Murray joins fan club as Federer becomes the hottest ticket in town
Clamour to see tennis great Roger one last time
THESE are inflationary times, but little compares to what happened with Laver Cup tickets around mid-afternoon last Thursday. No sooner had Roger Federer released a video announcing that this would be his final top-level appearance than prices began to spiral on the exchanges.
A day pass that was already fetching over £200 was quickly on its way to multiplying around five times for those desperate to see history, from this coming Friday through to Sunday.
Despite the steep initial cost of admission, the O2 Arena was sold out long before Federer gave the news that his multitude of fans were dreading.
But then it is not hyperbolic to state that these three days promise something that we will never see the like of again, even if it is all happening in an event that is somewhat confected.
Three of the greatest athletes any sport has ever seen — Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic — will line up together for Team Europe.
Added to them is Andy Murray, who for a few years turned the Big Three into the Big Four. For good measure the team captains are also from the category that might be termed living legends: Bjorn Borg for Europe and John McEnroe for Team World.
So while the tournament itself might not be that meaningful, it does bring together a rare assembly of tennis royalty to round off a week of historic resonance in a much more profound and important context.
What nobody quite knows is the sort of shape Federer will be in, and how much part he will be able to take in a project that is very much his own brainchild.
Under the rules of the competition each player from the six-man teams must feature in at least one singles match. A minimum of four must participate in the doubles.
All through the US Open there were rumours about whether the Swiss was going to make it to play in London, but these met with little official response. Reports in Switzerland suggested that he had problems with water on the right knee which has, long term, defeated him.
Presumably Federer, who has been back on the practice court in recent weeks, has been told he is able to give it one last throw with no future commitments to worry about.
His plan originally had been to play one more Wimbledon, but clearly the damage is too great after three surgeries to continue for another nine months.
There had been speculation that he might wish to bow out at his home-town tournament of Basel next month, at the venue where he was once a ballboy.
Yet his relationship with the event in his birthplace has been a complicated one, even though he has played it regularly and won it 10 times. His interaction with tournament director Roger Brennwald has been particularly strained over the years, and they have clashed over appearance fees.
He might also fear playing one more full-blooded match on the ATP Tour against an opponent going all out for victory, but he has said so little recently aside from last week’s announcement that this cannot be known. It is planned that he will at least make an public appearance there to say farewell.
What can be said with certainty is that Federer has invested much time and money in the Laver Cup, which is promoted by his management company Team8 and came into being five years ago with a launch edition in Prague. It has since gone to Chicago, Geneva and Boston before winding up in London at what was the highly successful home of the season-end ATP Finals before that moved to Turin last year.
Within the game there is some scepticism about the format, with half the team picked on merit after the French Open and the other three being so-called ‘captain’s picks’.
The basis for selection is murky, and not always done for purely sporting reasons.
Murray, for instance, was named during the first week of Wimbledon when he hardly warranted being ahead of the likes of Cam Norrie, given the season he was having. Murray is though, of course, a more prestigious name to attract fans. There is no mechanism for the late inclusion of Carlos Alcaraz, the new US Open champion.
There has also been the issue of Team Europe being far stronger than its rest of the world opposition. McEnroe’s team are yet to win in their brief history, and at Boston in 2021 they went down by 14 points to one (matches on the Sunday are worth three times those of Friday).
Yet what is also true is that casual fans have hugely enjoyed the spectacle of all this talent — and all these egos — mixed up together on teams in this highly unusual format.
The sight of Nadal rushing off the team sofa to give coaching tips to Djokovic at changeovers, for instance, would not happen anywhere else.
After the crushing disappointment of Friday night’s Davis Cup defeat, Murray said he was looking forward to it: ‘Maybe I will get the opportunity to share a court with him (Federer) in doubles or something like that, which would be really special. But I don’t know how much he’ll be able to play.
‘Obviously he was an amazing player. I was lucky to get to compete against him in some of the biggest matches, in the biggest tournaments, on the biggest stages in our sport.
‘At the time I probably didn’t appreciate it as much but now, looking back, it’s pretty amazing. It’s incredible what he achieved and also what Rafa and Novak have done, as well.
‘He had an unbelievable career. The way that he played the game, conducted himself and all of those things, I think all of the players respected him for that.’
So it does not do to get too sniffy about where this competition lies in the broader scheme of tennis, this year above all, when it will be all about one man.