Hitting Back (26 page)

Sometimes we'd play outside on little scooters. They'd shout
'Let's race!' and I would gallantly say OK. All the time my head
was saying: 'Make it close, make it close, make it close', but at
the last minute I couldn't. I just couldn't let them win. I know
it was terrible of me. Two little girls and I couldn't let them
win.

Well, I say it's terrible but I don't believe in letting kids win.
I think it's fine for them to lose as long as it's not by a massive
distance. Mum and Dad used to say I'd go nuts if I lost when I
was younger, but I still lost. You need to learn how to lose. If
you win everything when you're a kid you get spoiled and
when you're older you don't know how to deal with losing.

It was a measure of how happy I was with Mark that we
were virtually living on the road and at home together all the
time. In that winter of 2005 I even decided to go with him to
South Africa to train because he had booked a family holiday
there. It was my choice, because he had told us when he took
the job as my coach that he couldn't break the commitment to
his family holiday. However, it didn't quite work out as we
planned.

We had thought a few of the Swedish players might come
down and train in the same place, but they didn't show up that
year and I was short of practice. Everything was good off the
court. My Mum came over for Christmas, I was getting to
know Kim Sears who became my girlfriend, the weather was
great and the fitness work was fine – but there were no players
there and I had a tournament in the first week of the year. To
go from playing with Mark, who obviously hit the ball well but
not to the same level as some of the guys I would be playing,
was going to be difficult. I struggled in the first weeks of 2006
because I hadn't had enough tough match practice.

I think both of us knew it should have been better. It wasn't
annoying me, but both of us knew that having no one to hit
with wasn't the ideal preparation for my first full year on the
tour.

I lost in the first round of the Australian Open and then
Mark told me that he would not be able to come with me for
the tournament in San José. It was half-term week and he was
doing something with the kids. That was fine – so fine I won
the tournament. Kim came with me and I spoke to Mark before
all of my matches. He watched my progress on line. It was all
good. Everyone was happy.

I went to Memphis where I met up with him again and did
OK (lost in the quarter-finals to Robin Soderling).Mark claims
he beat me at pool nine times in a row in Memphis but I have
no memory of that at all. Maybe that is what shifted my mood
because when we went on to Las Vegas I suddenly felt really
tired, as if I didn't want to be there. I played a bad match
against the Spaniard, Tommy Robredo, and lost easily in
straight sets. He was ranked higher than me, so the result was
hardly surprising, but I knew I had made a really weak effort.
I hate that more than anything. The following week at Indian
Wells it was a little better. I beat a Greek player ranked nearly
a hundred places below me and then lost in the second round
to Nikolay Davydenko in three sets.

For both Mark and me things were getting a little stressful.
There was a lot of tension building up about little things. They
were probably petty, they shouldn't have mattered, but when
you spend so much time together, on and off court, you begin
to lose perspective. It is like the beginning of the break-up of
any relationship, you can argue about minor things to disguise
the major problem.

We'd been on the road across America, I'd lived with his
family in Wimbledon, we'd been on holiday in South Africa,
we'd gone down to the Australian Open and now we were
back in America again. I wasn't ungrateful. I'd enjoyed being
around him, his awesome kids, his lovely wife – I was lucky
they had asked me to stay – but now I was just starting to feel
tired. I didn't really know the reason for it. I was getting angry
in my matches like I never had before in our time working
together.

It stopped clicking and I decided I had to do something
about it. For me, that was by far the hardest decision I've ever
had to make in relation to a coach. Mark had been more than
a coach to me. He had been a friend and a confidant and a
companion. I had become close not just to him, but his whole
family. With Leon, it was just the two of us. With Pato, I had
never met his family. With Mark it was a personal relationship
that took in everything.

It ended pretty quickly in Monte Carlo. He had sent me a
text saying: 'Can you let me know. Do you need me at your
practice on Thursday?' I sent one back saying: 'No, I don't.
Let's speak when I get to Monte Carlo.' I think maybe he then
had a word with my agent Patricio, to clarify the situation, but
no way would Patricio have told Mark the initial news on my
behalf. When I'm close to someone, as I was to Mark, and to
Leon, I wouldn't want them to hear something like that from
anybody else. No way. I'm big enough to deal with it. If I've
got a problem I'm not scared to open my mouth and tell them.
When I know it is the right decision for me I'm more than
happy to say so.

Obviously people will think 'Davis Cup – Argentina' and, as
I have admitted, in that case perhaps I should have called John
Lloyd, the team captain first. If I'm honest it crossed my mind
that he might say: 'You could play if you really wanted to. You
could risk the next tournament . . .' And then I might have
started to feel guilty. And yet I knew I'd made the right
decision, and if I had said: 'OK, fine, I'll come to Argentina,' I
might have been absolutely snapping and not wanting to play
when I got there. Perhaps that was one of the reasons in the
back of my mind that stopped me from speaking to John, but
there was no reason not to face up to Mark when he arrived in
Monte Carlo. I met him in a hotel just before the tournament.
I spoke about the things I felt I wanted on the court and why I
felt I needed a change. It was horrible. I was really, really upset
and the break-up affected me for a long time. I didn't really
enjoy playing for the next month-and-a-half during which I
hardly won a game. I even spoke to Mum and Patricio about
not wanting to play tennis any more. I was really down.

People tell me I'm the most sensitive person in my group of
friends and family. I'm a pretty caring person and I don't like
it when I have to do things that might upset someone else, even
if it is for the best. Far from being the ruthless coach-sacker, as
I am sometimes portrayed, I don't like hurting people close to
me. I think it's a horrible thing to have to do – but, then again,
sometimes in professional sport you do have to.

I was affected by not being around Mark any more, never
seeing his family, travelling to tournaments on my own, not
having a coach. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I played
Barcelona, Rome, Hamburg, Roland Garros and I didn't start
enjoying myself again until I came home for the grass-court
season and could see my friends and family.

Mark's legacy to me is an enduring one. He was great.
When we met I was ranked around 350 in the world and not
enjoying my tennis. With him I jumped about 300 places in
the rankings in the space of eighteen months. I was on the
tour that I had always dreamed of. I was in big tournaments
without having to worry about wild cards. I won a tour event
and people were hailing me as a future grand slam champion.
He gave me the belief that I could be a success. He helped me
realise the dream of being ranked in the World Top-100. He
still gets quite emotional when he remembers the day I beat
Soderling to break that 100 barrier. It meant so much to both
of us. He is a sensitive guy as well and one of the things I like
so much about him is that he would defend me down to the
ground if he had to. It is a trait he shares with quite a few
football managers, who always defend the players in their
team. Some people would disagree with it, but for the
individual being defended that kind of loyalty is fantastic. I
will always remember him going ballistic in America when he
discovered that the US Open wanted to give me a wild card
but Wimbledon wouldn't trade a wild card back to an
American player because they said it was 'tacky'. Mark was
going nuts. He was really devastated.

We were new boys on the tour together. He hadn't really
been on the men's tour much during his playing career and I
suppose we built up this bond from the experience. I owe so
much of what I did to him. We spoke about loads of things,
often way beyond tennis. He was and is a really, really close
friend.

I suppose some people wondered why I didn't engage
another coach straight away. The thing is: it didn't feel right.
The decision to find my next coach – the right person to take
me from 30th in the world to the top-10 – would be a very
important one. I wanted a coach who had worked with the best
in the world and/or a grand slam champion. That's what I was
looking for. I wasn't going to be rushed. I'd be spending a lot
of time with this person. I wanted to find someone I could get
on with really well.

And so, enter Brad. I was really excited when I first started
working with someone who had the credentials of Brad
Gilbert. Everybody knows him on the tour: the Californian
who reached a career-high number four in the world, wrote a
book called
Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis
and then
coached Andre Agassi to six grand slam titles and an Olympic
gold. It could hardly be a more impressive CV.

The circumstances were a little unusual when we got
together. The LTA, bankrolled by the money they receive from
Wimbledon every year, offered a contract to a number of high-profile
coaches, Paul Annacone, Peter Lundgren and Brad
among them, to work with British players. I was told that I
would be travelling with Brad about twenty-five weeks of the
year – I even went through the calendar to pick out the best
weeks for us to be together – and the rest of the time he would
be working with other British players. That was fine. As I say,
I was excited. Within a year of working with Andre Agassi,
Andre had gone from 30th to number one in the world. It was
a phenomenal record. I was going to be working with one of
the master strategists in the game.

We began the arrangement after Wimbledon 2006 and it
soon became clear that I wasn't going to be sharing him much
after all. We went to Washington together and I made the final.
We went to Toronto and I made the semis. We went to
Cincinnati and only lost to a player Brad used to coach, Andy
Roddick. I made the fourth round of the US Open. Still
together, we went for a while to his house in California, and
then I won both my matches in the Davis Cup tie against
Ukraine. Then we went on to Asia for a couple of weeks. Just
the two of us – no physios, no fitness trainers – and it was the
start of an intense relationship.

He's not an intense character himself, he is very upbeat,
but for some reason he is intense to be around. He is known
for his ability to talk. At the beginning I was happy just to sit
and listen. One of his favourite subjects was American sports.
I enjoyed hearing about them, and tried to understand them
better myself, to take more of an interest, so I could participate
in the conversations. They were a bit one-sided because at the
time I didn't know anything about sport in the USA.

People talk about our personalities grating, but off the
court I would say we were getting on fine at first. Some days
were better than others. He does talk a lot, but he is in a good
mood all the time. He is always up for a chat about most
things. Perhaps we made a mistake when I spent the off-season
at his house. We even shared the same villa when I
went to practise at the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida.
Basically, we were seeing too much of each other and I felt I
needed a bit of space.

I learned a lesson: you want to be close to your coach, but
there also needs to be some distance so you don't get tired and
fed up. I never really did find that distance with Brad. It is fair
enough to spend part of the off-season with your coach so that
you can work on things, but when you've just spent three
months with someone and then go and spend another four
weeks together when you need to be relaxing, it just isn't going
to work.

We spent days together, evenings together, ate dinners
together. Imagine sitting next to someone at work in an office
for eight hours a day and then going home and having dinner
with them every night. It's like groundhog day – the same over
and over and over. I guess I just got tired of it.

It was probably my mistake for not changing the arrangement.
It went on for too long. I should have known: after
eighteen months with Mark Petchey, things had begun to go
stale; after eighteen months with Brad, same thing. I suppose I
could have told Brad I wanted to chill by myself sometimes, but
I think it was very important to him that we had a close
relationship. He wanted to generate the feeling that a coach is
always there for you when you need them. However, it's about
judging what's enough and what's too much in that sort of
relationship.

Maybe I could just have said: 'Brad, please be quiet,'
sometimes. It might have worked. But I liked listening to him a
lot of the time. I had fun hearing about his experiences. He had
loads of funny stories, but I was listening and listening, and
after a while I didn't want to listen any more.

Patricio always says to me: 'You're way too nice,' but I am
sensitive to the fact I don't want to upset or annoy someone by
saying something like: 'I don't want to spend so much time
with you.' Once the relationship started out like that, I found
it difficult to pull back from the situation.

On the court, I cannot deny I was doing well. Brad is
renowned as a great tactician and a thinker, and I don't think
it was a coincidence that my ranking started to move upwards.
He believes it is all about having no excuses, about finding
ways to win even through the bad days when you are not
playing well. Funnily enough, I didn't lose a three set-match for
the first four months of 2007, even when it went to a tie-break
as in the quarter-final against Tommy Haas (ranked 9 to my
14) in Indian Wells.