The day Roger Federer couldn’t stop laughing at CNN correspondent’s Spanish phrases, another tennis fan was having none of it. When ESPN reporter Lisa Schlesinger read a quote from a member of Team Federer, he was left stunned. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that can be true,’ Steve Zegras, a 27-year-old tennis fan living in New Jersey, told CNN of the quote published on her sports blog yesterday. ‘Why would you do that to a player? It’s so rude.’
Federer says he wouldn’t want to play in ‘America’
Schlesinger, a former tennis player who now works for ESPN, had written earlier in the week that Federer was ‘one of the most popular, most well-liked and most respected tennis players in the world’. However, in a blog posted about the same time, Zegras described Federer as ‘a terrible player’ and said: ‘He is a bad person, a bad person, a bad person, he is a terrible, terrible player, I don’t know how to say the word. I just don’t.’
Yesterday, Schlesinger wrote that Federer ‘hates the idea of playing in America’ and wrote that the tennis icon had told her ‘he would leave if he could if he were invited for a match’. ‘Roger said the real estate market in Paris was so good, the average salary would be higher than the average in South Africa,’ she continued. ‘His main concern in playing in America is the cost of living.’
While Federer does not speak in the way Zegras describes him, he does frequently say he doesn’t want to play in the United States and would ‘rather play in Europe’. At the 2010 US Open, he said of the tournament: ‘For me, this is my first big tournament of the year, I will play on grass. I want to show what I can do on grass and what I can do
