Roger Federer walked onto the grass horseshoe court at Newport on Saturday evening in a tan suit, kissed his wife Mirka after she had just introduced him, and worked out immediately that he was in trouble. “Oh man,” he said. “This is very high level and a tough act to follow.”
He then spent the better part of half an hour losing the fight against his own tear ducts.
The 45-year-old was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame alongside broadcaster and former player Mary Carillo, and his speech ran close to 30 minutes. The tears started about halfway through, when he began talking about his childhood hero Stefan Edberg, and he went again over his longtime coach Severin Luthi before he had even reached his wife.
“I need tissues and sunglasses. I need everything to protect me right now,” he said at one point.
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Mirka Federer, who has spent two decades avoiding microphones, delivered the introduction herself and quietly stole the night before Roger even got up. Her best story was about the moment the couple found out they were expecting twins for the first time, when she warned him her travelling days were probably done.
His answer, she recalled, was that he simply would not play anymore. She made the point that he was not being dramatic about it. They found a workaround instead, and two sets of twins ended up circling the planet with them.
Federer opened by marvelling that his wife could apparently give a speech, joking that he did not know if she had been secretly practising. When his turn came to return the favour he barely got the words out, describing her as his coach, his hitting partner before matches and his reality check.
“She and I grab each other’s hands, and we run through walls,” he said.
The numbers behind the tears remain absurd. Twenty Grand Slam singles titles, made up of eight Wimbledons, six Australian Opens, five US Opens and a single French, plus 103 tour-level titles and 310 weeks at world number one, including a record 237 of them in a row.
Federer used a chunk of the speech to name the players he shared a court with across three separate generations, running from Andre Agassi and Lleyton Hewitt through to Andy Roddick, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Hewitt got his own Newport induction back in 2022.
He also went back to the beginning, to a 13-year-old ball kid in Basel standing close enough to players he idolised to watch them sweat. He called his father the real RF, and credited a family ban on moonballs with turning him into an aggressive player.
For a ceremony built entirely around a plaque and a golden racquet, Federer spent a surprising amount of it arguing that none of the trophies were the point. “They call this the Hall of Fame, but fame was never the goal,” he said, describing the ambition instead as spending a life doing something he loved with people who loved it just as much.
He finished by pointing forward rather than back. “We all leave the court eventually, but the sport keeps evolving,” he said, before insisting the whole thing was not a farewell and that he was still writing his love letter to tennis.
Djokovic posted a tribute of his own shortly afterwards, saying nobody deserved the honour more, and Grigor Dimitrov was among the former rivals whose video messages played on the night.
“This boy from Basel thanks you for the incredible honour,” Federer said, closing out a speech that has done more emotional damage online than anything he ever did with a backhand.
