Pizzas galore!

We had talked at the club at the same stage last year, when Federer arrived at Wimbledon bruised from the French Open final, when he won only four games against Nadal and was out of France before you could say NetJets (the firm from whom he hires his private planes). He still wonders why there was “such a big fuss” over that defeat.

“It made no difference to me whether it was in five sets or three, but I arrived here and everyone was saying, ‘Oh my God, you got crushed, are you ever going to recover?’ ” he says. “They seemed to think it was the end for me and I was thinking, ‘What?’ But OK, it doesn’t matter now, that was fine.”

Federer is sitting in a wicker chair on the players’ balcony in grey trousers and a white T-shirt with RF emblazoned on the front in light purple lettering. “I guess that after the win in Paris this time I was able to be normal for a while, sitting at home with Mirka [his wife of two months, who is pregnant with their first child, due very soon],” he says. “I’m not able to do normal very often. Now I am back here. It’s not showing off in any way, but it’s nice to be back at Wimbledon and you meet up with so many people telling you how happy they are for you, how much they were cheering for you.

“It has been an incredible time. Now I can meet up with the players again and find out how it was for them and how it is for me. It was so good because before Madrid [last month] I hadn’t won a tournament for a long time [since the previous October] and it is nice to be back in this routine.

“It’s extraordinary for me because you figure everybody would like someone else to win, but maybe it’s the way I react to winning, the way I am respectful to the others and how fair I am because the players have voted for me five times to win the Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship Award. What I can say is, ‘Thank you very much, thank you for being happy for me.’ It does you good as a player to hear that once in a while.”

That is 59 once-in-a-whiles for Federer, 27. Each one has its magic, but the grand-slam tournaments, the barometers by which greatness is judged, are his raison d’être. Since the 2004 French Open, when he lost in the third round to Gustavo Kuerten, of Brazil, he has reached the semi-finals of 20 grand-slam events in succession. He has won four of the past six Masters Cups and has lost once in six years at Wimbledon.

He was supposed to arrive at SW19 as a basket case, unable to contend any more. The images the naysayers worshipped were of a weeping Federer in Australia in February after his five-set defeat by Nadal in the final, the racket-splintering Federer in Miami, Florida. Here was a man in meltdown.

“When I started out on my career, I had wanted to be a good role model,” he says. “But I didn’t want it to be forced. I couldn’t fake my way through ten or 15 years. My parents had always taught me, ‘Don’t throw your racket, don’t swear on the court, don’t scream, enjoy the game, play it fair, but tough.’ I said, ‘OK, right, let’s see how it goes.’ It took me many years, but I got it going.

“I received so many compliments on how I played and behaved and it gave me a good feeling because I knew how I was on the court, how I needed to be to be a success and also to be respected in the locker room. I was walking a tightrope for many years, because people who saw me winning thought I was the best in the world and when I was losing, they said I wasn’t trying, which was a big problem.

“Then it got to a stage when I was pretending I was fighting but I wasn’t really fighting, so I was pretending even harder, showing more so people wouldn’t write bad things about me. It was not a fun thing to go through.

“I suffered in Melbourne; nobody enjoys crying on the stage. In Miami I started well in the event, I had beaten Andy [Roddick] and I felt I would have the better of Novak [Djokovic] in the semi-finals, and it was going fine for a while when all of a sudden I was in a slump. I couldn’t hit the ball in the court any more. I had chances early in the second set, but my serve wasn’t clicking, my forehand and backhand went. It was a nightmare. Do you know what? I was just so sick and tired of playing so bad that when I missed that easy forehand I said, ‘It’s OK, just let it out.’ I was actually surprised how hard I crushed my racket.

“So, I cried in Melbourne and smashed the racket in Miami. They said, ‘Oh, he’s just got married and now he’s expecting a baby, so he’s going crazy because he must be really nervous about something.’ Or it’s, ‘Oh, he sees the end coming.’ I suppose I had shown so little in all the big matches I had won, so people started to believe they could read me, but they can’t. It’s good and it’s bad, but I know I can influence it in a big way, but I can’t always control the winning and the losing, especially the losing.”