MR. ROGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD

This might sound almost extraterrestrial to Americans and especially Angelenos, but Roger Federer’s hometown seems to boast no outward images of, well, Roger Federer.

Billboards large and small include an anonymous happy couple alongside wedges of Gruyere cheese, anonymous men on a boat drinking sparkling water, an anonymous couple lying on a beach in the surf, two hairdressers of possible local prominence and an anonymous burgundy Fiat, but no visible Federer.

On sidewalks, on buses, on the extensive tram system, there’s no sign of Federer but plenty of Jasper Johns, the American painter who never won Wimbledon but whose “Target With Four Faces” (1953), now showing at the Kunstmuseum, appears on posters all over town.

A soda ad in the train station features ... three Swiss soccer players.

If you wonder how a person could hog the No. 1 spot in tennis for 177 weeks with a striking lack of imperiousness, here might lie a clue.

If you wonder how somebody can hoard 10 of the last 16 tennis majors, stockpile the last four Wimbledon men’s singles titles, begin the 2007 Wimbledon on Monday up against the field but also against Bjorn Borg and his record five straight, yet maintain popularity among peers while refusing to reside at the intersection of prima and donna ...

Basel helps explain.

“Idolizing heroes -- the Swiss, they’re not so comfortable with that,” said Hans-Dieter Gerber, the Swiss collection manager for a Basel sports museum specializing in soccer, adding, “I think it’s more difficult for Swiss people to express publicly their feelings in such a way.”

Madeleine Barlocher has heard it before.

“You know, I mean, at the beginning, a lot of people said, ‘Why don’t you make more out of Roger here in Switzerland?’ ” said Barlocher of Tennis Club Old Boys, which Federer began to frequent at age 8 or 9. “I guess here we are a little bit different. We don’t want to make money out of someone.... We don’t think in this way.”

“People are not very euphoric,” said Emmanuel Marmillod, who teaches tennis to kids at the club, adding that they’re not nationalistic and “keep everything in the head.”

“Something is special here,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.”

“They’re very proud of him, especially the German Swiss,” said Lynette Federer, the champion’s mother. “They’re really proud, but they don’t speak it out loud.”

Then the native South African who married a Swiss guy and gave birth to the most gorgeous tennis anybody ever saw affects a whisper and impersonates the locals: “ ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a great guy, but don’t tell anybody!’ ”

Besides, she reels off by heart, Tina Turner lives in Zurich, Phil Collins lives on Lake Geneva, Charlie Chaplin lived in the French-speaking part of this four-language country. It’s a respite for celebrities. It’s perhaps the inverse of that case in India where the cricketer and model Mahendra Singh Dhoni went for a haircut and the police had to contain the crowd outside.

“People don’t get carried away,” Lynette said.

Wait for October, Roger Brennwald said, and you’ll see plenty of Federer, but that’s not because of Federer.

That’s to promote the Swiss Indoors, the tournament Brennwald hatched in 1975 and which once featured the specter of Jimmy Connors playing tennis while little Roger Federer worked as ball boy. Where once Brennwald traveled the world seeking Borg or Boris Becker or Andre Agassi to play his tournament, now his North Star sits up the road.

“Now we have the world’s best player,” Brennwald said. “It’s strange we have so many people in the world, but the best player in the world would be born in Basel. Sometimes I think I’m dreaming because I cannot understand what’s going on.”

You hear that wonder often in Basel.

What’s Basel? It’s a city of 170,000 in a country of 7.5 million. The Rhine River runs through it. It’s gorgeous, especially in the narrow streets near the river. It’s astonishingly quiet. It’s not mountainous in the Swiss-postcard mode, but it’s hilly, especially around Federer’s childhood home.

It’s wildly international because it abuts the borders of both France and Germany and because it harbors the Swiss chemical/pharmaceutical industry, which is how Robert Federer happened to meet Lynette Federer in a fate twist Wimbledon draws would come to rue.

It’s a city where you always run into somebody you know, Gerber said. It’s a casual place where, he said, even the Basler Tieg -- the old money -- “dress very simply” and “don’t flaunt their wealth.” It’s where you might hear somebody say that their friend lives near Federer in suburban Oberwil and sees him hauling down his laundry basket. Where Barlocher’s daughter came home one day a few years back and said, Oh, I saw Roger in town today -- just walking around, unimpeded.

“He is not like a god,” said Esther Roth, who works at the tourist office in the train station. She appreciates Federer nonetheless.

The hard search for Federer’s face can run to Munchenstein, the hilly suburb with thriving trees and amok green where he grew up in a tall and somewhat narrow house, beige with brown thatched roof and awnings, close to nearby houses.

It can lead back into the city to a sporting goods store with five floors and no sign of Federer until you reach the “racket sports” section at the top, where the racket he endorses sits next to the James Blake/Maria Sharapova racket, no favoritism, as if we’re in, oh, Los Angeles.

It can lead to Tennis Club Old Boys, in a pristine neighborhood where the trees completely shade the sidewalks. It’s an unpretentious facility with a hut, a bar and restaurant, seven clay courts. On a Wednesday midday, people play cards and drink wine while a black Labrador retriever naps.

There, about 17 years ago, Lynette Federer held a membership -- still does -- and had an indomitable tennis game and knew Barlocher, who’d played in the 1959 Wimbledon girls’ draw and who directed the club. One day, Lynette said to Madeleine, “I have Roger here. Could you train him?”

Federer spent four years riding there on his bicycle -- as Barlocher remembers it -- and, when asked for snapshot memories of that time, she said, “You know, if I would have known how it would come out, I would have paid more attention.”

She said that anything the coaches suggested, Roger could do immediately. She rhapsodized about that backhand and remembered how he once lost a match on Court No. 1, and while all the other children finished their matches and began eating, Roger remained under the umpire’s chair, crying.

He was also “full of fun and nonsense in the head like a lot of young people,” Barlocher said, and when it came time to play they once had to fetch him from atop a tree.

She showed photos from the 80-year-old club’s 75th-anniversary book with its multiple pictures of the sprite Federer -- plus Martina Hingis and Patty Schnyder, who played here as juniors -- and she said it’s all fairly surreal.

Marmillod, the tennis teacher, said, “You cannot compare him to Borg and McEnroe and Sampras and Agassi,” because their auras differed from Federer’s and, “If you see Roger Federer, you are, ‘Hey, he’s a buddy.’ ”

The Swiss love that, evidenced by the three autographed Federer photographs in the club, and the Federer cardboard cutout, and the unpretentious little sign high on the fence outside that reads “Roger Federer Centre Court.”

There’s something about those homages, and it’s this: They might be the first images you spot in the whole city of the No. 1 tennis player, of whom Brennwald says, “It’s a miracle that we have this ball boy years ago named Roger Federer.”