TRIALS OF A GREEK DEMIGOD This is an article that Nabila emailed me. It's from an Aussie paper, but I don't know which or who wrote it. Sorry!
On centre court, the scene of Rafter's victory over fellow Australian Mark Philippoussis, tournament staff gather for an impromptu photo. Above it, in braodcast booth number 10, John Newcombe is no doubt glad to have escaped the embarrassment of having to interview someone who won't talk to him. In the men's locker room, John Fitzgerald and Darren Cahill are chatting.
Mark Philippoussis has just walked by, from the showers to his wood-pannelled locker. He wears a towel around his waist. The rest of his 192-centimetre frame has been shaped and trained into an outcome Dorothy Parker would appropriately have described as perfectly fine. Philippoussis's face is the mask you often see worn by members of the losing team after a big sporting contest. If they cry, they do it in private. In public, it's a look of pained,withdrawn stoicism.
Philippoussis's father Nick, walks past, ignoring a reporter's question. Then the post-mortem begins.
"Answer me now......answer me now", the older man demands in a muffled but angry voice.
"That was silly.....that was silly," says his son in the placatory tones of a child on the defensive.
It was not the first time Mark Philippoussis had lost a tennis match and
walked into a paternal inquisition instead of an embrace. After a match in Monaco, his former coach, Nick Bollettieri, recalls, "he (Nick) embarrassed Mark....berated him in the locker room".
So at the end of what should have been one of the greatest days of his professional life, Mark Philippoussis is defending himself. Not from the media, with whom he has been skirmishing on and off for more than two years,but from his father, who despite an array of coaches and managers in Australia
and the United States, remain the last word on his son.
To those who know him, 21 year old Philippoussis is still a big kid with an emerging tennis game that may yet make him one of the giants of his sport. He is also, and no less, a son still in the shadow of an obsessive and dominating father,. Together, they have become estranged from the Australian tennis establishment. The home they share in Florida is indicative of the distance
they wish to keep between themselves and Melbourne, their hometown and the headquarters of Tennis Australia. Through this rift, Australia’s 1998 Davis Cup campaign has become a soap opera.
Australia has rarely, if ever, seen such an outsized, glamorous tennis talent as Mark Philippoussis, so it’s hardly surprising that no-one is sure how to handle it or him. Newcombe or Rafter may have been as good-looking, but they
outsmarted opponents rather than overpowered them. Pat Cash arguably possessed less ability, but his fearsome competitive streak made up for that.
No-one has the capacity to suck the air out of an audience the way Philippoussis can: the heartfelt sigh of the smitten female fan; the “whooo!” of appreciation at the reading on the service speed monitor - 229 km/h is a record - or a forehand delivered like a knockout punch to end a point.
According to French Open champion Carlos Moya of Spain, “you just have to guess where the ball if going to go and pray.” Moya had just lost a semi-final of the US Open to Philippuossis in four sets. It would have been three but for the pair of double faults the Australian served to lose the third set. During the final of a tournament in Germany last year, one of Moya’s countrymen, Alex Corretja, hid behind a linesman in mute acknowledgment of his helplessness in
the face of Philippoussis’s deliveries.
That is Philippoussis’s story. When he is in the mood, or what he calls “the zone”, he can be unstoppable. In New York he added fitness and patience to his more obvious virtues and would rally and wait with the aplomb of an adult playing with a child. But these moods can vary as wildly as a day-to-day reading of the Dow Jones index.
In the final against Rafter, Philippoussis was a player struggling with two identities. Eventually, the original personality prevailed - the reckless one that tried to end every exchange with an explosive serve or ground stroke and
threw away point after point in the process. And so on and on it went, until Rafter claimed his second consecutive title, 6-3, 3-6, 6-2, 6-0.
At that moment it was apparent that Nick Philippoussis did not like what he had seen. The player’s families and friends are accommodated in small blocks of a dozen or so seats at either end of the courts’ eastern side. At the end of the match, Nick stood, along with everyone else, and gestured angrily with his index finger to the far end of the court. There, Tony Roche, stood and applauded, an unassuming-looking lightning rod with a lean, almost gaunt face half-hidden beneath his sponsor’s cap.
Nick’s body language was emphatic, even if his words were inaudible. Six times he turned to speak to his son’s coach, Pat Cash. Each exchange was brief, as though the questions asked were rhetorical. In the middle of the court, Rafter patted Philippoussis on the shoulder and offered consolation. Philippoussis cocked his head to listen, then walked back to his chair.
At the trophy presentation, Philippoussis watched glumly as Rafter collected
the silver cup, then, sitting in his courtside seat, stared at the ground as Rafter walked his prize slowly around the perimeter. Later, Philippoussis conveyed his feelings at that moment: “It was hard looking at him, lifting up that trophy,” he said. But close at hand was someone who remembered what it
feels like to lose. Pat Cash left his seat at the end of the court, then reappeared moments later on centre court, standing next to the player whose acquaintance he had first made barely three months earlier.
“It’s very lonely when you lose,” Cash said later. “I felt it was the right thing to do. I don’t think I could have stayed up there and clapped for Pat or
whatever. It was more important to be there as a friend.”
As Rafter scrambled up a wall to clasp hands with Tony Roche, his coach of the past two weeks and official and unofficial mentor for the previous two years,
Philippoussis was escorted off court by Cash. Graciously, the finalist stopped to sign autographs on his way out.
Philippoussis celebrated his 21st birthday at Melbourne’s Crown Casino last November. Ten months later, after he survived three match points to beat Sweden’s Thomas Johansson in five sets in a US Open quarter-final, his father hugged him and told him he had become a man.
In reality, the rite of passage has not been so simple or so conclusive.
Tennis history in Australia is littered with Anglo names: Crawford, Bromwich,Sedgman, Hoad, Rosewall, Laver, Emerson, Newcombe, Roche, Fitzgerald, Rafter.
They came from family farms (Emerson, Roche, Fitzgerald) or working-class suburbs (Hoad, Sedgman) or solid middle-class homes (Newcombe, Rosewall). They left home in their late teens and went to play overseas with a trusted mentor,or in the case of Rafter, on of his six brothers.
When the parents showed up, it was for a cameo appearance - usually Wimbledon - just as they might have turned out for a school play or speech night. Otherwise, if there were news, it was shared during a long-distance call. The
invisible ties that bind a child to a parent were severed quickly and cleanly, if not always painlessly. The child struggled with homesickness, poor form and motivation. The ones who survived that struggle developed an extra layer of resolve, like a second skin that repelled the wounds the game and its business
can inflict.
They benefited from the security that comes with growing up in a country that had always been home. They fitted comfortably into a structure that had
existed for generations. For Nick Philippoussis, Australia was the New World.The son of a Greek businessman, his education included three years at a boarding school in Istanbul. He met his wife Rossana, a native of Trieste in northern Italy, in what was then Yugoslavia. The idea to make Australia their new home came after Nick saw an episode of the children’s program Skippy while
visiting a brother in Switzerland.
“I decided, I was seeing such beautiful bush and water, kangaroos and koalas,”
he said in an interview last year. “I said to my wife, ‘That’s the place to go... to Australia”. They arrived in Melbourne in 1973 and settled in the bayside suburb of Williamstown. (In those days, Williamstown was firmly a part of the city’s heavily industrial western suburbs rather than the aspiring and
separate village it is now.)
Three years later, Mark Philippoussis was born, a brother for 10 year old Anna
Maria.
It is an axiom of the social history of the past two centuries that migrants to the New World - be it Australia, Canada or the US - are seeking a fresh start in life and that the person offered a second chance cherishes opportunity more than the one who regards it as a birthright.
International tennis has been dominated by these arrivees or their children:
Pete Sampras, whose parents came from Greece; Andre Agassi whose parents left Iran for Las Vegas; Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova, who fled what was then Czechoslovakia for the US; Monica Seles, who, at the age of 13 and with her
parents, departed the Hungarian enclave of Novi Sad in Serbia; Jennifer Capriati, whose father Stefano claimed to have played professional soccer in Italy.
In most but not all cases, they pushed themselves or their children to near
breaking point. Tennis was the head start that would put them ahead of the field in this country. Success could be achieved with hard work. Parents,usually the father, became coach and/or foreman. It took Agassi years toforgive his father for the training regimen he inflicted on him as a child.
Now it is Australia’s turn. Jelena Dokic, already regarded as the best female player in the country, came here from Serbia with her parents; Andrew Illie’s parents fled Romania with the fall of the Ceausescu regime for Melbourne; Nick and Rossana Philippoussis saw bush and blue skies and salt water on the small screen and knew where they wanted to live.
Mark Philippoussis’s introduction to tennis began as a ball boy in the social
doubles matches his father used to play. If he behaved himself, he was told,he would be able to play with his father when those games finished. Soon, they were playing each weekend. Then, as Mark mixed soccer with tennis, it wasevery morning and afternoon, before and after work and school.
They played and practiced through Melbourne winters, wearing gloves and
feeding coins into the light meter that illuminated the all-weather court they played on in nearby Yarraville.
Nick had received some tennis coaching at boarding school. He speaks six languages and had a rare gift, it would seem, for communicating and coaching. Two summers ago, he sat at a table by the gymnasium of Perth’s Burswood Resort and explained how he instructed his son. This is how he taught him to volley:
“When you are on the net and expecting a volley, just pretend that you are a part of the net and the net is your castle. You are the prince, waiting for the princess. The ball is the princess. Now, what would you do when the princess comes to the door of your castle? Will you wait for her to come up or
will you go down to meet her? The best thing to do is to go down and met her,isn’t it?"
In Nick’s account, the boy agreed with him. He always did, and still does.
Very few coaches or manages have had the same rapport with Philippoussis Jnr or Snr since then. Even Gavin Hopper, his coach-cum-fitness instructor since January 1997, and therefore the longest serving adviser in Mark’s four-year
professional career, has been sacked once before. Some, such as Peter McNamara, one of Mark’s coaches at the Victorian Institute of Sport, and former Melbourne AFL player Todd Viney, barely had time to see a change of seasons.
Bollettieri, the American coach present at some stage in the creation or development of the careers of Agassi, Seles, Jim Courier and Mary Pierce,
among others, has been terminated twice. In his biography, My Aces, My Faults, Bollettieri described the other Nick as “demanding and possessive. I was told that he dominated his son, distrusted outsiders, hated the media and insisted
that everything be done his way”.
The single-mindedness which Bollettieri and a host of others have observed has
little to do with the culture of sport and a lot more to do with the culture of immigrant society. Traditionally, in Greek and Italian culture, the eldest boy in the family is the Number One Son, upon whom all care, attention, encouragement and material possessions are lavished. The boy is loved to the
point of indulgence and indulged to the point of being spoilt. He grows up being told the world is his. In male-dominated Greek society, some would reach formal adulthood believing otherwise.
But there are also unrealistic expectations that go along with this indulgence. Contact with the family remains constant, even when the son leaves home (after a short break at his new home in Florida, Mark Philippoussis will
have his father for company as he competes on the European indoor circuit) The son is expected to excel in his work or studies. In recent Australian sports
history, only two athletes of Greek descent could truly be said to have excelled: George Peponis (now a doctor) in rugby league with Canterbury and Australia, and Anthony Koutoufides, who starred for Carlton in their AFL premiership year of 1995. Now there is a third.
Nick Philippoussis has always given his son as much time as he could. When his job as a bank officer got in the way of Mark’s career and his employer wanted
him to undertake a management course, Nick quit and began driving taxis part-time, fitting his shifts around Mark’s training.
Nick remembers his passengers laughing when he told them of his decision as he
drove them to the airport to catch their business-class flights. Now his son is a multi-millionaire, the prince, living in his castle in Florida. Nick Philippoussis is the drawbridge. He alone decides who can come in.
What may have been the defining moment in their relationship and the event
that shaped Nick’s attitude to tennis authority in general (and Tennis
Australia in particular), came in 1992, Mark had returned from an unhappy tour
of South-East Asia, funded by the Australian Institute of Sport, where he was
a non-residential scholarship holder. There had been tantrums off the court
and, on it, matches carelessly lost. For his sins, Mark was suspended from the
AIS for six months and from the Victorian Institute of Sport for one month.
However briefly, Mark had become an outsider. But his father stood by him
during that time, more determined than ever to turn his son into a force to be
reckoned with.
When Nick Philippoussis recounted the talk he had with his son back then,
there was an unyielding edge to his tone. “If you want to play tennis, we are
going to go out on the courts every afternoon and I’m going to make you work
hard. I’m going to make you work so hard that you’re going to sweat, and
you’re sweat is going to come out of your arse, dripping down. After that, I’m
going to make you run again. I’ll make you push and you are going to hurt and
cry. Then I’ll push you again. I’ll make you one of the toughest guys there is
in Melbourne.”
So at a stage when tennis usually draws gifted children out from under the
wing of under-qualified parents, Mark and Nick Philippoussis became closer
than ever. That bond remains Araldite-fast to this day. Hopper says the
remorse Philippoussis feels in defeat is till that of a child disappointing a
parent. “He definitely feels he has done that with his father,” Gavin Hopper
said. “He wants to do all he can to repay that time, but not to anyone else.”
In turn, Nick protects him, especially from journalists who regard his son as
a moving target, rather than a stationary icon to be admired from afar. He
spent 15 minutes saying “no” on the phone to a request to interview his son
for this story. The reason for his refusal was that I had previously used the
word ‘humiliated’ in a description of how Mark Philippoussis, the 13th seed
lost to unseeded Greg Rusedski in a first-round match at Wimbledon last year.
(Another Melbourne journalist is on the blacklist for commenting on the
younger Philippoussis’s car collection - not on his obsession, but on the
media’s obsession with documenting each new acquisition).
John McCurdy, who manages Philippoussis’s Australian affairs for Advantage
International, previously knew both father and son when he was a coach at the
Victorian Institute of Sport. He noted that if Nick Philippoussis “believes
that somebody’s done the wrong thing, it’s difficult for him to forgive and
forget”.
Said another close observer of the Philippoussis operation: :”You’re dealing
with really difficult people”.
Now the operation is far removed from all this. Home for Mark Philippoussis is
a $US1.5 million spread at Longboat Key, one of a line of islands off the west
coast of Florida. Bollettieri’s famous tennis resort/boot camp is nearby. An
international airport is a 45-minute drive away. Mark and Nick will travel to
the European indoor tournaments together then return to their new home until
mid-December.
Almost all of the leading Australian players live away from home. Rafter in
the tropical tax haven of Bermuda, Mark Woodforde in Palm Springs, his doubles
partner Todd Woodbridge, along with Jason Stoltenberg and Scott Draper. In
almost every case, however, they will come when they’re called for Davis Cup
duty.
The call is usually more of a whisper. While the best players in countries
such as the US regard playing Davis Cup as an imposition on their time and
ability, Australians have treated it as an honour, valuing it as one of the
few occasions when an essentially individual sport becomes a team pursuit. If
Rafter had second thoughts about flying to Townsville so soon after his second
US Open title to play lowly Uzbekistan in a qualifying round last month, he
never said so.
Until recently then, the participation of the best players in Australia has
more or less been taken for granted. The now public dispute between
Philippoussis, John Newcombe and Tony Roche, which saw Philippoussis announce at the start of this year that he would not be available for Davis Cup selection, has put an end to that.
Newcombe and Roche were appointed as the first joint captain and coach of the Australian Davis Cup team in January 1994. Newcombe was the team’s front man,Roche, who coached Ivan Lendl when he was number one in the world, was the teacher. Under the terms of their contract with Tennis Australia, Roche was required to work with the Australian Davis Cup Team members in the weeks leading up to and during Grand Slams and Davis Cup ties. For much of the year,for instance, Pat Rafter travels alone, without a coach. Immediately before
and during grand slams, Roche oversees his preparation, as he is obliged to do for other members of the Australian Davis Cup team under the terms of his contract with Tennis Australia. The key phrase here is “members of the Davis Cup team” not “Australian players”.
Technically, Roches’ coaching period is supposed to be 22 weeks a year,although in reality the arrangement can be more flexible. There were times,for instance, when Rafter and Philippoussis would train on the hard court behind Roche’s home in the Sydney suburb of Turramurra simply because they
were in the country, rather than because a grand slam or Davis Cup event was looming.
So implicit was the trust between Newcombe, Roche and the Philippoussis that,in early 1996, when stricken with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Nick asked the Davis Cup
captain and coach to act as his son’s guardians should the disease prove fatal. Newcombe and Roche both agreed to this. The first public strains on the relationship appeared soon after, however. Newcombe was unhappy when Philippoussis, citing injury, chose not to play in a qualifying round against Japan in April of that year.
They got over that hurdle and 12 months later, seemed as close as ever. But by
the time of the Davis Cup semi-final against the US in Washington DC last year, it was apparent that a barrier had gone up again. The Philippoussis camp felt Newcombe and Roche were showing favouritism towards the “flavour of the month” Pat Rafter to the neglect of Mark, and at the very time when he was struggling to stay motivated. A dangerous split seemed to be forming.
After the tie, Newcombe and Roche held a 90-minute meeting with father and son. “The reason why I had the meeting was to make sure that whatever Nick was
saying to Mark, we would say, too,” Newcombe said. “The three of us needed to be saying the same things to make sure.....to try and find out how to get his passion back to play.”
Nick Philippoussis and another source, who was not at the meeting, say the message was also a wake-up call; a suggestion that Mark was more interested in the trappings of his tennis success, rather than the hard work that was necessary. If he were not prepared to dedicate himself to his sport, he should
consider taking a break from the game.
The reason for the joint meeting, it is said, was to make sure Mark received
the message directly, rather than through his father’s filter. Still, in a recent interview published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Nick applied that filter anyway, saying Mark was upset because “he thought I could be dying and all he wanted was some support with his tennis”.
Nick Philippoussis asked Roche to coach his son for at least the remainder of
that season, a two-month swing through the European indoor tournaments. Roche refused. It is believed he had a wish to expand his travel schedule. It may have been, as well, that the money on offer was insufficient. Mark took the
rejection badly. Despite reaching the final of two indoor tournaments in Switzerland and France, he made a heated phone call to Newcombe in December according to Australian Tennis Magazine. The magazine quoted Philippoussis as saying, “You and Rochey said you would help me..... You are just two more
people I have to prove wrong, along with the rest of the world.” With that, he declared himself unavailable for Australia’s 1998 first-round Davis Cup tie against Zimbabwe in Mildura in April.
Still, when the time came, Philippoussis flew to Mildura at the behest of Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett to attempt yet another reconciliation. The trip was, as American TV commentator Mary Carillo told her CBS audience during the US Open final, “a public relations disaster”. Australia lost the tie to the
unheralded Zimbabweans. Philippoussis drifted further apart from his erstwhile team-mates, Mark Woodforde, in particular, as well as from Newcombe and Roche.
When the reality and cause of the argument is disputed by both sides,perceptions become all-important. The sight of Philippoussis chatting on his
mobile phone in a courtside seat reserved for Australian team members during a match did as much as anything else to weaken his position. It caused an uproar.
At the start of this year’s US Open final in September, there seemed to be a truce of sorts, at least between Philippoussis and Roche. But that was before
both Mark and Nick Philippoussis looked across from their vantage points and spotted Tony Roche in the Rafter camp.
Up in the television commentary boxes, John Newcombe was virtually conceding that he had lost control of the issue. He had sent a fax to Philippoussis just after Wimbledon, declaring his sorrow at Mark’s absence from the Davis Cup team and suggesting it was time to bring a third party in to try to resolve
the dispute. Meanwhile, there’s the rift with Rafter to heal.
During their three-year doubles partnership, Mark Philippoussis and Pat Rafter had been the Scream Team of the international tennis tour. Doubles tennis is usually the game’s twilight zone, played after-hours and out of the way during tournaments. These two were handsome, charismatic and exciting to watch. They played to packed and noisy courts, reaching the semi-finals at both Wimbledon and the US Open in 1996.
As far as one can pinpoint such things, it seems their association began to unravel in 1997 when Rafter first won the US Open. Philippoussis had watched Rafter’s march to the final from his player’s box seats. Despite Rafter’s invitation to stay for the final, Nick and Mark left New York on Sunday afternoon for a business meeting in Baltimore.
Within Australian tennis circles, the reaction to Rafter’s victory was both
surprise and delight. Surprise because this was a player ranked 54th in the world at the start of 1997, and delight because Rafter is a genuinely likeable character. After the win, Australian team-mates began to notice the distance Philippoussis gave them as they trained together for the Davis Cup semi-final in Washington in September. “He sat on the other side of the court, with his dad,” Mark Woodforde, the left-handed, red-headed half of the all-conquering “Woodies” doubles team recalled.
“Straight away, I could sense that something was up. He wasn’t happy. The first day of practice, the session lasted maybe 30 minutes. I remember him breaking maybe six or eight racquets before the matches began.
“We all felt we could win, except Mark. He was preoccupied with the fact that Pat had won the US Open. It made a tremendous difference in his approach to tennis and changed his friendship with Pat”.
Rafter knew it as well, announcing in November that the doubles partnership was over, although they did pair up, briefly, at this year’s Australian Open. According to one source an attempt was made to patch things up during a tournament at the Californian desert resort of Indian Wells in March. But it seems that Philippoussis was in no mood for reconciliation.
Rafter tried again a week later during a tournament in the Miami suburb of Key Biscayne. They drank and played pool together in a bar with a group of friends, then talked alone for 45 minutes. The next day in the dressing room,Rafter found himself frozen out again. And so it remained through the northern hemisphere summer.
Recently, in Los Angeles, Rafter spelt his feelings out as plainly as he could. “I just said, ‘Listen, if you’re not my friend, if you’re not going to be great mates, I don’t want to play doubles with you.’ That’s why I play doubles, I play with friends. I don’t play because I want the money.”
If Rafter knew why the estrangement had occurred he preferred not to say. “I have no idea,” he said. “There was nothing really said or done. It just sort of slipped away.”
As the dual US Open champion and the first Australian multi-grand slam tournament winner in more than 25 years, Rafter has no shortage of new friends and enough old ones to keep his feet on the pavement. The apparent loss of
this one made him sound defiant, rather than regretful. “He was a mate. If he goes away, I’ve got plenty of other friends who I hang out with. It was a shame, but I felt more ashamed for his sake. He’s definitely changed.”
Soon afterwards, they played each other at a tournament in Toronto. Rafter won
in straight sets. “When I played him in Canada, I think there was a bit too much emotion for myself in that match,” Philippoussis said. A week later in Cincinnati, Philippoussis initiated a reconciliation of sorts simply by saying hello in the way that he used to. “We’ve always been speaking,:” he said, “but
obviously it wasn’t as warm as it was in the past”. (The thread binding them appears likely to snap again at any time, while Philippoussis’s relations with Newcombe and Roche also appear to be dangerously frayed).
Meanwhile, Philippoussis has toys big and small with which to occupy himself. Garages past and present have been stocked with two Ferraris, a Lamborghini,
Humvee, Porsche, Harley-Davidson and a Ducati. It’s an expensive habit but,for now, he can afford it. His prize money from the US Open final was $US400000. American manager Tom Ross says his appearance fee for lesser tournaments that pay the stars to show up can vary from about $US80 000 to the “occasional six-figure guarantee”. Another estimate puts his projected income from prize
money, endorsements and appearance fees at nearly $US3 million for the next 12 months.
But, of course, money isn’t everything. The challenge for Philippoussis is off
the court as much as on. To play smart and be patient and then lethal, like the man his father believed he had become. Or to falter on the grandest stage when confronted by the biggest occasion and the decisive moment.
To be a mate and celebrate the triumphs of a friend as though they were your own. Or to retreat and brood, and cling to a father who would like nothing better than to keep his boy with him and, together, to prove the world wrong.
