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by Pete Bodo
[[This is the first in a series of articles on coaching in pro tennis]]
Writing about coaching in tennis easily becomes an exercise in futility. Every time you try to make a point on the subject, you feel like you need to qualify it, because the history of this or that great player can be cited to repudiate it. That really is what it's like. Can a coach make a champion? No way! But look at what Ion Tiriac did with Guillermo Vilas. . . Does Roger Federer need a coach? No way! But look what Brad Gilbert did for Andre Agassi, at a very delicate moment in Agassi's career.
For that reason, I decided that instead of trying to write a bullet-pointed treatise on what makes a good coach, who needs a coach, or just what a coach provides, technically, strategically or emotionally (though there will be some of all of that), I would just do a series of red-meat posts on the subject, touching on the nature of the coaching challenge, and the role coaches have played going back to the dawn of the Open era. That's a lot of ground to cover, and I'm going to travel it through the players and coaches I've observed over the years. For there's only one thing I know for sure about the subject of coaching: It's a complicated issue that can't be defined, gift-wrapped, and tied up with a nice ribbon.
Coaching is, at best, an inexact science; sometimes, it borders on the dark arts. At others, it seems to require nothing more than a shrewd grasp of the fundamentals of strategy and familiarity with how the game is played at that particular moment in time. But it's almost always more complicated an issue than it ought to be, for two reasons:
First, tennis is less a game of strategy than execution. If Monica Seles had a strategy, I never figured it out (don't take me too literally on that) - but has anyone ever had better execution, which for our purposes can be defined as the ability to hit the ball where it will do the most damage, with maximum velocity, more often than can an opponent? Tennis is a simple game - you hit harder, deeper and more consistently than the other guy and you're going to win, period.
But if that's all there were to it, tennis would be a tediously simple game, more like the popular sports bar game, Pop-a-shot. But execution isn't an achieved, static state (call it tennis Nirvana); its a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute streaming battle. Federer's struggle with his serve in the recent Australian Open vividly demonstrated that. No coach is going to do you much good if, for reasons having to do with your head, heart, or fast-twitch muscles, you can't . . . stick the goldarned ball in the court. And any idiot is going to look like a coaching genius if you're a young Seles and can do just that.
But there's more: It's a misnomer to all tennis an "individual" sport, why is why the notion that it's next of kin to golf is both absurd and damaging. Skeet-shooting and ice-dancing are individual sports, like golf. Tennis, though, is a intense mental and physical battle between two individuals. Executing a triple-toe-loop (whatever the hail that is) or launching a foul shot from the free throw line is one thing - executing tennis strokes in a streaming game, and one in which the person across the net is trying to throw a monkey-wrench into your gears, using any combination of tools (speed, specific kinds of strokes, court positioning) is a whole 'nother story. And that both increases the value of good tennis while putting severe limitations on it. Does anyone believe that a little better coaching and Andy Roddick turns the tables on Federer?
Second, the nature of tennis as a sport of individuals, rather than a team enterprise, profoundly influences the nature of coaching. A tennis coach can be utterly powerless - it isn't like the tennis coach can come up with a great plan that hides the weaknesses of certain players while emphasizing the strengths of the better ones. The tennis coach is lashed to the mast of the player, for better or worse. He looks like he's got the easiest job on earth when his protege is imposing his terms on a match, rolling and crushing opponents (which doesn't mean the coach is redundant, just that certain aspects of his repertoire are not needed) - or when his guy is getting waxed because he can't keep his forehand in play, or reach the shots of his fleeter opponent.
But the nature of tennis as a sport of individuals also means that a good coach-player relationship can be a profound asset. Let's face it, if you were to define tennis with something like soccer's claim to be The Simple Game, you could do worse, in the accuracy if not the public relations department, than to describe tennis as The Lonely Game. No athlete takes the field with quite as much pure, personal responsibility on his or her shoulders, and few are playing under harsher terms: You play to win money; you don't win matches, you don't make money. You don't make money and the next thing you're living in mom's basement, contemplating going back to school. Worse yet, your game is solely your responsibility, and remind me of just who can't benefit from an extra-pair of eyes, a point-of-view different from his own, a different perspective on a problem, or goal, or having a trusted partner whose own best interest is your best interest.
Of course, there's a significant potential downside to the intensity of the coach-protege relationship, but if anything I'm surprised at how rarely it bubbles to the surface on the tour. You coach may be a poor analyst of the game (unlikely), a lousy judge of the strengths and weaknesses of your game (more likely) or a charlatan (Most likely; look under "S" for Schnyder, Patty).
The precise contribution of a coach is difficult to measure, except in the most obvious cases, or when a generous protege chooses to set aside the requisite self-centeredness of The Life and graciously acknowledges the role his or her coach is playing. The players who did that most frequently and graciously, in my time, were Martina Navratilova and Andre Agassi. As much as Martina seemed to enjoy being the imperious diva, she gave a long series of coaches, from Sandra Haynie to Rene Richards to Mike Estep, plenty of credit, in public, for their role in her success.
From time to time, I've wondered at why the ATP or WTA doesn't take it upon itself, as part of its player-resources mandate, to maintain something like The Official ATP Coaching Registry, the intent of which would be to help players find coaches, and vica versa. This lack of a formal coaching establishment and structure also tell us a few things about the game, and the coaching profession. Professional tennis is insular, consisting of a relatively small group of players, administrators, and support personnel who create a society unto themselves.
Whenever someone expresses envy at the amount of international traveling I've done, I like to point out that it hardly feels like real travel at all; you can take any tennis tournament that takes place almost anywhere on earth, move it to any other location, and the only thing that's really different is the junk food you consume at the venue, or the language in which say "thank you" to the courtesy-car driver who drops you off at your hotel. This is tennis, not adventure tourism.
Tennis doesn't feature a secret handshake (and the fist-bump no longer qualifies - thanks, Michelle!), but it has some of the properties of a secret society. For that reason, the pool of coaches is small and self-selecting, consisting mostly of former players who won't, can't, or don't want to stow the rackets and put on a coat-and-tie. The only way for an outsider to crack it is to be brought in by a player, but once the coach is inside, he has some room to operate. Have you ever looked at Novak Djokovic's guest box and wondered, Why Marian Vajda? What's he done to earn this job?
The answer to that is simple: he was around. And I don't mean to slight Vajda's talents, which are obviously significant and - who knows? - perhaps far better than we know. But it's only natural that a relatively insular society would operate mainly on the basis of existing relationships, rather than open competition for roles in that society. Let's remember that Paul Annacone didn't find his job as Pete Sampra's coach on Craigslist. He was good friends with Sampras's coach, the late Tim Gullikson, so when Gullikson was felled by brain cancer, he asked Annacone to serve as his interim replacement. Had Tim recovered, Annacone may never have scaled the heights of coaching.
Djokovic's coach, Vajda, is a Slovak, with a career-high ranking of no. 34. The closest he ever came to winning an ATP title was a losing effort in two finals (Munich and Bari). In 2007, Djokovic described the relationship this way: ". . .We started working almost a year ago, okay, nine months ago. And we improved a lot. And I think Marian was a good player, a very solid player himself, as well. He was about 30 in the world, and so he has this experience on the court. He can give me some right advices in the right time. When you're on this level, when you are in the top 20 in the world, you don't need something special to work on, you know, just more mental support and some small things which you cannot notice by yourself. That's why the coach is important, and it's very important to have somebody next to you. And I think Marian and I are getting along very good together. And we've shown that with the results in the last nine months, ten months, you know."
And I think Marian was a good player, a very solid player himself, as well. He was about 30 in the world, and so he has this experience on the court. . . Well, that's a nice way to put it. Another way to put it is: fully 33 guys who were ranked above Vajda at his best theoretically would be "better" coaches for Djokovic than is Vajda (if coaching ability were linked to personal success). Nobody in his right mind believes this to be true, but it suggests something most tennis insiders know: when it comes to coaching, it's not about how good you were; it's about what you learned about Selachimorpha after a few years spent in shark-infested waters.
In this regard, Brad Gilbert, renowned for his Winning Ugly philosophy, has the ultimate credentials for coaching; on paper, he had a world no. 34 game; despite that, he managed to climb as high as no. 5 in the world. Hey, where can I get me some of that stuff, scores of players must have wondered.
Chris Clarey has the Djokovic coaching time-line covered here, but there's still one thing I haven't exactly figured out, based on my knowledge of how the tennis community works: who did Vajda know, who knew Djokovic, to set the potential partnership in motion? Clarey mentions an interview in Paris, but somehow I doubt that was arranged when the Djokovics got a resume in the mail. If the self-selecting nature of the coaching business seems like it overly restricts the pool of potential coaches, just consider the number of former tour-level players afoot in the world, and contemplate the relationships they must have formed with fellow pros, doubles partners, agents, tennis facility operators, or federation personnel.
But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here. The thing to remember going in is that potential coaches for top-drawer players are limited, and that even the best of them has to work with a palette of colors limited by the skills, ambitions and determination of his player, and the skills, ambition and determination of his opponents. Although coaches are masters of technique and strategy, they're not primarily technicians, and they operate with some severe limitations as strategists (you try figuring out how Federer can effectively keep Rafael Nadal caged in his backhand corner, and let me know what you come up with).
For that reason, the most opaque aspect of coaching - skill at creating and maintaining a healthy relationship with a player - is not just the most valuable, it's also foundational. I don't want to be unfair to Tony Roche here, but by his own admission he seemed uninterested in creating a Sampras-Annacone, Nadal-Uncle Toni, or Agassi-Gilbert relationship with Federer (and it certainly didn't seem like Federer himself was looking for that kind of relationship, and Roche's lack of ardor may have played a role in that). Over the coming days, we'll be taking a closer look at some of the partnerships in tennis, so stay tuned. And please be patient - on Sunday, I'll leaving on a one-week family vacation, but more about that tomorrow. . .