The Ivan Lendl interviewThe Czech-born tennis ace was mocked and derided but he is smiling nowFrom The Sunday Times
Paul Kimmage
May 24, 2009
Ivan Lendl with his daughters Isabelle, Marika, and Daniela (Corbis/Martin Schoeller)
A sweltering Saturday afternoon at Feather Sound Golf Club in Florida: he unfolds the small plastic chair he paid five bucks for in Walmart and plants himself at the back of the sixth green. “This is the life,” he sighs, “watching your kids play sport.” The clipped Czech accent hasn’t changed but the expression is unrecognisable. Ivan Lendl is beaming.
I have travelled from London to write a feature on Lendl and his five sporting daughters. Two of them, Isabelle, 18, and Daniela, 16, are golf prodigies and were playing this afternoon in a Future Collegians World Tour event at Feather Sound. The arrangement was that I would interview Lendl before the round and then follow him as he watched them play the 18 holes.
The walk was as enjoyable as any I have spent on a golf course but the interview wasn’t quite what we had planned. His girls are witty and lovely and brilliant but how do you spend a day with a tennis legend and ignore the quirks and traits that drove him to the top?
In the perfect world of Ivan Lendl there is no subjectivity. There are no politicians, no newspaper columnists, no grey areas. There are facts, box scores, black and white . . . his vision of a sports daily is something along the lines of France’s L’Equipe.
He merely wants to read that in the second minute of the third period a guy was penalised, the other team scored and it might have turned the hockey game. Please, no opinions. “I’m not interested in a psychological profile of the guy who took the penalty and what motivated him,” he says.” - Greg Garber, The Hartford Courant, 1993.
“So, you didn’t like reading profiles of other athletes,” I suggest.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Well, you can call me sarcastic - and probably rightly so - because I know what was written about me and how much of it was wrong, or untrue, so I would read a profile of Jack Nicklaus and sit there, wondering, 'Why am I reading this? How much of this is true?’ So I grew rather hesitant to take information from that. I want the facts.”
“Has that changed? Are you interested now in other sportsmen and what drives them?”
“I am very happy to read question and answer. I am very happy to watch question and answer. I am not going to read or watch somebody’s opinion about something.”
“So you are still mistrustful of writers?”
“I don’t think it’s mistrustful, it’s just a fact of life. If somebody writes a piece and it's question and answer, I trust that they will quote the answers they were given. I do not trust their judgment on the person.”
“You don’t?”
“No because . . . Okay, so we’re talking here now and then you’re going to go away and write a judgment of me or an assessment of me. How can you do that in an hour and a half? [The time I have been allotted for the interview]. That’s totally unfair to me and unfair to you and totally unfair for the readers.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I smile.
“So that’s where I stand.”
“But that doesn’t mean you’re not interested in the psychological profiles of other athletes?”
“No, you’re right, it doesn’t. I am interested but not necessarily from that source, and it depends also on what sort of psychological profile you want to look at. I see enough golf and tennis to make my own assessment.”
“Did you read the John McEnroe autobiography? The Jimmy Connors biography?”
“No, I didn’t read any of them.”
“Why not?”
“Well, John, Jimmy and I - and I think you can go three ways with this - didn’t see eye to eye. But having said that, I know the guys well enough to make my own assessment of them and I’m not interested in their ex-wives or kids or whatever, I’m just not. I happen to like Stefan Edberg a lot but if he wrote a book I wouldn’t read it either. So it’s not personal, I’m just not interested.”
“The context of your relationship with Jimmy and John was...”
“Is that what you call it?” he laughs.
“You were competitors, rivals, so it was almost a given you weren’t going to get on. But when you step back from it now - and it’s almost 15 years since you retired - aren’t you interested in McEnroe’s perspective on the rivalry? What he was thinking on the opposite side of the net during those key moments of your battles?”
“No, because it’s totally irrelevant,” he says. “If he had written it when we were playing, I would be the first to read it. But now there is no point because I am somebody else now. That was a totally different life, a totally different lifetime. Okay, so maybe John was scared [of me] and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he had respect [for me] and maybe he didn’t. It makes no difference ... and again, that’s not to knock him because if it was [Mats] Wilander or Edberg writing, I still wouldn’t be interested.”
“You’ve never done an autobiography?”
“And I never will.”
“Why not?”
“Why yes?”
“Because you are one of the most interesting and most misunderstood sportsmen of all time.”
“But isn’t that how you keep the mystique,” he grins.
“For sure,” I smile, “but why not set the record straight and say, ’This is who I am. These are the events that shaped me. Now make your own mind up'.”
“You don’t know me well enough but the gist of it is this. When I do something, I do it right or not at all. To write a proper book I would have to name names, it would hurt some people, and I don’t think that’s necessary. Secondly, it’s not that important to me. I know who I am and my friends know who I am, that’s what is important to me. Would it be nice that all the tennis fans know who I am? Yeah, but not at the price of hurting people.”
“Is it true that your daughters have watched only a few of your matches on tape?”
“That’s true.”
“How much of your life, your sporting life, do they know about?”
“Very little. I never talk about it.”
“Is that not another reason for writing an autobiography?”
“If they want to know I’ll tell them everything,” he laughs. “They have the source, all they have to do is ask.”
My mother was always snapping at me to eat my peas and carrots. But the more she yelled, the more I resisted her. Then she would start hitting me across the face. It hurt but I forced myself not to cry. If I had, she would have known that she had got to me - and I couldn’t let that happen.” - Ivan Lendl, from an unauthorised biography by his former friend, George Mendoza. An only child, Lendl was born into a tennis family and raised in the coal mining city of Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. His mother, Olga, had once been the second-ranked female player in the country. His father, Jiri, a lawyer, had been ranked 15. By the age of 13, Ivan could beat his father. A year later, he beat his mother for the first time. She did not take it well...
“One of the most interesting things about Connors,” I announce, “was the influence of his mother and grandmother. His father was a peripheral figure in his life. He was raised by two women to beat men. I get the impression it was the same for you?”
“Not quite to that extent,” he replies. “I think if you look at any successful athlete, especially in individual sport, you will find one dominant parent. I don’t know enough about Jimmy to make a comparison, but in my case my mother and I never really played tennis together because our personalities clashed. As soon as I beat her once, that was it. She wouldn’t play with me, so I was in the hand of coaches.”
“She seems quite a hard woman. Was that quote from the Mendoza book true?”
“No, that’s just crazy.”
“It’s totally untrue?” I press.
“Whether it’s true or not, I would never say it. Look, it’s not about my mother. My mother did a fantastic job, working, playing tennis, taking care of me. I will not complain about my mother. She had a hard life and I am not going to say a word about that.
"Was she tough on me? Of course. But maybe that’s what helped me. One parent is always tougher than the other, one is a disciplinarian and the other is not. In our family, my mother was the disciplinarian but making quotes like that ... no.”
“You became the most dominant player in the world through dedication and force of will. Was it your will or your mother’s?”
“It is my opinion that every child does a sport for their parents at first. People say, ’You should not push a child. The child has to love it’ but how is the child going to love it if they are not pushed in the first place? Because if you give them the choice they won’t want to be there. So they get pushed or ’given the opportunity’ or whatever you want to call it, and there is a time when they start playing for themselves.”
“Do you remember when you started playing for yourself?”
“No. I don’t think you can pinpoint it to a day but I always hated losing. It’s a miserable feeling. I hate it. I hate losing. I do it even now when I play golf with friends.”
“Another significant influence on your life was growing-up in a communist state. Is it true that you watched the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague?”
“Yeah, I remember my parents were in Prague for club matches and I was with my grandparents in another town. They came to pick me up and we went home on the train and at every station there were tanks aiming at the trains.”
“That must have been terrifying?”
"Well, it wasn’t terrifying because you are only eight [and don’t understand]. My parents were very upset and I was warned not to use words like ’occupants’ or to laugh or spit or say anything against them. People went to jail for using words like that. That’s another reason I wouldn’t write an autobiography - people here just wouldn’t understand. People in Hungary and Poland and the former Soviet republics would understand but people in California? Are you kidding me? They have no idea what it was like.”
“So tennis opened the door to a completely different world?”
“Yes, tennis was a vehicle to get out of there.”
“What is it like coming to the U.S. for the first time?”
“I was 15 and came to play in the Orange Bowl and it was great ... At home, I was able to play a maximum of two hours indoors a week. Well, how much better are you going to get? But I came here and played six hours a day for two months and didn’t bother to look around. It didn’t matter to me that the stores had all the fruit you wanted to eat - I just wanted to get fed so I could go and play again. That was what I cared about and tennis became a great vehicle for a better life.”
“Was there a sportsman you admired or particularly wanted to emulate?”
“Well, I learnt a lot at that time from Martina [Navratilova]. She defected and without her I don’t think I would have pulled off what I did over there because they were afraid I would defect as well. [Lendl was allowed to travel the globe freely under the liberalised policy his country adopted after Navratilova defected in 1975. He paid 20% of his earnings to the Czech tennis federation.] I had no interest in politics or in defecting. As long as they didn’t stand in my way to achieving what I wanted to achieve, I was okay with it.”
“During those formative years here, your relationship with the media was strained,” I suggest. “And your relationship with the fans suffered as a result of that.”
“Well, let me tell you about the media,” he says. “Because there was no freedom of speech in communist countries, I had to be careful what I said and didn’t upset the agreements or arrangements I had because if I was home they could have taken my passport and I would never have travelled again; would never have been heard of again. But the first question [at the press conference] was always, ’Would you like to live here? When are you going to defect?’ Well, what can I say? There was no answer I could give and that’s how it started.”
“In 1982, your early mentor here, Wojtek Fibak, said this about you in The New York Times: ’Ivan will not show his real face on the court because tennis is his profession. He wants to be Ivan Lendl, superstar, No 1. He wants to be cool because that’s his protection. If he would suddenly open himself, he might be hurt somewhere. By being hard and cruel, he’s not asking the public to like him, just to respect him'.”
“Well, that’s Wojtek’s observation.”
"Was he right?”
“I think you can draw a big distinction between golf and tennis. In golf, if I say, ’I didn’t drive the ball well today’ as Tiger [Woods] did yesterday, his opponents can’t hurt him. But if I say, ’My backhand passing shot is terrible at the moment’ and you are playing me tomorrow, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to exploit that and crush you,” I laugh.
“So that’s a big distinction,” he smiles. “They [the media] would ask me, ’How are you going to play the guy tomorrow?’ Do you want me to advertise it? I mean, I can tell you right now about [my weak points and] what I hated because it doesn’t matter.
Everybody thought highly of my forehand but I hated it when they served to my forehand on big points! I hated that! But why would I tell the media that? I don’t see [Roger] Federer saying how he is going to play [Rafael] Nadal!”
“The flipside of having to be guarded was that the public never saw the real Ivan Lendl,” I suggest. “The cliched projection of you here was that you were robotic and devoid of personality, the embodiment of the caricature communist, ’Ivan the Terrible’"
“Yeah.”
“That wasn’t very fair was it?”
“No, definitely not ... Nobody hates communists more than I do - not even Rush Limbaugh!”
“Did it hurt?”
“In that business you grow a thick skin very quickly. Of course, you prefer if it’s not written but I didn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“You never played the game or courted popularity,” I suggest.
“No, to me that’s sucking-up.”
“And you would never do that?”
“No, I believe you are who you are, and if they like you for it great, and if they don’t, too bad. You are not going to please everybody so stick to your principles.”
“Isn’t there a part of us all that wants to be loved?”
“That’s human nature, and there’s nothing wrong with that but again I would rather be liked by a lesser percentage for what I am, not for who I pretend to be. That’s important to me.”
"In September 1986, you won the US Open and made the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time. The headline was ’The Champion that nobody cares about'."
“Yeah, I have not spoken to them since and I never will. It was totally uncalled for in my opinion.”
“That must have been incredibly hurtful?”
“It was unpleasant but there is no rhyme or reason for the way things unfold sometimes.”
“There were some fantastic characters playing tennis in that era,” I observe. “What was it like coming from Czechoslovakia and having to pit your wits against guys like Connors and McEnroe, who were loved here?”
“Well, I’m not sure I agree with that statement.”
“What? That they were loved?”
“Yeah,” he laughs. “I think, whenever you played the No 1 player in their own country it was difficult but you had to learn to deal with it. It was very satisfying, when you had 20,000 people cheering against you, to hold the trophy and smile. That always appealed to my perverted sense of humour.”
It was the worst loss of my life, a devastating defeat: sometimes it still keeps me up nights. It’s even tough for me now to do the commentary at the French - I’ll often have one or two days when I literally feel sick to my stomach just at being there and thinking about that match. Thinking of what I threw away, and how different my life would’ve been if I’d won. - John McEnroe, “Serious.” Twenty-five years ago, in June 1984, Lendl played McEnroe in the final of the French Open. It was Lendl's fourth appearance in a Grand Slam final and he had yet to register a win. McEnroe was playing the tennis of his life and had crushed Lendl in four finals that year. On the morning of the match, L’Equipe published a cartoon of a brash and confident McEnroe pointing a gun across the net at a cowering and sweating and petrified Lendl. This was our perception of him; the guy who fell at the final hurdle; the guy who couldn’t get it done. But then something extraordinary happened...
“Did you see that cartoon?” I ask.
“Of course not. As an athlete you should never read the press, good or bad, it’s not good for you.”
“You lost the first two sets of that final and he was two games to love up in the third.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asks.
“Well, that’s what McEnroe says in his book.”
“You are absolutely certain about that? I know popular recollection is that he was two sets and a break up but my recollection was that he was not a break up in the third but he was up a break in the fourth - 4-3 serving two gain points for 5-3. That’s my recollection.”
“He definitely says in his book that he was up a break in the third,” I insist.
“I dispute that. I don’t recall it that way.” [Lendl's recollection is totally accurate].
“Okay,” I concede. “The bottom line is that you somehow managed to turn it around.”
“Right.”
“Do you remember the turning point or a key moment? He describes being distracted by the crackling of a TV microphone.”
“You mean a plane flew over and he got distracted,” he chuckles. “It didn’t take much with John!”
“Do you remember a key moment?”
“No, what I remember is this. We played in Dusseldorf a week before and he beat me 6-3, 6-2. About two weeks before that we played at Forest Hills and he beat me 6-4, 6-2, or something like that. He didn’t lose a match that year. It was one of the best years anybody ever had. So he was clearly the favourite and we started and I’m just basically getting blown away and just trying to make it respectable, that’s all I am trying to do.”
“You’re trying to survive?”
“What else are you going to do? You can either pack it in or you can keep fighting. So I just kept fighting and I happened to win the third set and from then on I thought I was going to win because I saw him tiring and I wasn’t near tiring yet because the points were short.”
“How did it feel when you had done it?” [Lendl won 3-6 2-6 6-4 7-5 7-5].
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“You must.”
“I don’t remember any of it. A friend of mine said to me a few years later, ’You looked really tired in that locker room'. I said, ’What are you talking about? You were not even there'. But apparently he was.”
“Did you celebrate that night?”
“No, I was too tired.”
“There was no joy? No elation?”
“Sure I was elated, of course I was elated but ... you play for yourself. You don’t play for your parents or for your coach, you play for yourself.”
“But you didn’t celebrate?”
“No.”
“Did you drink?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“I had one beer after one of the Australian [Opens I won] and it was ugly. I promised Tony [his coach, Tony Roche] I’d have a drink with him if I won and it got ugly. We tried to remove some of the chairs from the room of the hotel and forgot to open a window!”
“Okay, back to McEnroe and your major. He said some pretty cutting things about you over the years: ’The guy hasn’t been good for tennis. He has been so selfish. And he’s certainly not the kind of guy who brings out the best in others. He’s hurt the popularity of the game so much ... Do you like a robot being No 1?’ "
“Sounds to me like sour grapes,” he smiles.
“He also said some very complimentary things. ’As much as I may have disliked him, I have to give Lendl credit: nobody in the sport has ever worked as hard as he did. He became a great champion'.
His expression contorts. “Ehh, somehow those two don’t go together, do they?”
“He described the 84 French as the worst loss of his life, a devastating defeat.”
“I think it was,” he concurs. “People always say it was the most important match of my career and I disagree - I think I would have won my share afterwards anyhow. But it was the most important match in a negative way of his career because I think, if he had won, that he would have put more effort into [winning] the Australian and would have finished with 10 or 12 majors instead of seven, and talked about in the same breath as Rod Laver and Roger Federer. I agree wholeheartedly that it was devastating for him and his reputation and career.”
“You say you didn’t like him or Jimmy?”
“And I don’t think they liked each other, either.”
“Does it give you any pleasure that you inflicted so much pain on him [McEnroe]?”
“No, not at all. It was nice to win and if it was somebody else I’d have felt the same way.”
“What about your relationship with them now?”
“I have not seen Jimmy since he retired. I see John about once a year at Madison Square Garden ...This is funny actually, Jerry [Lendl's former manager, Jerry Solomon] and I ran that event last year between Sampras and Federer and John was there doing television. So we talk a bit and I say, ’You know John, ever since I met you in 1977 in Santos, Brazil, at a junior banana ball, I knew one day you were going to work for me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he laughs.
“But John, actually, has a good sense of humour and he starts laughing and says, ’Well let’s keep it at one day.”
“And you haven’t seen Jimmy? That’s a surprise.”
“Well, I don’t think Jimmy or I make a habit of hanging around tennis tournaments. I mean he coached Roddick for a while but I don’t go to tennis tournaments much. I am much more interested in juniors than the big boys.”
“Which of your rivals did you like most?”
“Edberg. He had a sick sense of humour just like me. You know what they say about quiet water always making trouble? That’s Stefan.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong but 1984 was also the year you met your wife, Samantha?”
“That’s wrong.”
“I read that you married in September 1989 and met five years before that.”
“Yes but I think it was less than five years. I’d better not say any more or I’ll get in trouble.”
“You once said that if you had a family you would have to cheat either your children or your tennis?”
“Right.”
“You won your last major at the Australian Open in 1990 and your daughter Marika was born four months later.”
“Right.”
“So you ended up cheating on your tennis?”
“Well, when the kids are really small and if you have a very good spouse - and I clearly do - there is not that much a man can do. So I would not blame it on the family. It was just father time. In tennis, as you get older, it’s not that you lose the straight-line speed or the stamina - the stamina actually gets better - it’s the agility of turning [you lose] and agility was starting to go. A split-of-a-second late here, two splits there and the point is gone. And you can’t do anything about it. There is nowhere to hide.”
“So it wasn’t so much the kids as a natural decline?”
“Right.”
“You once teased Tony Roche that he wasn’t a real man because his wife had given birth to two daughters?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you feel when Samantha kept having girls?”
“I loved that. It didn’t bother me at all.”
“A son would have made no difference?”
“No.”
“You retired in 1994. A lot of great sportsmen struggle in retirement but you have clearly flourished?”
“Well, life clearly changes,” he says. “You have to readjust your values and learn very quickly that it’s not all about you all the time. If you don’t, you have problems. I was trained to compete all my life and could not see myself walking away from competition and that’s where golf came in. Golf was a great vehicle for me to get the competition out of myself. I love competing. I get nervous before I play. I get the same buzz as when I was playing tennis. I love it.”
“That’s great.”
“I belong to four clubs and between the four of them I have won the club championships 25 times now, which is a highlight for me ... It sounds silly in a way when you’ve won the French and the US Opens to be worrying about the club championships but the competitiveness is still there.”
“So golf has filled the void?”
“Yes, golf has been a saviour. I would have been at home biting my dogs!”
“How has Samantha put up with you for so long?”
“I don’t know,” he smiles.
“You must have some good qualities?”
“I think I’m fairly reasonable as long as I get those juices out of me. If I don’t, I’m miserable.”
“You’re obviously still in love?”
“Of course, and not only with my family, I love my life.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/paul_kimmage/article6349407.ece?token=null&offset=156&page=1
AuthorTopic: The Ivan Lendl Interview (Read 11805 times)
June 09, 2006, 09:18:04 PM