Getting close to the best was an inspiration for Roger Federer and myself

In a video made of Roger Federer when he was 36 and had 19 grand slams to his name, the great tennis player looks at pictures from an earlier time, when he was a ballboy at the Swiss Open in Basel. You hardly recognise him because he’s so young. In another section of the video he stands guard for the winner Michael Stich, who presents them with medals.

“I loved being a ballboy,” he says in the video. “I had the opportunity to see the best players up close.” The adult Federer smirks at the “shining eyes” of the child Federer, getting shiny eyes himself. “Like it was yesterday.”

This week I watched a replay of the fourth and fifth sets of the 2017 Australian Open final between Federer and Rafael Nadal. It was not without some feelings of melancholy, because Federer ends his career on Friday. Many hymns have been sung to his one-handed backhand, his elegance, his body control, his creative and featherlight game. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty,” David Foster Wallace writes of Federer.

Federer is an icon of sport. For tennis he had a style-defining effect, like Michael Jordan in basketball or Wayne Gretzky in ice hockey. But there is another, a special reason, why he is admired and loved by everyone: he is a chosen one – and yet the boy from Basel is one of them.

That has to do with his career. It has come about naturally. Federer has made use of the existing opportunities that community and society offer everyone. As a child and teenager, he was in the hands of institutions. It was the Swiss Tennis Federation that sponsored him and educated him at boarding school. So he matured into a world star within society. And he gave something