A Champion’s Mind Page 2

  Dad was somewhat intimidating, but if he wasn’t my best friend, he wasn’t a big disciplinarian, either. I remember one time I said a bad word, and he tried to put soap in my mouth. He wasn’t physical with us—we didn’t get spanked, but then we didn’t do much that would have called for spanking. Parties? Recreational drugs? Delinquent behavior? We just didn’t do any of that in our youth. It was especially easy for me: I was very focused on tennis, and I didn’t let anything knock me off that trajectory.

  The nurturer in our family was my mother, Georgia. She was the compassionate one. She would listen, be there to talk to you, and walk you through whatever was on your mind. My mom has been way under the radar as far as an acknowledged influence goes, but some of my best—and toughest—qualities probably come from her. She’s the sweetest lady on earth—she gave us lots of hugs, she felt our every adolescent pain. But underneath that warmth and deep concern for her family, she was tough.

  Mom was born and raised in Salacia, a village near Sparta. She grew up dirt-poor. She had seven siblings, and slept on a concrete floor for a good part of her youth. When her oldest brother emigrated to Canada, he basically took his siblings with him. So my mom landed in North America without speaking a word of English, and ended up working with some of her sisters (she has five, all close in age) as a beautician in the Toronto area.

  When Mom was in her twenties, she moved with her sisters to Washington, D.C., and that’s where she met my dad—they were introduced by mutual friends. My dad’s father had advised him to find a nice Greek girl to marry and start a family with, and Georgia turned out to be the one for Sam. They shared a vision based on the importance of family life and creating a home where their children could flourish.

  Partly because my mom is a relatively new American, we were raised with a very strong Greek influence. We have an enormous family support group—I must have thirty cousins, although my life has made it tough for me to cultivate relationships with them. We attended Greek Orthodox church every week, and we went to all kinds of Greek festivals and outings—it was just like that movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Mom still cooks traditional Greek dishes like spanakopita (a spinach-based dish) and dolmades, and I’ve heard more than my share of bouzouki music. But we were on the road to assimilation. We never had to wear any of those crazy traditional costumes or anything like that, and we often had spaghetti bolognese for dinner.

  When I think about my mom and how poor she was as a child, I realize she had to be pretty resilient and very strong. She immersed herself in a totally foreign culture—as a woman from a traditional society, no less—at age twenty-three. She had family to help, but still—it couldn’t have been easy for her.

  If I got my calm, reserved nature from Dad, I got my toughness, a share of my resilience, and a measure of my stubbornness from my mom. She helped instill my basic values—showing me that I wasn’t going to get anywhere by taking shortcuts. I think I may have gotten my ability to focus absolutely and exclusively on the task at hand from my mother, too. Throughout my career, my mind rarely wandered, and I was never sidetracked by distractions, no matter what I was going through off the court.

  Mom had her hands full with the four of us, and my budding talent didn’t make it any easier. Stella and I, the two enthusiastic athletes, kind of overshadowed Gus and Marion, and I gradually overshadowed Stella. I guess I was the “golden child,” although I’ve never liked putting it that way. But a lot of the focus was on me. A lot of money was spent on me. At times this led to a little resentment.

  Gus was a big surfer and had an active social life, which was a good thing because I was always with Dad. Still, like any kid brother, I occasionally wanted to hang out with Gus and his friends, but you know how Toxic Kid Brother Syndrome works. In that sense, having tennis helped me; I was so focused on the game that I was immune to some of your typical sibling turbulence. I wasn’t competitive with Gus in childhood; the age difference of four years meant we lived in different worlds. But I know that my privileged place sometimes bothered Gus. He would have to drive me and Stella to tennis lessons, and I could sense he didn’t like that job. I think it was a reaction to not getting enough of Dad for himself; he felt a little left out because Stella and I, especially as we got a little older, were catered to in the family.

  Sometimes Gus could be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I remember my dad got him this guitar, and he’d come into Stella’s room, or our (my and Marion’s) room, and he would start playing really loud and yelling. It was obnoxious, but I guess he just wanted a little attention—he was annoyed at me because it seemed to him that I was being spoiled, so he would just bang away on his guitar.

  Stella, who now coaches the UCLA women’s tennis team, could do no wrong. She was the perfect daughter, and maybe that was because she was more outgoing and expressive, and kind of up for anything—as well as talented in tennis. It was one of those deals where my parents just felt that if she and Gus were getting into a fight, it was always Gus’s fault. I didn’t mix it up much with Stella; our common interest in tennis made us allies.

  My most powerful memory of Stella is from a day when we were taking a lesson from Robert Lansdorp. (It may come as a surprise, but I almost always shared my lessons with Stella—she had thirty minutes, and I had thirty. It was written in stone.) So this one time, she was at the net and Robert was really banging balls at her. He was being extra mean, which is saying a lot, and she was trying to fend off his shots—almost in self-defense. And she started hyperventilating, and then crying. “Why are you crying?” Robert asked in his gruff voice, feigning disgust. “Come on, toughen up.” And Stella turned away from him; she couldn’t take his demanding ways anymore. I remember walking over and putting my arm around her and trying to console her. I just said, “It’s okay, Stella, everything is going to be all right.” It was kind of funny. Here I was, this twelve-year-old kid, consoling somebody: “Aw, don’t worry, it’s okay.” I felt so bad for her that I remember this incident as if it happened yesterday.

  My other sister, Marion, played a little tennis and she was pretty good at it. But as the youngest child, she was slightly overshadowed. It wasn’t surprising that it happened, because she was introverted, and I think she had a hard time trying to keep up and fit in with the rest of us. Trouble was, Stella and I were always playing tennis, and Gus was a boy and so many years older that Marion really had nowhere to turn. It was sometimes hard for her.

  When Marion got a little older, she found God and really blossomed; her faith helped her get through her awkward teenage years, and she made a lot of friends through her church. She eventually became more confident, outgoing, and talkative, and evolved into a wonderful person. I believe in God, though I’m not especially religious. But in Marion I’ve seen how much faith can do for someone.

  In the big picture, we were good kids who got along well, despite the inevitable conflicts and sibling rivalries. If our parents played favorites with Stella and me, it wasn’t because they loved us more—it was because of tennis. I think that message somehow got through. I hope it did. And maybe that was why things never got rough or ugly. In some ways, we were an All-American family; in other ways, we were anything but. And we are very close, to this day.

  By the age of eight, I was really serious about tennis. The days when I was content to have my mom feed me balls in her spare time were over. I was getting a strong dose of lessons. When I think about my developmental days, I have a vivid memory of my dad having to go to the ATM to take out sixty bucks, or whatever it was at the time, and giving it to me so I could pay Robert Lansdorp.

  Cha-ching, cha-ching. There were lots of visits to the cash machine. My dad didn’t make a lot of money, but he had put some away from his restaurant business and he had a pretty good job. He needed those resources when the big expenses began to kick in.

  Soon after Fischer began advising my dad and taking on his role as the overseer of my development, I settled into a consistent training pattern. Lansdorp
was the forehand and groundstroke guy, Fischer was involved in developing my serve, and another local coach, Del Little, was the footwork and balance specialist. Eventually, I also had sessions on the volley with Larry Easley, a Kramer Club pro who was also the men’s tennis coach at Long Beach State University. This was my unofficial developmental team.

  The foundations of my ground game were laid by Lansdorp. He’s an icon in Southern California tennis circles, legendary for his no-nonsense drill sergeant approach. His fingerprints were, and still are, all over some of the best ground strokes in the game. Almost all Lansdorp protégés developed huge forehands. He teaches a fairly flat, clean, economical stroke, and he was especially good with girls, including Tracy Austin, Lindsay Davenport, Melissa Gurney, and Stephanie Rehe, all of whom were junior sensations and, to varying degrees, successful pros. Robert’s best male player, until he started to work with me, was Eliot Teltscher. Ironically, Eliot became better known for his powerful backhand, and that’s what I meant when I said that every player has natural tendencies that prefigure how he would turn out, stylewise.

  Robert and Pete Fischer didn’t get along—Robert flat-out thought Pete was a quack. And that meant something, because Robert was a good guy who already had great credentials when we met. Robert comes across as very tough; he’s certainly outspoken and brutally honest. If he didn’t care for you, he didn’t hide it. Those qualities hurt him, but he was kind of a loner who always insisted on doing his own thing his own way. I don’t know if he intimidated Fischer, but they more or less worked around each other.

  I was a hard worker as a kid, and I respected Robert. He intimidated me. He’s a big guy with huge hands and a very gruff manner. My lessons were on Thursdays, and I remember being in school and feeling kind of nervous, looking at the clock, because I had Robert from 3 P.M. until 4, and as much as I liked taking lessons from Lansdorp, I also couldn’t wait until they were over.

  When I started playing, it was still the wooden-racket era, and Robert taught me to hit properly. A few years later, technology would transform the basic tennis racket, and eventually it would be easier for everyone to develop a weapon. But I shaped mine the hard way. Some of the things we did were very basic. Robert would open his racket cover—back then, it was just a soft, zippered vinyl case that covered the racket head down to the throat—put his keys inside of it, and close it back up on the head of the racket. (Robert always had about forty keys, so his key ring was heavy as an anvil.) Then I would practice the forehand stroke with the weighted racket. For a little kid, that was tough, but it taught me to drive through the ball. With Robert, it was all about the sweet spot and driving through the ball.

  There was no secret technique in Lansdorp’s repertoire. His big thing was repetition, which had a critical side effect: it taught extreme stroking discipline. Robert had this big, supermarket-size shopping cart filled with balls, and whatever we were working on—preparation, taking the short midcourt ball, the running forehand that became my trademark shot—we would do it for an hour, or my half of the hour that I shared with Stella. We did drill after drill after drill.

  Eliot Teltscher thinks that Robert has a genius for feeding balls—a job you wouldn’t think is that difficult. But Eliot is right; Robert put the ball in exactly the right place, time after time. And we’re talking about hundreds of balls an hour, day after day. I hit a million balls and that was important—I had to get that muscle memory, burn it in so it was a natural thing.

  One of Robert’s favorite tricks was hitting these big topspin shots right at me, jamming me. And remember, this is a very big man who weighed two hundred plus, hitting with a skinny twelve-year-old. Fending off those shots taught me to stand in and go toe-to-toe with him, trading shots. That toughened me up. Robert would stand in a position favoring one leg so that he could get balls out of the cart in a hurry with one hand and feed with the other for hours. He ultimately had hip surgery, and I swear it was because of that leaned-over feeding position. He would take up that post right around the middle of the center service stripe and bang big forehands crosscourt for fifteen-minute stretches at a time. It was exhausting.

  My running forehand is all Robert, and so is my version of the forehand approach shot from the midcourt—one of the trickiest if least flashy of shots in tennis. This shot can be a putaway, an approach shot, or a rally shot. It’s a tough one because it’s much easier to hit running side to side than forward and back. When you’re moving into the court, you’ve got to get enough lift on that shot to clear the net, but cover it enough to get good pace and depth (and not drive it long).

  I changed my forehand a little as time went on in the pros, using a little more topspin to increase my margin of error. But it’s changed very little over the years, and if one of my kids decides he wants to play tennis, and Robert is still on the court, he’d be the man I would ask to teach it. A few years ago, I was at the Riviera Club, where Robert was teaching at the time, and he asked me to hit with this twelve-year-old he was developing. I helped him out and thought nothing of it until a few years later I recognized the girl on television; it was Maria Sharapova. Robert had a sharp eye for talent. He was also good at intuitively understanding who “had it”—who had the potential and grit to be great, psychologically. He figured out your personality and heart. But God, was he tough!

  Fischer became a daily presence in our family’s life as time went on, and we soon had a comfortable pattern going. I would work with Del Little on Tuesdays, take from Lansdorp on Thursdays, and work with Fischer at the end of his workweek, on Friday. Between lessons and on weekends I played practice matches with other juniors, or went to tournaments.

  Little was very close to the Austin family, who were like royalty in Southern California tennis, having produced Tracy, Pam, John, and Jeff—all of whom played on the pro tour, with Tracy leading the way as maybe the most celebrated prodigy in the history of the game. Little taught at the Kramer Club, but he took a lot of kids from there up to his place, near Lomita. The setup there was far from fancy; in fact, the two courts he used were in some kind of trailer park. Little was a great teacher; he would stand in the corner and just run me around, hitting balls to all the different areas of the court, always emphasizing footwork. We did a lot of drills involving the split step and things like that. He was very big on always being in balance.

  Fischer’s tennis time was limited, because he was much in demand as an endrocrinologist and pediatric growth specialist with health-care provider Kaiser Permanente. But while he wasn’t around much to work with me on weekdays, he was always in and out of our house, having dinner with us and talking with Dad. Fischer had a good grasp of tennis style and strategy, and he tried to impart that knowledge to Dad and me. Pete was a pretty good feeder, and I got a lot out of working with him, especially on the serve, which is where things get a little weird.

  Pete and Del Little had this thing they called “the Chong.” God, it still makes me laugh just to think about it. It sounds mysterious, like something out of martial arts. The Chong had something to do with the way you took your service stance and how you brought your heels together to create a certain angle. I never did understand it, but it was wild to hear Fischer say, “That’s right, Chong!”

  One of my signature mannerisms is the start of my service motion (some players, including Sharapova, have incorporated this move). I have my left foot up at the baseline, more or less pointing toward the court I’m serving into. Then I slightly shift my weight back, and lift my left toe well off the ground, signaling the true start of my service motion. Pete and Del started me doing that, because it had something to do with bringing my feet together to Chong.

  But Chong or not, I did end up with a pretty clean, simple service motion, and that would be a great plus. The more glitches and ticks you have, the more things can go wrong. In later years, Pete often said I was very “coachable.” I was just a kid, of course, and I did what all kids do—I soaked things up like a little sponge.

 
; Fischer made another big contribution that I can explain more easily. He taught me to disguise my serve. During lessons, he would have me toss the ball in the air, and then he would call out where he wanted me to hit it, and with which spin, if any. Later, players would say they had trouble reading where my serve was going, or what kind of ball movement it had, and that was all Pete’s doing.

  Over time, I learned to use my wrist and I had a talent for “pronating,” or bending my wrist in a way that enabled me to use the same basic motion to hit different kinds of serves. The kick serve was the only one that was a little different, because you have to toss the ball farther back and to the left to get that big kick, and it’s impossible to disguise. But even then, I didn’t telegraph my intention as much as most players.

  Larry Easley came into play when I abandoned my two-handed backhand and started serving and volleying. Easley, who was terrific with the volley, helped me out. We had moments of serious doubt and struggle during that transition, as I discuss later, and people at the Kramer Club thought I was crazy to change my backhand—especially when my rival Michael Chang gained valuable ground on me as a result. So much for short-term rewards.

  I didn’t really have heroes, tennis or otherwise, when I was a kid. I didn’t have posters in my room, I wasn’t a fanatic, obsessed with collecting autographs or anything like that, but tennis became a family affair because of my involvement. We would watch all of the Grand Slam finals at home together. At one point our television was out for a long time. I think it broke and my dad, who thought maybe we were watching too much, decided to take his sweet old time fixing it. That year we went down to the Jack Kramer Club at 6 A.M. to watch the Wimbledon final. I remember that vividly; it was like this big family adventure.

  Pete Fischer would sometimes come to the house after dinner with Del Little, who had a lot of old tennis films. My father would set up the old 16 mm film projector, and Del would train it on a white wall in our dining room. And then all of us—my dad, Pete, Del, Stella, and me—would sit there and watch some final between guys like Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and Lew Hoad. Pete had this Rod Laver fixation, and I remember watching Laver traipse around the court on the wall of our dining room. I was deeply impressed by how smoothly Laver played—even on grainy, black-and-white 16 mm film.