supreme court; With Roger Federer playing what may be the best tennis in history, Robert Sullivan discovers the champ's winning style.

Byline: Robert Sullivan

Perhaps you think that Roger Federer, the tennis player playing the greatest tennis in the world today, is dying to talk about tennis. Well, he is not. Today, in Los Angeles, in his denim blazer over a hooded sweatshirt and

t-shirt, with black Prada leather sandals and Diesel jeans, he has no real interest in talking about this year's win at the U.S. Open, which was a feat for the history books-he became the first player to capture three Grand Slam titles in one year since 1988, the first player in a long time not to play as if the game were merely a display of brute strength, but to mix power with a kaleidoscopic array of skills and play a luxuriously finessed game out of tennis past. Nor does he want to talk about the Thailand Open in Bangkok, in which he is scheduled to compete in a few weeks (a tournament he went on to win-his twelfth consecutive victory, an achievement he shares with only two other players, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe).

"I've answered enough times how my forehand works," Roger says. The answer, by the way, is magically. But to hear him talk about using it against Andre Agassi, in one of his trademark you've-got-to-be kidding moments, is like hearing him nonchalantly describe the sunrise over his native Alps. "I smashed it back from the baseline for a winner," he recalls, shrugging, not seeming at all like a guy with a 130-mile-an-hour serve.

No, what Roger Federer wants to do is relax and enjoy a breakfast of eggs benedict at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel with his girlfriend, Mirka Vavrinec. For the record, Mirka is not his coach. Amazingly, in this day and age of hyperattenuated sports management, Roger has no coach. He fired him last year, around the time he suffered a first-round loss in straight sets in the French Open. It was a move that showed that the young man was ready to start thinking for himself.

Mirka is, however, just about everything else-his scheduler, his press agent, his stand-in practice coach. If you had been at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens earlier this year, when Roger needed to work on some shots before the start of the U.S. Open, you would have witnessed Mirka, a former top-100 women's player, on center court, on the other side of the net. "I'm good for emergencies," she says.

Mirka is also most certainly his fashion coach and has been since they met four years ago, during the Sydney Olympics. He is from the northwest of Switzerland, in Basel; she is from the northeast, in Lake Constance, a two-hour drive. While they play doubles matches only occasionally, they almost always shop together. "She knows me better than I know myself sometimes," he says.