Hitting Back (12 page)

Pickard also complained that I'd taken what he called 'the
glamour trip to Newport', instead of stepping down
immediately in class – but if you are eighteen years old and
offered a wild card into an ATP tournament, what the hell are
you going to say? 'No, sorry, I'm going to play a Futures
tournament, just to keep me grounded.' Then they would have
accused me of lacking ambition.

Lloyd even had a go at Jimmy Connors for saying something
nice about me at Wimbledon. I would have thought that a
compliment from one of the greatest players ever was a good
thing. Everyone in tennis has a lot of respect for his judgement
as a match commentator, but when he was nice about me some
people disagreed. Lloyd said he shouldn't have praised me so
much because I was that 'kid who didn't try in the fifth set
against David Nalbandian.'

Why couldn't the critics just have sat back and said: 'It's been
a great run, hopefully he can build on it for the rest of the year'?
That's all you need to say. But that tells you everything you
need to know about the mentality of British tennis. Those guys
are two of the most experienced coaches in Britain and they are
coming out with stuff like that. Obviously, there are so many
different ways of making it to the top. No one is going to be
right all the time. Whatever they said, I had to do it my way.

It was the same for Tim Henman. He did it his way too. Not
everybody liked that. He was horribly and unfairly criticised
for it, but I know that as his successor, I owe him a great debt.
He gave people hope in British tennis when, before he came
along, there was just disaster.

I didn't meet him properly until I was sixteen. I'd obviously
watched him and supported him while I was growing up, so
when I did meet him, it was strange. You can imagine what I
was expecting. Everyone knows that Tim comes over as a
pretty serious guy on the court. He doesn't show too much
emotion, except those little fist-pumps. He seems very reserved.
So when I joined the Davis Cup squad in Luxembourg in April
2004. I thought I would be totally intimidated by him.

I couldn't have been more wrong. He was friendly and
funny, always making jokes and wanting to play games – any
game from Top Trumps to throwing a piece of screwed up
paper into a bin, or seeing how many times you could keep a
tennis ball bouncing on your head. I was at the age I wanted to
do all those things as well. It was as though the thirteen-year
age gap just didn't exist.

I was a 16-year-old kid who couldn't even play because of
my knee injury and I would have understood if he was almost
a little bit rude to me. But he wasn't and he could not have
been more the opposite. I obviously couldn't practise, but I
watched all the time and picked up balls by the side of the
court. Tim was never less than great to me.

He does a good job of covering up his real personality. It was
his way of dealing with the fame and you have to have a lot of
respect for that. He didn't want to have to deal with the hassle
of being asked about controversial subjects. I should know.
Controversial subjects tend to involve fellow players or
someone you are going to be seeing for the rest of your career.
He understood that controversy puts you in an uncomfortable
position. He did a really good job of making his life easier.

He was also a great guy to have around the locker room of
any tournament. He always spoke to everyone. After thirteen
years on the tour, there are almost bound to be guys you have
arguments or problems with, but I don't know anyone who
dislikes him. There was just the one time when David
Nalbandian said something after their match in Madrid and,
apart from that, I have never heard any other player say
anything. Nalbandian was raging that Tim was pretending to
be something he wasn't. The quote was: 'All this selling himself
as a gentleman is not true. He is the worst rubbish there is.' It
was so obviously against everyone else's opinion that
Nalbandian was probably just upset because he lost.

I don't think Tim ever really cared about his press. He had a
really successful career. He played at the top level of his sport
for thirteen years. He is now the father of three daughters and
I am sure he is going to enjoy settling down with them and his
wife. I am positive he has no regrets about the way he dealt
with the press, even if they regret he wasn't more colourful. He
never had any big issues with them, he never threw them any
bones to chew over. He just tried to be positive in his press
conferences. I completely understand. It gives you time to
concentrate on your tennis.

It is part of the job, the press conference, but it can be tough
to conduct one after every single match. In the end, it becomes
a routine. If I've won I say: 'I played well. I executed my game
plan well.' If I've lost, I say: 'I didn't play well.' That is, more
or less, it. We probably have to do about 110 press conferences
a year and who can blame someone for sparing themselves the
trouble of being interesting.

Anyway, I think it is unfair of the media to comment on how
somebody deals with them. They don't know what it is like to
be on the receiving end of some of the articles that get written.
I don't think it was right of the press to criticise Tim's dealings
with them, especially someone under as much pressure as he
was. They didn't see it from his point of view. Tim has done a
lot for British tennis, no question. It is not his fault that there
aren't enough British kids playing tennis. That is the
responsibility of the governing body. His responsibility was to
win matches. It was irrelevant whether his personality was best
suited to young children.

He was even accused of coming from a background of
middle-class privilege, but that is how he was brought up. Was
he supposed to act as if he was working class? It is not comfortable
trying to change your personality, pretend to be
someone you are not. Tim was always the person he was, in
terms of being middle class. He just didn't show the real and
funny side of his personality. I don't blame him. I have seen
first hand that you can get yourself into trouble when you do.

He was never completely perfect. He swore on court,
although he didn't make it as visible as some players. He loved
winning, he hated losing, but instead of getting really pumped
up or obviously down, he just showed the same emotional level
all through the match. Who is to criticise that? Some of the
greatest players of all time were the same. Bjorn Borg was one
and Roger Federer, to an extent, is another. I can't be like that,
but there is nothing wrong with it as an approach.

Tim and I have spent a decent amount of time together ever
since. After Wimbledon in 2005, when I was embarking on the
tour in America for the first time and didn't know any of the
players, he took me out for dinner. He also played backgammon
with me and tried to make me feel comfortable. It
could have been really horrible for me as the new boy. He
always made an effort, despite the fact that I was a potential
rival. That is why Jamie and I, and so many other guys on the
tour, have so much respect for him. He was always, always
helpful to us. He's a great person.

He always said I was hopeless at backgammon and I needed
a lot more practice, so when my eighteenth birthday was
approaching, he had his chance. He was out shopping when he
saw a great backgammon set for sale in a London store and
went in to buy it for me. But when they told him it cost about
£400, he thought better of it. 'I like Andy,' he told my mum,
'but not that much.'

Even though he's clearly a bit tight when it comes to my
birthdays, I regard him as a friend. When Greg Rusedski was a
star in ITV's
Dancing on Ice
, Tim and I were texting each other
all time with our comments. Some of Tim's were pretty funny.
I imagine he would no more go on one of those reality
programmes that I ever would, but that doesn't mean Tim is
not a fun guy to be around.

It annoys me that some people saw him as a loser. That is the
press. If you don't really follow the sport and just flip through
a newspaper, you would have seen headlines like: 'Henman
Loses' or 'Henman Fails Again.' That was not the real story.
Headlines rarely are.

Tim was a god at Wimbledon. He had unbelievable support
and has a fantastic record. He didn't win a grand slam, that is
true, but he came along at the wrong time. During the years he
played Wimbledon, Sampras was all-dominant through the
nineties, followed by Federer who recently won five years in a
row. There wasn't much room for Henman to be the
champion.

I don't think you can see it as failure when you spend your
career at the highest level. If a journalist was the fourth-best
journalist in the world or a lawyer the fourth-best legal mind
in the world, they would be considered pretty damn good.
Then they would have to maintain it for ten years to be up
there with Tim. To do what he did in such an unbelievably
hard field is fantastic. To be at the top for so long in any area,
let alone sport, is something to be proud of. Tim was not a
failure.

I know people will say: 'But he didn't win a grand slam.' But
would he exchange his whole career – the four Wimbledon
semi-finals and four quarter-finals – with Thomas Johansson,
who won the Australian Open in 2002 but only spent a couple
of years in the top-10? I don't think so.

If you haven't played this sport at the highest level you
cannot appreciate how hard it is to win a grand slam, especially
with guys like Sampras and Federer around. What you do on
court isn't always controlled by you. I could play brilliantly,
then someone like Goran Ivanisevic would come along and fire
down forty aces. You can't control that. That's the tough thing
about this individual sport. You can do all the right things and
then someone comes along who plays a little bit better on the
day.

I'm not disputing that everyone really wants to win a grand
slam, I would
love
to win a grand slam, but it doesn't mean
that your whole career, everything you have worked for, is
ruined because you don't win one.

It might surprise some people that Tim and I were good
friends, given the difference in our characters. I seem to have
generated more controversies in three years than he did in his
whole career, but we still had more in common than people
think, though not, I admit, in the disciplinary record.

As a British player, I was accused of triggering the country's
first fine for player misconduct in the 106-year history of the
Davis Cup, when I swore at a match official in Glasgow during
the tie against Serbia and Montenegro in 2006. It caused a
massive fuss, but it was ridiculous. That was another one of
those things that the press jumped all over.

I know players who have said way worse things than I did
to umpires. In this case, the man was the youngest umpire in
the history of the Davis Cup. I suppose that might seem pretty
rich coming from someone who was a teenager at the time, but
I felt he gave such a poor performance that I told him what I
thought of him. I said: 'You're fucking useless.' That is
terrible. I should never have said it. In the history of sport I
think worse things have been said, but still, I am not saying it
was right. I'd just lost a match and I was annoyed. I played
rubbish. I was angry. It was wrong of me. However, the press
were trying to suggest I had said something far worse. Then
they started investigating what the maximum fine could be
and speculating that maybe Great Britain could be thrown out
of the competition for two years. They wanted to make the
story as extreme as possible.

In the end, after the referee had sent in his report, we
received the smallest possible fine, just over £1,000, about the
same amount as you receive for a warning on the ATP tour. It
was ludicrous. I didn't feel guilty afterwards, I was just amazed
that something could be so blown out of all proportion.
Obviously what I said was wrong, but I've sat in press conferences
when one of the journalists has sworn while he was
asking me a question.

We were talking about the sudden possibility of me
qualifying for the end-of-the-season Masters Cup in 2007, and
the reporter said something like: 'Did you think to yourself:
"Oh shit! Now I've got a good chance of qualifying"'

I said: 'Hold on a sec, you can't swear when you're asking
me a question. Imagine what you would say if I said that to
you.' He just laughed it off, and to be honest, I found it quite
funny too. You've got to have a sense of humour about these
things, but I just thought I'd point out the hypocrisy.

I had pretty decent support from my colleagues at the time.
Greg Rusedksi admitted: 'At Wimbledon I've used every bad
word in the book. We have to remember he's only eighteen
years old but he's moving in the right direction.' John Lloyd,
who went on to become my Davis Cup captain, gave some
pretty good advice: 'If he's going to swear he should learn
where the microphones are.'

The truth is, I don't swear
that
much. When I'm with a
group of people I don't swear
that
often. Anyway, a lot of
people swear. Everybody swears sometimes, but just because
you do it when you're on TV seems to make it worse somehow.
When you're playing a tennis match, you don't think the
cameras are on you. You are just in the zone and you say things
you probably shouldn't.

I know it's not a good example to set to kids. I hope I can
stop doing it. However, remember when I was playing football
when I was young, the parents were swearing, the players were
swearing, it went on all the time. It is pretty much similar in
most sports. I'm never going to be on court not saying a word.
Sometimes you need to let off steam.

It has never really caused me too much trouble, apart from
that Davis Cup fine. The worst time I remember was when I
was younger, playing in a team competition inn the Czech
Republic and I swore then on the court. Gran had come over
to watch me and she didn't speak to me after my match
because I had behaved badly. Actually she didn't speak to me
for quite a while. She was
very
angry.