The Ivan Lendl interview
相當長的訪問，談了Lendl現在的生活，過去和McEnore，Connors等等。
過了這麼多年，似乎他的個性依然沒變。
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/paul_kimmage/article6349407.
ece
From The Sunday Times
May 24, 2009
Paul Kimmage
Tennis ace Ivan Lendl was mocked and derided but he is smiling now
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.”
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