Hitting Back (18 page)

I'm thinking: 'My brother's just won Wimbledon and you're
freakin' asking me if I'm jealous of him!' I took my headset off
and moved away. People were saying: 'Oh, I'm sorry' as I left
because they knew it was out of order. I asked who the woman
was, but I still don't know her name. All I know is that she
wasn't part of the sports team.

In the end, I put all these things together and decided it
wasn't worth speaking to the BBC any more.

Some people might think this is all very petty – the media
have a job to do and I should get over it – but I don't think it's
a bad thing to ask people who can influence millions of
listeners, viewers and readers to get their facts right, and
present them honestly, especially if it makes my life and work
really difficult when they get it wrong.

The fall-out from the betting story went on for a while.
When I turned up for my next tournament in Madrid, I had to
speak to a couple of people from the ATP. Obviously, I had
nothing to tell them, only the stuff they had been reading
themselves in the papers. They told me that I had to be careful
about what I was saying because it was a pretty rough time for
the sport, but no one lectured me.

Then I met someone who is working for the ATP's new anticorruption
unit. He asked me about five questions, such as did
I know of anyone who had bet on a tennis match, had I seen
anyone betting at matches? The answer to everything was no.
I don't know of anyone betting on matches and I don't know
of anyone throwing matches. I asked him a couple of questions
in return. He said they were investigating over a hundred
matches, mainly with strange betting patterns attached to
them, but so far, they haven't found anyone guilty.

The trouble with these strange betting patterns is that a lot
of them could be completely innocent. If you're a gambling
man, sitting in the stadium watching two players, one ranked
20 and one ranked 90, and suddenly the guy ranked 20
clutches his hamstring and calls a trainer, it might be a smart
move to bet on the lower-ranked guy. Good luck to you. It
doesn't mean that in every – or in any case – a player has been
bribed to lose a match against a lower-ranked player. As I said
all along, it is a very, very difficult thing to prove.

I know the episode didn't exactly heighten my popularity,
either with some of the players or with the public, but I
survived. The one thing I always say to everyone around me is
that it doesn't matter what people say because they don't know
me. The majority of critics don't know how difficult it is to
achieve anything in sport and, in this country, the press seem
to like it when someone fails. That's what makes a story. It is
rare to go to the front or back page of a newspaper and read a
positive story. I'm not playing tennis to be popular. That's not
why I do it. I've got the same friends I had when I was fifteen.
I'm still the same person to my family and that is important.

I never thought for one minute that going on the tour would
change me, and it hasn't. In the first three years on the senior
tour I played 45 tournaments in 35 cities in 18 different
countries. I've thrown coins in the Trevi Fountain in Rome and
seen the whole of New York from the top of the Empire State
Building – that was awesome – but being on tour has never
struck me as glamorous or amazing. I've been doing it, in the
juniors, since I was thirteen. It is a way of life. I guess I am used
to it.

I can't say I've seen much of most of the countries because
between playing and practising, there just isn't time. Even in
Rome, I've never bothered to go to the Coliseum because there
is such a long queue and I don't really have the time to wait.

Most of the time of a professional tennis player is divided
between the court, the locker room, the hotel and the airport.
Most of that is spent alone or with your coach, but the locker
room is where you get to know the other guys a little. For me,
the best thing about men's tennis is the characters. There are so
many different ones on the tour these days.

Roger Federer is the ultimate in being cool and calm on
court, Rafa Nadal who is always bouncing around and
absolutely ripped, Andy Roddick, the all American boy, super-confident,
serves at 145mph and appeared in the US sitcom,
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
. I am just never going to do that
kind of thing, by the way.

Then you've got guys like Janko Tipsarevic from Serbia, who
is really clever and studies Nietzsche and reads Dostoevsky. He
has a tattoo on his arm that says: 'Beauty Will Save The
World'. If I was ever going to have a tattoo, it would probably
repeat something said by Muhammed Ali but I don't think it's
going to happen. Tattoos aren't that great. My dad's dad had
one and said it was fine until he was about thirty-five and then
it started to get wrinkled.

Not that I give tremendous thought to tattoos. The main, the
only, professional focus is winning. Not just playing but
winning. By the start of 2008 I had been on the tour nearly
three years and I just sensed that when Federer lost to Novak
Djokovic in the Australian Open, it started to open up more
possibilities for us all. Perhaps I went some way to proving it a
month later by beating Federer in the first round in Dubai,
although he later came out and announced he had been
suffering from glandular fever. So it was premature so say there
had been a shift from the old guard to the new, but it made me
think that men's tennis was in a really good state.

We had someone, Federer, trying to win the most grand
slams ever as well as being one of the greatest players of all
time. We had someone else, Nadal, who I would call the best
clay-court player in history. And then Djokovic had just won
his first grand slam to freshen up the story. In previous years, it
had been a case of the favourites versus the outsiders. Now the
players below the top two in the world were no longer huge
outsiders. There were a few of us in that mix: Djokovic,
obviously, Gasquet, Berdych, Blake, me. There were chances for
quite a few on a given day. I reckoned by now I was in that few.

I've known Djokovic for years because we grew up playing
in the juniors together. I still speak to him and get on with him
now we are on the tour together, but you get to the stage where
you don't want to be too close. I reckon for the next five or six
years I'm going to be playing him in the semis and finals of
major tournaments and I want to beat him. It's easier to do if
we're not close friends.

Many people like his personality, including his famous
impressions of other players. He does great take-offs of
players' serves. The best ones are Roddick and Sharapova, and
Nadal tugging at his shorts. I don't think he does me though.
He's been accused of arrogance on one or two occasions, but I
wouldn't want to say anything bad about him. Given that
we're rivals, we get on fine.

He does speak his mind. That is probably a good thing. I
remember him having a go at Nadal once by saying Rafa took
too long a break between points by walking too slowly,
dragging time out, bouncing the ball. It's true. I was timing the
break between points when Nadal was playing Jo-Wilfred
Tsonga in the Australian Open 2008 (Tsonga had put me out
of the tournament in the first round, so I had some spare time
on my hands). You are allowed 25 seconds to prepare to serve
and Nadal was taking 37 seconds, while bouncing the ball over
twenty times.

The top players obviously do get away with too much even
though the rules are there. You can't be too strict. I'd say 28
seconds would be fine, like driving at 73mph on the motorway,
but once the time goes beyond that, they're breaking the rules.
The rules aren't there to be broken. They should be stuck to.
The umpires should tell the players to get a move on.

I don't know exactly why they don't, but a player should get
a warning if it happens repeatedly. They shouldn't get away
with stuff like that. It's not fair on the other player. That is one
of the little things I would change on the tour. Then again, I
would change pretty big things too.

If you were starting from scratch you would redesign the
men's tour completely. As things stand, it doesn't seem right
that we only spend four weeks playing on grass and yet we can
spend up to four-and-a-half months playing on clay. The
Masters Series tournaments – the biggest tournaments on the
tour, the next stage down from the grand slams – are all
bunched together when they should be more spread out, and
they also need to do something about the Davis Cup. It's at the
wrong time, in the middle of the tour. You go to a different
surface in a different time zone and you're going to get injured
doing that. If affects your preparation for the next two or three
tournaments as well because you can't just turn up on the day
in the Davis Cup and start playing. You need to get used to the
surface and then you switch straight back to another one. It's
too hard. They need to do something about that.

We must respect traditions, but innovations can be good too.
Most of us thought the glamour ball girls in Madrid were fine.
It certainly brought a bit of attention to tennis when football
usually gets all the headlines. They're not the best ball kids I've
ever had, but it's fun. At most tournaments, the ball kids play
at the club or love tennis, whereas the models haven't played
much tennis. They don't throw the balls very well and they
can't catch them very well either, but they're not terrible.
They are easy on the eye, although some players get a bit
distracted. I guess it's better than having a 14-year-old spotty
boy throwing balls at you.

That doesn't mean I want to get swept up in the Hollywood
side of tennis. That is not the way I am. Quite a few players
know actors or have dated actresses and models. Tommy Haas
is friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger and dated a Hollywood
actress, so did Andy Roddick, and Robby Ginepri went out
with Minnie Driver. I don't really know a lot about this, but
there is a cross-over between tennis and celebrity at some level.
It doesn't interest me, but I think my brother might be tempted
to enjoy it.

I suppose when you think of some of the players on the
tour over the years – McEnroe, Borg, Connors, Becker,
Sampras, Agassi – these are some of the biggest names in
sport. Their fame goes beyond sport and it is natural that
people would want to be around them. It is pretty obvious
that Federer is established as a global superstar, doing adverts
with Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry, but I don't think for
one second that any of the top players are stupid enough to
get distracted by it because this is a really short career. You
can be famous at any age, but if you haven't won a grand
slam by the time you're thirty, the chances these days are that
you never will.

That cuts down the fun in the locker room. There is nothing
like the pranks and banter that go on in football or rugby, but
that is because we are not part of a team. Even so, crazy things
can happen occasionally. The Frenchman, Michael Llodra,
caused a few headlines at Key Biscayne in 2005 when Ivan
Ljubicic, the Croatian player, found him hiding naked in his
locker. Not surprisingly, Ljubicic asked him: 'What the hell are
you doing here?' Michael explained that as Ivan had been
playing so well lately, he had been trying to absorb some of his
positive energy.

I wasn't there, this happened a little bit before my time, but
I remember thinking that I would have found it funny if it
happened to me. I
think
I would have found it funny. Maybe I
would have found it a bit worrying too. At least it proves that
when people moan that there are no personalities in tennis any
more, it isn't completely true.

One of my favourite players when I was growing up, apart
from Agassi, was Guillermo Coria, the Argentine player. He
didn't have Agassi's personality but he had a great game to
watch. Following him gave me my introduction to another
controversy in our sport – performance-enhancing drugs –
because he was suspended for a while in 2001 for testing
positive for steroids. I didn't really understand it at the time, I
was only about thirteen years old, but clearly drugs have been
an issue in our sport for a while.

There was a time when it looked as if a whole batch of
supplements issued by the ATP themselves were contaminated
with nandrolone and Greg Rusedski was one of the guys who
had to fight to clear his name.

In the end, not many players have ever been found guilty.
Coria's original ban of two years was reduced to seven months
and he sued the multi-vitamin company that supplied his
supplements.

I am really conscious about everything that goes into my
body. That is why I don't take any vitamins or protein shakes,
because of the potential for contamination. I am scared. If you
fail a drugs test, your respect in people's eyes is just gone.
When you are a clean athlete, even if they don't like you as a
person, they can still respect what you do on the tennis court.
But if you are seen to be taking drugs to enhance your
performance, then that is really tough to come back from. I'd
rather just eat a lot of healthy food and work hard. The only
thing that I take that is not completely natural is the energy
drink I have on court. Of course, you never know if something
like that could be contaminated either. You just have to try and
give yourself the least chance of that happening by taking as
few supplements as you can. I have heard that apparently 10
per cent of the products on the shelves could make you fail a
drugs test. Maybe that is a scare story. I don't know for sure,
but I would rather not risk it and find out.

We get tested so often throughout the season and in the off-season
that I think it would be difficult to get away with much.
When I was in Miami training during the 2007–8 winter break,
I was tested three times – twice for urine, one blood – and that
reassured me. I like the fact they test us all year round.
Obviously, there have been bans for some players but I still
believe I am competing in a relatively clean sport.