Many players, including some who could really benefit from better coaching, reject the idea of on-court coaching, which is a staple of just about every spectator sport we watch. Just look at how many WTA stars decline the option to consult with a coach during a set-break changeover. Me? I don't need no stinkin' coach, I can handle this.
This situation is about the nature of the game than attitude. Why is there no stigma attached to having a full-time, traveling coach, yet tremendous resistance to the idea of on-court coaching? It's because the court is supposed to be a special place, where you check the customary habits, conveniences and advantages at the tram-line. Once you set foot on that court, you're supposed to do your own problem-solving. Tennis is the ultimate go-it-alone sport, and that's its greatest glory.
To that end, it's interesting that players who reflexively balk at the idea of on-court coaching have no problem whatsoever with on-court coaching during Davis Cup ties. It speaks volumes about the power of tradition and the special lore and allure of Davis Cup, but it sure doesn't make sense.
Roger Federer's seeming aversion to the idea of being in a an intensive coaching relationship isn't a quirk - it's part of a tradition. Wanna bet that all those tough Aussie icons (the Rod Lavers and John Newcombes of this world) admire The Mighty Fed for not walking around with a coach trailing five steps behind, carrying the racket bag and trying to send a text message to his stringer?
As a result, tennis coaching has long been considered, by some and in some configurations, a semi-legitimate occupation, for someone lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time to earn a player's confidence and trust. (Come on, haven't you ever wondered, when the camera quickly panned to a Michael Joyce even a Toni Nadal: I wonder just what, exactly, he does?).
And the answer to that question sometimes has very little to do with the staples of coaching, technique and strategy, and a lot to do with emotional support and morale maintenance.
Tennis is a sport played by individuals, usually in a one-on-one context, and that has a tremendous shaping influence on many aspects of the game. But tennis also is a sport taught and/or learned by individuals, often on a one-on-one basis - which is why everyone starts out hitting more or less the same way but we with a Fabrice Santoro here, a Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal there. The stylistic variety in tennis is staggering. After all, how many different ways can you strike a corner kick, and how many different types of jump shots do you see?
Tennis isn't a game you pick up in a dusty lot, the way even the poorest street urchin in rural Brazil can pick up soccer. It isn't a game you're directed into at school, like basketball. There is neither an active, free infra-structure of coaches nor a more-or-less universal playbook. Tennis is not only technique-intensive, it's also dogma free. Tennis doesn't even have that tide of peer pressure (and adulation) that can sweep along a young athlete with talent for football or basketball and makes it easier to accept the discipline and training required to get good at it. Truly, tennis is the lonely sport.
All this helps explain why tennis has a rich history of intense, unconventional student-coach relationships, and why some degree of emotional bonding is part of most successful relationships. The ability to form such a relationship is an important gift, because most players outgrow the coaches who developed their games - who helped them find that proverbial statue buried in the block of raw marble. The significant exception is the parent who becomes a player's coach for life. It's funny, but while coaching is seen as something extraneous, something left outside the court where the player does his or her most important work, tennis has pretty much obliterated the taboo against the most intense of all forms of coaching, that of a parent-child coaching relationship.
Intrusive, demanding, even bellicose parent/coaches are not merely accepted, they're a regular sub-culture, at least in the women's game. Sports is full of pushy, over-involved parents, but in most sports they fade or get shoved into the background as their children become good enough to make a markmake a mark. That they don't in tennis tells you something about the game. And let's be frank about this - many of these parent-child relationships are spectacularly successful (Yuri and Maria Sharapova, Karolj and Monica Seles, Richard and Venus and Serena Williams. . .), although the extent to which "coaching" as we generally understand it comes into play may be surprisingly minor.
Robert Lansdorp, who developed the games of a long list of champions including Pete Sampras, Lindsay Davenport, Tracy Austin and Eliot Teltscher, recently told me the one thing most gifted players need if they hope to make it big is a "manager." He wasn't talking about a business manager, but someone to take charge, make decisions, and always put the best interest of the player first.
Strong personal bonds and sometimes the chemistry of attraction provide the glue that holds a coach-student relationship together. We spent quite a bit of time recently talking about pioneering women; are all of you familiar with the story of Eleanor "Teach" Tennant? Her journey in tennis began when she adopted Alice Marble and turned her into a multiple Grand Slam champion.Tenant was a precursor of Lansdrop, or Larissa Preobraschenskaja (the legendary Spartak coach who helped develop the current crop of Russian stars, starting with Anna Kournikova).But in Tenant's time, tennis was still an amateur, largely under-the-radar sport. That made it easier for a coach and player to form a long-term relationship, much like the exotic nature of tennis and the poor economy of Russia made it easy for Preobraschenskaja to influence an entire generation.
Throughout modern tennis history, gifted young players have always made their way to any of a fairly small number of nationally known and respected tennis coaches - the Landsdorps of this world. That trend only intensified with the Open era, and the lengths to which parents would go to get their kids the best coaching. Coaches like Lansdrop are foundational coaches who shape games, but they're often discarded when a player blossoms, because they aren't considered sufficiently familiar with top-level tennis, and the ins-and-outs of the pro circuit.
On the cusp of the Open era, a new kind of coach appeared on the scene in the form of Harry Hopman. This Australian visionary was the architect of the Australian Davis Cup dynasty, and the man who shaped the games - and characters - of a host of Aussie icons led by Rod Laver.
American readers will understand what it means when I say Hopman was a Vince Lombardi-esque figure. He was a disciplinarian, a taskmaster, and a perfectionist. He was interested in greatness, not just good, clean fun, or even excellent technique and strategy. He was, simply, famous for being a shaper of men into fit, strong, dedicated competitors..
Great players were always highly competitive and hard-working. Hopman saw that and successfully institutionalize those virtues. He implanted a quasi-militaristic ethos that paid handsome rewards on the Davis Cup battlefields, but also at Grand Slam events for his favored players. Those elites loved him, but those whom Hopman deemed second-rate, or insufficiently fit for high-level tennis combat, became outcasts and pariahs. Some of them (double specialist and spectacular hothead Bob Hewitt comes to mind) actually emigrated from Australia to start new tennis lives elsewhere.
In those years just before the game went Open, Australia and the US dominated tennis, although Europe and to a lesser degree South America were in the mix. The US did not have a Harry Hopman, but at the dawn of the Open era it had an institution nearly as powerful and fruitful - a strong collegiate tennis system. Players like Chuck McKinley, Dennis Ralston, Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Bob Lutz, Erik van Dillen, Brian Gottfried, Dick Stockton, Harold Solomon filtered into the pros through the collegiate system, where their games - and values - were shaped by coaches like George Toley, Frank Brennan, Tut Bartzen and others. But by the time Jimmy Connors did his obligatory year at UCLA, and John McEnroe sampled life at Stanford, that vein had been exhausted. The stakes were too high for players to attend college. We were in the age of the cradle-to-grave tennis professional, and it seemed to call for a new breed of coach, someone with a far more diverse and all-encompassing mandate, someone more like the "manager" of whom Lansdrop spoke.
Enter, Ion Tiriac - the man who changed the face of tennis coaching. To be continued. . .
