Christopher Clarey > Quotes

“Nadal did not just embrace the moment. He gave it a bear hug and lifted it off the ground with its heels kicking.”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“Federer, then fourteen, was in his first year as a boarding student in Ecublens, a suburb of Lausanne on Lake Geneva. He was still in his home country but very much an outsider as a youngster from German-speaking Basel. The primary language in Lausanne is French, and Federer arrived in August 1995 with a problem”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“Freyss, the director of the Ecublens center and the national technical director of men’s tennis in Switzerland, could understand Federer’s distress. He had been at an academy himself in his youth: boarding at the French Tennis Federation’s training center in Nice in the 1970s along with Yannick Noah, the future French Open champion”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“worked a lot with him on his left hand, and by doing that you improve the overall coordination, and your brain becomes more symmetric,” Dorochenko said. “Federer was a creative type, a guy who did not have much concentration and who had lots of ups and downs. He broke rackets and threw away matches. He was really not good in mental terms, and so we said, okay, let’s construct a tennis for Federer that fits Federer, and Peter Carter was really the constructor in chief. I don’t think Federer knew all that was done for him, but it led to developing a technique that was totally made for him. Nobody made Federer fit into a mold. A mold was made to fit Federer.”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“Lynette was from South Africa and had met Robert at age eighteen near Johannesburg, when both were working for the Swiss chemical company Ciba-Geigy. Though Lynette’s first language was Afrikaans, she attended an English-language school at her father’s insistence. After she and Robert moved to Switzerland and later started their family, she spoke English at first to Roger and his older sister, Diana”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“It was so amazing to me how much Roger’s strokes looked like Peter’s,” Macpherson told me. “Maybe Roger doesn’t even completely realize. Peter used to hit the forehand like Roger does. The ball’s already left the strings, and he’s still looking at the contact point. I’ve got a nice vivid memory of Peter doing that, and it was unique, and then all of a sudden we’ve got the best player in the world doing the same thing, like a golfer holding the finish. It’s no coincidence, that’s for sure.”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer

“The French have a fine expression that applies to Federer: "Joindre l'utile à l'agréable," which translates loosely as combining business with pleasure but is actually broader in scope, encompassing the tasks of daily life. If you're going to empty the dishwasher or stack the wood, find a way to make it novel and amusing.”
― Christopher Clarey, The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer