession — that I find so compelling. And as you say, your interviews with Federer are always revealing. Most interviews with him are, because he rarely limits his comments strictly to the topic at hand, and there seems to be a porous filter between what goes through his head and what comes out of his mouth. I think fans of his will enjoy your accounts of your trips with him and talks with him. Interesting that when he’s in a group of friends and business colleagues, Federer will spend as much time listening as he does talking. Geoff Dyer hates Anthony Powell and "A Dance to the Music of Time" more than anything in the world.Da ich selten Biografien lese, war dies für mich tatsächlich ein Genre-Ausflug über meinen üblichen Tellerrand hinaus. Und es hat sich durchaus gelohnt… :-) An extended meditation on late style and last works from one of our greatest living critics (Kathryn Schulz, New York). Federer seems like someone who is good at appreciating what’s around him, and retaining his sense of wonder about it all. On a few occasions, when he’s been asked about a past match, I’ve heard him mention that he enjoyed the weather that day—the sight of the sun setting over the court, or a storm he could see coming in the distance. As you say in the book, “jaded” has never been in his vocabulary.

Titled The Roger Federer Effect, Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed their Lives and published by Pitch, the book includes more than 40 exclusive interviews with players, coaches, rivals, fans, friends and people from outside tennis, including the world of music, film and even politics. Your enjoyment will depend on how interesting you find the myriad subjects touched upon over the course of the book but Dyer is nothing if not an affable and amusing host who manages to convey interest in things you might not have thought yourself interested in. That said, there are definitely some subjects Dyer is unable to do that to (ie. jazz - the only thing worse than reading about jazz is listening to it), but all told I found this book to be fairly entertaining and enlightening even.Anelise Chen's So Many Olympic Exertions feels like a book on a similar wavelength as this one. But while that book was largely a serious examination of why we do what we do, Dyer's is equal parts serious and hilarious. It's not just people, either, but art more generally. How much weight do you give the end of a film or novel? If an otherwise fabulous series ends badly (HBO's "Game of Thrones" comes to mind here, though that's just the more recent popular example — I haven't watched it), does it negate the positive things that series gave you earlier on? Does it render the whole experience worthless? By interviewing people in Roger’s life (friends, peers / rivals, coaches, fans, journalists, celebrities/personalities etc.), this book provides stories from every interviewee’s perspective, how they view Roger as a person and as a professional tennis player, how Roger impacts their life one way or the other. The parts of this I enjoyed the most had to do with Dyer's own personal adventures and misadventures, whether his long-running mission to never pay for shampoo again or his frustrated attempt to complete "A Dance to the Music of Time." Even when I didn't completely relate to the enthusiasm Dyer shows to things like jazz, I always enjoyed the writing. And when Dyer turned his attention to people and things I am enthusiastic about — films, novels, Christopher Hitchens, Federer, etc — I was enthralled. I feel everyone should take my review with a pinch of salt, because it's me reading a biography about someone I know most things about and have read a lot of interviews and watched a lot of pressers of.

Auch wenn alle Drei exzellente Spieler sind, war es doch immer Federer, der mir aufgefallen ist. Im Gegensatz zu den meisten seiner Gegner blieb er stets ruhig und wirkte immer ein wenig so, als ob er über den Dingen stehen würde. Und auch wenn er nicht immer der Sieger war, wirkte er nie wie ein Verlierer. Dyer gets off to a bad start when he writes about Dylan and has the temerity to rewrite some of his lyrics. Yeah, Geoff, you're not that good. There’s also snippets of autobiography included here, like Dyer’s love of playing tennis leading to numerous health problems over the years, which also ties into the theme of last things as Dyer is ageing (he’s in his 60s) and facing his mortality as his body begins to break down. I was surprised by how druggy a writer he turned out to be, although I shouldn’t be given that I know nothing about the man! Later in the book, you take a 7:00 A.M. flight with Federer from sunny California to wintry Chicago for business. For a lot of us, this would be the height of drudgery and—even on a private jet—the downside of a life lived on the road. But not for Federer.The best way I can describe it is via Cioran's wise observation that the further one advances in life the less there is to convert to. Some writers are so strong with such distinct and profound a vision of the world as to affect you in the psychic space where that urge - to convert - once had resided. You respond to that power even as you know that conversion would be a regression, a stupid insult to the writer in question." (77) But “The Last Days of Roger Federer” weds this erudite treatment of “lateness” with the author’s own personal, far less theoretical approach to it. (“This book must not be allowed to become an injury diary or sprain journal,” he admonishes himself at one point.) The obverse of art for Dyer is tennis. “Playing tennis is such a big part of my happiness,” he writes. “Let’s say I play twice a week for a maximum of two hours per session. That’s only 4 out of 112 waking hours but as a percentage of my weekly allotment of well-being it’s way in excess of that figure, even when offset by the number of hours— 16? 20? — spent feeling wrung out and utterly depleted afterwards. The glow of those four hours suffuses the whole week.” It's a long book, bogged in statistics and tennis detail which misses opportunities to explore motivation during major changes in Federas life, even when there is a rich source of recorded information during post match interviews. But as the book goes on, Dyer has some interesting thoughts on mortality; about how, as we get older, we recover more slowly (if at all) from injuries. But in our minds, we are still the young people we were at our peak. Our minds are willing but our bodies are weak. This isn’t a book about endings. It is a book about how to get a sample of many books about all these other things.