BUENOS AIRES — Eric Carmen’s ballad “All by Myself” was playing on the car radio last Thursday as Roger Federer opened the door, ducked through the opening with another crowd shouting behind him and took a seat for the late-night ride back to his hotel.
As the vehicle and its police escort pulled away from the tennis stadium, the convoy rolled past a long line of cheering Argentines. A number of fans broke free of the barricades and began running next to the windows, shouting “Roger!” or, in the shock of making eye contact, nothing at all.
“Bye-bye,” Federer said through the glass in a conversational tone, waving and smiling without flashing his teeth.
“Does it start to seem normal after a while?” I asked.
“This?” he said, his voice rising. “No, no, no. This is unbelievable.”
You might think that Federer, at this advanced stage of his chart-busting career, would have seen it all through the tinted window when it comes to hero worship. But the regular tennis tour, it turns out, is a relatively sheltered place: a circuit full of routine and regular haunts.
Federer’s exhibition tour in South America, which ended last week, was a long way from Wimbledon in both distance and spirit, and perhaps it is easier here to see just how far Federer has come from Basel and his days as an unpolished, pony-tailed Swiss wunder teen.
“They are so passionate here,” Federer said. “I’ve had more fans break down here in South America than anywhere else in the world. They cry, and they shake, and they are just so, like, not in awe but so happy to meet you. It’s disbelief for them that they can meet me, and that is something that has happened a few times before, but it’s very rare. Here I must have had at least 20 people probably hugging me and kissing me and so happy, you know, just to get a chance to touch me, even. And they’ve actually been very, very respectful when they realized I couldn’t sign more autographs because it was a safety issue or whatever the circumstances might have been.”
The mania was fueled by the fact that this was the 31-year-old Federer’s first visit to South America as a professional and his first visit of any sort to the three nations on his itinerary: Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.
It was hardly a nonprofit mission. Federer played six matches on the South American tour, including two in the temporary 20,000-seat stadium constructed in the northern Buenos Aires suburb of Tigre. He was, according to local reports, paid $2 million for each of his six matches (news conferences and other appearances included), which surely made this the most lucrative exhibition tour on a per-night basis in tennis history.
It also earned Federer significantly more money in 13 days than the $8.5 million in official prize money he earned during the entire 2012 season: a year in which he returned to No. 1 for several months and won six titles, including his 17th Grand Slam singles title at Wimbledon.
The paydays surely did not go unnoticed at A.T.P. headquarters. The off-season is two weeks longer than usual this year, which required a tighter schedule at the end of the season and contributed to Federer’s skipping the Masters 1000 event in Paris in November.
He still maintained his exhibition schedule, however. But while Federer surely would not have cut into his energy reserves and family time if the finances were not right, he insisted that money was not his primary motivator.
“With the season shorter, you can actually do a trip to South America like this,” he said. “Of course, you can always do a one-day trip, but I’m at the stage of my life when I do a one-day trip all across the world, I don’t think it’s worth it. I felt I needed to organize something that was really going to have an impact: for me personally, and also then for the people.
“The first idea was to play maybe three, maybe four matches, and at the end, they wanted an encore in São Paulo and an encore here in Argentina, and I was like, ‘It’s going to cost me four more days but I’m already over here, and you know what? I’m really, really happy to do it and it shows there’s great excitement and maybe there’s a big market for this kind of thing.’ Personally, I’ve always wanted to come to South America, and I think tennis-wise, obviously, it’s really coming along now.”
The continent has actually seen much brighter days in terms of star power. Guillermo Vilas, the long-haired Argentine, was once winning major titles and writing poetry on the side. Gustavo “Guga” Kuerten of Brazil once won three French Opens and drew hearts in the Paris clay.
Marcelo Rios, the Chilean left-hander with the touch and temperament reminiscent of John McEnroe, once sat at No. 1 in the rankings.
For now, the only three South Americans in the top 50 of the men’s rankings are the Argentines Juan Martín Del Potro and Juan Mónaco at No. 7 and No. 12 respectively and the Brazilian Thomaz Bellucci at No. 33. The women are in much direr straits, with no South American in the top 100.
But momentum could rebuild again with the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and with Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, soon to stage a regular men’s tour event and more South American cities in line.
Federer, a tennis history buff, did his best to honor the past: exchanging groundstrokes in São Paulo with the 73-year-old Maria Bueno, the Brazilian women’s star who won seven Grand Slam singles titles. He then spent time with Gabriela Sabatini, the Argentine, now 42, who won the 1990 U.S. Open.
Federer also extended his reach beyond tennis. He met with the Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, at her residence in Buenos Aires and got goose bumps of his own when he met Pelé, the Brazilian soccer icon, for the first time in São Paulo.
“It was very powerful,” Federer said. “It’s like disbelief he exists, because you only know him from TV and from pictures. He was very sweet, a very passionate, larger-than-life kind of person.”
But even if tennis continues to bob in soccer’s massive wake, particularly in South America, this is now Federer’s moment — even at No. 2 in the rankings behind Novak Djokovic — to stir the global pot.
“There were a lot of No. 1’s in tennis who were playing in Argentina: John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, all these guys, but I’ve never seen something like this,” said José Luis Clerc, the former Argentine star who helped persuade Federer to make the South American journey. “The reaction of the people, everybody was crazy.”
It was indeed a scene on and off court. The V.I.P. Lounge at the stadium in Tigre was a vast assemblage of artfully crossed legs, tight shirts, half-eaten finger sandwiches and Argentine celebrities on the lookout for other Argentine celebrities. Three large golden statues of nude male figures dominated the lounge, holding tennis rackets in a position from which not even Federer could make a winner.
His arrival was delayed for nearly an hour on opening night by concerns about the structural integrity of the temporary stands. But Federer and Del Potro eventually made it on court to play in front of the biggest tennis crowd in Argentina’s history, with Del Potro winning in three sets on Dec. 12 and with Federer winning in two a night later. Exhibition or not, the tone was more intense than light-hearted, even if Federer and Del Potro managed to orchestrate an exchange on Thursday in which Federer could hit two of his trademark between-the-legs shots off lobs in the same point.
“It was a great night but a little strange for Juan Martín,” Del Potro’s coach, Franco Davín, said Thursday. “He’s at home in Argentina, and they cheer more for Federer.”
So it goes at this stage as Federer rides the wave of his own making and then rides off into the night with his public in pursuit, not sure if it will get another close-up look.
“It is totally an out of body experience, almost disbelief that it’s really happening,” he said, looking out the window at the crowds. “I feel very fortunate and I guess that’s also one of the reasons I would like to play for more years because these things are not going to come back around when you retire.”
