Hitting Back (25 page)

The other thing I had learned is just how tactically aware he was.
He would watch an opponent play matches, apparently uninterested,
but at the end he would say: 'Right, this is what he does and this is
where I think I can hurt him.' He was very, very astute. That is why I
felt quite encouraged going into the US Open that year. Here was a
kid who just gets it. Tennis isn't just about playing well, it is about
making your opponent play badly. Andy understands that in a big way.

When he played Andrei Pavel, a phenomenally experienced player,
in the US Open first round, and beat him in five sets, it was something
a bit special. After the summer he'd had, all that travel, a new coach
and an exhausting set of matches fresh out of the juniors, it spoke
volumes for him as a competitor that he could go out there and win.
It was lovely to be part of it and Andy was so excited. He really
couldn't have been any happier.

We never did have any stand-up fights, Andy and I. After our road
trip in America, he came home to stay with me and I think it must
have been nice for him to be around normal family life. The stability
was good for him when everything else was going a bit manic. It was
just rather ironic that having rushed off to the States to escape the
Wimbledon factor, we had an apartment (belonging to Pat Rafter's
ex-girlfriend) in Wimbledon. There was no escaping the tennis
connection.

There are certain moments that stand out vividly from our time
together. I was with him when he cracked the World Top-100 in
Bangkok. To remember his face after that match against Soderling still
makes me well up with emotion. You can hardly understand how big
that was to him. He was down and out when he called me after
splitting up with Pato in the spring. He was low and really struggling.
To go from there to being inside the top-100 in the space of a few
months was incredible. This was a kid who had only one thing on his
mind: to be successful at tennis. His achievement made us both pretty
emotional, but the really amazing thing was the way he continued to
play that tournament when he had already achieved one of his major
goals. He was thrilled to bits but he still had a job to do.

In the semi-final against Paradorn Srichaphan, the massively
supported local favourite, he hit an unbelievable winner down the line
on match point and I told him so afterwards. 'Nah,' he said. 'If I hadn't
hit that, I don't think I'd have ever forgiven myself. I saw the size of
the gap down the line and I didn't think I could miss.' I'd been looking
at the same gap, and it looked less than a centimetre wide to me. I
told him: 'I've seen some real genius in the way you played today.' His
belief in his own talent is overwhelming.

But, inevitably, problems appeared. We made a difficult start to the
following year. Part of that was due to the South African holiday I had
booked before I signed the contract as Andy's coach. When I took
the job, I told Andy and Judy that I had booked the family holiday and,
after missing Disneyworld, I owed it to them to make sure this one
happened. Andy and Judy both said it was absolutely fine and, when
the time came, Andy wanted to come too.

On one level, it was the best time we had together because it was
all about family and friends and we had a great time. However, there
was no one there for Andy to practise with except me. We tried,
though: I played with him every day; I sprinted with him; we even ran
together on Christmas Day. Afterwards, a number of people
criticised they way we'd worked. They said some horrible stuff. It was
tough, but the kid was eighteen years old. Was it going to be a
career-breaker? I didn't think so, but there is no doubt it caused the
year to begin badly.

Then there was the business of the so-called sexist remark in
Adelaide, when Andy said, as a joke, that he'd been serving like a
woman. He meant that his serve had been broken too many times.
The outcry was ridiculous and that's where people don't understand
Andy. To some players, the reaction to that remark would have been
like water off a duck's back, but it really affected him. That was a very
hard trip for us on an emotional level and the match he played at the
Australian Open against Juan Ignacio Chela, which he lost in straight
sets, was the only bad match he played in our entire time together.

It was huge pressure. He was playing in a grand slam event against
a well-established player in front of hordes of people and it was very
difficult for him. For me, the defeat was no big deal. I just said: 'That
was a learning experience. It wasn't great. Move on. Next
tournament.'

Obviously, I was criticised for not being with him in San José the
following month, when he won his first tournament on the tour. I was
on half-term holiday with the girls, but I also thought, after our tough
start to the year, it would do us the world of good to have a break.
I believed I was doing my job properly by not making him reliant on
me. By the time he was winning match point against Lleyton Hewitt
in the final, I was at Atlanta Airport ready to meet him again, trying
to follow the match on the phone with his agent, Patricio.

Later Andy told me that once Lleyton had missed his first serve on
match point, he knew he'd won the title. I told him that it was only
when Michael Stich double-faulted on match point that I'd known I'd
won that famous match of mine. That is the difference between us as
tennis players.

It was difficult towards the end of our coaching relationship
because he was obviously questioning whether I was the right man
for the job. I think the world of him because he made the right
decision, but it must have been very hard for him, given the closeness
of our relationship. It was a courageous decision. For him to find
somebody with Brad Gilbert's experience was good and I never
resented that. Our time had run its course and it was right for him to
move on.

We made the final split in Monte Carlo. We had a conversation
about it in a little seaside café and then I met my wife and the girls
who were over on holiday. I knew the news was going public at 4pm
and was bracing myself for the response. Sure enough, my phone
started ringing at one minute past four. My youngest daughter wanted
to know what was going on. I told her: 'Andy and I aren't working
together any more.'

'Who's calling you?' she asked.

'People want to know what I think about it.'

She screwed her face up. 'What, because you lost your job?' My
wife and I were in tears of laughter and it was a fantastic reminder
that life goes on.

I'm sure some people find it hard to believe that Andy and I could
split so amicably and remain such close friends, but that is the reality.
When Andy and I speak now, we hardly mention tennis at all. We
talk as friends and that is the way it will always be.

I wasn't on tour to see how his relationship with Brad worked out
at close quarters, but I suppose I wasn't surprised when they decided
to call it a day. When you know the two characters involved, it was
obviously going to work for a while but eventually become too much
for one or the other. Brad had a firm belief in what he brought to the
relationship. And Andy has a firm belief and confidence common to
all the top players that he is going to do it his way.

I've followed his career ever since we parted and I'm convinced he
is going to make it to the top of the sport. But I did say to him once:
'I don't envy you as a person. You're going to go through so much in
your life that will be difficult. You're going to be incredibly successful
and yet often you're going to read stuff that makes you sound like a
failure.' That will be difficult for someone as sensitive as he is. I don't
think people know what they do to him when they say critical things.
He has sometimes been very badly misjudged.

My description of Andy might surprise the people who judge him
only by what they see on the court, but if someone asked me to sum
up the young man I came to know intimately, I'd say this: He's
sensitive, passionate, stubborn, competitive beyond ultra and,
ultimately, a very genuine human being.

You could say I have a pretty broad taste when it comes to
coaches. There was the grand slam-winning American talkaholic,
the Essex-born TV commentator whose career-high
ranking was 80, the veteran clay-court guru who once coached
Ilie Nastase, the young Glaswegian with an earring who now
works for the LTA, and my mum. Currently, it is the former
British Davis Cup player, Miles Maclagan, who was born in
Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe, plus a bit of help from the
former world number two and French Open runner-up, Alex
Corretja from Spain.

Every change had its reasons. I like to think they were good
reasons, but often I would look at the headlines and discover I
was being called a 'Tennis Brat' for moving on to someone else.
However, if there is one thing that makes me happy about my
career so far, it is that I have remained friends, close friends,
with most of the people who have coached me. That's good,
especially when I'm related to one of them.

I started playing tennis with Mum as soon as I was old
enough to walk around and swing a racket. She would tell you
that I was much easier to coach than my brother. I always
enjoyed it because it was never stressful. She was really positive
and supportive. My games with her were much more relaxed
than with other coaches. It was fun. Jamie and I both enjoyed
making her run and she obviously enjoyed it as well, but when
we reached a certain age it became a bit boring. We hit the
balls too hard and she couldn't reach them any more.

Mum and Dad loved doing sports with us. That is how we
spent our time as a family. We didn't read books or watch
movies. We played golf, squash or five-a-side football with
Dad. We played tennis with Mum. She coached Jamie and me
until we were eleven and twelve years old and then, in my
case, I started to work with Leon Smith, a very young
Glaswegian guy who, up to that point, didn't have much
experience, but my mum thought he would be fun for me to
work with.

Leon was awesome. He was young, he wanted to travel and
he wanted to learn. He had loads of energy and even though he
was about ten years older than me, we played a lot of football,
pool and snooker together. We enjoyed the same things. It was
a bit like my time later with Tim Henman. We'd enjoy any
game as long as it was competitive, even just throwing balls as
hard as we could at each other. It was pretty immature stuff,
but so much more fun than sitting around talking.

Leon could hit the ball reasonably well, so we'd practise
together. He would come and pick me up from school when I
was allowed time off subjects like Religious Education, PE and
Art to go training at Stirling University. We got on really well
because he was an unbelievably nice person and I guess he was
someone I looked up to.

He was a bit of a poser back then: tall, good-looking with
bleached blond hair. On one of our trips he acquired an earring
too. He went into Claire's Accessories for it, which was quite
funny because it involved him standing in a queue with a huge
crowd of little girls.

I would imagine he had quite an effect on me because I used
to bleach my hair a little bit too, with a spray lightener. I'm
sure it was horrendous for my hair: it made it go rock hard,
and sometimes ginger if it went wrong. Fortunately, that
wasn't Leon's only legacy. He gave me the enthusiasm to carry
on with my tennis. Most kids stop playing before they're
sixteen in the UK. The numbers are quite frightening. Maybe
more than half give up the sport in their mid-teens.

I have always said the most important thing when you are
young is not to have pressure on you to play from your parents
or from your coach. I think it's important to be disciplined, but
I also think it's very important for your coach to be positive
and supportive, not critical and negative. That's the age when
you start to get a bit self-conscious. If someone's getting down
on you, you stop enjoying the sport. It hurts your feelings much
more than when you're eight years old and criticism goes
straight through your ears without stopping.

I enjoyed playing when Leon was around in my teens, and
that is why we stayed together for such a long time. It was a
new world for both of us. Obviously we didn't travel together
all the time. Sometimes I'd be part of a GB team and then one
of the LTA Age Group captains would travel with us, but when
we were together we had a great time.

Our parting – my first as an employer – wasn't nice, but in
sport you feel there comes a time when you need to move on.
I'd been working with him for about six years, and it just
seemed to get a little bit stale. It was tough to decide to make
the break, but also I was training in Spain by then. I'd been
working with different coaches in Barcelona, I'd go to
tournaments all over Europe and Leon wouldn't be there. It
wasn't his fault. We just didn't have the money to fund it.

It was a tough decision, but I think it was the right one.
Some people might find it a little odd that someone sixteen
years old would be prepared to make such a major decision
but I thought it was a sign that I was growing up. I decided I
needed a coach who was going to be there most of the time. It
was just being practical.

You know how good the relationship was between you and
your coach by what happens after you've parted. If you don't
speak to them ever again, then obviously the relationship
hadn't worked out. If you do stay close, then you can say the
relationship was solid. Leon and I stayed in touch. We still get
on and speak to each other. At my first Wimbledon in 2005 he
was in my box for every match. He works much of the time in
London and comes round for dinner at my new flat in
Wandsworth. I'm sure we'll always be friends.

He reminds me of things like the time I played about thirty-six
drop shots in one match. It's probably true. I enjoyed things like
that. There were lots of times, especially playing domestically,
when I'd be winning matches so easily I'd be trying to make the
ball spin back from one side of the court to the other, and I'd
keep trying until I did it. That might have been frustrating for my
coach, but I don't think Leon minded too much.

After Leon, came the Colombian 'Pato' Alvarez. This was a
case of moving to the other extreme. Where Leon had been
young, inexperienced and was mainly used to the rain and
indoor hard courts of Scotland, Pato was sixty-nine years old,
had coached forty top-50 players including Nastase, and in
Spain they called him 'El Guru' of clay-court tennis. It is a bit
of a cheat to say he was my coach really, because we only
worked together for six months and it was always in the company
of other players, but still, we did work together and at the
beginning it seemed to go very well. When we travelled to
Spain at the back end of 2004, I won two Futures tournaments.

Then I started to up my level of competition and I was
struggling. We were travelling with the two other players from
the Sanchez-Casal Academy and there was a bit of an age gap
there too. I was seventeen, they were 22 and 24. It wasn't
much, but it was significant. I wanted to feel more independent.
I wanted to have my own coach with me. At the start
of 2005, we were playing Challenger events on clay in South
America against difficult opposition in unfamiliar conditions,
and I didn't want to be left alone, but Pato would get up and
leave me mid-match to check on the progress of the others.
There was no direction. You'd look up to find a friendly face
and there'd be no one there.

I was a junior grand slam winner, but that didn't mean
anything in this situation. I was playing qualifying Challengers
in Chile and not getting anywhere. In one tournament I lost in
the last round of qualifying, in the next I lost in the first round.
We realised the arrangement wasn't working.

By now I knew I wanted to leave Barcelona. I had been there
at the Academy for nearly three years and training was
becoming very repetitive. It was great for a certain amount of
time, but then I started to get a little bit bored with it. I wanted
to spend time back home. Pato lived in Barcelona. I knew it
wouldn't work if he continued to coach me because I couldn't
ask him to leave his home and his family in Spain. Plus, his
preference was obviously to work with a group of players. He
used to coach Emilo and Javier Sanchez and Sergio Casal all at
the same time and it worked for them, but I didn't want that.
I wanted an individual coach.

I've heard it said that our parting was awkward and perhaps
that is how it seemed, but that might have been because Pato
didn't speak English that well. The press called him and he said
a few things, but it might have come across as more aggressive
than he intended. I wasn't hurt by what he said. I didn't believe
he'd been deliberately nasty. He seemed to say that I wouldn't
make it as a player if I continued with the same flat mentality,
but the reason I was like that on and off the court was the fact
I was unhappy with our arrangement. It is pretty tough to
work and travel with someone aged seventy when you are only
seventeen.

We also had a disagreement about my style of tennis. Every
single tournament I played with him was on clay. I felt that if
I wanted to be one of the best players in the world it was
important to play on all surfaces from clay to hard to indoor
to grass. I'd played on clay for six months in a row and it
seemed to me I needed to have a more complete game.

His teaching style works best on a clay court and he believed
there was very much a set way of playing. It worked for me
when I was younger, then I started to develop more shots and
understand how I could hurt the opposition more with a
flexible approach. Pato believed there was a 'correct' way to
play tennis. You should begin every rally by playing to a guy's
backhand, for instance – but what if he had a weak forehand?
I felt I needed to do things differently.

But we were both philosophical about it. Splitting up with
coaches is one of those things in tennis. In fact, the following
year, when I went to play the tournament in Barcelona, Pato
came along to watch me and as I had no coach at that time, he
stayed on to help me – he even took me to see a Barcelona
football match. (He supports Real Madrid really, but has a
couple of season tickets at the Nou Camp as well. I guess he
goes along to watch them lose.)

I only made the second round at the tournament but we
talked on the phone a couple of times and he was saying:
'These are the things you need to do better and I think you can
be world number one.' I still get on absolutely fine with him.
I'm sure that whatever was said at the time must have been his
English letting him down. He's a great coach; I still speak to
him and still have huge respect for him.

For a period I went without a coach. So does Roger Federer
from time to time. It is something that happens. Mum filled the
gap at Roland Garros, where her main responsibility was
making sure my kit was clean and buying me those great
French baguettes and smothering them with chocolate spread,
but it was obvious I was going to need someone to help me
through the grass-court season and, in particular, my first
senior Wimbledon. Turning to Mark Petchey, then the head of
men's tennis at the LTA and now a Sky Sports commentator,
proved to be an inspired idea.

He had always been supportive of me in his LTA role, even
though the first time he ever saw me play was the semi-finals
of a Futures event in Edinburgh when I was absolutely
hammered 6–2 6–1. He told me that I'd be a top-10 player
after that defeat, when anyone else might have thought I'd be
lucky to get a job as a ball boy. He was always the person most
supportive of me at the LTA and agreed to help me through the
grass season as part of his LTA job. I didn't need to be told
how to play tennis, but having someone with me all the time,
to be positive and help with strategy would be very valuable.

I was enjoying playing. It was fun on the court again, after
the last difficult days with Pato. Mark and I weren't getting
deeply into technical things, it was just a relief to be out there
playing with freedom. It was also a relief when he helped share
the burden of press attention. British tennis was struggling
quite badly that year – no change there, then – and everyone
wanted to know if I was going to be any good. Mark decided
to make a splash by saying I could be as big as Wayne Rooney,
which seemed ridiculous to people at the time. But, a few years
on, he still loyally stands by his prediction.

Wimbledon was little short of mad, with me reaching the
third round against Nalbandian. Mark and I hardly had time
to get to know one another properly, but what happened next
threw us together virtually every minute of every day for ten
weeks. I had asked Mark if he would consider being my
individual coach. That would mean him leaving the LTA and
many weeks on the road away from his young family. I knew
it would be a tough decision for him and I was really happy
when he agreed to do it. We headed off right after Wimbledon
and hardly stopped. It was like a road movie. We went to
America together and I played virtually every type of
tournament you could think of – Challengers, tour events, a
Masters Series, a grand slam – week after week for nearly three
months, criss-crossing Canada and the States by plane and hire
car until we almost forgot where we were.

We ate together, stayed together, practised together and he
remains a very close friend. When we came home, he invited
me to stay with his wife and two daughters in Wimbledon and
it was the first time I'd been close to someone with young kids.
I'm not too good with babies, I don't know what to do with
them, but once they're four, five, six years old I can start to
play with them, mess around, wind them up a little bit. That's
what I used to do with Mark's two little girls, Nicole and
Myah. I used to get them completely hyper then give them back
to their parents and go to bed.