Roger Federer is a name sure to become legendary in the tennis world. He has won four Tennis Master’s Cup titles, thirteen Grand Slam singles titles, fourteen ATP Masters Series titles and an Olympic Gold Medal, all by the age of 27! Federer has won 19 Grand Slam singles titles (a record which still stands), 10 of which were won consecutively between Wimbledon in 2005 and the US Open in 2007. Federer is currently ranked second in the world, having held the number one rank between February 2004 and August 2008; he was also the winner of the Laureus World Sportsman award for four consecutive years between 2004 and 2008.
Roger Federer was born in August 8, 1981 in Basel, Switzerland. He spent most of his childhood in Munchenstein, Switzerland near the French-German boarders with his parents- Swiss-German Robert Federer and South African Lynette Federer. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and was even given the honor of meeting Pope Benedict XVI while playing at the 2006 Internazionali BNL d’ Italia tournament held in Rome. Although Federer considers French-Germa as his native language, he can speak German, French and English fluently.
At the age of 6, Roger Federer had shown great potentials of becoming an athlete. The beginnings of this great tennis player started with the weekly group lessons at the age of nine. When he reached the age of ten, he was already working with a private coach. When he was a teenager, Federer also showed talent in football and interests in playing cricket, but eventually decided to focus on tennis. He enjoyed watching Marcelo Rios play as a youngster. To this day, he still supports his hometown club, the FC Basel, and plays cricket during his off-time. At fourteen, he won all the national championships of the groups in Switzerland, and was given the rare chance to train at the Swiss National Tennis Center in Ecublems. In 1996, he joined the ITF junior tennis circuit. The year 1998 marked his final year as a junior player and the start of his career in tennis pro. In this same year, Federer won the prestigious junior Wimbledon and the year-ending title of the Orange bowl and was recognized as the ITF Junior Tennis champion of 1998.
All successful athletes have their own style in court. For Federer, his versatility in all types of tennis courts is definitely an advantage. As a sports critic once said, in the ear of specialists, tennis players can be a clay court specialist, grass court specialist, hard court specialist or be like Roger Federer. He manages to dictate the play with his precise groundstrokes. In addition, he is also an excellent volleyer and baseliner. He makes use of a hybrid grip or the grip that is between the eastern and semi-western stroke. He manages to reduce the reaction time of his opponents by delivering powerful angled groundstrokes.
In his career, Roger Federer has won a whopping 57 singles titles. He was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of the year 2007. Federer is engaged in charity work outside of his tennis career. He founded the Roger Foundation in 2003, to promote sports to young people and to help disadvantaged persons. At only 27 years old, we may have not yet seen the best of Roger Federer yet.
