In a light-hearted preamble, the eight-time Wimbledon champion totted up his career in some of his lesser-known statistical milestones.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot the obvious stats like the number of majors or number of weeks at number one,\u201d Federer said. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m talking about the numbers that really paint a picture. Between 1998 and when I first went on the ATP tour, and when I retired in 2022, I wore more than 5000 headbands. That\u2019s more than [Bjorn] Borg and [John] McEnroe combined.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if you think that\u2019s impressive, I wore probably over 7000 pairs of socks. That\u2019s probably twice as many as most of my opponents, because I doubled them up.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut really, there\u2019s no way to measure what it means to be here. It\u2019s hard to put it into words,\u201d Federer said, reflecting on his journey from being a 13-year-old ballboy at an ATP tournament in Basel to the pinnacle of tennis.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really want to thank every ball kid who ever stood through my matches or all our matches, for that matter, for hours on end,\u201d he said. \u201cI see you. I thank you. I was you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Federer had to wipe away tears as he name-checked his idol Stefan Edberg, other tennis stars, family and support staff who had inspired him throughout his career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need tissues and sunglasses and everything to protect me right now,\u201d he joked. \u201cThis is such a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been an incredible journey,\u201d Federer said. \u201cFor me, the International Tennis Hall of Fame provides a great opportunity to look back, but also to look ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you can tell, I\u2019m still writing my love letter to tennis. My time as a player is done, but tennis will always stand at the intersection of everything I care most about: my family, our friendships, the past 40 years, the future we\u2019re building. Tennis for me is responsible for it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a light-hearted preamble, the eight-time Wimbledon champion totted up his career in some of his lesser-known statistical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1558,39172,16719,6261,39275,287816,16132,15312,57236,7560,85411,1019,296,424,111,139,69,1118,90786,6372,213,287817,3217],"class_list":["post-584750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-been","tag-describing","tag-emotional","tag-entrance","tag-fame","tag-federer","tag-formal","tag-greatest","tag-hall","tag-honours","tag-inducted","tag-international","tag-into","tag-life","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-pantheon","tag-roger","tag-sports","tag-tearful","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}