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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Tennis has never before been blessed with such an array of talented stars doing battle for the sport's most coveted titles. Games featuring Murray, Nadal, Federer, Djokovic, the Williams sisters and Maria Sharapova are among the most thrilling matches in the history of the game - and Neil Harman has witnessed them all. He is so close to the beating heart of tennis that he has become a confidant to many of the game's stars and administrators, even at one stage mentoring Victoria Azarenka to help her handle the media pressure at the top of the women's game. In short, Neil enjoys a privileged access that is unmatched elsewhere in the sport. Here he shares tennis's most intimate secrets in a book replete with personality, excitement, drama and intrigue. Featuring frank, in-depth interviews with all the leading players, their coaching staff, their agents and managers, Harman presents the game from an insider's perspective and offers the fresh insights and strong personal views for which he is celebrated. Court Confidential recounts a defining time for modern-day tennis: from Wimbledon to the Olympic Games, from Serena Williams's battle with illness to Andy Murray's historic grand slam victory, this is a book for tennis fans everywhere.
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To Maureen, Elizabeth and Kathleen.
Acknowledgements
I SUPPOSE I was taking something of a risk with this project. After all, almost everyone told me that tennis books don’t sell and, well, this one might not either. I just felt it was now or never, with the Olympic Games to be staged in London, with Andy Murray talented enough to win a grand slam tournament, with the sport in such a healthy state. And so I started to type.
Nothing is possible without faith, hope and love. I wanted to see this venture through, so having faith in myself and many other people was one thing, I hoped it would work out and you, dear reader, have to be the judge of that; the fact is, I love this sport and – in the platonic sense of the word – a lot of those in it.
Because you always think you are going to leave someone out that you should not, I thought it best to keep the acknowledgement section as short as possible. To those who supported me all the way through, I have the greatest time and affection. I strove long and hard to find someone who believed in me and the idea of this book. A lot of folk did not. John Beddington, a good friend, pointed me in the direction of Ros Edwards of Edwards Fuglewicz who wanted to help and she, in turn, found Jeremy Robson of The Robson Press. This book would not have happened without them and I am deeply grateful.
Ros’s colleague Julia Forrest read and reread the manuscript; Lewis Carpenter and Hollie Teague took on the task at Robson and their meticulous approach and considered opinions have all been invaluable. In the tennis world itself, I am indebted to players, coaches, agents, administrators, and especially to those superb PR folk too often taken for granted. ‘Do you think I could get five minutes of time with [so and so] for the book?’ became a familiar request and was very rarely refused. The same is true of those who work very closely with the leading players: Tony Godsick (Roger Federer); Benito Perez-Barbadillo (Rafael Nadal and now Victoria Azarenka); Edoardo Artaldi (Novak Djokovic); Matt Gentry and Louise Irving (Andy Murray); Jill Smoller (Serena Williams); and Max Eisenbud (Maria Sharapova). I badgered them quite a lot and they didn’t seem to take offence. Special thanks to Stanislas Wawrinka – a brilliant player and an even nicer person – for keeping me in coffee all year long.
The Times, a newspaper I have been honoured to serve for eleven years (and hopefully many more), backed me all the way. Tim Hallissey, the sports editor, is the most decent of men. Most of my colleagues in the British press were extremely supportive. They know who they are.
Andy Murray won his title. He won the Olympic gold medal. Without him, his performances and his help, I’m not quite sure whether this book would have taken shape. Thanks Andy. And, it goes without saying, my pride in what you have achieved is immense.
Neil Harman
28 March 2013.
Contents
Preface
Who would agree that tennis is perhaps the cruellest of games, as two dedicated combatants bat a ball back and forth, back and forth (audience suffering cumulative neck injury to watch it), in a small rectangle, over interminable hours? Naked as they fail or recover, some see this as the essential bare bones of humanencounter. Those who freak out become heroes.
Why? Because the game is a schizophrenogenic event, bringing men and women to the brink of the bearable, and the audience is no different than those who witnessed the lions consuming the gladiators. Whether played on grass, earth, or whatever, it really is an absurd game. As you do, just sound out loud the echo of – ‘bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong ‘out’. And for love. Who the hell ever came up with that as a call in the world’s most sadistic game?
Christopher Bollas’s comment on my article in The Times on Novak Djokovic vs. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, French Open quarter-final, 6 June 2012.
IT IS A dwindling species, the tennis correspondent, those employed to articulate the antics of the modern-day gladiators. The post is increasingly at the mercy of declining budgets, dictated to by bean counters and besieged by blogs. In Britain, the spiritual home of lawn tennis, you can count our number on one hand. When I began as a tennis reporter on the Daily Mail in 1982 – covering Wimbledon for the first time having started to learn the ropes at the tournaments in Beckenham, Birmingham and Bristol – each national newspaper employed a mainstream tennis writer on its staff. Not any more. Times have changed. Not yet, I am relieved to say, at The Times.
Almost everyone who writes about tennis has to try their hand at a little of something else, be it football, golf, rowing, cricket or whatever the office throws at you. And yet the tennis circuit never stops, it rises and falls, courses and flows, as we wax and wane. Every day, somewhere in the world and often logged only in the minds of those intimately involved, a tennis match of professional significance is played and someone’s day will end either with a sense of achievement or – more likely – the gnawing worry that this was a sport that you truly have to love to want to keep going at it. Tennis is a bloody and brutal world in which only the most courageous of gladiators will survive.
By a startling irony, as the cutbacks among those who cover it intensify, tennis entered 2012 enjoying its greatest global reach and blessed with talents that resonate with a larger percentage of the planet’s population than ever before. There may be a remote part of North Korea or the Amazonian rain forest where Roger Federer is not instantly recognisable, but they are the exception.
The explosion in the number of outlets offering thoughts and opinions – whether tweets, blogs, rolling news or sports pages updated minute-by-minute on the internet – adds to the cacophony surrounding each result, from the distant to the most recent, each jostling for prominence in our heads and profoundly affecting our perception of time and imperatives. Every result brings a cascade of comment. Many times in the past few months, I realised I followed too many people on Twitter and could well appreciate why of many players who chose to use it, some did so sparingly and others quit altogether. I asked Federer why he did not embrace Twitter. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ he said.
In 2012 – and for the foreseeable future – the staff writer is at the public’s mercy like never before, through often visceral comments at the foot of articles posted online as if every word is being microscopically probed for a hidden meaning. Murray’s former agent, Patricio Apey, used to say to me ‘Neil, with you, I always try to read between the lines’. And there was I simply trying to make sense of the lines themselves.
Work-wise, there is more to be done and far less time in which to do it. I am not one to willingly pare back on quality. That has to stay, however long it takes to ‘get it up online’. There are increasing constraints on travel, and night-time tennis at almost every venue on the circuit massively curtails the old-school social delights of the job. Every opportunity to sit and discourse over a bottle of wine during a tournament is to be savoured for they are few and far between. We are slaves to the computer and its latest form, the iPad. To point out these changes is not to evoke sympathy but merely to state a fact – that this job, for all of its myriad marvels, is not as much fun as it used to be. If you are a workaholic like me, there are a lot more hours on site and, consequently, there is a lot less time to relax and recuperate. Of course, you want to be in more place than one, but quite often, that one is more than enough to be going on with.
Invariably though, the locations are warm, the scenery glorious (the mountains around Indian Wells, the royal blue of the Mediterranean at Monte Carlo, the glorious greenery of Wimbledon) and the contests enthralling. I love to write, to talk, to share, to listen, to engage and, yes, to ‘gossip’ as Switzerland’s Stanislas Wawrinka, who has become as close to a friend as it is wise to have among the players, often says. I thrive on deadlines and, if you like all of that, plus you do not mind taxis, airport queues, economy food, non-boutique hotels and having to listen far too often to sensible people being asked all manner of pointlessly daft questions, this life is for you. And as for the pointlessly daft questions, I’m sure I ask my fair share.
I propose this book as a conscious attempt to shine a little light on a pastime where what you see on the court is merely a twinkle in the galaxy of goings-on, intrigues and tales to be told when the lights are turned off and the net taken down. There will invariably be players and officials who do not want to have me around, who don’t appreciate what I choose to write, who will fall out with me over what some might consider trivialities but which they take very seriously. A lot of people trust you, some do not. It is the way of the journalistic world.
There is a limit to what you can discover even in such a small world, where most people know everyone else, rely on everyone else, are trying to get an edge on everyone else and where revealing the smallest detail can blow a trust and wreck a friendship. This is to be a study of how the sport works, who makes it work, who is trying to make it work better, who has an appreciation for how that might happen, who stands in its way, what pressures people are under. After all, at the end of a year, there are only two No. 1 players in the world and behind them are extended crushed dreams, broken promises, rude awakenings, missed opportunities, angry exchanges and terrible mistakes.
Memory (if slowly fading) tells me it had been a lot more fun and professional in the bygone days. Sometimes I yearn for those years when the scores at the US Open were chalked on a scoreboard at the back of the now decapitated press box level of the Louis Armstrong Stadium, when we actually had to go out and watch the tennis ‘live’ to know what was going on, to attend every press briefing we could because there were no transcripts and you had to be in there to ‘feel’ the interview and inform the reader of the manner in which the words had been spoken. Now, press interviews are regularly shown live on websites across the world, though the journalists doing the work on site for the rest of the media resting at home have cottoned on too late to how much their intellectual property is being abused. We are losing, indeed have probably lost, that battle.
A Melburnian Introduction
ACROSS THE DUSTY red-soil plains, rivers and deserts, we return for a fresh start. It has been like this for years, and a quarter of a century since my first visit to this mighty land in 1988. The load of the previous season is barely set down and we reset our compass to the bottom of the world, full of hope and promise.
Taken from the Australian version of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, the sense as I land in Melbourne is radiantly captured in the words, ‘The wildflowers in their beauty, the mountain ranges tall, the billabongs and rivers, and friendly birds that call’. We are here for sport but we cannot overlook the nature which surrounds it and to what backdrop it is played. This is a lovely, vast place, where friendliness and frightening events mix, where bushfires rage in one state, rivers rise in another, and tennis is but a sideshow, albeit a beautiful one.
Like the Australian weather, the tennis year is brutal, not only in its length, but its complexity, its scope and yet, my arrival – whether or not the route has taken in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Chennai, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart or Sydney – refills the mind with wonder. The competition is back, though it has never really gone away. There is so much to be thankful for in the year passed, the story of which will unfold as you turn the pages of this journey through the sport’s corridors the like of which I walk to take my usual seat in the media room at Melbourne Park – an ever-improving monument to progress and sunny optimism – and into the fresh air of the challenge. For the moment, we look forward. Invigoration fills the lungs.
Almost the first person I see is Novak Djokovic, the two-time Australian Open defending champion, and if anyone radiates invigoration, it is the 25-year-old from Serbia. We talk about the new beginnings in 2013. ‘What is the definition of better?’ he responds when I ask him to consider if such a thing is possible, for he is pushing the boundaries ever wider with his game of defiance, balance, beauty and savage artistry. ‘Is it having more variety, coming to the net, playing more efficiently for yourself, just playing from the baseline and physically wearing your opponent down? It depends.’ Djokovic said.
Every surface is demanding and requires a different adjustment from the player, so that’s why it is so difficult to compare tennis from twenty or thirty years ago to now because technology is so different. We don’t know what technology is going to bring tomorrow, maybe we just sit on the bench and let the rackets play themselves.
The vast majority of the players are taking care of what they do, how many hours they sleep, what they eat and drink. There is more efficiency. I consider the semi-finals and finals last year (over ten hours of tennis inside two days that defied athletic logic) as two of the three most exciting matches I played in my life and winning a grand-slam title in such fashion was fantastic. It was so gruelling and physically so demanding that at times it felt like an out-of-body experience.
I’ve been preparing well but what makes the change is the mental desire and that flame for success, that hunger to win. I think in life it can always get better, I don’t know why and how or where but I think that it can.
Later that same evening, Djokovic emerges from the annual pre-Open gathering of the male players and bursts over to report: ‘The best-run meeting I’ve ever attended,’ which suggests a burgeoning concept in the tennis world, that of unity among players, great and small.
Next to gravitate over is Brad Drewett, the executive chairman and president of the ATP World Tour, the governing body of the men’s game. His eyes are wide and light but his walk is stooped, laboured. Brad has not been at his best for a while now. We will have coffee in a couple of days, he says, to talk about the sport we both love. I get back to the hotel and there is a note waiting to join a conference call with Ross Hutchins, the 27-year-old British Davis Cup player, one of the gentlest of souls, the like of whom you would hope your daughter might bring home one day, who has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Your spirit is crushed. Invigoration gives way to deep sadness.
Within forty-eight hours of that sledgehammer blow, it is revealed that Brad Drewett is suffering from motor neurone disease and a daze descends. What on earth is going on? Two of the world’s nice people, the bedrocks on whom a sport depends for certainty and scrupulousness in a world often shorn of those characteristics, are not well at all. The confident air of a few days ago is replaced by a degree of fatalism that makes you wonder what can go wrong next.
Tennis is shattered by the news of Drewett’s illness, not least because he has a wife and four young children; but he is also the quintessential tennis person, who has just achieved what became a burning ambition, for none before in the sport has checked each box from player, to player council, to tournament director, to CEO. Of that, tennis cannot lose sight, nor will it I am sure. He will be supported and succoured by the hierarchy and rightly so. In the short to mid-term, he is to remain as the men’s leader and the certainty that he can still lead is all-pervasive.
But just as the unity the men’s game has been striving for – the driving ambition of Drewett’s leadership – is within their grasp, there is certain to be a period of instability, of reflection, and of a jostling for position. Justin Gimelstob represents the dynamic, go-getting, edgy front tennis requires; he is a man who might challenge a sport in which most people who clamber to the top hope that nothing changes and their privileges remain untouched. The survival rate among ‘leaders’ in tennis is a testament to their ability to preserve the status quo.
Gimelstob, a former player of decent standing, has a gift for self-promotion that irks some but, channelled properly, can have an effect both lasting and beneficial. He is one of three player representatives on the ATP Board. This makes governance tricky in that there are also three tournament representatives, an alignment of the two strands of the sport which makes for delicate and often irreconcilable negotiation. ‘I’ve worked my butt off and there’s nothing I take more pride in than representing the players and doing that while maintaining the balance of doing what’s right for the tour and the tournaments,’ Gimelstob says. ‘I live and breathe this every single day at a tournament. There is no level player, no management company, no executive staff and no tournament that doesn’t have full access to me every single day of the year.’
Gimelstob accepts that the ATP structure is not perfect.
My determination is to represent the players fairly in the partnership to work as hard as possible to make sure that their ratio in the partnership is being maximised. One of the things thrown out indiscriminately is ‘players union’ and some players would be better off for that. If you look at the history of basketball, football, baseball, ice-hockey with purely player unions, these sports have had major work stoppages in the past decade; my standpoint is that we run our tour on the players’ side like a union but they own half of their league.
It is a 365-day-a-year job trying to manage and stay on top of all the moving parts of the sport. You cannot compare the player board job to the tournament board job, it is an incomparable challenge and one I love. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate trying to represent these players. It’s not all piña coladas and birthday cake, it’s tough, especially as a former player who is seen in one way. I don’t always stand behind the way I acted, what I said and how I handled things as a player but that coming with the maturing process of realising that tennis is a very brutal, tough individual sport and a lot of the qualities you pick up aren’t commensurate with being successful or playing nicely in the sandbox post-tennis life.
I could be put off by Gimelstob’s ambition but I am not. Tennis needs leaders with ambition. He refuses to stop trying to move the margins in favour of the players. He gets frustrated. He is drained. Even at the start of a year with so much to look forward to, the amount that needs to be done can unnerve the sturdiest of souls. The grand slams have their desires, the tours their own; there is the stultifying bureaucracy, the Davis Cup to sort out. ‘I refuse to say, “it is what it is”. I believe in it too much,’ he says.
One constantly hears that tennis is in such a great place, but for how long? It cannot stay this way forever: even Roger Federer, the lead man, the multi-garlanded heartbeat of the game, this exceedingly special person, won’t be around forever; Rafael Nadal is suffering from the effects of a game that borders on the maniacally physical; and Djokovic and Andy Murray, the British hero, are attempting to shoulder the burden of taking it on and up. It is imperative – especially as we set out on another year – that the sport looks further afield, secures its markets, expending time and effort preparing for the rainy day that is bound to come, perhaps sooner than we think. What worries Gimelstob and worries me is that tennis has a tendency towards internal quarrelling which disrupts its capacity to build on what it has and that opportunities – rare and exciting – can be lost. It is with Drewett and Hutchins at the forefront of my mind that I intend to tackle the year. Let us all do tennis as much good as we can. Where they would love to be bounding right now, out to the courts warmed by the sun, it is my honour to bound. This is a grand slam tournament, one of the four cornerstones of the year and, truthfully, it hardly gets much better than this.
On a barge down Melbourne’s Yarra River come Djokovic and Victoria Azarenka, the two defending champions, the two No. 1 players in the world, with the trophies for presentation at the draw for the 2013 championships. It is a novel means of introduction and it works. Djokovic has won the title for the past two years and only Roy Emerson and Jack Crawford from the halcyon days of Australian domination have three consecutive titles to their name. It has not been achieved in the Open Era of tennis, which began in 1968.
Azarenka has shown since her first – and so far only – grand slam victory a year ago that she possesses the capabilities and the drive to do more. She is not universally popular, which is a shame because deep down she is a person of immense warmth, possessed of an absolute drive to succeed which, were it not for the unappealing noise she makes as she strikes the ball, would be something to admire, rather than scorn. I suspect that, as they chug their way along the calm waters of the Yarra, things will get a lot choppier in the next two weeks, but these two voyagers will be the people to beat.
There is no undergrowth for Djokovic and Azarenka to hack their way through and yet, more and more, professional tennis in the twenty-first century is akin to a jungle. Strange shrieking and grunting noises abound, there is as much shadow as there is sun, and the sport has its fair share of reptiles and lizards. It is about finding a way to negotiate with all of the threads – the top professionals, the coaches, the agents, the tournament staff, the officials – to disseminate and to distil, to filter the rumour, disturb the status quo, set the agenda, lead with your chin and determine fact from fiction. And to survive.
There are monster companies at work by all of which a word or a gesture out of place can be interpreted in so many ways. The monsters are ubiquitous: IMG, Lagardère Unlimited, CAA, Octagon, new kids on the block like XIX Entertainment (Murray’s representatives). There are also the individuals who see the talent in a young player, sell themselves to that player and their parents, watch them grow and protect them when they become real stars. I admire the likes of Morgan Menahem (Jo-Wilfried Tsonga); Lawrence Frankopan, who has built a company, Starwing, that represents Stanislas Wawrinka as well as a collection of top juniors; and Ugo Colombini (Juan Martin del Potro). All these people do sterling work for their clients against the multi-million dollar machines who want to own and manage as much of the sport as they can lay their hands on.
The Times office back home is largely fixated with Murray, and why wouldn’t they be? The British No. 1 is the face and the heartbeat of the game in a country that has trouble deciding whether it likes him or not. There is no doubt in my mind, there never has been and I would quite like a pound for all the times I am asked ‘what is he really like?’ and ‘how do you get along?’ The answer in the first case is that he is a shy, sensitive, inquisitive, straightforward, intriguing young man blessed with a glorious talent and an athletic aptitude I have not seen in any British player; to the second it is ‘pretty well, I think’. He understands and accepts what the press does, that he has his business and we have ours and that is about it.
‘The thing that makes me nervous is the winning, being part of history,’ he has said.
That’s what I play for. I don’t know if that’s what everybody plays for. But I’m sure if you ask Rafa [Nadal], Roger [Federer], Novak [Djokovic], what makes them nervous, [it] is the history of being part of such a huge match. The grand slams mean so much now. I think they’ve become such a big part of the sporting calendar, not just in tennis. They’ve become a huge deal over the last few years. All of the guys are playing all of the events. Even when Ivan [Lendl] played, guys missed a lot of slams. That doesn’t happen any more. That’s what motivates me, the slams. That’s what I train hard for and that’s what gets me pumped.’
Celebrity is not at the centre of Murray’s life. He has never chased a headline, not exactly been driven to market himself and, as a consequence of that and some of his behaviour on the court, he has not been an easy marketing tool.
I’m not really into that stuff. I know a lot of people that are. I don’t really get it. Now it’s actually much less. I think if you live kind of a normal life and aren’t out doing stupid things like falling out of night clubs with no pants on, after a while the paparazzi lose interest. I’m pretty much going home, walking my dogs, practising. Still, around Wimbledon time, it’s different than the rest of the year. I have TV crews calling my house phone early in the morning. Mornings of big matches, you’re getting followed. It doesn’t help, and in the UK I don’t think we really do that good a job with it. If you want your sports teams and athletes to be successful, you don’t really want to be throwing them off their stride in the most important moments. And when you lose, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, you’re useless, you don’t ever win anything.’ So at least [they should] try to help while we’re in the event.
I think that we do, but perhaps Andy isn’t talking about me specifically but us as a group. The week before the first week of a slam is an experience in itself. For a British writer, the demand is to cover – and support – those from home in the qualifying event. In the men’s event, there is Jamie Baker, a contemporary of Murray, a Glaswegian whose spirit and determination are exemplars; and James Ward, a Londoner who has a talent and will not stop trying to make the most of it. In the women’s event, Johanna Konta, a recent recruit to the British ranks courtesy of a long process of courting from the Lawn Tennis Association, is trying to negotiate the jungle. By virtue of their surge up the rankings, Heather Watson and Laura Robson are in the main draw, as is the veteran of the group, Anne Keothavong.
I see my role as to report and offer (considered) support. I have a strong belief that sitting courtside – and the players knowing you are there – acts as a stimulant. They may raise their game a differential notch or two. A gesture (of the appropriate kind) is acceptable. We are trained to write objectively – but that does not mean I don’t want the British players to succeed.
The rankings may not say so officially but the leaders of the respective packs are Federer, the cheetah, and Serena Williams, the lioness. For the languid Federer, his levels of commitment to the sport in court-time in 2013 will be reduced. He has paid his dues. At thirty-one years of age, having played for over twelve years and with 600 Tour matches under his belt, the Swiss qualifies for exemptions from the tour. He does not have to play the mandated ATP Tour 1,000 events, so he is leaving a couple from his schedule. ‘I’m giving myself space, I have to make sure I create a schedule so it makes sense for my practice,’ he says. ‘I have some catching up to do from that standpoint.’
Federer is adored and respected. When he walks onto a court, the court is his. He is the lord of the manor and, as such, his every movement and stance is uniquely monitored and examined. We know what he does for the sport; what he does outside of the game – though much of it private – offers him a role in the sport that only the absent Nadal comes close to replicating. The women’s game is defined by Serena Williams. Hers has been the most extraordinary story, her family the most remarkable people. Like Federer, she is in her thirties now, and like Federer, she holds the court in her thrall. She is box-office. They start the tournament in pleasing style, Federer does not drop a set in four rounds; Williams drops only eight games by the same stage.
The major incidents in the first week involve a third-round, five-set loss for Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, the No. 6 seed, to the Frenchman Jérémy Chardy. In conversation with del Potro before the event started, he tells me he is ‘a changed person’ though he does not elaborate. I get the sense that something is troubling him but that is where we leave it. On the women’s side, there is the usual and apparently inevitable loss for Samantha Stosur, the Australian hope, in the second round (better than usual) to China’s Jie Zheng, 7–5 in the third set.
In the fourth round, there is one match that stands above all others. Djokovic plays with relative calm in the early stages and now plays Wawrinka, a man who could be an absolute star in his homeland were it not that he shares that particular piece of Europe with Federer. Since speaking to him at Wimbledon in 2009 (the day before he played Murray in the fourth round), a conversation that was marked by him falling through his canvas chair, Wawrinka and I have spent a lot of time together discussing the sport. I like these chats and so, it seems, does he. I sometimes watch him and wonder, with that talent, and those shots, why is he not an established top ten player. It has to be that he doesn’t believe in himself enough. I don’t know what possesses me but I go up to him before the match against Djokovic and say I want to see the real Wawrinka play tonight. It may flout journalistic rules to express my opinions to a player in this manner at all. I don’t really care. I know that Novak will give it his all, he never fails to do that. I just want to see Stan do the same. He says he will. I send a Twitter message saying I believe it will be a firecracker of a match. It turns out to be the best I’ve seen since the 2008 Wimbledon final.
Wawrinka is leading 6–1, 4–1. It is astonishing stuff that has the world No. 1 rocking, as if on the ropes, dodging some punches, but the Swiss is landing with three-quarters of them. Were he to build a two-set lead, surely, in this form, he would prevail, but he drops serve at 5–2 and a sense of ‘uh-oh’ is in the air. Djokovic wins five straight games to take the second set and then the third 6–4. It is time for Wawrinka to fade, but not only does he not fade, he plays with such an air of certainty it is barely credible and he wins the fourth set on a tie-break.
There are many points in a match more crucial than others and one such arrives at 4–4 in the fifth on a fourth break point for Wawrinka when a forehand return is called long. He has a Hawk-Eye challenge up his sleeve but the umpire’s upraised index finger (indicating he agrees with the call) is enough to dissuade Wawrinka from asking for the replay. He will live to regret coming over shy Stan. The replays we see indicate the ball skimmed the line. On such infinitesimal margins can great matches be determined. Trailing 11–10, both players seizing up with cramp, Wawrinka is match points down. On the first he delivers a 124mph serve through the ‘T’, on the second he plays the most sublime backhand of his life down the line and on the third, a rally that will go down as one of the best of all, it is Djokovic who – as usual – has the last word, as a perfectly rolled cross-court backhand leaves Wawrinka stranded, winded, devastated, at the net.
Djokovic wins 1–6, 7–5, 6–4, 6–7, 12–10 in five hours and two minutes. The rest of the tennis world has been watching, and tweeting, in admiration and disbelief. Within an hour of the match, the players have tweeted to each other, a new and fascinating phenomenon. Marks of respect are everywhere. It is, to my mind, the defining moment of the championship.
There are matches of distinction and matches (and performances) we would best forget. The rise of 19-year-old Sloane Stephens as a player of regard is much enhanced by her victory over Williams in the quarter-finals. I recall being introduced to her in Indian Wells in 2012, and how engaging and confident she seemed. I see why now. She is not put off when Williams takes a timeout after a heavy fall and instead keeps it all together to win 3–6, 7–5, 6–4.
In the semi-finals, she will play Azarenka, a match that will go down in the annals more for what happened off the court than on it. Cries go up all around when Azarenka, who has blown five match points in the eighth game of the second set, and then lost serve, calls for the trainer. She takes the equivalent of two timeouts, for injuries to her rib and her knee; there is a nine-minute hiatus before Stephens is allowed to serve. She is a point away from 5–5 but loses serve and the match. There is a misunderstanding in the on-court interview when Azarenka says that she almost did the choke of the year. She thinks she has been asked where her game has gone, whereas the question was why did she ‘go’ from the court. The Americans are up in arms, seizing on what they regard as gamesmanship against their player and the Twittersphere is blue with complaints. The Melbourne press feeds on this, describing the final between Azarenka and Li Na as ‘Melbourne v. Azarenka’. Azarenka’s coach, Sam Sumyk, describes the media as ‘sharks’.
There is much mending of fences behind the scenes but what is clear is that medical timeouts are open to abuse and if you give a player an opportunity to use a rule to their favour, they are almost certainly going to take it. We cannot know what goes on out of public view, we have to take a player’s word for it and, call me naive, I take Azarenka’s. She calls Stephens the next day to express her regret that it had to end the way it did; Stephens accepts the call and the emotions that inspire it with good grace. Azarenka wins the final against Li with some aggressive tennis, though she has to do it with the crowd almost entirely in the Chinese corner. Her will to win remains remarkable. The champion plonks a can of Red Bull – one of her sponsors – on the table in front of her during her TV interviews, which is strictly against the rules. No one does anything about it.
For Djokovic, life is like a box of chocolates. After his momentous struggle against Wawrinka, he defeats the No. 5 seed Tomáš Berdych for the loss of twelve games, the No. 4 seed David Ferrer for five (a stunning success) and then has an extra day to rest ahead as those in the second semi-final, Federer and Murray, extend each other to four hours before the British player prevails in five sets, having played poorly in two tie-breaks, but serving twenty-one aces and hitting his spots as well as he has ever done. And so, for the second grand slam in succession, Djokovic meets Murray to decide the outcome.
Djokovic ought to win the first set, but loses it when Murray plays a tremendous tie-break. Murray ought to be 2–0 up in the second, the Serb is teetering yet somehow holds on despite three break points and we enter a second tie-break during which there is an extraordinary moment when a feather floats into Murray’s eye-line as he prepares for a second serve at 2–2. He stops to retrieve it, he moves back to serve and misses. Djokovic is never behind in the match again and wins 6–7, 7–6, 6–3, 6–2, a final that is not a classic but which encapsulates Djokovic’s further dominance of the sport: his movement, his power, his ability to transfer defence into attack, his impossible drive.
Murray, chastened but not depressed, flies home that very night. Though suffering from the effects of twenty-three hours in the air, he drives to the All England Club for dinner with his contemporaries: Baker, Colin Fleming, Jonny Marray and the stricken Hutchins. They laugh and they cry. A couple of days later, I sit down with Hutchins at the club, a lad I have known since he was thirteen, for one of the more remarkable conversations of my career. He is fighting the good fight, taking it to the enemy, in his case, cancer. For months now he has been troubled with pains in his back and hip. He appreciates he may have endured them for longer than he should since he did not pick up on the signs. He says:
Being a sportsman helped me to overcome the initial diagnosis and mindset but the weakest points in my body are hip and back and being used to playing with pain there meant that it made me not look further into it and maybe I could have caught it earlier. I had been playing with pain in my body so it helps in one way and maybe not in others. The support has been incredible and a little unreal. When you see all these messages and cards, emails and letters from people you’ve not spoken to for a long time at the start I was thinking ‘who is this for?’ because it didn’t feel like it was for me. And then you start to realise it is you and you are quite overwhelmed by it. You are lifted, you feel special that people want to reach out to you. You text me and I think ‘oh I wonder what Neil’s up to’ and I go and read your paper. I know there are hundreds of people around the world who have experienced it because they write and tell me ‘I went through stage four’ or ‘my husband did this ten years ago when the medicine wasn’t that good and now he is sitting here next to me’ and that kind of makes you realise (not that people would write to you saying they didn’t get through it), but those who write about living a happy life force you to believe you will do this. This can give me 2–3 per cent of a lift.
When I walk into the Royal Marsden Hospital, I see so many people affected by cancer and I know it is curable and this is the process by which, if the body accepts the drugs, you will get over it. I don’t think anything other than that. Maybe a couple of seconds every day you allow bad thoughts to come into your head, you have to have some realisation and respect that it could happen but you mustn’t allow negativity to come in. This is an evil trying to push me off my path but I intend to stay on the path.
He tells me he has become engaged to his sweetheart of ten years, Lindsay Wood, and I shake him by the hand and wish him well. He is in my head as I write, dreaming of a better tomorrow.
Chapter 1
Arranging a Game
THE POLITICAL SHAPE of professional tennis has not altered much over the years – the roadblocks, enmities and challenges remain and in some cases have become more entrenched as the years have gone by. Too few people in the sport want to open their eyes to the possibilities for change, innovation and risk. Those who do will risk a slapping down along with those who offer them the succour of publicity. The status quo favours those who have forged their positions of power and do not want to lose their front row seats and who, inevitably, fight extremely hard to keep things as they are.
Before the start of the year no one could remember the last time the seven different bodies representing the sport’s leadership – the four grand slam tournaments, the ATP World Tour, the WTA and the ITF – had met in the same room and by the end of the year nothing had changed. This is not joined-up leadership in my opinion.
Every now and again, there is a new face in the seat of power. After a protracted, often hapless process, Brad Drewett became the executive chairman and president of the ATP World Tour from 1 January, 2012. The 54-year old Australian, who reached the top forty in his playing days, had been elevated from his role as the CEO of the ATP’s ‘International Group’ helping to spur the growth of the game in the Far East, especially China, with whose leaders, both in tennis and beyond, he was on excellent terms. For a large part of the year, Drewett was troubled by a problem with his vocal chords which hardly made an unenviable task any easier, for there was much that needed to be talked about, to debate, to engage with. By November, at the O2 arena, he looked dead beat. By January 2013, we would know the full savage extent of why.
Before his illness took a defining hold, would Drewett be able to deliver change? Did he want to? Was it worth the opprobrium? At the start of the year, I spoke to Etienne de Villiers, who had been in charge of the tour between 2005 and 2008; a man brought in by the ATP from the world of Disney to instigate change, to make new things happen and yet, when he did, he was roundly castigated and more or less driven from office.
De Villiers and I became good friends and I found the condemnation of him after he had left office far too personal and extreme. He did what he thought was right, he tried to make a difference and that is the best much of us can hope for. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the structure of the association and whether he thought the ATP, where the decision-making was shared between tournaments and players, required a redefinition of values and priorities.
He said:
I took a lot of flak for being the architect of change but I knew from day one how tough it would be. I had this wonderful meeting in Dubai three months into my tenure with [Marat] Safin, [Lleyton] Hewitt, [Roger] Federer, [Andre] Agassi and Rafa [Nadal] who was just a kid. Rafa said ‘don’t listen to anything I have to say because I don’t know anything about tennis, you are the businessman.’ Then he gave me hell about wanting to change the clay court season. When I see him now I ask: ‘Whatever happened to that innocent guy?’ ‘I grew up’, he says.
Andre said: ‘Are you going to listen to me if I tell you what to do? I’m the No. 1.’ I said it had sounded like a trick question. He gave me this incredibly steely intelligent stare. I said, ‘No, I’m not going to listen to you, I’m going to do what I think is right’, and he said, ‘Then you have a chance of succeeding, but understand this – you will be hated by everyone for doing what you are going to do, even if you believe it’s the right thing and only ten years later will you be given credit for it and if you can live with that, you’ll do a great job because the lows are going to be lower than you ever imagined.’
De Villiers said he went into the job with his eyes wide open. He was a bit of a table-banger, he ruffled feathers, he upset folk, he wanted to move faster than tennis had moved for a long time. ‘So none of what happened to me ever came as a shock,’ he said.
The trouble with the ATP is that it is a fundamentally flawed concept. As Churchill said, ‘Democracy is the poorest of all of the solutions but it’s the best solution we’ve got’. I don’t know that any structure is better. You could argue that the players could have their own union but then you would have inherent conflict and employer/employee always arguing about how to divide the spoils and I think that would be very difficult.
For as long as you have sixty-three disparate tournaments that have to be drawn and dragged to do things that are not only in their self-interest but in the sport’s and ultimately everyone’s interest they will resist because it wasn’t their idea or it’s not what their owner thinks or their federation thinks, or they think because they hit a tennis ball twenty years ago, they know how the sport should be run.
Following De Villiers’s departure in 2008, the ATP launched its ‘Brave New World’ of two strong top tiers in key markets, with nine Masters ‘1,000’ events in Europe, the United States and Asia which culminated in the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals in London in November as well as ten ‘500’ tournaments (from twenty-two applicant cities) that also included Latin America. By 2011, six of the leading events would be combined with the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA).
There was much talk of consistent delivery of stars with a guaranteed player commitment of eight of the 1,000 events and four 500s, including one post the US Open (after September). There would be $800 million in facility investment, a greater than 50 per cent rise in prize money and, in total, more than $1 billion of added capital and increases in tournament ‘on-site financial commitments’ would be made via the Masters 1,000 and 500 events and spectacular new stadia have and would be built around the world.
At the onset of 2012, the ATP World Tour promotes itself as ‘entering its fifth decade as the leading governing body in professional tennis’ – a bold pronouncement and not entirely in keeping with reality (hardly a new sensation in tennis). Beneath the board operates a council of twelve players from various levels and a thirteen-member tournament council of whom ten are in place at the start of the year. Federer is the incumbent president with Nadal and Novak Djokovic as premier aides. That players of this stature are willing to engage in the process is welcome but do they have the best intentions of the sport as a whole at heart? The year ahead will tell us the answer but several of those lower down the rankings are wary.
The players are looking enviously towards the money paid by the grand slam tournaments – one of the running stories of the year – but the ATP sets its own compensation levels and there is much to be done to improve the lot of those in the lower echelons. In over twenty years, the prize money at the Futures and Challenger levels has barely risen and inflation has bitten ravenously into everyone’s earning potential. There is little monetary incentive for the lower ranked players to want to improve and the ATP needs to keep all of its family members happy.
The WTA’s ‘Leadership team’ is fifteen-strong and headed by Stacey Allaster, a Canadian named by Forbes as one of the most powerful women in sport. She had replaced Larry Scott – once a politician for the ATP before generating astonishing sponsorship deals and securing equal prize money across the grand slam board – as the chairman and CEO in mid-2009 and signed a five year extension of her contract which was a significant achievement. The WTA is made up of seven directors and also has an eight-woman player council and twelve-person tournament council.
In 2008, the WTA introduced a Roadmap designed to shorten and streamline the season, increase prize money and the bonus pool payments (for those who lived up to their playing expectations) and provide more breaks for the top players by reducing their commitment, with the goal of generating healthier players who showed up more regularly for the tournaments they had committed to. This year would mark the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the women’s tour, perhaps the most significant moment ever in the advent of women in sport.
The ITF, the International Tennis Federation, is the governing body of world tennis which ‘oversees administration and regulation; organising international competition, structuring the game, developing the game and promoting the game’. The Board of Directors is elected every two years by national associations while the president serves a four-year term. The current incumbent, Italian Francesco Ricci Bitti, is in his third period of office, spanning twelve years. He has an executive vice-president and a dozen vice-presidents, whose number includes at least one from each of the four grand slam tournament nations. The day-to-day duties are carried out by a ‘secretariat’ of six that includes the president and executive vice-president.
Last and most powerful of all are the four grand slam tournaments, comprising in the order in which they are played, the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Together their chairmen form a grand slam committee, of which American Bill Babcock, formerly legal counsel at the defunct Men’s International Professional Tennis Council and subsequently the grand slam administrator employed by the ITF, is the paid director. Few people have more experience of the political machinations of the tennis world than Babcock.
The structure of the calendar remains a lifelong conversation piece. As the cornerstones of the sport, the grand slam tournaments decide their dates and everything else works around them. The Australian Open is staged in the last two weeks of January, which coincides with school holidays and when the weather in Melbourne is invariably perfect.
If the sport were to start all over again with a blank sheet of paper, the ‘Aussie’ would almost certainly be staged later in the year, with mid-March the optimum after a strong hard court build-up. The tournament is remote in more ways than one, far away in travel terms and further away from any other event of substantial significance in distance and time. Once the sport departs from Melbourne, there is a four-month hiatus filled with tournaments of varying hues and values (from clay courts, to hard courts and back to clay again) until the next major, the French Open in Paris’s late spring.
The chequered nature of the tennis season, where one element does not always flow straightforwardly into another, makes it difficult to follow and thus the story often becomes disjointed.
After Paris, there is a strangulated grass court season of two clear weeks until the grand-daddy of the slams, Wimbledon. Six weeks later, we are in New York City for the US Open. This year the Olympic Games will be staged at the All England Club with a three-week gap both after Wimbledon and before the US Open. It means that working through the 2012 schedule will require a player’s greater care and attention than usual.
Dotted through the year, the weeks for the Davis Cup and Fed Cup competitions are slotted in, two events which, were it not for their historic value, the ITF would have very little with which to bargain at the top table. They know it and so does everyone else. The ITF is as protectionist of its events as any wildlife organisation of an endangered species. The Davis Cup, which began in 1900 as a friendly fixture between the United States and the British Isles, has grown into a huge competition so confusing that those of us who have written about it for thirty years still have trouble explaining its more intricate variants. The ITF, on behalf of the Davis Cup, haggled for and won ranking points for player participation but points are awarded only at world group level and not lower down, which makes for a two-tier system. This is plainly ludicrous. Without these two events, the ITF almost forfeits its reason to exist. No one wants to lose the Davis or Fed Cups, but almost everyone (bar the ITF) wants to change them.
Beneath these major events is a tranche of smaller tournaments of varying prestige, and lower still the Challengers and Futures for men, Tiers III and IV for the women. This is where the matches are at their most raw, where a player’s first ranking points are accrued, where the pain of the weekly defeats (for there are many more of those than there are victories) have to be utilised to a player’s benefit, where teenagers become grown-ups and the grown-ups staying in the game bully the teenagers. There has not been an increase in prize money for years at this level, which is where the potential for match-fixing is at its most acute.
Then we have the juniors, the fresh-faced, driven boys and girls, more often than not with fixated parents pushing them all the way, who are looking to make their mark, to grab their slice of the fame, often calling their own lines knowing that sometimes, to be scrupulously honest may cost them in the long run. The junior matches are increasingly intense and ferocious and pored over by a phalanx of agents. I will learn during the year of a leading executive of a national association accused by several parents at a small tournament of openly encouraging his son to question line calls that should not have been questioned. This is the world we are in.
Of course tennis is a sport that has its fears for corruption. Such is its cut-throat nature, so ferocious has the competition become, such is the physical power required to succeed in it that it is increasingly exposed to the threat of corner-cutting and cheating. There have been doping charges in the past and there will be more in the future for sure. The testing procedures are alleged to be flawed and the amount of money required to police it properly is not made available. No one can be 100 per cent certain that no one has ever doped, indeed there are those on the internet who are insistent that the sport cannot be played at its current levels unless someone somewhere is supplying something that is both illegal and undetectable. The sport has to guard, too, against the ever-present threat of match-fixing. There are hundreds of matches played every month at numerous levels and the demands on policing and enforcing the sport’s codes of conduct require eternal vigilance. Does tennis have the means and the wherewithal to pronounce without doubt that it is clean? It does not.
The superstar players are truly stunning in so many respects, as people, as athletes and as representatives of their sport. Golden age is an over-used phrase but it is difficult to come up with anything better. Djokovic, Nadal, Federer and Murray are the John, Paul, George and Ringo of the men’s game, a set of four individuals who together make such sweet music. Yet, like the Fab Four, they have their foibles. On the surface they get along fine, but underneath they want to beat the others’ brains out. There are those who want to join the band, but they have not been allowed to play along. The four men at the top have lent the sport a mystical, magical sense of well-being such that tennis wishes it could stay like this forever and fears what might happen if one or more of them fades away. Then we might all be in trouble.
Through no fault of their own, the women’s game is in the shadows. It does not have a Martina–Chrissie hegemony, rather there are lots of fine players milling around waiting for someone to make an expressive mark. A lot of sponsors clearly want to be a part of women’s tennis but they have been unable to find the single company that wishes to have its name adorning the tour, as Kraft, Sanex and Sony Ericsson had in the past. Tennis is in a stunningly successful period, for all its disparate and fragmented structure. Fernando Soler, the Spanish head of the tennis division of International Management Group, IMG Worldwide, the world’s pre-eminent sports management agency, puts it best.
Men’s tennis has never been as high as it is today and it is a credit to these four guys, but there is sometimes a lack of recognition for what some promoters have done for the sport. You have seen the evolution in facilities, of building tennis events, improving the quality of TV product and distribution of the television rights, the evolution of the TV world from terrestrial, to digital to satellite and how well tennis feeds into the channels, from Monday to Sunday, seven hours per day. Look at what has happened at the grand slams, notably Wimbledon and the Australian Open [both of which IMG represents], the facilities are incredible and the level of investment behind this and the quality of the management and their commitment so that the players can perform at the level they do, is better than it has ever been.
