It seems every TV channel your turn on when you are watching a major tennis tournament - whatever country you are in - you always see a substantial sit down interview with Roger Federer. Just the other day in the United States, Federer is sitting with for a long interview with Chris Fowler and the ESPN2 crew and then he is sitting for an extended interview with Bill Macatee and The Tennis Channel. You know that he is also doing similar interviews with British TV (probably BBC and Sky) and also for Eurosport and Swiss TV. What is with Roger and his accommodating nature with the media? Rene Stauffer, in his book The Roger Federer Story, Quest for Perfection (www.rogerfedererbook.com) gives us a look at Roger and his media persona in this exclusive excerpt from his best-selling book.

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.

There is no escape from the media for successful tennis players. It grows up with them and creates an involuntary community of purpose. They have to give interviews to the media after every match-so press conferences have be­come as much part of the game as showers and massages. Conversations with the media, however, can be stressful with difficult questions being asked and more than niceties being exchanged. Sometimes skeletons are dragged out of closets, provocative questions posed and prejudices reaffirmed. Many players therefore view press conferences as an irksome duty-a frustrating waste of time. Players answer questions suspiciously and become reticent or evasive and attempt to create distance between themselves and the media. Those who say nothing can’t say anything wrong. They can also retreat from their ex­posed positions more quickly where cameras and microphones mercilessly catch every movement and every word and broadcast them to the world.

These mandatory post-match interviews are normally conducted in English first and then, if necessary, in the player’s native language. On some oc­casions, press interviews can last longer than the matches themselves. The growth and development in the media world have contributed to a greater demand by television, radio stations and internet websites to cover events in person and gain quotes and comments from the players.

It may be a blessing that Federer, in addition to Swiss German, also has a near perfect command of High German, English and French-but sometimes his multilingualism is a disadvantage in these interview sessions. His press conferences routinely last the longest of any player because, next to English and German, he also has to provide quotes in French, which in the meantime has become a second native language for him and is the second official lan­guage of Switzerland behind German. Federer is also often accompanied by a small group of French-speaking Swiss journalists at the bigger tournaments.

With the other players, such as the Argentineans, press conferences are almost a walk in the park. Guillermo Coria, for example, even after five years on the professional tour, only appeared at press conferences accompanied by a translator and then only spoke Spanish. David Nalbandian is such a master at the art of evasion and economy of words that his interview transcript rarely takes up more than one page.

Some players, on the other hand, use the press conference as a forum to settle personal scores, to take revenge for unwelcome articles. Time and again there are instances when certain interviewers are boycotted or ejected from the room. Even John McEnroe, for example, had no reservations about do­ing this. Boris Becker also used to humiliate journalists, though somewhat more gently. He would sometimes answer questions from people who he had known for years and on familiar terms with only to maliciously begin ad­dressing them in formal terms.

Playing these kinds of wicked games is unimaginable for Federer. He is a person who greets journalists when he comes in and then says good-bye to them when he leaves-even after defeats. When he first started to play profes­sional tennis, he constantly astounded reporters after interviews by thanking them for having come to his match and his press conference. He notices when there is a familiar face who he hasn’t seen for a long time in the press room, approaches the media to ask which journalist is covering which tour­nament, and sometimes even poses questions back to the reporters during press conferences.

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