Читать книгу Laura Robson - The Biography - Tina Campanella - Страница 6

It was January 1994, the height of Australia’s blisteringly hot summertime, and the city of Melbourne had once more succumbed to its annual tennis fever. The Australian Open was well underway at Flinders Park and cries of both anguish and joy could be heard daily from the packed tennis courts.

And while tennis legends Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf were on their way to claiming their first major victories of the year, just a stone’s throw away from the sweaty action, Laura Robson was busy making her entrance into the world.

Born in the city that traditionally begins the tennis year, and surrounded from her first breath by all the heady excitement of the international sport, some would say that it was in her DNA to someday become a racket queen.

But she had a long journey ahead of her.

She was the youngest of three children born to successful Antipodean couple Andrew and Kathy Robson, and it could easily have been Australia and not Britain who would claim her future glory as their own.

However, Laura’s life in Australia was short-lived: when she was just 18 months old, the family moved to Singapore, where her father’s job as an executive for Shell oil took him. It was there, in the refined surroundings of an expat country club, that she first picked up a tennis racket.

Laura was born into a family that highly values sporting skills and the hard work and dedication that it takes to turn talent into success: the whole Robson gene pool is overflowing with sporting achievement.

Her great-grandfather Pat Fogarty is a legend at the Perth Australian Rules Football Club and even has a grandstand named after him there. Her mother was a professional basketball player in her native Perth, and her uncle, Larry Dwyer, was a star member of the Fremantle Dockers Premiership team. Add these achievements to those of her two cousins – who have represented Australia in hockey and kayaking – and it would have been amazing if Laura hadn’t turned out to excel at some kind of athletic activity.

So, when the young family arrived in Singapore, it was only natural for Kathy and Andrew to immediately seek out somewhere they could pursue the sporting hobbies of their choice. They found the Hollandse Club, a sprawling, private, tropical oasis located at the heart of the city that the Robson family would call their home for the next four years. The family were regular visitors to the club, which offered everything from squash, golf, hockey and swimming to football and tennis, and it soon became almost like a second home.

When Laura was four, the family began playing friendly tennis knockabouts among themselves with Laura drafted in as ballgirl. As a reward for her efforts, she was treated to ten minutes of play at the end of each match, and Kathy was immediately struck by her daughter’s instant ability to hit the ball.

Enrolled in the club’s under-7s coaching group, Laura’s first training session was an astonishing experience for those around her.

‘They were quite strict about the kids staying in their age ranges,’ recalls Kathy. ‘But after about five minutes the coach came back and said they would need to create a special group for her. By the age of five we could see signs of a special talent.’

While not a pushy tennis parent, Kathy encouraged Laura to enjoy the sport – but not to the detriment of her other interests, or for that matter to her childhood as a whole.

Early family photos reveal Laura to be a beautiful child with a wide and infectious smile and a penchant for dressing up. It’s clear that her early years in the far-flung city of Singapore were happy ones.

A few months after her sixth birthday, however, the family made their final move and settled in Wimbledon, London – just a few steps away from the tennis capital of the world. Laura felt instantly at home in the cooler, greyer city, despite it being the polar opposite of the colourful place she had just come from.

The family bought a dog, Ella, and settled down permanently.

As a precocious six-year-old, Laura had a wide range of interests. She was an attentive child in class, an elegant dancer in her ballet lessons, musically gifted at the saxophone and obsessed with baking. But it was in tennis that she naturally shone, and she joined a junior tennis academy a year later.

It’s safe to say it was sibling rivalry that started Laura on the road to serious tennis, as her first major competitor was her brother Nick. ‘He’s two years older than me and, as he was always that bit better, I would lose and sulk for the rest of the day,’ Laura says. ‘It’s the reason I kept playing – I needed to beat him.’

Laura was 11 when she finally started winning.

‘It was worth the wait,’ she now admits. ‘I was just more competitive and took training more seriously than he did.’

By the time Laura turned nine, members of the Robson household were all early risers. Kathy was up at 5am to take Nick to the pool for swimming training then back at 6am to take Laura to the tennis courts before both were whisked off to school.

Nick was swimming for Middlesex and approaching Olympic qualifying times and Laura had attracted the attention of various tennis coaches, including the Lawn Tennis Association’s coach Carl Maes. Carl noted that, although Laura had trouble staying emotionally under control, he could see right away that she had a lot of potential.

But, with so many interests and commitments and so little time in the day, young Laura had a very adult decision to make.

Along with her talent at tennis, she had begun to excel in her ballet lessons, and had been offered a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School. She also loved to spend hours in the kitchen with rolling pins and icing, and at night she fell asleep with cookery books under her pillow, dreaming of being a baker. In the years to come, she would sometimes take over a small part of the kitchens at the hotels she stayed at on tour. There she would relax by baking trays of splendid cupcakes and cookies for her friends and family.

Laura’s dilemma was that, in order to be a professional tennis player, she would have to put aside everything else – including her schoolwork – and focus exclusively on the sport. It was a tough decision, but one she wouldn’t regret. She started taking her school lessons at home and began to work hard at the sporting career she was determined was her destiny.

Most British children being groomed for tennis glory are packed off to live at prestigious training academies in foreign climes.

Laura’s fellow tennis ace and friend Heather Watson left her home on the island of Guernsey when she was 12 to live and train at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida, while Andy Murray left Scotland for Spain in his early teens, to train on the clay courts of the Sanchez-Casal Academy.

Overseas training meant being uprooted from friends and families and, although seen as a small sacrifice to pay for sporting glory, it was a lot to handle for a young child like Laura, who was so close to her parents.

‘When it got more serious, we did look at some academies, but it came down to us not wanting to split the family up,’ says Kathy. ‘I would probably have had to have gone and lived wherever with her and for us the family unit was just too important. She had a brother, a sister and a dog and all that stuff is more important when you are growing up. We took the view that if she was going to be good enough then she was going to be good enough.’

The Robsons were a family who prided themselves on their normal, middle-class home life and didn’t want that to change. None of their children, no matter how gifted, would take precedence over any of the others, and all three would have their feet rooted firmly on the ground.

Laura’s tennis career would be separate from her family life, which would remain normal, and Kathy would be supportive but not pushy. It was largely as a result of her mother’s excellently practical attitude that Laura would grow into the remarkably grounded and balanced young lady she is today.

She would go after glory with everything she had, but she would also always know that she had a life to live ‘off the courts’ too. Her loving and supportive family would be there to both applaud and console her, and at the end of each day, whether she’d done well or things had gone badly, she would return home to the same house and do the same household chores that she always had.

Other young tennis players haven’t been so lucky. Countless pushy tennis parents, over the years, have been the cause of numerous deeply ingrained emotional issues that have blighted their children’s careers – and their lives. And, although some would say that it is this kind of backing that produces world-class players, surely many might argue that it is too high a price to pay for professional recognition.

‘It’s a huge issue on the junior circuit,’ says former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash. ‘Parents being very aggressive, very abusive, cheating.’

Richard Krajicek, from Holland, another former champion, suffered mercilessly as a result of his father’s unreasonable behaviour.

‘If I didn’t practise well my dad would make me run home behind the car,’ he says. ‘Once he was upset with me and he spanked me pretty good. I’d just come back from the States and he didn’t know about jetlag. He thought I’d tanked the match, that I didn’t try.’

Krajicek struggled emotionally and physically because of the relationship, adding: ‘A few days later he said to me: “I’ve heard about this jetlag, I shouldn’t have done it – but all the other times you deserved it.”’

This gives a heartbreaking insight into the pressure that only parents can put on their children.

Between the ages of 20 and 30, Krajicek didn’t speak to his father, after finally learning to stand up for himself.

The Dutchman won Wimbledon aged 24.

Krajicek’s own son is now playing junior tennis, and as a father he has a totally different attitude to his boy’s career.

While Krajicek junior was playing under-12s tennis, his father noticed his son getting upset by a series of cheating opponents, despite the fact that some of them were his friends. Richard understands all too well the reason why the other children were resorting to underhand tactics.

He says: ‘I told him that, although his opponent was a friend, he’d rather have problems with you than lose the match and have problems at home.’

Showing where his priorities lie, he adds: ‘Maybe the way I approach it now my son is going to have a good relationship with me but he’s going to be a terrible tennis player.’

Kathy Robson’s determination to put the welfare of her daughter and that of the whole family before Laura’s tennis career is all the more commendable because pushy parents are actually more usually associated with women’s tennis than with male players.

It’s a trend that was begun by the father of Suzanne Lenglen, the flamboyant French player who is widely recognised as the first female tennis celebrity. Coached rigorously by her father, he controlled every aspect of her training and devised monotonous techniques, such as laying a handkerchief down at different positions on the court, and repeatedly forcing her to hit it with her racket.

At all Lenglen’s games her father sat within earshot of her and loudly reproved his daughter for the slightest of errors.

It paid off: Lenglen won 8 Grand Slam singles titles and 31 Championships between 1919 and 1926. In those seven years she lost only one match.

But his actions set a sadly dangerous precedent.

In more recent times, four-time Grand Slam winner Mary Pierce is known as much for her father Jim’s abusive behaviour towards her and her opponents as for her tennis prowess. Mary now admits that Jim was physically abusive towards her while coaching her as a youngster, once even shouting: ‘Mary, kill the bitch!’ while watching his daughter play in a junior match.

When she turned 18, Mary finally found the courage to break away from her father, aided by the Women’s Tennis Council, the governing body of the women’s circuit.

Jim was subsequently banned from the 1993 WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) Tour, and Mary eventually had to get a restraining order against her father to prevent him from attending any more of her matches.

‘It’s like a weight off me,’ she said at the time. ‘When I miss a shot it’s not the end of the world anymore.’

At the height of her game, Serbian tennis ace Jelena Dokic also struggled to cope with the behaviour of her father, who was also her coach, who displayed constant outbreaks of aggression.

Instances of this included stomping on a journalist’s mobile phone at Wimbledon, claiming that the draw was rigged at the Australian Open, calling members of the Edgbaston Priory Club ‘Nazis’, and threatening the Australian Ambassador to Serbia with a rocket launcher.

Dokic eventually parted ways with her father, Damir. In 2011, she informed the press that he wouldn’t be at the Australian Open, admitting: ‘He can’t watch my matches because he gets too stressed’.

This was somewhat of an understatement.

American coach Nick Bollettieri has long experienced the detrimental effect that parents can have on their offspring, when they act as coaches. ‘Having mum and dad so closely involved is not the most productive route to success,’ he has diplomatically said. ‘Too close a relationship in terms of sport, more often than not, proves a negative.’

There are exceptions, like Serena and Venus Williams’s mother and father, Oracene and Richard, and Andy and Jamie Murray’s mother, Judy. But, on the whole, pushy parents are more often than not a hindrance to their children’s success.

‘There have been plenty of examples where parents have really pushed an individual and that isn’t so healthy,’ says Tim Henman. ‘In an ideal world, the passion and the drive should come from the player.’

It’s clear that Kathy Robson made the decision to leave Laura’s career to the experts, opting instead for providing stoic support and firm gentle persuasion.

It would prove to be a winning combination.