It was a crazy time. Andy's life changed out of sight after Wimbledon 2005. For anybody aged eighteen to go through all that craziness in such a short space of time was amazing, and for ten months of that time I was riding shotgun as his coach. It was an unforgettable experience for both of us, and despite the fact that it came to an end (and I thumped him once in a car), I'm sure we'll be close friends for the rest of our lives.
I'd been involved with him at arm's length before that famous Wimbledon, while I was working for the Lawn Tennis Association. I was well aware of him and his talent but I didn't know him on any kind of intimate basis. I knew he'd split with his former coach, Pato Alvarez, before the French Open, and someone came up with the idea that I would hook up with him to help him through the grass-court season – Queen's and Wimbledon. I assumed that is where our association would begin and end. We had absolutely no way of knowing what would happen next. The wins at Queen's, the cramps, the fame, the five sets against a Wimbledon finalist – it was all completely unpredictable.
His rise was phenomenal. Nothing short of it. To go from being 350 in the world to 50 in ten months was almost unbelievable. It began with a bang at Queen's, where he won two matches and then at Wimbledon, where he was two sets up against David Nalbandian in the third round, the last Brit standing in the tournament. Within seconds of every match ending, my mobile phone went into meltdown. Probably the best thing that happened to us was being able to go away on the road for ten weeks, to get out of Britain and escape the publicity.
I never for one moment expected to be caught up in all this. I had a good job with Sky Sports TV commentating on tennis. I was just planning to leave the Federation, where I was manager of men's national training, because I wasn't seeing eye-to-eye with the performance director and Tim Henman's former coach, David Felgate. Sky gave me a lot of freedom and I had a good life with my wife and our two little girls after years of being on tour or holding down two jobs at once. There was no way I could say to my wife: 'Right, I'm volunteering to go away for ten weeks at a time again.'
Well, there was one way. After his amazing success at Wimbledon, Andy asked me if I would join him as his full-time coach. It was a massive decision, as I already had an idea of what it would involve. I'd spent two years coaching on the women's tour, with Sylvia Talaja of Croatia and the Slovenian Tina Pisnik, when Sylvia went from about 90 in the world to 17, and Tina rose from 150 to 55. So, when Andy asked if I would work with him as his coach, I knew – to a degree – what I was taking on. As much as it was a fantastic opportunity – which it was – it was also a huge commitment and meant walking away from a solid job at Sky.
My wife was obviously a huge part of the decision. She had our youngest girl when I was away for those two years with Sylvia and Tina. It was tough on her, very difficult. But I was an ex-player with a mediocre career having reached 80 in the world (although I beat the former Wimbledon Champion Michael Stich in the first round of the South African Open 1994) and I had to find something to do. If I was going to be away again, with Andy this time, my wife had to buy into it. She did. She was phenomenally supportive.
On the plane to the States, Andy and I must have been as surprised as each other – it was definitely a shock to my system. A week or so after Wimbledon, I found myself sharing a room with a teenager eighteen years my junior. It was a culture shock, I can tell you. There was a moment during that tournament week in Newport, Rhode Island, when I asked myself: 'What's happened to your life that you're suddenly back on the road with an 18-year-old instead of at home with your family and a fantastic job with loads of freedom at last?' But soon the answer became clear.
It may have been intense to share a room with this kid, but it was also fun. Put it this way: it was never boring. The grass courts at Newport were shocking and, Andy being Andy, he said so, which didn't endear him to the tournament director who had given him a wild card. But the amusements were great. We played basketball and video games. I realised immediately just how competitive Andy was – and always would be in everything he did.
It didn't matter what we played, he needed to win. There were no two ways about it. He needed to win. If he lost, he was 'fine' but you could see the disappointment. He tried to keep a lid on it, but I didn't mind – it is being so fiercely competitive that makes him such a great tennis player.
To quell my mounting sense of inadequacy, we started playing backgammon. He hadn't played an awful lot at that stage and I was winning a few games which he, in his inimitable way, put down to pure luck. As time went by, I felt I should teach him some of the tricks and patterns of the game, which I hadn't let him know at the start to preserve my dignity. That was an obvious mistake. As with everything, he started getting better and better, and then the matches were dangerously competitive.
I never let him win at anything – he won anyway. In fact, the only time I eased up on him and let him win deliberately was on one occasion in South Africa, when we played a set of tennis and I sensed he was struggling a little bit for various reasons. I had a feeling that if I won the tie-break, it wouldn't be conducive to his mood. But on the games front, I never let him win. As for video games, he was in a different league to me. He bought me a Tiger Woods golf game and remained forever frustrated by how useless I was.
On the road we did virtually everything together. We trained together, ate together, shared rooms together. He had that ankle injury which meant I had to make sure he used a wobble board every day to strengthen the joint. I spent a lot of time throwing a ball to him. I started picking up his likes and dislikes, including food. That was pretty straightforward. He had pasta arrabiata or fillet steak and a Sprite every night. America must have been struggling for cows by the end of our trip.
Our next stop after Newport was Aptos in California, a smaller Challenger event, where we stayed with a family. We stayed in one of their spare rooms with a dart board, and played horseshoes with our host in the back garden. I remember thinking how surreal this was, chucking horseshoes around in a Californian yard a million miles away from Wimbledon. It didn't seem like the same life. Once when we went to a Mexican restaurant with the family, we were asked: 'Do you know what Mexican food is?' Andy and I suppressed smiles and resisted the urge to ask: 'What's a nacho?' We always had a rapport in any funny situation.
That's how the bonding starts. I look back on that time and realise that Aptos was important in many ways and especially because Andy won the event. There was a lot of pressure on us both. Many people felt I wasn't the right person for the job. I understood that. You've got a kid clearly going places fast and he's decided to go with a former player who didn't make it beyond 80 in the world. 'What does he know?' and 'What the hell did he do?' were the questions being asked of me. There was pressure on Andy to prove I was the right choice for him at that stage of his career.
I also heard a lot of negative stuff about Andy and his attitude. People from clothing companies said they didn't want to sponsor him because he didn't hit the ball hard enough. Coaches said: 'He'll never do anything. He's too soft'. Very few people were positive about where he was going. I'd said to potential sponsors about eighteen months before all this: 'You sign him up, he's going to be something a bit special', but they just said: 'Nah, I don't see it.' There are a couple of people out there, I'm sure, regretting their decisions now.
That's why that Aptos week was very important. Even the resident racket stringer there said to me: 'Jeez, he's something else, isn't he?' I said: 'Yeah, there's a bit of genius there.' He agreed. 'I've been saying to everybody at the club: "Make sure you take a good look at him this week because he won't be back".'
Incidentally, no one – journalist or sponsor or coach – has ever come back and said to me: 'Sorry, we were wrong about Andy.' I was absolutely vilified for my comment at Wimbledon that he could be bigger than Wayne Rooney; I was crucified in the newspapers for that. Of course, I know that football's a bigger sport but in terms of individuals – if you look at the headlines Andy's generated in the last three years – I think to some degree I've been vindicated. All I did was go out there and try to emphasise how talented this kid could be. And boom! I was knocked back straight away. I wasn't upset. I thought: 'Ok, time will tell.' And it has.
The tournament after Aptos was a tour event in Indianapolis where Andy lost in three sets to the American, Mardy Fish. He'd been a break up in the final set but it was boiling hot and he was shattered. It wasn't all bad: we had a decent, comfortable hotel now we were on the main tour and, more important than that, we found a Starbucks. That was one of our things. We'd drive miles to find a Starbucks where Andy, without fail, would have a chocolate cream Frappucino without the chips. We always got a funny look. 'Without the chocolate chips?' This genuinely baffled the Americans. But Andy is not someone you argue with. Sometimes we'd drive out of a town for miles to find the Frappucino. It became a sort of ritual.
From Indianapolis we went to Canada, where my family joined us for a holiday. I couldn't join them for an earlier trip to Disneyworld because I was away with Andy and this was my attempt to make it up to them. No Mickey Mouse but they had Andy to play with and, as they loved him to bits, that was fine. They'd mess around together and play card games and he was really good with them. We went on bike rides round the lake and he would always do just enough to beat me. It was never a leisurely cycle; it was always full-on or not at all.
By now, I was really getting to know Andy. As a person, he was one of the most sensitive kids I knew. There are some very precious moments we had together that will always remain private, but I can tell you that the person I know is far removed from what people see on the tennis court. The guy you see on court is a competitive animal, but that isn't him. That is just his rage to be the best he can be.
He gained a reputation later for shouting at his coach, but he never did that to me. Never ever. We had a chat about his behaviour once at Indian Wells the following year, but I don't have any complaint about the way he treated me. He vented his frustration, much of the time, because he is a perfectionist. I could handle that. In fact, you want to see that in someone you're coaching. It's better than being satisfied with being second best.
Vancouver was next and I had to fly back home for three days to be at my best friend's wedding. Andy stayed on and reached the quarter-finals and then we met up again in New York and took a hire care to Binghampton, somewhere upstate that I would respectfully describe as the back of beyond. This was a considerable change from the tour events. It was stinking hot, we were in a public park, the changing room was a caravan and there was nothing else but the tennis going on. Plus, in the second round, he was six match points down and out on his feet against a guy from India ranked 263. But that animal within him would not give up. I still, to this day, remember the backhand pass he hit to save one of those match points. I just sat there staring, thinking: 'My god, how did you hit that?' He came back and won the match and the tournament, earning himself a wild card to Cincinnati.
Off court, life had been equally eventful – this was the time I hit him. Luckily, we laugh about it now. The area around the tournament was a little rough. One day we were driving through a street of boarded up windows and came to a set of traffic lights. Andy leant over and honked the horn. He is always trying to wind you up, that is his modus operandi, but on this occasion I thought it was distinctly unwise.
I said: 'Don't do that', because we were behind a beaten-up old Cadillac at a set of traffic lights and it hadn't moved even though the lights had gone green. He honked the horn again.
Now, maybe I'm slightly paranoid because once when I was staying in Atlanta I'd been told about guys who travelled at night in their cars looking for people to shoot or whatever, and I had a whole fear of flashing lights and honking horns at unknown cars behaving strangely. I said to Andy: 'Look, you don't know who's in that car. They might jump out in a fit of road rage and smash our car up – or worse – us.' He took absolutely no notice and honked the horn again.
I warned him in my sternest tone: 'I'm telling you now, just don't do it.' He did it again and at that time, pushed beyond endurance, I prodded him hard with an elbow. It's funny now but at the time I was just desperate to protect British tennis's greatest asset from being beaten up by a 7'6" giant. Can you imagine the headlines? Sometimes he was just a kid having fun, and I had to find a balance between having fun and making sure I discharged my responsibilities to him, his family and world tennis. I may have been way too paranoid, but I was trying to guide him through some of the perils of being on a worldwide tour.
The episode did him no harm. The next thing you know, he's playing Marat Safin, the world number four, in Cincinnati – and taking him to three sets. He had moved up about two hundred places in the rankings already, an incredible jump. I was amazed. But to Andy, it wasn't a surprise at all. He always knew he was going to be good. He wasn't scared. Not at all. He loved playing in front of a big crowd. He was much more likely to struggle somewhere that had no audience and no atmosphere.
The other thing I had learned is just how tactically aware he was. He would watch an opponent play matches, apparently uninterested, but at the end he would say: 'Right, this is what he does and this is where I think I can hurt him.' He was very, very astute. That is why I felt quite encouraged going into the US Open that year. Here was a kid who just gets it. Tennis isn't just about playing well, it is about making your opponent play badly. Andy understands that in a big way.
When he played Andrei Pavel, a phenomenally experienced player, in the US Open first round, and beat him in five sets, it was something a bit special. After the summer he'd had, all that travel, a new coach and an exhausting set of matches fresh out of the juniors, it spoke volumes for him as a competitor that he could go out there and win. It was lovely to be part of it and Andy was so excited. He really couldn't have been any happier.
We never did have any stand-up fights, Andy and I. After our road trip in America, he came home to stay with me and I think it must have been nice for him to be around normal family life. The stability was good for him when everything else was going a bit manic. It was just rather ironic that having rushed off to the States to escape the Wimbledon factor, we had an apartment (belonging to Pat Rafter's ex-girlfriend) in Wimbledon. There was no escaping the tennis connection.
There are certain moments that stand out vividly from our time together. I was with him when he cracked the World Top-100 in Bangkok. To remember his face after that match against Soderling still makes me well up with emotion. You can hardly understand how big that was to him. He was down and out when he called me after splitting up with Pato in the spring. He was low and really struggling. To go from there to being inside the top-100 in the space of a few months was incredible. This was a kid who had only one thing on his mind: to be successful at tennis. His achievement made us both pretty emotional, but the really amazing thing was the way he continued to play that tournament when he had already achieved one of his major goals. He was thrilled to bits but he still had a job to do.
In the semi-final against Paradorn Srichaphan, the massively supported local favourite, he hit an unbelievable winner down the line on match point and I told him so afterwards. 'Nah,' he said. 'If I hadn't hit that, I don't think I'd have ever forgiven myself. I saw the size of the gap down the line and I didn't think I could miss.' I'd been looking at the same gap, and it looked less than a centimetre wide to me. I told him: 'I've seen some real genius in the way you played today.' His belief in his own talent is overwhelming.
But, inevitably, problems appeared. We made a difficult start to the following year. Part of that was due to the South African holiday I had booked before I signed the contract as Andy's coach. When I took the job, I told Andy and Judy that I had booked the family holiday and, after missing Disneyworld, I owed it to them to make sure this one happened. Andy and Judy both said it was absolutely fine and, when the time came, Andy wanted to come too.
On one level, it was the best time we had together because it was all about family and friends and we had a great time. However, there was no one there for Andy to practise with except me. We tried, though: I played with him every day; I sprinted with him; we even ran together on Christmas Day. Afterwards, a number of people criticised they way we'd worked. They said some horrible stuff. It was tough, but the kid was eighteen years old. Was it going to be a career-breaker? I didn't think so, but there is no doubt it caused the year to begin badly.
Then there was the business of the so-called sexist remark in Adelaide, when Andy said, as a joke, that he'd been serving like a woman. He meant that his serve had been broken too many times. The outcry was ridiculous and that's where people don't understand Andy. To some players, the reaction to that remark would have been like water off a duck's back, but it really affected him. That was a very hard trip for us on an emotional level and the match he played at the Australian Open against Juan Ignacio Chela, which he lost in straight sets, was the only bad match he played in our entire time together.
It was huge pressure. He was playing in a grand slam event against a well-established player in front of hordes of people and it was very difficult for him. For me, the defeat was no big deal. I just said: 'That was a learning experience. It wasn't great. Move on. Next tournament.'
Obviously, I was criticised for not being with him in San José the following month, when he won his first tournament on the tour. I was on half-term holiday with the girls, but I also thought, after our tough start to the year, it would do us the world of good to have a break. I believed I was doing my job properly by not making him reliant on me. By the time he was winning match point against Lleyton Hewitt in the final, I was at Atlanta Airport ready to meet him again, trying to follow the match on the phone with his agent, Patricio.
Later Andy told me that once Lleyton had missed his first serve on match point, he knew he'd won the title. I told him that it was only when Michael Stich double-faulted on match point that I'd known I'd won that famous match of mine. That is the difference between us as tennis players.
It was difficult towards the end of our coaching relationship because he was obviously questioning whether I was the right man for the job. I think the world of him because he made the right decision, but it must have been very hard for him, given the closeness of our relationship. It was a courageous decision. For him to find somebody with Brad Gilbert's experience was good and I never resented that. Our time had run its course and it was right for him to move on.
We made the final split in Monte Carlo. We had a conversation about it in a little seaside café and then I met my wife and the girls who were over on holiday. I knew the news was going public at 4pm and was bracing myself for the response. Sure enough, my phone started ringing at one minute past four. My youngest daughter wanted to know what was going on. I told her: 'Andy and I aren't working together any more.'
'Who's calling you?' she asked.
'People want to know what I think about it.'
She screwed her face up. 'What, because you lost your job?' My wife and I were in tears of laughter and it was a fantastic reminder that life goes on.
I'm sure some people find it hard to believe that Andy and I could split so amicably and remain such close friends, but that is the reality. When Andy and I speak now, we hardly mention tennis at all. We talk as friends and that is the way it will always be.
I wasn't on tour to see how his relationship with Brad worked out at close quarters, but I suppose I wasn't surprised when they decided to call it a day. When you know the two characters involved, it was obviously going to work for a while but eventually become too much for one or the other. Brad had a firm belief in what he brought to the relationship. And Andy has a firm belief and confidence common to all the top players that he is going to do it his way.
I've followed his career ever since we parted and I'm convinced he is going to make it to the top of the sport. But I did say to him once: 'I don't envy you as a person. You're going to go through so much in your life that will be difficult. You're going to be incredibly successful and yet often you're going to read stuff that makes you sound like a failure.' That will be difficult for someone as sensitive as he is. I don't think people know what they do to him when they say critical things. He has sometimes been very badly misjudged.
My description of Andy might surprise the people who judge him only by what they see on the court, but if someone asked me to sum up the young man I came to know intimately, I'd say this: He's sensitive, passionate, stubborn, competitive beyond ultra and, ultimately, a very genuine human being.