Re: The Ivan Lendl interview
“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...
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