Читать книгу Laura Robson - The Biography - Tina Campanella - Страница 7
ОглавлениеDespite the decision to remain firmly on British soil for her training, Kathy still wanted the best coaching for her daughter. Teaming up with British coach Alan Jones was a natural first step towards glory.
Jones had an impressive track record. In the 1980s, he had guided Jo Durie to win the Wimbledon girls’ title and she had gone on to become one of the top five tennis players in the world.
No Brit had won the girls’ title since.
Alan Jones could see Laura’s obvious talent, but in his opinion it was another of her qualities that stood out.
‘My wife and I have had plenty of young players of school age pass through our house over the years and they’ve had one thing in common – it’s impossible to get them to do their homework,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2010. ‘Not Laura. She would get straight down to it without any trouble. Even at that age you could see she was bright, had strong discipline and a work ethic.’
This coach had a very specific approach to Laura’s training and he is now credited with laying the foundations for the young player’s future success. But he also insists that Kathy’s shrewd parenting was central to her younger years on the tennis courts.
‘Time and time again I come across parents who are much too focused on instant results and short-term outcomes for their children,’ he explains. ‘The strategy was always to try and give Laura an adult sort of game and make her go for her shots even if it meant losing matches that she should have won.
‘She would sometimes lose to girls who would loop the ball and play safety first, getting it in all the time and winning by making a few mistakes. But in the long term it is better to have a bigger game. Luckily, Laura’s parents bought into that.’
Tennis star Jo Durie, who is still close to her former coach, also helped guide Robson through various ups and downs during her early years of professional training. Jo well recalls her first encounter with the promising player, and the immediate impression she made on the former World No. 5 when they first got on a practice court together.
According to Durie, something about Laura stood out from the other girls they were working with. ‘Straight away you could tell she hit the ball really well,’ Jo Durie commented. ‘A lot of the time it went into the back fence, but there was an unusual sense of timing.’
Durie and Jones coached her to compete in a series of under-12 championship matches, where they taught her some important lessons. ‘I remember her losing in a first round,’ says Durie. ‘We asked her and Kathy afterwards if she wanted to win under-12 titles just by making fewer mistakes than her opponent, or end up being good at 18 by learning to hit the ball properly and hard and lose a few more matches than might be expected.’
At the time, Robson was training at the Hazelwood Lawn Tennis Club, which had a brand-new elite tennis academy on its premises in North London. The brainchild of coach Alan Jones and backer Stephen Marks (the head of French Connection UK), the academy had opened in 2003 and was a new concept in British tennis training – modelled on the holistic hothouse approach that had proven such a success for Nick Bollettieri in Florida.
The Bollettieri Academy, where training was intense and totally focused on perfection, had produced Andre Agassi, Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova, so it certainly had a proven track record. But traditionally cautious British parents didn’t generally favour the hothouse method of sports training that Jones envisioned with his academy.
Directing this radically hard-line approach at future British tennis stars may have raised a few eyebrows, but the LTA was firmly behind the scheme. ‘The bottom line is we want to create champions who will then inspire others,’ said Marks, while Laura was a Hazelwood pupil.
She was one of just sixteen students at the school, where fees were £25,000 a year and training – which included Pilates, sports science lessons, school lessons, movement classes and an extremely high class of tennis coaching – was extremely intense. In the morning, Laura had two-and-a-half hours of footwork and training. After lunch, she had two hours of school lessons, before it was time to play tennis. At the end of every day, she had an hour of stretching.
‘Ultimately you come here to aim for the top 100 in the world,’ said Hazelwood coach James Lenton in 2005. ‘We’re using that as our benchmark. No one comes here to be treated like royalty.’
The team had a no-nonsense approach to training, which was perfectly in line with what Kathy Robson was looking for. She wanted Laura to stay with her family, but focus hard on her chosen career in tennis.
Since arriving in London, Kathy had been shocked at the British attitude to female sports, which differed markedly from that in her native Australia. ‘Women’s sport in Britain is a disgrace,’ she bluntly told a reporter who visited the club in 2005 to write about its facilities.
Laura was 11 and in training, and Kathy was watching from the sidelines with Ella, the Robsons’ puppy.
‘It scares me,’ Kathy went on, ‘the idea of girls and young women over here seems to be to hang around in shopping malls in big earrings. In Australian schools, to be good at sports is the ultimate. Over here, if you’re good at sport, you’re butch.’
Kathy didn’t pull any punches, and her words resonated with the reporter, who wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘All hail that woman. She is frighteningly right.’
There was no mollycoddling at Hazelwood, which was breaking down sports training barriers in the country and starting a veritable revolution in tennis coaching. It was just what British tennis needed.
Although the bulk of Laura’s training was done in Britain, she did attend short training camps overseas, including some at La Manga in Spain. Former British No. 1 Elena Baltacha was also at the camps and knew Laura already from Hazelwood, where they both trained. She took Robson under her wing on the trips and often babysat her and another girl after training.
Baltacha remembers Laura being disciplined about doing her homework, and, while she occasionally had to intervene to stop some enthusiastic bed-trampolining, she had a soft spot for her young charge.
‘Laura was probably about 10 and I was around 20,’ she recalls, before referring next to the girls in her charge: ‘They were quite good mostly, but I did have to tell them off for chatting after lights out. I had to pretend to call the head coach to scare them into going to sleep.’
Living so close to Wimbledon’s famous courts, it was only natural that Robson would watch the big matches that were regularly taking place just a short walk from her home. She learned a lot from closely examining the form of experienced players like Martina Hingis, whom she greatly admired. She dreamed about one day playing on Centre Court.
When Laura was 10, she was given her first opportunity to play on the hallowed courts at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, and she was understandably very excited. The LTA had specially selected a group of young, promising female tennis players, for an exhibition on Court Three that was set to take place on the middle Saturday of Wimbledon. To prepare them, the elite group spent two days at a training camp, so that the show game would be faultless.
Laura’s family managed to procure some tickets, and on the morning of the exhibition she woke up raring to go. But, sadly, when she looked outside she could see the familiar summer rain that so often hindered Wimbledon matches. She got dressed in her tennis whites and trainers, and made her way to the club.
When the exhibition was due to begin, the rain still hadn’t let up, and it continued to pour down throughout the afternoon, and Laura’s first ever moment on a Wimbledon court was unceremoniously cancelled. So, instead of playing tennis, she tucked into strawberries and cream and soaked up the atmosphere. For her, it hadn’t been a wasted trip by any means.
By now, Laura was being noticed by more than just former tennis stars and top coaches: in that same year, she signed with sports management agency Octagon, who would carefully manage her career off the courts. With global experience in athlete management, Octagon would negotiate sponsorship contracts and marketing opportunities for Laura and, when the time was right, build her personal brand, which would be key to securing her financial security in the years to come.
Her agent at Octagon was Abi Tordoff, who grew close to the youngster during their time working together and would go on to protect her from the sustained media attention she would receive in just a few short years’ time.
The first sponsorship deal Laura signed was with famous sporting brand Adidas, followed shortly by the deep-pocketed Wilson company, most famous for its rackets. This resulted in her getting a steady supply of chic tennis wear and rackets, and access to the Adidas Player Development Programme, which provided top-notch coaching and training to those lucky enough to be involved with it.
Such exposure was invaluable, and word about Laura’s burgeoning talent soon reached the ears of one of the greatest tennis trainers in the world: Martina Hingis’s mum, Melanie Molitor. The 11-year-old was subsequently invited to Switzerland to train with Melanie and Martina.
Flying over to accept the invitation, Robson couldn’t believe her luck. ‘It was like a dream come true,’ she said in a later interview. ‘I used to watch Martina a lot. I liked the way she played because it was so smart and I tried to bring some of that into my game.’
It was an inspirational experience. When Laura returned to Britain, she began to hit the junior tennis circuit with every ounce of focus and skill she could muster.
