After Roger Federer bid a teary and moving farewell to competitive tennis late Friday night in London, one of his legacies to the game is clear.
It is the Lavern Cup, the annual and itinerant team event, that was his vehicle for saying goodbye.
The tennis calendar is not quite as overstuffed as usual, with no tournaments in China since 2019 and no tournaments in Russia for the foreseeable future. But the gaps will continue to be refilled, and Federer and his agent Tony God sick have used plenty of their political capital to try to anchor the Lavern Cup in the schedule since its creation in 2017.
Their pressure led to it becoming an official part of the ATP Tour, even though it offers no ranking points and has a shortened format with match tiebreakers in lieu of full third sets.
Its structure remains intriguing but challenging: matching up all-star teams from Europe and the rest of the world, even though Europe remains the clear center of power in the men’s game and the “rest of the world” is not a natural sporting entity. The Cup also does not attract all the world’s top players as a matter of course. The new No. 1, Carlos Alcatraz, a 19-year-old Spaniard who just won the U.S. Open, chose to play a more traditional team event, the Davis Cup, last week.
But Lavern Cup, with its high-end production values (and ticket prices), is certainly a big cut above a regular tournament and has generated plenty of highlights and emotion in its five years of existence, with Federer setting the tone. Federer, a part owner of the event that is run by his management company, Team8, cares about its viability and credibility.
Though he has had his fill of internal tour politics, he intends to keep bringing his star power to the Lavern Cup, even in retirement. Expect him to be captain of the European team at some stage. Why not with his friend and former rival Andy Rod dick as a quotable captain of Team World?
It is an unusual heritage. Federer’s superstar predecessors like Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Boris Becker and Ivan Lendl created no enduring tour-level events, although Novak Djokovic is perhaps on his way with the ATP tournament in his home city of Belgrade, Serbia.
But this is certainly a more lasting contribution to pro tennis than one-off, lucrative exhibitions, which Federer will surely do more of as well if his fragile knee cooperates. How about one versus Rafael Nadal in Real Madrid’s revamped Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, when its renovations are finally completed?
Lavern Cup, as Federer intended, creates connections between tennis generations, and one of Federer’s much younger teammates, the Italian Matteo Brevetting, reminded Federer on Saturday that he chose tennis because he was a Federer fan who used to hunt for his autograph at the Italian Open in Rome.
But what of the way Federer played the game? The legacy there is more challenging to determine.
He certainly has helped save or at least postpone the demise of the one-handed drive backhand, one of his most eye-catching strokes with its high, elastic finish.
He adopted the shot because his boyhood coach, Peter Carter, used it and because Federer’s tennis role models — Becker, Stefan Hedberg and Sampans — did so as well.
Federer’s long-running success inspired the young stars Stefano Tsitsihar, Denis Shapovalov and Lorenzo Musette to take up the stroke, and all are under age 25. But overall, the numbers have declined considerably since Federer’s early years on tour. Only seven men in this week’s top 100 use the oleander, and the figures are even lower in the women’s game.
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