I have always been a fan of tennis – both watching it as well as playing it! In this early photo of yours truly (circa 1976), I had half of the Wimbledon outfit right (the white pants):
Funny, I used that wooden Stan Smith Capri racket all the way from before junior-high school into college without restringing it a single time. Life was so much simpler then!
Tennis may have been one of the reasons I was attracted to my wife-to-be (35 years and counting now) back in High School. Here is a picture of her at the courts of Lumberton Senior High in Lumberton NC (circa 1980).
She played on the varsity squad. She still hits a mean, low, hard groundstroke off the forehand that just barely clears the net – much the same as Maria Sharapova did throughout her career. My wife, Ann, is always on the lookout for books for me, and happened to come across this one:
Most of us remember Maria for winning 5 grand slams starting with her victory over Serena Williams at Wimbledon in 2004 when she was just 17 years old. Shortly after that, she earned the world number one ranking – a ranking she held on and off for a number of years. It is easy for us fans to just see the success that elite athletes have and just assume they all were just blessed with natural talent and had an easy time of it ascending the ranks to their elite status. Biographies such as Maria’s help us to understand that the truth is generally very different! Reading her book shed some light on the extreme degree of commitment and sacrifice that was required by Maria and her whole family in order to achieve what she did.
One of her first memories was hitting tennis balls at the age of 4. Her father had taken up the sport and it was a way for her to spend time with him. By the time she was 5, she was showing real determination on the courts and at the practice wall where she would hit repeatedly. It was at this time, that her father was convinced she could be world number one someday! He managed to get her into an event in Moscow where he was able to get the attention of none other than Martina Navratilova to watch Maria play. She told him that if they really wanted to pursue the game, he would need to take her to Florida.
It was not easy arranging the necessary Visa’s in the 1990’s, but by several strokes of luck and persistence, he was able to secure a visa for himself and Maria to go to the US (but could not get one for Maria’s Mother – they would live apart for a couple of years). So, Dad and 6 year-old child headed off to the USA with $700 cash, little English, and not much of a plan as to what to do when they arrived!
It was by sure persistence and hard work by both Maria and her Dad that they were able to secure proper training as well as enough cash to just survive. I highly recommend reading the book to get a real feel for how difficult it was – it is truly an astounding story! Maria had a single-minded focus of being able to beat everyone she played that kept her driving against what seemed insurmountable odds.
So why did I choose to write about this in my blog? I think even at the recreational athlete level, it is easy to look at competitors that are more successful than we are and think that they have some natural ability that we simply don’t have. But more than likely, those athletes that are doing better than we are, have simply worked very hard to get to where they are. It’s a good reminder that we should stay focused on getting a little better every time we play our sport, and to really use our practice time effectively by having a good plan on what we want to accomplish in a given session. Step-by-step, focusing on both the physical and mental aspects of the game, we will start to perform much like those athletes we thought were just naturally gifted!
If you are interested in Maria’s book, here is the amazon link: