Federer was the top seed at Halle in 2009. The week before he had played one of the longest finals in French Open history, beating Robin Söderling on Sunday in Paris to claim the only major missing from his collection. Halle had been his Wimbledon warm-up since 2003 - the place where, year after year, he scraped the clay out of his game and reaccustomed his footwork to grass before flying to London. But after Paris, his body said no. He pulled out before playing a match, citing fatigue. His absence cracked the draw open and left the tournament's storyline searching for a new lead. It found Tommy Haas - the German who had spent years chasing his first Halle title and had been promising for a decade to take it.

Novak Djokovic in June 2009 was 22 years old, already a Grand Slam champion (2008 Australian Open), and well into the long apprenticeship that would eventually make him the most successful tennis player in history. He had reached the finals at Miami, Monte Carlo and Rome that spring, and had taken titles in Dubai and Belgrade. But grass was not yet his surface. His final at Halle was only his second career grass-court final, and it would be six more years before he won his first Wimbledon. In the third set against Haas, after taking the second in a tiebreak, his game collapsed: 6-1 in 25 minutes. The grass was unkind to him in a way the clay never was.

Wildcard winners are unusual at any tournament. They are nearly extinct at events where every seeded player is a top-30 fixture. Haas had been a top-five player a decade earlier, before multiple shoulder surgeries and a devastating 2002 motorcycle accident that left both parents severely injured - his father in a coma - that took his career off the rails. He had spent the late 2000s trying to climb back. The Halle title - on home soil, in front of German crowds, against the rising Serbian who had been beating him for years - was the moment the climb finally paid off. He would reach the world top 15 again before he was done, and would eventually retire in 2018 as one of the older active players on tour. None of it would have happened without the wildcard the tournament gave him that June.

The doubles final delivered another local story. Christopher Kas and Philipp Kohlschreiber - the unseeded German pair - beat the wildcard pairing of Andreas Beck (German) and Marco Chiudinelli (Swiss) in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4. They had walked into the draw with no seeding and walked out with the trophy on grass, in a week where two German wildcards won both events at one of the most prestigious ATP 250 tournaments on the calendar. The Gerry Weber Stadion - opened in 1993 with a retractable roof that closes in 88 seconds, named for the local fashion brand whose founder dreamed up a world-class tennis facility in his hometown of Halle - had given the German game one of its best weeks in years. Federer, recovering in Switzerland, would return in 2010 and win it. Haas would never win it again.