Tennis Lessons, Life Lessons, Part 3

I've Got Your Back: Coaching Top Performers from Center Court to the Corner Office
by Brad Gilbert, James Kaplan

(Page 4 of 4)

During my first year in the pros, I saw more and more of the up-and-comers come and go. It wasn't just homesickness and injuries and the tough conditions at minor tournaments like Taipei that did them in; it was losing. Every tour hopeful had been hot stuff at some point in his life - in the juniors, in college. But once you started mixing it up with the world's best, you had to be ready to take some falls. It didn't feel good to lose, but you had to learn to shake it off and move on.

I was just good at that, I guess. I wasn't little anymore - I'd hit my fighting size of six one and 175 pounds - but I was still tough.

But tough ain't enough. You have to be smart, too. You have to have a plan. If you lose to a guy, you can't exactly go punch him. You can't really do anything - except make sure you get a piece of him the next time you meet.

Well, there are two ways to accomplish that. One is to get better. But even improving your game won't take you the whole way. As I said in Winning Ugly, every victory in tennis is a combination of one player's strengths and the other player's weaknesses. And if you know the other guy's weaknesses, you have a huge leg up. Back when I was at Foothill, Chiv used to scout all my opponents for me. After my loss in the NCAA finals, I realized that maybe having had someone to do that for me had made me a little lazy. So when I started on the tour, I began keeping a little black book on every guy I played, and even on every guy I saw playing.

I guess a couple of things made me different from other up-and-comers on the tour. True, I had a positive attitude and resilience and foot speed. But other guys had those traits. What set me apart, maybe, was my eye for the game, my memory for how people played it (with the black book to back it up), and my drive to pay attention. Almost every other guy on the tour, when he was finished with his match, couldn't wait to get the hell out of there - to go back to the hotel room and watch TV, or go pound a few beers. Call me nutty (and a few people did), but I loved to hang out at the venue: watching matches or practice, shooting the breeze with guys in the locker room or training area. (I still love it.) And whenever I was watching tennis, I was taking notes - either in my memory, to write down later, or right into the little book.

There wasn't any rhyme or reason to my black book. If you'd ever seen it, you would not have been impressed. It was all just scribblings, but those chicken scratches meant a lot to me. I'd write a guy's name, and jot down three or four things about him: "Forehand - every time he gets tight, he misses it." Or, "Huge serve in the ad court; his money ball, that out-wide serve."

After a while, I had quite a few names in there, and quite a few pointed observations. And since the cast of characters on the tour was more or less constant, the odds were pretty good that, just from having watched a guy practice in Hartford, I already had a cool little scouting report on him when I had to face him in the third round in Hong Kong. Maybe I'd be in the bathroom before my match, reading about this guy's huge out-wide serve in the ad court. So I'd think, Okay, I've got to take that away. Even if he hits a winner down the middle, I've got to stand in the alley to receive his big serve on the left side. That book was the only coach I could afford in the early days, but it was worth its weight (and then some) in gold.

By the end of 1985, my ranking had climbed to 18 in the world. And since I was finally making some serious money, I decided to marshal my forces for an assault on the top 10. What that meant was hiring a coach. I didn't have to think twice about who I wanted for the job.

Chiv had now been at Foothill for twenty years, and had made the school a real force in California collegiate tennis. His position of great respect (and a terrific assistant coach, in the person of Dixie Macias) allowed him to put together a deal with the school whereby he could travel with me during the fall quarter, from the U.S. Open till December. Once classes were out for the summer, he came on the road with me again. We worked together ten to fifteen weeks a year, for five years in a row: By 1990, largely thanks to Chiv, I reached my apex of number 4 in the world.

Chiv's one condition with me was that he be allowed to bring along his beloved wife, Georgie. Georgie coached the women's tennis team at Chabot College in Hayward, and she's really the female Chiv - she knows just about as much about the game as Tom does.

What did Chiv do for me? It had a lot less to do with my strokes and footwork (which were pretty sound by that point - they had to be!) than just making my life easy while I fought through the rigors of the tour. When you're on the road, it means a huge amount to have "little" things like food and laundry and practice-court time taken care of, so you can concentrate on tennis. Chiv would also carefully scout all my potential opponents, taking detailed notes on his ever- present clipboard. And he was an incredibly positive, nonjudgmental guy - the kind of guy who, since I tended to be a bit, shall we say, tightly wound, was very important for me to be around.

Chiv's levelheadedness meant a tremendous amount to me. There was never an angry word between us. No matter how badly I played, he never yelled at me once. (A lot of coaches, even in tennis, are of the Vince Lombardi/Bobby Knight ream-'em-out-and-wake-'em-up persuasion.) And no matter how beautifully I won, unless it was a final, he never wanted either of us to get too excited. "Let's figure out what we're going to do tomorrow," Chiv would say.

Back to the meals and laundry for a second. At the time Chiv was in his mid-forties. And by now this must be ringing a bell for you: Wasn't there something strange about a middle-aged guy, a man of dignity and accomplishment, doing laundry and fetching breakfast for a guy in his mid- twenties?

My answer to that is: There are no menial jobs, only menial people. Chiv brought every ounce of his dignity and accomplishment to his work with me. And the main thing is, he loved the work. He loved me and believed in me. He was proud of his part in propelling me into professional tennis. And he was delighted to be able to do anything he could to help me achieve my potential. Back then, if I had called him at four in the morning with some problem, he wouldn't have asked any questions: He would've said, "I'll be right over." (I half suspect he still might.) He had my back.

His work made me feel totally taken care of; it made him feel like a powerful guardian. It made us feel like a team.

Neither of us knew it then, but Chiv was preparing me for my next step in life, a step I'd never dreamed of.

Reassess your commitment to being a team player. No matter how good you are, you can do better.

Thanks to Tom Chivington - and, to give myself some credit, my own development as a human being - I learned a tremendous amount over the fourteen years between the day I first stepped onto the Foothill campus and 1994, the year that would be my last on the pro tour. I learned to love playing tennis, and to pay very close attention to every aspect of the game. I learned about something seemingly small but actually huge - the value of the clock.

There were a dozen other lessons, too, but one of them was so big that it took me a while to get my mind around it. I saw how Chiv's humility - putting Foothill's importance, and then my importance, before his own - had made him a great coach. I loved and appreciated every molecule of that man's being. But that was Chiv, I thought. I was Brad, a different guy altogether. Humility wasn't something for me: I needed my ego to power me through the very significant challenges of the men's professional tennis tour. When you're going up against ultraskilled, ultratough competitors every day of the week, being humble doesn't cut it.

That's the way it seemed to me at the time, anyway. Unbeknownst to me, however, I was about to acquire a new teacher.

Copyright © 2005 Brad Gilbert, James Kaplan. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Brad Gilbert is the author of the tennis classic Winning Ugly, which has sold more than 125,000 copies. Before he became a coach, he played professional tennis from 1982 to 1995, winning twenty pro titles.

James Kaplan is the co-author, with John McEnroe, of the #1 New York Times bestseller You Cannot Be Serious.