[ad_1]
Roger Federer has always been a tennis student. As a teenager over 20 years ago, Federer was interested in who the sport’s great historical figures were, what they won and how they shaped their strokes.
Federer is locked Rod Laver Australia’s only tennis player to win the Grand Slam – Wimbledon and the championships of Australia, France and the United States – twice, in 1962 and 1969. agha
In 2017, Federer respectfully bowed to Laver. helped create The Laver Cup, an exhibition team competition where the top six male players from Europe face off against six players from the rest of the world. The event was held in Prague, Chicago and Geneva. It will be held between Friday and Sunday after a year break due to the pandemic. TD Garden in Boston.
“In our sport, we don’t have an adequate platform for the former great players, the legends of the game,” Federer said by phone from his home in Switzerland, where he was rehabilitating after surgery. right knee This forced him to miss the US Open. “If you look at golf, there’s a great way to go about it. The old players are always there, always welcome and always giving advice to the younger players. Having an event like the Laver Cup is a way to shine a light on Rod Laver and the many other legends who paved our way. way.”
Federer, along with his longtime manager Tony Godsick, has done his bit to connect some of the best in the game past and present through the Laver Cup. Its two captains are Bjorn Borg, who has won five consecutive Wimbledon and six French Open titles, and John McEnroe, who has won four US Open and three Wimbledon titles. Co-captains McEnroe’s younger brother Patrick is a 1991 Australian Open semi-finalist and Borg’s Swedish national and former world No. Thomas Enqvist.
Borg’s European team has six players in the top 10. These are number 2 Daniil Medvedev, who won the US Open this month beating Novak Djokovic; 3 Stefanos Tsitsipas; 4 Alexander Zverev; 5 Andrey Rublev; 7 Matteo Berrettini; and No. 10 Casper Ruud.
McEnroe’s Team World includes Felix Auger-Aliassime at number 11, Denis Shapovalov at number 12, Diego Schwartzman at number 15, Reilly Opelka at number 19, John Isner at number 22, and Nick Kyrgios at number 95. All compete in 12 singles and doubles matches in daytime and evening sessions throughout the weekend.
Opelka playing the Laver Cup for the first time. He wanted to play for a long time.
“The Laver Cup is the Laver Cup,” said Opelka, who reached the last 16 at the US Open. “They turned everything into capital. They set up the dream event. Who wouldn’t want to be there? Anything Rod Laver is named after, anything Federer is on, is a great honor.”
The format of the event is a great balancer, although on paper Team Europe may seem to have an advantage with the higher ranked competitors. There are singles and doubles matches, and point totals are cumulative, with one point for each win on the first day, two points on the second day and three points on the third day. The first players on the winning team to reach 13 points each receive $250,000 in addition to appearance fees based on a player’s rank.
In 2017, Federer defeated Kyrgios 11-9 in a tiebreak to secure a Team Europe win. Then two years ago, the European team won the third year in a row where the world team led the last two games, but then Federer beat Isner 6-4, 7-6 (3) and Zverev knocked out Milos Raonic in the final. . match 6-4, 3-6, 10-4. In the Laver Cup, a super tiebreak is played instead of the third set.
Federer is not playing this year. Also absent are the injured Rafael Nadal and Dominic Thiem. DjokovicRepresenting Europe in 2018, he declined to participate.
“We’re obviously missing the top three guys, but our team is one of the strongest we’ve ever had,” said Zverev, a four-time Laver Cup contender with Isner and Kyrgios. “We have all the young gun generation guys which is great to see. Everyone is very motivated. It will be a fun, entertaining week for all of us.”
In a commercial sense, it’s hard to argue with so many top players facing off in multiple matches over three days.
“We knew from the beginning that this event would be a success,” Godsick said. “The secret sauce is the format. It works because too many matches come to the wire, or what we call the Laver Breaker. It makes it more interesting for players. There’s more peer pressure when you play against your biggest opponents, while other opponents are cheering you on.”
Federer in essence Laver Cup from the beginning. In his first year in Prague, he worried when the fans weren’t sure that the first game would arrive at 11:00 (the arena finally filled up). He worried that Nadal would hurt him on his last day in Geneva and have to withdraw and then have to deal with the angry John McEnroe, who wanted to make his own last-minute substitutions. But when he played doubles for the first time in their career with Nadal, he mostly had fun.
“Certainly, Duo with Rafa It was really special because there was so much excitement that preceded it,” Federer said of the match in Prague in 2017. They defeated American Jack Sock and Sam Querrey 6-4, 1-6, 10-5.
For Federer, the real appeal of the Laver Cup is the camaraderie between players who often look at each other over the net instead of sitting side by side in comfortable rows. Even as his playing days are over, Federer is confident he will continue to support the event.
“I definitely see myself in the business,” he said. “I would love to be a captain one day. I think it’s a nice way to let competitors live together for a week. It’s really fun and cool to share the locker room with these guys you usually share, but don’t talk tactics and see how everyone prepares and actually supports each other. You don’t normally cheer against each other, but you don’t care if they win or lose. It’s very different this time.”
And when it comes to the fact that the game’s past champions, including 83-year-old Laver, participate every year, that’s what Federer wants.
“This event is a meeting,” Federer said. “That’s what I wanted it to be. Having wisdom, stories, legends is telling stories to the younger generation. I’m happy to be on those teams, to hear Bjorn, to see John, to see Rocket. [Laver] and watching the young learn from the old. It conveys wisdom. ”
[ad_2]
Source link