Each week I do a post for the sports-blog No Mas called Deep Tennis. I'm going to start copying them here. It's pretty simple: The editor there asks me a question about tennis, preferably historical stuff, and I answer it. This week's is about the legend of Ivan Lendl. It begins, as it must, with a clip of the man at his brutal best.
“You know who no one ever talks about anymore? Lendl. It's funny, but after all those years of watching the guy, I don't know a thing about him. Was he as boring as he seemed or was there more to him than met the eye? Where does he rank on the all-time lists? And what does he do now... I imagine him owning some austere tennis/fitness compound in Czechoslovakia where he feeds young girls suspicious energy drinks.”
The relationship between Ivan Lendl and the fans of tennis is unlike any other. The sport’s audience is famous for despising its champions when they’re in their primes, embracing them just as they’re about to kick the career bucket, and then moaning about how much better the game was when they were out there kicking ass and taking names.
This is not the case with Lendl. The Czech No. 1 and Hall-of-Famer was hated during his playing days, of course, so much so that he never received any kind of end-of-career embrace from fans. The best we could do as his back gave out and his career wound down was tolerate his presence. Which wasn’t difficult—he’d been beating the hell out of everyone for so long, we couldn’t imagine the sport without him.
The strange thing is what has happened to Lendl—or rather the idea of Lendl—since his retirement. You know how they say that at this point, probably a half a million people claim to have been in the Polo Grounds for Bobby Thompson’s Shot Heard Round the World? That’s kind of how I feel about today’s Lendl fans. Virtually everyone old enough to remember him now tells me how much they loved the guy, how he was their favorite player, bar none. Even friggin’ Snoop Dogg sings Lendl’s praises! I wasn't a fan when he played, but I confess to a wish to see that little arm-shake he did right before he served. You knew when you saw Lendl, you were seeing the serious game.
So the man with the fish face, argyle shirts, monstrous Adidas racquet, groundbreaking forehand, and mile-wide mean streak is hip. I wonder sometimes where these fans were when he was playing. This is the guy whom Sports Illustrated called the “The Champion That Nobody Cares About” right on its cover (now that’s when tennis was huge! you can’t even get Roger Federer on the SI cover at all these days). He was seen as a sallow, workaholic drone, a perfect Eastern-bloc foil for the ultra-talented and semi-lazy American John McEnroe.
What we didn’t know then was that the sport’s future belonged to Lendl, and McEnroe, a serve-and-volley student of the old Aussie coach Harry Hopman, was the final gasp of tennis’ charismatic good old days. Lendl was a pioneer of sports-nutrition and fitness training. He was also the most important figure in the game’s on-court transformation into the power-baseline sport it is today. Before Lendl, tennis players were either steady baseliners (think Borg) or net-rushers (think Laver, Mac, pretty much everyone else). Along with Jimmy Connors, Lendl ended that dichotomy by playing attacking tennis from the baseline. More important, he did it with the inside-out forehand—20 years after Lendl’s peak, it’s still the crucial shot in men’s tennis.
Lendl was also one of the earliest male tennis divas. He stuffed sawdust in his pocket (it helped keep his grip dry) and spilled it along the baseline. He put up with no distractions whatsoever; Lendl wouldn’t start play until every last person was in his or her seat. Once he was bothered by the Goodyear blimp hovering above his court, so he had the tournament referee radio up to get the blimp to move.
As far as the pantheon goes, I’d place Lendl as the fifth best men’s player of the Open era, behind Sampras, Federer, Borg, and Laver, and just ahead of Agassi, McEnroe, and Connors. He won eight majors, reached the final of the US Open a ridiculous eight straight times, won three of the four Slams, and owned winning records against just about everyone. He beat Connors 17 times in a row at one point, and he basically drove Johnny Mac from the game. One of my favorite things about Lendl was how he handled the “tricky” guys, the guys no one wanted to play. Most prominent of these was Miloslav Mecir, another Czech. Mecir was known as the Big Cat, and he played a bizarrely silky and effortless game that was difficult to read. (Despite never winning a major, Mecir may be the most name-dropped ex-pro among today’s tennis aficionados, to the point where I’ve started to think of him as highly overrated.) Anyway, Lendl never had any trouble with him, drubbing him five of six times, including a blowout in a US Open final. Lendl didn’t care who you were or how weird your game was, he just got down to the business of beating you like a drum.
Sadly for tennis fans, Lendl is now devoted to golf, and acts like the sport that made him rich is just something from his past. He’s a U.S. citizen, has lived in Connecticut for years, has Republican tendencies, breeds vicious police dogs, and has raised three daughters to be golf prodigies. Typical of Lendl, he says he never let any of them beat him in golf, even when they were little kids.
That brutality in his personality may explain why Lendl never got much love as a player, and why he’s so admired in retrospect. The guy is terrific in theory; he had a cool executioner’s look on court, and a rapier sense of humor. His scouting report on a young Andre Agassi was devastatingly concise: “A forehand and a haircut.” (Lendl is famous for his putdowns, and equally famous for not being able to take a joke at his expense). This all would have been fine if McEnroe hadn’t disappeared from the top of the sport in the mid-80s. That left Lendl to dominate—he finished No. 1 from 1985-’87 and again in ’89 and won 94 titles, second only to Connors. But where Lendl made a great Cold War foil for the stylish McEnroe, the Czech's mechanical game and heartless dominance was a little tough to take on its own.
So we’ve given Lendl his due years later, when we can enjoy the idea of him without actually having to watch him beat some poor sap into the ground. But that’s certainly fun to see once in a while—check out the youtube clip above to see the man in all his vicious glory. Or, if you want to see a young Ivan take it on the chin (not literally), click below for the last point of his loss to Bjorn Borg in the 1981 French Open final. Now that's dirtball!
PS: I've got a post up about the clay season over at ESPN.com.