Federer Reflects On Weekend With Bill Gates

Ahead of his return to the ATP World Tour next week in Stuttgart, Roger Federer recently spent time with Bill Gates in the Microsoft co-founder’s hometown of Seattle. ESPN The Magazine chronicled their enlightening and entertaining weekend together for the World Fame 100 issue, in which Federer came in 4th on the list. Below is an excerpt of the feature.

[Roger Federer] is in Seattle because of Bill Gates. A Federer superfan and dedicated rec-level player, Gates watched his favorite player at Indian Wells. They bonded there over tennis and philanthropy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions on improving living standards in Africa. Federer’s foundation also focuses on Africa, especially education for children. They decided to organize an exhibition at the KeyArena in Seattle — Federer vs. John Isner, the tall, big-serving American — as part of a fundraiser for Federer’s charity.

A couple of days before the exhibition, Federer, wife Mirka and a few others from his team visited Gates’ 66,000-square-foot compound on the shores of Lake Washington, called Xanadu 2.0. Before courses of halibut and steak, they spoke about physics and Leonardo da Vinci and his audacious, open-minded genius. Growing up, Federer wasn’t focused on being a student, he says. He stopped going to school at age 16 to play tennis full time. Over the years, he’s tried to soak up knowledge where he can. The night at Gates’ estate was a career high point. “It was so inspiring,” he says. “It was surreal.”

Gates invited his guests into his library. He and Federer paid special attention to a notebook in a glass case — the Codex Leicester, filled with Leonardo’s drawings, theories and thoughts. Gates paid $30.8 million for it in 1994.

Federer stared in amazement. “He tells you that Da Vinci wrote upside down and from right to left — Leonardo da Vinci! — and he was not only great at one thing but he was also great at other things, and you realize how broad somebody’s mind can be. Bill Gates is one of those people too. You can feel it. He makes you — not because he wants to in any way, because he’s super humble — but he just makes you feel so small, in the sense that I know so little. Everything he says just seems really important, and you try to absorb it. I tried really to put my antennas up.”

Over the course of a long weekend, Federer and Gates had two dinners and a lunch together. They practiced tennis in front of an exclusive audience of deep-pocket donors, and Federer presented Gates with a new racket similar to his own, a matte-black Wilson RF97. It was inscribed on the throat with Gates’ profile and renamed the BG97.

Gates was struck by Federer’s curiosity, and, of course, by his grace. “You know, tennis, it’s sort of physics,” he says. “But it’s also artistic, particularly the way Roger appears to move so effortlessly.” Practicing with Federer, noticing his attention to detail, his meticulous approach, Gates was reminded of a software engineer’s painstaking efforts to make computer programs easy to use. “You’re making impossible things actually look fairly easy because you’ve done so much behind the scenes to understand it,” he says.

The ESPN World Fame issue is on newsstands until June 16. Read the full Federer story here.