If tennis were a country unto itself, with physical borders and a uniting flag to go with its distinct customs and culture, it would be Roger Federer’s bandanaed profile on the bank notes. For the better part of the past two decades the Swiss maestro has been the closest thing in sport to a true sovereign, one who projected soft power with aristocratic dress and polyglot speech and backed it up with an arsenal of mind-bending on-court majesty that routinely tipped into the divine. Even Federer’s taped retirement message – delivered in September 2022 from his Basel office against a display case that featured a sampling of his 103 career titles – played like a president’s fireside chat.
Still, the significance of that moment might well have been lost on Joe Sabia if he hadn’t lucked into the job of filming it for posterity. “I hadn’t really watched much of Federer when I met him in 2019,” says Sabia, a non-tennis fan who first interviewed Federer for a viral web series he created for Vogue called 73 Questions. “It’s a 15-minute, one-take shoot. There’s a lot of collaboration with the talent. It’s theatrical, hard to pull off – but he did it rather easily, on Wimbledon centre court no less. I was amazed.”
