Article from Ace magazine January 2003.

article is below the pics

Thanks so much Kate!

Every morning for 18 months, a small, blond 12-year-old boy waited outside
the school gates of Immanuel College, Adelaide, South Australia. At 8.20am,
his 21-year-old fried Brett Smith would arrive, he'd jump in his car, and
instead of going to school they'd drive through Adelaide's elegant
tree-lined Boulevards and go and hit tennis balls for anything up to five
hours. Thus did Lleyton Hewitt work on his game.
Bunking off school, hitting ball after ball under the Adelaide sun, Hewitt
turned a serious talent into a world-class skill. Even at 12, he was
ferociously competitive. "He was a fiery young man", says Brett. "If you
played against him, you didn't care for him, but if you played doubles with
him, he was a lot easier to like." Hewitt was then within eight years of
becoming the youngest player in history to be world No.1.
It wasn't all slog. Sports mad, Hewitt was rarely without a football. Some
days, he and Brett would get up at dawn, and be on the North Adelaide Golf
Course by 5.30am, sneaking in a free round of golf before anyone else
arrived. By 8.30am they'd be finished and go and have a McDonald's for
breakfast. But tennis was where he excelled. "I think there was an
inevitability about it, because he was just getting so good, so quickly, so
young," says Brett's father and Hewitt's first coach, peter Smith.
Hewitt was honing a dream. "A lot of kids talk about winning Wimbledon, or
beating Pat Cash," says Smith. "But for Lleyton it wasn't just a dream, it
was almost like destiny. There are little things about Lleyton that are
different. He has a deep-seated feel for the history and fibre of the game
which is very unusual with modern players."
Lleyton Hewitt was born on February 24, 1981 in Adelaide. Two years later,
almost to the day, his sister Jaslyn was born. Adelaide is an old colonial
city, and a leisurely lifestyle. "It's a big country town," says Zak
Millbank, a journalist on the local paper, The Advertiser. "There isn't
exactly a lot of night life." If you don't like sport, there isn't a lot to
do." Fortunately, the Hewitts loved sport.
They lived in Westlakes, about 45 minutes northwest of the city centre.
Unlike the grandest parts of Adelaide, which boast fine Edwardian and
Victorian buildings, it's a nouveau building riche, middle-class area which
has become increasingly fashionable for its proximity to the lakes. The
Hewitts had a tennis court and a swimming pool, and played endless cricket
in the back yard. They still do. "Table tennis was a big thing, snooker,
pool. Anything related to sport," says peter Smith. "And whatever they did,
they did it with a passion to do well. I think they were always destined to
become good at whatever sport they played."
Lleyton's father, Glynn, was an Australian Rules Footballer turned
financial adviser. His mother, Cherilyn, was a state-standard netball player
turned PE teacher. A success-driven, target-orientated family, they were
sufficiently well off to send Lleyton to the private school where his mother
taught.
Having retired from their respective sports, Glynn and Cherilyn developed a
passion for tennis. Every year they took two week's holiday, packed the kids
into the car and drove the 400 miles from Adelaide to Melbourne for the
Australian Open. Renting an apartment on Punt Road, one of the main
thoroughfares in the city, they "watched every game, every day and every
night", according to Peter Smith.
After night matches, the children, just five and three when they were first
taken, used to be carried out of the stadium fast asleep. But according to
Smith, it gave them a feeling for the big arena: "They loved it."
When Lleyton was six, in 1987, he was at his grandparents' house when he
say Pat Cash win Wimbledon. It made a deep impression. "For me it was a huge
thing to see an Australian win such a big tournament," he said in July 2002,
when he won the title himself. Cash' triumph was a powerful influence on a
competitive little boy. That same year, Lleyton began having tennis lessons.
The Hewitt's were recommended to peter Smith as a coach. From Westlakes it
was an hour's drive, and since Sunday coaching began at 7.30am, it meant
getting up at six o'clock. "Glynn, Lleyton's dad, tells the story that as he
was driving across the city with Lleyton and Jaslyn that first morning he
though, "Well this won't last," says Smith. "Fourteen years later he was
still doing it."
Smith is a quietly-spoken 51-year-old who admits he has always had a
"strangely serious approach to coaching". It's not his only job: all the
time he was coaching Hewitt he worked in the day teaching technology and
black and white photography. "That might sound like tennis was a bit of a
hobby, but it was serious involvement," says Smith. I"I kept teaching during
the day because I like to teach."
Once an aspiring player himself, he is quietly confident about his coaching
style. "I never really took too much notice of what anyone else was doing."
He had a conventional, almost old-fashioned approach. "One thing that
intrigues me is that I did teach Lleyton in a very formal way." He demands,
and inspires, respect, but what really distinguishes him is his willingness
to go out on a limb for his pupils.
Australian Davis Cup captain John Fitzgerald, who moved to Adelaide for
coaching from the tiny town of Cummins, lived with the Smiths for many
years. So did Peter Carter, the former Swiss Davis Cup Coach who was
tragically killed in a road crash in 2002. If he was a father figure at
home, Smith was very tough on court.
"The attitude was you don't pay good money to be told you're great when you
are hopeless," says his son Brett. "He's pretty hard on people at times, and
some people can't take it, but Lleyton thrived on it. He'd play on Saturdays
and think he'd done well, and Dad watched him, but then the next day Dad
would say: "You can't hit a backhand to save yourself. If you had, you would
have won easily." When he looks back on it, Lleyton says it was good for
him."
Smith may have been coaching only part time, from a modest six-court club,
but he worked his magic on the outstanding doubles player, Mark Woodforde,
Peter Carter and Darren Cahill, who himself became coach to Hewitt and later
Andre Agassi.
He is now tennis director and head coach at the David Lloyd Next Generation
Memorial Drive Club, next to Adelaide's Oval. But when he worked with Hewitt
they all trained at the Denman Tennis Club in an area called Lower Mitcham.
Unusually it had two separate courts by the clubhouse. "They're open air,
but totally enclosed, so you're not running around picking up other people's
balls," says Smith. "It made for a very intimate environment and it suited
my style, and my pupils like Lleyton. We had our own thing to do."
When they began learning tennis, the most striking thing about the Hewitt
children was their serious-minded attentiveness. "They were beautiful
children, very attractive, with blond hair and everything about them was
very professional- the way they dressed, their equipment. They were always
there early, doing their little warm-ups, and they were the ultimate pupils.
Not so much because of outstanding ability, but because they were very
respectful," says Smith. "I remember Lleyton as shy and quiet, quite a
humble kid."
It took Hewitt 12 months to find his game. "To begin with he was struggling
physically to hit the ball, let alone play," says Smith. "I remember my wife
Bronwyn saying to Cherilyn, Lleyton's mother, not to worry he wasn't winning
tournaments, and her saying, "It's not the lack of tournament wins we're
concerned about, we'd just like him to win a match." But by the time he was
seven or eight it was clear he was well above average." Once he began
winning he didn't stop.
Coming from a family of sports professionals, Hewitt had a work ethic
instilled in him from an early age. His parents were said to be very tough
on him, with both of them attending every match, even in the under-12s.
Right from the beginning, Glynn took an hour long video of his son, every
six months, to monitor his progress and, according to Inside Sport, when the
South Australian tennis Association held a talk about tennis parents not
putting to much pressure on their kids, the Hewitt's famously didn't turn
up.
The family is extremely tight knit. Though Hewitt now tours the world for
much of the year, he still lives with his parents in an extension at the
back of the house in Westlakes. When he is away he phones home every day. At
the end of last year, when Lleyton split with his coach, Darren Cahill, it
was Glynn who was said to be behind the rift.
But whether he was pushed or not, there was no doubting Lleyton's talent.
"He was really quite outstanding," says Smith. "He was a terrific competitor
and a lot of the things we see today were evident at that time. Because he
was so small but so talented, he was always playing people who were two to
three years older than he was, who tried to intimidate him. On occasions his
parents tried to get involved, but he learned to stand up for himself."
It is how he learned his famous mental toughness. Experts differ on the
definition, but to Jeremy Bond, a psychologist at the Australian Institute
of Sport, "Mental toughness is the capacity an individual has to maintain
world-standard processes under critical stress." He doesn't believe Hewitt
was born with it. "I think it's a skill he developed from a very early age.
Competing against older kids is where people learn to be street fighters."
For Hewitt, tennis became a gladiatorial combat he desperately wanted to
win.
Famous for his training schedule, said to be the toughest on the tour,
Hewitt pounded the Adelaide sand dunes to a pulp (it's good for the calves).
But to take on bigger guys, the shy, respectable kid had to get himself
fired up. With his friend Brett, he used to watch Sylvester Stallone's Rocky
films, about the underdog boxer, Rocky Balboa, again and again. The proud
owner of all five films, he has seen them 100 times. With his on court
screams of "Come on!" and repetitions of the mantra, "I'm not going down!",
you can see him pump willpower into the tank.
"It's to do with what psychologists call finding the levels of arousal, or
the ideal performing state," says Jeffrey Bond. "Unlike a player like Bjorn
Borg, who prefers to play in a much calmer state, Lleyton Hewitt plays
better when his arousal system is really pumped high. That's where the Rocky
films come in. They are about developing an adrenalin rush, and being right
on that sharp edge all the time. I think you'd find that mental toughness
would apply to any competition he was in. I suspect that for Lleyton Hewitt
there is no such thing as a social game of golf."
It all looks very different from the other end of the court. Opponents see
it as in-your-face aggression, and the coach Brad Gilbert once said he was
surprised no one had whacked Hewitt in the locker room. There are
unconfirmed (but undenied) reports of Hewitt as a junior "sledging" or
abusing another player sufficiently to make him cry, and unforced verbal
errors have become a feature of his game. The French umpires were
"spastics", the US Open linesman apparently racist, and his home crowd in
Adelaide "stupid". It's said that Alex Corretja so dislikes Hewitt's conduct
on court, he no longer speaks to him.
Peter Smith says the pressure is so intense it's unforgivable, but that's
not how some see it. The Australian paper, The Age, called him "a disgrace
to Australian tennis", and in 2000, in a poll by Inside Sport, he was voted
the least admired sportsman on the planet (ahead of Mike Tyson). He has also
fallen out with the ATP, which fined him $103,000 for not attending a press
interview, though the fine is being appealed. It's at times like these when
the man he calls "The Professor", Pat Rafter, his closest friend on the
Tour, has a quiet word.
But Hewitt is too focused to let his off-court troubles affect him. Always
a man in a hurry, he has raced up the rankings like someone taking the
stairs 10 at a time. Records were smashed like so many service returns. In
January 1997, aged 15, he was the youngest qualifier in the history of the
Australian Open. One year later he became the lowest-ranked player (at 550)
and youngest for 10 years to win a Tour title when he beat Agassi and Jason
Stoltenberg (his present coach) in the last two rounds of the ATP Adelaide
event.
Hs ranking went from 772 at the end of 1997 to 113 at the end of 1998, then
to 22 (1999), 7 (2000) and No.1 (2001). He has held on to pole position in
the Entry system ever since. He may still look like a big kid in baggy
shorts and back-to-front baseball cap, but not even Andre Agassi achieved
such a meteoric rise.
All the while, however, he was struggling to grow up. He once said that
when he played his first ATP tournament at 16 in his home he didn't have a
clue how the tour worked. "I just sat in the locker room having a Coke,
hoping I wouldn't lose love and love." There has been precious little time
for friends, let alone girlfriends, though apparently Serena Williams was
once smitten. When they were both 16 she asked him to partner her in the
Australian Open mixed doubles. He obliged, but that was it. He was too busy
with his game plan.
"He has three or four very close friends, and these days it's pretty hard
for him to get close to other people," says Brett Smith, who spent the last
two months travelling with him. "A lot of school is about growing up, and he
missed out on that."
Off court, like his hero Tiger Words, he is obsessively neat. "You go into
his room and you think no one lives in it," former Aussie Davis Cup Coach
John Newcombe once said. "Everything is put away. It's the neatest room
you've ever seen in your life." According to his father his is also a
hyperactive fidget who can't sit still.
But Kim Clijsters, his Belgian tennis-playing girlfriend, has brought a new
dimension to his life. The daughter of a former football international, she
has much in common with Hewitt. Her superstition about going to the same
restaurant when she got to the French Open Final drove him crazy, but when
they are apart they reportedly make a minimum of four phone calls a day.
"They are sweet together," says the former British player Annabel Croft.
There are sings that Hewitt is beginning to calm down. Almost everyone
comments on his new-found maturity, his increased graciousness after
matches.
But it seems that Lleyton Hewitt still has something to prove. "Why else is
he doing what he's doing?" suggests Jeffry Bond.
There is much speculation about where he goes from here, and if, as many
hope, he will become even more aggressive in his game, and take it to the
net. But whatever happens, Hewitt has made his mark. He may barely have
taken down the posters of his own childhood idols, but for aspiring kids
now, it is Hewitt who is the hero. At the end of November he was in Sydney
where 82 kids were taking part in the Lleyton Hewitt International week-long
junior camp. Every single one of them had their baseball cap on back to
front.