Roger Federer says he\u2019s a big believer in kids playing sport, but he\u2019s not keen on his own children following in his footsteps.<\/p>\n
The Swiss great and wife Mirka had identical twins Myla Rose and Charlene Riva in 2009 and another set came along five years later, Leo and Lenny.<\/p>\n
They are occasionally seen watching their dad ply his trade, but after years travelling the world on the tennis tour, the 36-year-old would prefer not to have to do it all over again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, I hope they don\u2019t just because we don\u2019t need another 25 years on tour,\u201d he said at the Australian Open when asked if he would encourage them to be professional players.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I\u2019m just a supportive parent. I can\u2019t tell which direction they\u2019re going to go. If there\u2019s going to be anything in sports or somewhere in finance or business, I have no idea where they\u2019re going to go. All I know is I\u2019ll be incredibly supportive of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
He did reveal they already play tennis, not because he has been encouraging them, but because their friends all do and he doesn\u2019t want them to feel left out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m happy they all do play tennis a little bit because basically literally all our friends who have kids as well, they all play tennis,\u201d he said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want my kids to be the only ones who don\u2019t play tennis, so with my wife we have sort of a little requirement on things they have to do in their life, and tennis is unfortunately one of them. It\u2019s not because we want them to. It\u2019s because I think it would be a pity if they played no tennis at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the reluctance for his children to follow in his footsteps, Federer, who is chasing a 20th Grand Slam in Melbourne, is a great believer in kids playing sport more generally, believing it can teach them a lot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s great for them to do sports early on in their life. I think it\u2019s good for them,\u201d he said.\u201dWinning, losing, that comes a little bit later, but you<\/p>\n
learn a lot from that. I did anyway. I think also you make a lot of friends through sports. You get to know yourself a bit better. It\u2019s healthy. You move around. You go outside. I\u2019m a big believer in these things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roger Federer says he\u2019s a big believer in kids playing sport, but he\u2019s not keen on his own children following in his footsteps. The Swiss great and wife Mirka had identical twins Myla Rose and Charlene Riva in 2009 and another set came along five years later, Leo and Lenny. They are occasionally seen watching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19405,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19406,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19404\/revisions\/19406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}