GAME, SET AND WATCH

British-Indian director Asif Kapadia spoke to us about Federer: Twelve Final Days, which follows the last few days of the tennis great's career

- Shougat Dasgupta

When Roger Federer first won Wimbledon in 2003, he was a goofy Metallica-loving kid with a glorious game. It was the beauty of that game, the dashing ease of it, that the advertisers latched on to, that led to the creation of 'Roger Federer', the tennis champion who alighted from his soft-top Mercedes onto Centre Court, shucked off his cardigan and his Rolex and sliced some hapless plebeian opponent to ribbons, barely pausing to say "en garde".

The advertising narrative, the inanities of Nike, Rolex et al, reduced the brutal but fragile verve of Federer's game into shorthand for the plutocratic good life, the athlete-as-CEO. They took Federer's gift and somehow buffed and polished it until they achieved the most prosaic, the dullest of dull sheens.

So it's not director Asif Kapadia's fault that the new Amazon Prime documentary, Federer: Twelve Final Days, feels like just more buffing and like product placement for The Laver Cup, a quasi-exhibition match between Team Europe and Team World that is Federer's brainchild and partly run by his management company. Federer's image-the smooth, genial executive living a friction-free life-continues to generate millions of dollars, making him one of the world's 10 highestearning athletes even now, nearly two years after retirement and six years after he last won a Slam.