My Federer Obsession: Part 2

When I saw Roger Federer play for the first time in 2003, tennis didn’t mean much to me, but… By 2003 when I first saw Roger Federer, tennis didn’t mean much to me but this hadn’t always been the case. As a boy I loved the sport with an all-consuming passion. Between the ages of about five and eleven, it was–by some distance–the most important thing in my life. I first played it–or a version of it–in the south of France. My parents owned a house in a village called La Garde-Freinet, a treacherous hour’s drive from Saint-Tropez. We used to stay there in the holidays, but in 1981, when I was five, we decamped there for a whole year as my father, a historian, had taken a sabbatical from his university job in order to write the first volume of his biography of the econ¬omist John Maynard Keynes. My eight-year-old brother and I attended the local school, where we learned idiosyncratic French (in my case, a tortuously ungrammatical Franglais) and formed tentative friendships with other kids from the village. Our younger sister was born in December that year–the first home birth in the village, as the local paper noted,…