THE MASTER

THE BRILLIANT CAREER OF ROGER FEDERER CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

John Murray, 421pp, £20 The crucial elements in the life of one of the tennis greats of our time were well set out by G Sampath in The

Hindu: ‘His Swiss-south African origins, early years of training in Basel, his teenage tantrums, the untimely demise of his Aussie coach Peter Carter and how it goaded him to take full ownership of his talent, the years of absolute dominance followed by a three-way rivalry with Nadal and Djokovic, and his wife Mirka’s role as a shield against off-court pressures.’ Clarey, Sampath went on, ‘pulls off the difficult feat of assimilating these known facts with original observations, drawing on anecdotes and insights culled from interviews with some 80 people’.

William Skidelsky, in the Times, acknowledged Clarey, chief tennis correspondent of the New York

Times, as the ‘doyen of tennis journalism’ whose ‘knowledge of the sport is compendious’ and his portrait of the early life ‘especially interesting’. ‘His parents, both keen players, supported their son’s tennis but left him free to make his own choices, and his advancement, Clarey makes clear, was a collaborative effort.’ It was Carter who had most influence on the embryonic champion both in life and death, and, said Sampath, ‘moulded his distinctive free-flowing technique and bequeathed him the famous one-handed backhand’. And it was Carter’s shocking early death that ‘played a crucial role in motivating Federer’s ascent to greatness’, revealed Skidelsky. ‘In the months that followed there was a marked change in his approach: he became far more focused and determined — as if playing for “Pete upstairs”.’