In which I learn about the game in the simplest yet most effective way possible – by witnessing my parents’ enthusiasm for tennis … particularly winning tennis.
TENNIS DIDN’T START with the coaching, the boys or the tumble dryer; it had always been there. My mum and dad were big players, and had been very involved at that very same Dunblane Tennis Club since we moved to the town when I was about five. There were four blaes courts – an early, less luxurious version of clay – and a cute little wooden pavilion at the club. It seemed enormous then, but now it doesn’t even exist, replaced by the slicker facilities at the new and improved Dunblane Sports Club.
My earliest memories are that they – and by default we, my brothers and I – were almost always down at the tennis club. My mum and her best friend ran the kids coaching sessions on Saturday mornings, and they both played competitively for the adult team, too. At first, I hated having to spend so much time down there, but only because I was too small to play. Aged five, I was too short and too slight to wield an adult racket, and children’s ones were years away from being invented, let alone making it to Dunblane. And the courts seemed enormous, a bigger space than I ever could have covered, and that shale surface was agony to fall on and made your trainers dirty.
So I’d hang around, looking after my two younger brothers and longing to be allowed a piece of the action. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on the boys, but they preferred kicking balls around, feeding the ducks or climbing trees. What I was really doing was watching the adults and the older kids from my spot on the grass, peering eternally through the green diamond mesh of the fencing. Everyone seemed to be having a blast, regardless of the cold or the rain. The frustration was immense – to see the fun but not be able to take part. Frankly, it was agony. A pain only mildly alleviated by playing badminton over the washing line with my brothers when we got home.
At home, the tennis theme continued. My mum, especially, was a huge fan. During Wimbledon fortnight we couldn’t watch anything else on the TV, and to be honest we barely got fed. It was just Wimbledon on the telly all day long, punctuated by cold food – a bit of salad or something from the back of the fridge perhaps. At first, it was a real shock to the system as my mum is a great cook, but after a few years we accepted it as standard procedure. Dad would always be home from work bang on 6 p.m. to catch as much of the tennis as possible. They’d discuss the day’s play as if nothing else mattered, and we just rolled with it. It was Wimbledon.
We didn’t care, though; it was intoxicating to see Mum and Dad so excited about something to the point where normal rules fizzled away, and in the end we started to absorb the excitement, too. There wasn’t anything else to watch, so over time the rules and the scoring system started to make sense, the patterns began to slot together as the match took shape and we caught Wimbledon fever along with them. My mum, ever the armchair tactician, would explain the various shots to me, pointing out how one player was beating another and why, and talking about what she would do in that situation. Many years later I would realise she had no idea what she was talking about! And as the finals rolled round, there was no question of us doing anything else. Wimbledon would be on, my mum would be gasping, clapping and commentating, and the channel wouldn’t be changed until someone was lifting the trophy.
Eventually, early one summer, the day came. I was allowed to have a shot. My mum gently showed me how to swing the racket – her way too big and way too heavy racket – but I had been watching for so long I was like a coiled spring ready to go. My dad chipped in with the teaching, too, and before long I was given the chance to have a first racket of my own. I was at home, half-heartedly playing in the garden with my brothers when my dad came home with two rackets to choose from. He sat me on the sofa and showed them both to me carefully, showcasing them like an expert holding precious artefacts in a museum. I’d like to think he had painstakingly whittled down a multitude of choices available to just these two, and selected them especially for me, but I knew the reality: one was from the sports shop in the next village and the other was from Woolworths. These were the only two junior rackets in town.
I can remember them both so clearly, it was as if I were choosing my first pet. The one from the sports shop was a Junior Dunlop Maxply. The Maxply was quite a famous racket at the time, and this was the junior version, slightly lighter and a little shorter, although not a mini size. It must have cost my dad about £11! And the Woolworths’ one, well, it was a pale imitation. It had cheap, two-tone flecked strings and felt flimsy even to me, a ten-year-old. I knew it cost only about a quid, and I knew that my dad would have loved me to choose it. I did think about it, and I even felt really guilty about wanting the Dunlop, but … not quite guilty enough. I wanted the proper one. I wanted to play. I told the truth. The Dunlop Maxply was mine and I cherished it like a beloved toy.
Once I had a racket to call my own, there was no stopping me. I didn’t have anyone to play with at home as my brothers were still too little, so I would spend hours hitting the wall on the side of our house. It was hard to find a space with no windows, so I made do with the strip of brick – covered in harling – between the metal door of our garage and the building’s edge. It was a tiny narrow strip though, as the huge square door took up most of the space. This meant that every good shot knocked the little stone chips off the wall and every duff shot brought a deafening clang as the metal reverberated against the tennis ball, shortly followed by the front door opening and my mum running out to yell, ‘Stop hitting the ruddy door!’ She just wanted the occasional bit of peace and quiet – but the end result was a good one: I got pretty accurate, pretty fast.
It was at that wall that I started to forge my own little space in family life. If I was practising, I didn’t have to look after my brothers; I could do my own thing. And if I got better I could play with Mum and Dad, and eventually the other kids at the tennis club.
Back then there weren’t really any official tennis coaches in Scotland. There were no indoor courts in the whole country, so no one could coach for a living as it could only ever be a seasonal thing – it was mad to think you could get a full-time job out of it! In the winter we’d go indoors and play badminton, then as summer came round again the activity in the clubs was entirely driven by volunteers. Sure, there were people who would help you to learn and there were always adults around who wanted to share the game – but as for coaches, no way.
This meant that I learned the game through a combination of semi-enforced Wimbledon-watching, my mum and dad teaching me, and trying to avoid that garage door. And in time, I got quite good. My dad was the better player, and he was the one I was most like in character. He has a huge love of strategy, a real sense of mischief and is a fierce competitor and a bad loser. He loved to plan ahead in a game – to work out his opponent’s strategy and what they would struggle to return. And then he loved to try and trick them with his flashy shots. He thinks he invented topspin – he honestly believes he was playing that shot before Björn Borg was – and he loved a slice or a drop shot when you were least expecting it. He liked to make it hard for his opponent, even if that opponent was his pre-teen daughter.
Learning from someone with a wicked sense of competitiveness taught me well and taught me fast. He was completely unashamed about wanting to make winning as hard as possible for me, and that in turn gave me the freedom to be completely unashamed about wanting to beat him back. Ambition was – and still is – nothing to apologise for.
Thirst to win aside, he was far from a pushy father – a sense of mischief and fun ran through every activity, whether it was tennis with me, football in the garden with my brothers or family French cricket on a rare sunny summer’s day. We were all treated the same, all considered as free as each other to have a go at everything. There was no question that I should sit out just because I was a girl. All three of us found it frustrating playing any sport with him as he always seemed to win, and genuinely didn’t want to get beaten by his kids. It was only years later, as adults, that we realised he had been making up the rules of whatever game we were playing on any given day … to his benefit! Hilarious now, but it certainly was perplexing back then.
His sense of competitiveness wasn’t entirely unexpected though. He had been a professional football player before I was born, in so far as you could be a ‘professional’ player in the early 1950s. Payment was £1 per game, which the teams had to queue up outside the manager’s office after matches to collect, and all training and playing took place outside normal working hours as the players still worked their regular 9 to 5 jobs. Still, there wasn’t much need for excessive training as the ground was twenty-five miles from my dad’s house back then – a distance he cycled every time. Car ownership for families like ours was rare, so his bike was his daily transport.
There was no money, and no potential for big money in sport in those days, so his experience then was radically different from that of the boys now. It was enthusiasm and camaraderie that drove teams, rather than the lust for big cash you see in some parents’ eyes these days when they realise they may have a talented child on their hands. My sons adore hearing about the pure love of the game that the players had back then; it’s gold dust to them when Dad starts to tell tales of the old days at Christmas or family events. He played for a number of Scottish clubs, including Hibernian, but it may as well have been a different world. Apart from the thirst to win, that is …
My mum was the total opposite – an excellent sofa strategist and a woman with a warmth that she couldn’t contain on the tennis court, the sort of player who will say ‘Good shot!’ to her opponent without hesitation. My dad made no secret of thinking this was clearly a bad idea, and I agreed. I learned never to compliment an opponent while playing. Why would you want them to know what you found difficult? It would only encourage them to do it again. Mum didn’t seem to care a jot if she lost, she’d simply enjoyed a lovely afternoon’s tennis. I couldn’t understand that mentality at all.
Dad could make tennis hard for me. He had so much variety in his game that he could change the pace, spin, height, depth and direction of his shots without a second thought. Even when I was still learning the basics, I grasped that if I tried hard enough to copy him I could make it tough for him, too. I learned the shape of the shots. I practised the shots against the wall and, before too long, I could return a sneaky lob, I could make him run, I could hit with back spin and I could – occasionally – win a point. And that, well that opened the doors to a whole new world of fun.
I played my first competition when I was eleven, about a year after getting that starter racket. It was just a local thing, organised via the Dunblane Tennis Club, but before long I went to what was called a ‘district sift’, which I suppose would be called a ‘talent ID day’ now. The clubs in the local area sent their best juniors up to a central venue to see a national coach (part-time of course) who would assess them. A couple of other Dunblane kids and I turned up and were given a numbered piece of card and two safety pins, to attach it to our sleeve.
It was the first time I’d felt genuinely nervous playing tennis. In one short year I had gone from longing to play to being a pretty good player, and now I was bundled in with a gang of kids from all over the district, hoping desperately that I’d catch this coach’s eye. And I did! Within a few months I was sent to a ‘national sift’ up at the Inverclyde National Sports Centre. This was another change of pace. It was an entire weekend away from my parents, staying in what seemed like impossibly glamorous and grown-up accommodation on site. I was sharing a room with a couple of other girls, and of course we were totally overexcited by the whole experience. With almost admirable inevitability we stayed up talking, playing pranks and having midnight feasts and woke up bleary-eyed.
Adrenalin got me through: it was nothing but playing my favourite sport with kids I had never met before, with a ticker tape of drama and anticipation constantly running as we all hoped it would be us who would impress, us who would be picked. That weekend there was barely a trace of my mother in me; I was all my father’s daughter.
It was thrilling when I was selected for the national squad, even though that constituted little more than the odd training weekend through the winter at Inverclyde, in a hall that doubled up for both badminton and cricket. The glamour! I was so young, only just thirteen, but I remember being totally fearless. I would head off on the train to Glasgow, change stations by walking across the city with my racket bag and carry on the journey to Largs, then walk up to the sports centre. A four-hour shift! After a winter of being able to play (albeit infrequently) for the first time, I was soon travelling all over the country to take part in matches and tournaments.
The following summer I was a pro at all this travelling: I would be put on the train to London by my mum, meet an elderly aunt at King’s Cross (who had come all the way from Woodford by tube to pick me up), and stay overnight with her before heading to the other side of London the next morning for a tournament at the Queen’s Club in Kensington. I had seen nearly all of London by the time I got there, and read several books. I can’t imagine letting a child do that now, but it was the most relaxed of adventures back then. I had not a shred of nerves and no idea of the potential dangers. It was just one of the things about being in Scotland at that time: if you were even slightly good at something, especially a summer sport like tennis, you would outgrow the opportunities at home pretty quickly, making travel an inevitability. Having to travel was a sign of doing well and it was still that way twenty-odd years later when Jamie and Andy reached a similar stage.
The travel was exciting, and it all felt so terribly grown up, but it was the competing that I really lived for. And competing was mostly what we did – there was barely anything in the way of training. There weren’t really any formal coaches, and nothing as grand as individual lessons or a fitness programme to follow: we learned to play the game by playing the game. I became a pretty good athlete – thanks to my sporty genes – and a pretty good competitor simply because I wanted to win. I worked out how to make things difficult for my opponent. I would evaluate what they could or couldn’t do, and use that to my advantage. It was satisfying to try and get the measure of someone, but devastating to have them do the same to you. Whenever I lost, I’d sulk, but I’d always learn from it.
My greatest asset was having parents who were happy to play with me, apparently endlessly. And as I got better I was invited to play on the Dunblane ladies’ team, alongside adults, even while I was still a junior. It didn’t matter that they were perhaps not top-drawer players – they were adults with a level of experience and maturity that couldn’t help but rub off on me. I was playing doubles, too, so I was having to learn how to communicate, how not to let an adult partner down by having a tantrum if things didn’t go our way, how to make the space work with two people on the court, and understanding the value of being part of a team. The adults at Dunblane were always happy to play with us kids in a way that I don’t see happening so much in clubs today. Kids get talent-spotted, slotted into squads and programmed how to hit the ball but not given enough opportunities to learn how to play the game. There’s too much coaching and not enough free play. We were bundled in with a mix of ages, abilities and sizes and just had to work it all out as we went along. Tennis is a thinking sport, and you need to learn to solve all sorts of problems on court. The more variety you have in competition, the better.
I played in competitions nearly every week between April and August, my poor mum picking me up from school to drive me to Glasgow or Edinburgh. With the obliviousness of youth, I had no idea what a grind this must have been for her. She had to find someone to look after my brothers, take me to the match, drive me home, say a brief ‘hi’ to my dad (who had assumed the brother duties after work), grab something to eat and put me to bed. I didn’t even let her watch me play. She made me nervous. Seriously nervous. So she became quite adept at hiding behind trees, clubhouses or newspapers. Tennis parenting is the sort of chore you never realise is so mind-numbing until you’re a parent yourself doing it for your own kids. Back then, I was only interested in playing the matches.
Well, playing the matches and David Cassidy. These were now my twin passions. With a bit of Donny Osmond and Andy and David Williams, too. Now, they were gorgeous. If I wasn’t playing tennis, I was busying myself with my little jotters, doodling their names and obsessively monitoring how they were doing in the charts every week. I would lie in bed with my transistor radio under the covers, listening to Radio Luxembourg and scribbling down all the chart positions, ready to discuss at school the next day. It was the only thing I cared about as much as tennis, and perhaps the only stage in my life when I really thought about music until I took part in Strictly Come Dancing.
From the age of ten I was at an all girls’ school in Crieff, a forty-minute bus ride north of Dunblane. The sporting opportunities there were great, and being part of a team and representing my school was my first experience of sport being a form of self-expression. When your body is changing, you’re growing up and life all around you is opening up, there is a huge sense of satisfaction and belonging from being part of a group who are all aiming for the same goal rather than being caught up in personal teenage worries. There was a social aspect to being on the tennis team, and a consistency in the routine of match days and scoreboards, all of which meant feeling as if I fitted in somewhere. I belonged, I was part of something bigger than myself.
I remember one summer when I was thirteen watching Evonne Goolagong on TV (the Australian player who won Wimbledon twice, for the first time in 1971 when she was only nineteen), and thinking: She’s still a teenager, maybe I could be as good as her one day. But I had no idea what I would need to achieve in the next six years to get there. I thought maybe I needed to get a bit fitter? A bit faster? But I was clueless as to how to do that. I vaguely felt that something called ‘hill training’ might be involved, so I would run up the farm road behind our house with the dog from time to time. It was barely a slope but it was better than nothing. And that was the extent of it; there simply wasn’t anyone to tell me about interval training, or sprints, or anything specific that might improve my fitness. And, as I grew older, there was a second factor that started to creep into the lack of direction in my game: girls were clearly second-class citizens on the national training weekends.
The sessions at Inverclyde National Sports Centre were about every six or eight weeks, and the vast majority of the kids taking part were boys. There were very few girls involved, and after a few months it dawned on me that we were given significantly less attention. The centre had two wooden courts, and one air hall, which was basically a sort of rubber court with a bubble over it. It was quite a new-fangled thing at the time, with the added space-age effect of an airtight door which trapped you inside.
The weekend sessions were great fun the first couple of times, but after a while we realised that the coach would always send us girls to the air hall. He would pack us off with some instructions on what we might practise, then come back a couple of hours later to check on us. We would try and explain what we’d been up to, only to be met with little more than ‘Sounds great, time for a break then’. At one point we actually set up a competition to see who could guess the exact number of words he would bother to say to the girls’ group over an entire training weekend. I don’t think he ever reached more than about fifty, and the all-time low was three: ‘Girls. Air hall.’ Every session we spent playing games and doing drills without guidance; he was on court with the boys, actively watching, coaching and paying rapt attention.
This treatment was frustrating, because we could tell that we weren’t being valued equally, but by this point the girls on the team were solid friends. We weren’t going to complain too loudly because tennis was our social life and we didn’t want access to it taken away. We were learning valuable life skills as we travelled – largely unaccompanied – up and down the country to play: how to find our B&B or youth hostel, the right time to have a decent breakfast if you were playing a big game later that day, or simply how to get yourself from A to B with the right money in a world without mobile phones, credit cards, ATMs or the internet. We knew that these were great opportunities and we didn’t want to waste them.
I left school aged sixteen in the summer of 1976 and up until then I had fully intended to try to pursue tennis as a career. Perhaps it was naivety, but I had managed to spin out that young teen phase of thinking ‘anything is possible’ without restrictions for quite a while. The whole ‘I want to be an astronaut! Or a pop star!’ stage had manifested itself in pro tennis for me. But there was a massive stumbling block: there was simply no infrastructure in Scotland. I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how I could do this. I had no idea how much it would cost, what it would take and, crucially, I saw no template for it in anyone like me, anywhere near me. Back then Dunblane was a town with a population of only three to four thousand; there just weren’t that many people who had taken huge risks and pursued dreams on that sort of scale.
As I approached the end of high school, I had two options: I had an unconditional offer to study French and German at Edinburgh University the following year, and I was offered a tennis scholarship at a US university which would have covered virtually all costs. This was highly unusual back then. It was an incredible opportunity but I backed out of it at almost the last minute. On the one hand I badly wanted to go, but on the other it felt too far away. This was forty years ago, there was no way to research what it might be like or find someone who had done it before me. There was no Skyping a friendly face on the current scholarship to hear how they were getting along. The leap was just too big for me, and too far into the unknown and I turned it down with a heavy heart.
As the dream of becoming a professional player via a US scholarship faded, I set my heart on becoming a PE teacher as a sort of back-up. It seemed more manageable, more realistic, less far from home. My parents had seemed to think that was a natural progression too, but then I encountered one of those teachers. You know the one – the teacher who just doesn’t get you, and squanders what enthusiasm you had for doing something. Anyone who has come across one of these will remember them: they are the very opposite of the inspiring teachers who open up a world of possibility to their students. This teacher told me in no uncertain terms that the entire teaching profession was in a terrible mess and that there were no jobs to be had and, being the student, I believed her.
In the end I decided to go to Edinburgh University, deferring it for a year to see how far I could get with playing tennis off my own bat. I was so dejected to have let the opportunity in America go, but it really was as simple as it being too daunting for me. And if I couldn’t be a PE teacher, maybe another year of playing would be an adequate consolation prize for these disappointments.
It all began with great excitement when I headed to the British Junior Championships, which were played on the clay courts at Wimbledon, and got through to the quarter-final of the singles and the semi-final of the mixed doubles. Not long after that the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) announced a full-time squad of girls to be based at Queen’s Club. They selected the top six girls. I was ranked number 8. I just missed out. It was the difference between getting everything I’d dreamed of, and nothing at all.
So I had to go it alone.
There was no indoor circuit at that time, which meant that if you wanted to carry on playing tennis as autumn approached you had to go abroad. That is how I found myself in Barcelona’s Club de Campo the following spring, playing Björn Borg’s then fiancée. Most of my tennis adventures up to this point had felt like a series of gleeful treats and expeditions, but this was now beyond the realm of my wildest dreams. I was in sunny southern Europe, playing none other than Mariana Simionescu, who was engaged to the man himself!
In those days it was customary for any match winner to offer their opponent a drink in the club bar after the match. It was a really old-school tradition, but still very charming, and I was at an age where even being in a bar or restaurant of a venue like that felt like playing at being a grown up. Mariana beat me quite easily and came up to ask if I would like a drink. I was parched, so I said that yes, I would actually.
‘Do you mind if we pop to the changing rooms first?’ she replied. I said that was fine, and followed her to the changing rooms where she sat down, dropped her bag beside her on the bench and rooted around in it for a pack of cigarettes. She immediately lit up. I didn’t really know what to say. I was naive enough to think that surely sportswomen wouldn’t smoke. Perhaps I looked as shocked as I felt, because she looked back, saying, ‘Sorry, it’s just that Björn doesn’t let me smoke, so I have to do it in secret.’
I was numb, barely able to compute how I was in this, the most adult situation of my life. I was a child really, completely unused to being confided in or spoken to as an adult. A couple of days later I was queueing at the club’s buffet for something to eat and realised that I was in front of the Polish player Wojtek Fibak, the world number 5. There he was, just behind me! I had never dared to imagine that I might be rubbing shoulders with these stars one day, but apparently this was my life now. But not for long.
Because it was only a couple of days later that I blew it.
I had taken the bus into Barcelona to go to the poste restante, where I could change some traveller’s cheques and mail some postcards. It was hot and very busy on the bus so I had to stand, and I was jostled a lot as people fought to get on and off at the various stops. I didn’t think anything of it though, and happily waited for my stop.
It was only once I got off the bus that I saw that the toggle which fastened my bag was twisted in the wrong position. And the bag itself was open. I can clearly remember peering into the bag and thinking, my purse is gone, that can’t be right, before somehow believing that if I closed the bag and looked again, things would rectify themselves.
So I closed the bag, fixed the toggle, then opened it again to look for my purse. This time it would be there. But it wasn’t. I sat on the dusty edge of the pavement and emptied every single thing out of the bag. Still, it wasn’t there. There was my comb, my map and my hanky. All of the boring, annoying things that I only carried with me to make my mum happy. But no passport, no ticket home and absolutely no money at all.
After staring around me in shock for a couple of minutes, letting the severity of the situation sink in, I had the wit to go and find a passing policeman. He spoke no English but managed to find me someone who did, who in turn took me to the police station to call the British Embassy.
I didn’t cry – I very rarely do, and usually it’s when I’m happy – instead I went into a sort of automated ‘I have a problem there must be a solution’ mode. Perhaps the years of travel for tennis had toughened me up more than I realised, like the time I arrived at King’s Cross, aged thirteen, to find my aunt wasn’t there to meet me and then the following day got lost on the tube en route to the Queen’s Club and so on.
But apparently I wasn’t tough enough. When I eventually got home, my parents actually weren’t cross. And we all know that it feels worse when your parents are merely disappointed. In fact, I think they were mostly worried. Because later that weekend my dad sat me down and said, ‘Look, this is too dangerous. You can’t be doing all this on your own and we can’t come with you. So it has to stop.’
I was bitterly disappointed, but deep down I didn’t disagree with him. In a way, I was quite relieved that he had made the decision for me. I had slowly begun to understand that I just wasn’t cut out for this life, the life of a professional sportswoman: travelling alone internationally, communicating in such a spectrum of different languages, coaching myself and doing all of the organisation and scheduling needed for such a complicated life. I was a good enough player in Scotland, but I wasn’t good enough – or tough enough – for the global circuit.
There are times when you just need your parents to parent you, and this was certainly one of them. I was in that horrible adolescent situation when you know what you want, but you just don’t want to be the one to have to say it out loud. You want an adult to take that weight for you. In hindsight, my dad having the guts to stand up and make a difficult decision for me helped me later with the boys when it was my turn to do the active parenting. It gave me the confidence to step in when I saw them making a wrong decision or when they were simply too young to be entrusted with a decision so important.
But it didn’t stop the hurt over the end of my short-lived tennis career. What could? Instead, I headed to university with my tail between my legs and forgot about the idea of tennis as a profession for many, many years.