In a nutshell: this is essentially the book Federer would have written if he had decided to write one at this stage of his career.
Is that praise or faint damnation? It depends on what you’re looking for. Those who want deep, dark secrets, or even just some sniping about tennis’ Mr. Perfect, you’re going to be disappointed. There are few opportunities to criticize Federer to begin with, and the book demurs even on those – some unprofessional losses early on, opting not to play Davis Cup, being friends with Anna Wintour.
On the other hand, slavish fans looking for gossipy insights won’t really be satisfied either. You will find out that Federer didn’t kiss Mirka until the last day of their 2000 Olympics meeting, but it doesn’t get much racier than that.
What the book is is a solid retelling of Federer’s life and career, almost as if all the features Stauffer must have written on Federer over the years had run into each other and emerged as a continuous line. Stauffer is a Swiss journalist at Tages-Anzeiger, and the writing is simple and matter-of-fact, even if the translation makes it a bit choppy at times.
For those who know the basic outlines of Federer’s background but not much more, Quest for Perfection is great for filling in the white spaces. It’s accessible and sketches out his career development very logically. At the same time, it throws in enough about his personality and the rest of his life to flesh out the tale without turning it into it a flabby puff-piece.
For hardcore followers, the chronological account is a neat little refresher, but the most interesting parts are the less well-known stories about Federer’s childhood and early years as a player. There’s mention of Federer’s first ‘serious match’ at age eight, which he lost 6-0, 6-0 and cried afterwards. (The second part is easier to believe than the first.) Elsewhere, Yves Allegro remembers his teenage roommate thus – “I usually did the cooking because I had more experience. Roger didn’t have much initiative but he always helped if I asked him to.”
The last quarter of the book is a more thematic look at Federer – the player, the person, the business man, the celebrity, and all-round nice guy. His relative restraint in the commercial side of things is framed with an anecdote from his mother, Lynette:
Lynette Federer was astonished to read one of her son’s first interviews in a Swiss newspaper when he was still a youngster. The question to Federer was,” What would you buy with your first prize money paycheck?” and the answer actually printed in the paper was “A Mercedes.” Roger was still in school at the time and didn’t even have a driver’s license. His mother knew him well enough to know that the answer couldn’t be correct. She called the editors of the paper and asked to hear the taped conversation. The mother’s intuition was correct. He had really said, “More CDs.”
And while most of us know Federer had a wild temper as a kid, Stauffer gives us a good sense of the still snub-nosed kid who flung racquets around in the Swiss National Tennis Centre:
Roger personally recounted probably the most embarrassing story from his time in Biel. “There was a new curtain at the tennis center,” he said. “They said that if someone were to wreck the curtain, they had to clean toilettes for a week. I looked at the curtain and thought that it was so thick there was no way anybody could wreck it. Ten minutes later, I turned around and hurled my racquet at the curtain like a helicopter. It sliced through the curtain like a knife going through butter.” Everyone stopped and stared at Roger. “No, I thought, that’s impossible, the worst nightmare. I took my things and left. They would have thrown me out anyway.
Incidentally, those who tuned into the Tennis Channel Friday afternoon to see what you thought would be the Washington quarterfinals, the documentary being shown instead contains Federer telling the above story almost word for word – right down to the ‘knife through butter.’
His ability to retell stories notwithstanding, Steve – do you think the accounts of his early years give us any insight into the player Federer now is?
The source of all that youthful anger, Stauffer believes, is Federer’s perfectionism – an intense desire to play as well as it’s possible to play, and rage when he fell short of the goal. It’s an interesting thesis, and though it’s not pursued actively in the pages that follow, you find yourself thinking of it every now and again.
The account goes up to a surprisingly recent point, leaving off at the end of this year’s Australian Open. Which is fitting, because that’s as well as I’ve seen Federer play over the course of a tournament, and perhaps as well as he’ll ever play. Not a single set dropped, an awe-inspiring performance against Andy Roddick in the semifinals, and in the final, a straightforward win over a player who had been playing pretty close to perfection himelf – Fernando Gonzalez. He looked simply... untouchable.
The Quest for Perfection. Did it end when the book does?
Kamakshi
