There are thousands of commencement addresses on college campuses each spring. Most are unremarkable and go unremarked upon. But occasionally one gets people talking and gains traction online. That was the case with the speech given by the retired tennis champion Roger Federer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., on June 9.
Mr. Federer, who dropped out of school in his native Switzerland at 16 to play professionally, noted early in his remarks that he was not an obvious choice for a commencement speaker.
“Keep in mind, this is literally the second time I have ever set foot on a college campus,” he told the more than 2,000 graduates.
After some warm-up jokes about beer pong (which is said to have been invented at a Dartmouth fraternity party) and a few shout-outs to local institutions (“I got a chance to hit some balls with my kids at the Boss Tennis Center … I also crushed some chocolate chip cookies from Foco”), Mr. Federer got down to business and offered the graduates some tennis lessons that doubled as life lessons.
The part of the speech that has caught on with audiences far beyond the Ivy League environs of the Dartmouth campus — prompting numerous TikTok videos, many of them set to inspirational string music — was his reframing of his years of dominance on the tennis court.
“In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80 percent of those matches,” Mr. Federer said. “Now, I have a question for all of you. What percentage of the points do you think I won in those matches?”
