Can Ivan Lendl Lead Andy Murray to Greatness?

The New York Times Magazine:

Ivan Lendl Gets Back to Tennis

Can Ivan Lendl Lead Andy Murray to Greatness?

By PETER de JONGE

Excerpt from article courtesy of  The New York Times:

On New Year’s Eve, Andy Murray, a 25-year-old Scot and professional tennis player who has lost in the finals of three major championships and is currently on pace to end his fifth year in a row ranked No. 4 in the world, announced that he had hired Ivan Lendl as his new coach. His decision to offer employment to the mostly unloved, all-time-great Lendl made Murray’s desperate unhappiness with his also-ran status achingly public and set the tennis world abuzz, particularly in Britain, where Wimbledon starts next week and there hasn’t been a native-born male champion since 1936.

Like stockholders of a beleaguered corporation welcoming the appointment of a ruthless C.E.O., tennis cognoscenti heralded the appointment of Lendl, who had mysteriously exiled himself from the sport for 15 years, as exactly what Murray needed. They had reason to think they were right four weeks later when, after a single pre-tournament training session with Lendl in Delray Beach, a spot approximately midway between their second homes in Florida, Murray reached the semifinals of the Australian Open, the year’s first major, having lost only one set.

But there was something impatient and unkind in that oft-repeated “exactly what Murray needed,” and as Murray trudged into Rod Laver Arena and talking heads set the scene for his match against the No. 1 player, Novak Djokovic, it was clear that the tennis world was as weary of Murray’s big-match timidity and depressive on-court mutterings as Murray was tired of staring at the backsides of the game’s transcendent top three — Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Before the match began, Martina Navratilova was on his case. It is time, she said, for Murray to play some brave tennis, and she hoped that Murray would accept from Lendl the advice he had ignored from so many others. “When somebody tells you to go for your shots, it’s one thing,” she said. “When Lendl tells you to go for your shots, you listen.” After all, this was a man who hadn’t simply won eight major titles; when he had John McEnroe marooned at the net, he would aim straight at him, drill him in the chest, then turn his back and walk away.

With Lendl looking on impassively, Murray responded with the best match of his career, brandishing all his weapons, not just his brilliant defense. “A big challenge for Andy against the very top players is how, if someone is moving him around, does he regain the advantage, and go from being second-best in the rally to back on top,” says Mark Petchey, one of Murray’s many former coaches. “In Australia, he did it with his cross-court forehand.” The way Murray backed up Djokovic with his cross-court forehand and down-the-line backhand was as electric as a prizefighter’s coming off the ropes to stun the champion with a series of stiff jabs and overhand rights. “To see Andy find a way to hurt Djokovic was amazing,” Petchey says.

For four and a half hours, Murray played Djokovic dead-even, and at 5-all in the fifth, he earned three break points. Had one been converted, it would have let him serve for the match. Although he didn’t win any of those points and went on to lose the match, the skeptics were quieted all the same. “In the past,” the tennis champion Mats Wilander was quoted as saying afterward in the British press, “we have seen Andy throw in the towel by complaining about a sweatband or the wrong information from his player’s box. But against Novak, for the first time, he really showed that he is as good as the other ‘Big Three’ players who he is up against. Tennis-wise, there’s no difference.”

If Murray could do this after one practice session, what could he accomplish after sustained exposure to Lendl’s influence?

Tennis’s new odd couple flew back to Florida and put in two hard weeks in Delray Beach, and in his next semifinal encounter with Djokovic in the Dubai Duty Free tournament, Murray beat him soundly. The next day in the finals, however, he was smoked by Federer. The following week, still deflated, he lost his first match at Indian Wells in California, and by the time I caught up with Murray and Lendl at the next tournament, the Sony Ericsson in Key Biscayne, the sudden improvement was looking like the spike medical researchers find when the control group is given a placebo.

“Whenever there’s a new relationship,” says Todd Martin, who worked with Djokovic for eight months in 2009 and 2010, “hope springs eternal. This is the girl for me. This is the coach for me. I’ve picked the right college. But eventually reality sets in.”

Ivan Lendl, now 52, entered the world by way of Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, “the black city,” a soot-stained industrial center less than 10 miles from the Polish border. Murray was raised not far from Glasgow in picturesque Dunblane, a leafy throwback out of the Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society.” For both, their mothers were their first and defining coaches, and neither came to the job unqualified. Olga Lendlova had been ranked No. 2 in Czechoslovakia and Judy Murray No. 1 in Scotland, although to be fair to Olga, Scotland, unlike Czechoslovakia, has had little history of tennis achievement.

Olga was a taskmaster on and off the court, and an old profile of Lendl in Sports Illustrated hinges on a dining-room scene in which she browbeats her only son into eating his peas and carrots. By contrast, Judy, who divorced Andy and his older brother’s father when Andy was 11, tries to keep things light and fun and can’t always resist the urge to fire off a tweet about one of her son’s comelier colleagues, particularly the Spanish player Feliciano Lopez, whom she has dubbed “Deliciano.”

Murray beat his mother for the first time when he was 11, and Lendl managed the unspeakable at 14, but neither has come close to perpetrating tennis matricide. Throughout his career, without regard for the time difference, Lendl would sometimes call his mother after matches, and Judy Murray is still deeply involved in her son’s tennis. Murray has gone through half a dozen coaches or consultants in his seven-year pro career, and in the interims between firings and hirings, Judy has at times reassumed the role of coach, occasionally stepping over a body that’s still twitching. (Murray and his mother say that she is not his coach.) She told me that when Lendl signed on, she let him know “the kind of thing Andy responds to as well as the kind of thing he definitely does not respond to.” Whether it’s a subject two jocks can comfortably bond over, Murray and Lendl certainly seem to share what Wilander calls “a heavily involved mother.”

Lendl developed his game in pieces — first his almighty forehand and then, because he covered up the lack of anything else by rushing the net at every opportunity, a volley. He made do with a weak, sliced backhand until — according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine — Wojtek Fibak, who coached him for five years as a pro, insisted he learn to hit it with topspin. To make such a fundamental change deep into a pro career takes courage and resolve. In the spring of 1980, forcing himself to hit over every backhand, Lendl lost to Harold Solomon in Las Vegas 6-1, 6-1; months later, at the U.S. Open, with his new backhand integrated into his game, he returned the favor, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0. (Lendl now denies Fibak’s influence on his backhand.)

Fibak was also the author of Lendl’s intimidating game face. “I wanted him to become a machine, to hide his feelings, to wear an unemotional mask on his face, not to react to anything,” Fibak said. And it was through Fibak that Lendl met a student at the Spence School named Samantha Frankel, who would go on to become his wife. Seeing as Fibak hosted their courtship at his Greenwich home, the urbane Pole may be as responsible for Lendl’s warm gummy smile as his better-known scowl.

Murray’s mother focused more on tactics than on technique. “I learned my tennis playing against other people,” Judy says. “I never had a proper coach or learned how to play big or whatever. What interested me was the challenge of how you can cause trouble for your opponent and avoid trouble for yourself and if you are in trouble, how do you get out of it.” Rather than having her son spend hours a day churning out topspin ground strokes, as Mike Agassi did with Andre, mother and son played “loads of proper points and games.”

In the era of power tennis, tactical niceties can seem obsolete. A player bangs his serve, runs around his backhand and whales away with his forehand until his opponent submits — and the prototype for this brute style was Lendl himself, who bludgeoned rivals with his one-off Adidas racket as if he were clubbing baby seals.

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