Not pushing your kids is irresponsible
‘People say that you shouldn’t push your children. But I feel the opposite. If you are not going to help your children to unfold their potential, then who is? I saw tremendous potential in my son and I didn’t want to see him waste it.’
Enzo Calzaghe, father of boxer Joe Calzaghe
Does the name Elena Makarova ring a bell?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised it doesn’t. In 1995 Elena Makarova was the only Russian tennis player on the world women’s top 100. At the pinnacle of her career she was ranked number 36 in the doubles and 42 in the singles with 547.80 points. That’s a good deal fewer than German big gun Steffi Graf, who held first place with 4,592.86 points.
Ten years later.
On 5 June 2004 at the legendary French tennis stadium Roland Garros in Paris, two Russians, Anastasia Myskina and Elena Dementieva, were in the midst of a battle that would decide the winner of that year’s French Open final. This semi-final marked the beginning of the Russian tennis revolution which would reach its climax three years later in 2007, when Russian women held half the placings in the world’s top ten. This dominance has persisted, with Russia’s share of players among the 100 best women oscillating between 15 and 30 per cent.
Elena Makarova has long since ceased to be exceptional. Wimbledon’s courts are teeming with Russian players. As former world number one Serena Williams once said: ‘Everyone on the tour is from Russia. Sometimes I think I’m from Russia, too.’
As I write, a fifth of the world’s twenty best women tennis players are from Russia. The early twentieth-century poet Nikolay Nekrasov seems to have been right when he wrote: ‘The Russian woman can stop a horse in full stride, she can walk into a burning house and at the same time she has the beauty of a queen.’
But the fact that in just fifteen years Russia has risen from being a nation unremarkable for its tennis-playing to a position at the top of international women’s tennis is extraordinary. Although it is vast, the country does not seem much suited to fostering tennis stars – in most places facilities are decrepit, and there are more tennis courts in Paris alone than in the whole of Russia. Added to this the fact that the cruel Russian winter effectively prohibits all outdoor training for seven months of the year. Tennis players must fight to get their hands on the limited court time available at the few tennis halls. However, despite these atrocious conditions, the success of Russian women in world tennis is apparent for all to see.
By contrast, Britain, a once-proud tennis nation, has been reduced to the status of a mere wannabe. In the 2009 Wimbledon championship, nine out of the eleven British players were annihilated in the first round of the tournament. Those who thought it couldn’t get worse were mistaken. In 2010 British players delivered their worst performance in Wimbledon’s 135-year history. Only one home-grown player, Andy Murray, managed to make it to the second round. Home-grown is perhaps stretching it too far, as Murray had most of his tennis training in Spain. In 2011 things improved a little, with four British players fighting their way through the first round at Wimbledon. But with the exception of Murray, all got beaten in the second round once more.
This is not because the British lack ambition. Every year the government, sponsors and the Wimbledon organisation funnel around £60 million into the Lawn Tennis Association in the hope of creating winners. But despite this massive budget, which has equipped British future hopefuls with the best coaches, the best facilities and the biggest travel budgets, only two women and one man from the whole of Britain are ranked in the world’s top 100.
All this begs a very obvious question: how have the Russians with their rundown facilities, an inhospitable climate and minimal financial backing managed to succeed while Britain, with what seems a perfect set up, goes from one flop to another?
Tennis as an escape route
‘I can give you the politically correct answer or I can tell you the truth. Which would you like to hear?’ asks Mikhail Ivanov with a serious look on his face.
We are sitting in the Russian spring sun at a cafe in the popular Kitai Gorod quarter of Moscow. Formerly the home of the KGB’s infamous headquarters, the Lubyanka, it is now full of fashionable shops and trendy nightclubs. Moscow is a city with two personalities. Half of it flashes a Western-style, cosmopolitan face, where money flows freely and the only limits are the ones you set yourself. But from the other half come stony looks and distrust; the result of decades of subjugation under a harsh dictatorship. This contrast has been obvious to me ever since my arrival in Moscow; it’s a place where progress and stagnation exist side by side. One moment I’m standing outside a stylish club, the next I am walking past a grey concrete building where opponents of the Communist Party were executed en masse during the Soviet era. Many Russians stand with one foot in each of these worlds, and being aware of background proves crucial to understanding Russia’s tennis success.
‘Behind our most successful tennis players lies an enormous drive to earn money and escape from the material scarcity which they grew up under,’ Mikhail Ivanov tells me, once I’ve said I’d like to hear the truth.
One of Russia’s most respected tennis experts, Ivanov is now editor-in-chief of Tennis Weekend magazine. He tried to make a tennis star of his son and got him into a recognised tennis academy in France. But the food in France was ‘too good’, as he puts it – life became too comfortable and his son lost his appetite for success. Now 23, he is in Russia earning a bit of money as a tennis coach to help support himself while he studies.
‘Take Maria Sharapova [three times grand slam winner], who came from a small village somewhere out in nowhere Siberia,’ Ivanov says. ‘Tennis was the only means she and her father had of getting out of there. Or take Yevgeny Kafelnikov [Olympic winner in Sydney and later number one on the world ranking], whose father was a taxi driver in Sochi, close to the border with Georgia. Tennis was his only means of escape. I could go on.’
‘Not one single player comes to mind who had rich parents and who made it to the top,’ he continues. ‘Many of our top players come from shitholes outside Moscow where there is neither infrastructure nor educational opportunities. It’s not quite the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from there. Tennis is a means of escape.’
The Russian players’ hungriness to escape their circumstances makes good sense to me. But it still doesn’t explain why in the last ten years the country has suddenly gone from having one single player in the top 100 world female tennis players to occupying more than 20 per cent of the list. After all, Russia must always have had ambitous tennis players with the potential to join the world elite, but never before has this manifested itself with the dramatic results we have now witnessed. I ponder this as I leave Mikhail Ivanov at the Kitai Gorod cafe. Something must have opened the floodgates for the hungry Russian players. A couple of days later I realise that the answer is to be found in the depths of the Russian political system.
A Molotov cocktail of pent-up ambitions
In 1997, on a packed Centre Court at Wimbledon, the sixteen-year-old Russian Anna Kournikova caused a sensation by playing her way to the semi-final after defeating the world number ten, German Anke Huber.
True, she did lose the following day’s semi-final to the hottest star of the time, Martina Hingis, and later faded out, attracting more attention in fashion magazines than on the tennis courts, but her victory at Wimbledon proved to be the first in a Russian shake-up which would entirely change the anatomy of the world league table.
The seeds for Kournikova’s breakthrough were planted several years earlier, and by an unlikely gardener. Boris Yeltsin loved tennis. He started playing to combat stress, appointing the head of the Russian Tennis Federation Shamil Tarpishev as his personal coach and doubles partner. And while he was in office from 1991 to 1999, images of the tennis-playing president were often shown on television.
However, Yeltsin was not simply interested in tennis for himself, he was also a genuine connoisseur of the sport. He was deeply engaged in the cause of professionalising Russian tennis and often conversed face-to-face with Russia’s best players. He initiated substantial funding for facilities, coaches and travel budgets for the Russian Tennis Federation. In 1990 there were fewer than 200 tennis courts in Russian; today there are 2,500. Fifteen years ago there were 120 annual tournaments and today there are more than 1,000. In this way, Yeltsin both popularised tennis and gave people more opportunity to play it. It became a game for Russia’s VIPs. Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev played, as did Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev, and the country’s hotshot businessmen made many important deals over tennis matches. Even today, Moscow has tennis tournaments for businessmen which cost up to 2,500 dollars simply to participate.
Without realising it, Yeltsin opened the doors to a Russian Gold Mine. At the same time, the collapse of communism meant that tennis players no longer had to hand over their winnings to the state, greatly increasing the incentive to win. People had been given their passports back, so tennis players could leave the country. At last Russian players had the freedom and incentive to allow them to take to the world stage.
Kournikova was the first Russian woman to take advantage of this. She left for Nick Bolettieri’s tennis academy in Miami at the tender age of ten, and other child stars followed in her wake. As the former top player and coach at Spartak, Olga Morozova explained to me: ‘As soon as Anna Kournikova’s mother had raised the money to send her daughter abroad, all the other parents worked like crazy to find sponsors so that their daughters could follow suit.’
Kournikova became the first female tennis millionaire, New Russia’s first sex symbol and the first to enjoy the good life. While the gorgeous Russian dated Hollywood stars, her compatriots and their parents slogged hard to become next in the queue, all eager to taste the glamour, the fame and the money that went with success in world tennis. The tennis iron curtain had fallen!
Next in the Russian pipeline
Three hours’ drive from the bustle of Moscow lies Kaluka. As my driver said before I got out of the car: ‘If you need to go to the toilet, do it now, because you shouldn’t expect to see a toilet for the next three hours.’
Kaluka has absolutely no tradition of producing good tennis players. Even today, there are only two shabby indoor courts and seven equally miserable outdoor courts for a population of 615,000. Even so, tennis is why I have come to this town. This is where eight-year-old Sabrina lives with her parents. In Moscow, they are already talking about her. She recently signed a contract with the management company responsible for superstars like Dinara Safina and Elena Dementieva.
I am met at Kaluka’s town limits by Sabrina’s father Oleg who is waiting for me at a lay-by in an old white Lada. He is wearing a tight white T-shirt and smoking a cigarette out of the window. Two years ago he took his then six-year-old daughter with him to play tennis. Just like other children she wasn’t able to hit the ball to begin with, but even so he thought he saw potential in her. He reckoned that with his Master’s degree in athletics he could get her into good shape. Then he would simply have to get hold of the right coaches to help him. Today, two years later, Sabrina is considered to be the best eight-year-old girl player in Russia.
We follow Oleg to one of Kaluka’s few tennis courts. They are in a miserable state. There are huge holes in the asphalt and the net in the middle of one of the court is stretched between two rusty chairs. The concrete wall surrounding the courts has been sprayed all over with graffiti; in the clubhouse there is a dilapidated wooden hut. Oleg points to a little girl in a blue peaked cap running around one of the courts. It’s Sabrina, and this is where she trains. She has just played her first tournament in Moscow. Oleg explains that she unfortunately lost the final, but then her opponent was two years older than her. He also believes there was some kind of conspiracy between the umpire and the opponent’s coach, both of whom were from Moscow.
The facilities at Kaluka tennis court are Spartan
Today, Sabrina spars against a fifteen-year-old boy almost twice her size. As she effortlessly returns the boy’s ground strokes, Oleg looks at me and smiles proudly. Sabrina and her dad are very ambitious. They don’t just want her to be number one in the world, they want her to win at least two grand slams.
‘She set that goal herself when she was seven,’ explains Oleg. She recently asked him if they could buy satellite TV so that she could watch more tennis channels. He didn’t hesitate. Both Oleg and his wife Svetlana have PhDs in biology, but there is no work for them in Russia. They make ends meet by renting out fishing tackle. The good thing about that is that they can plan their own working hours – perfect when you are a full-time tennis parent.
Sabrina playing on one of the court in Kaluka
‘I have no other goals in my life,’ says Oleg. ‘My only goal is my child, so it is only natural for me to throw everything at her career.’
The hungry parents
Oleg’s greatest inspiration is Piotr Wozniacki, the father of Danish-Polish Caroline Wozniacki, the world number one for nearly two consecutive years. Oleg read about how Piotr had systematically worked to develop his daughter’s tennis skills from the age of five in a Russian tennis magazine. He recorded her training and evaluated her play every day. Oleg always has his video camera with him when he and Sabrina make the three and a half hour drive to Moscow to train with the best coaches. ‘I film all the coaches’ technical explanations and instructions so that I can learn from them myself and so be in a better position to help Sabrina,’ he tells me.
In addition, Oleg has what he claims must be one of Russia’s largest tennis libraries – a huge collection of books CDs, DVDs and professional magazines containing the stories of the most important figures in tennis on and off the court. He tries out all kinds of new ideas on the basis of his research. At one stage, inspired by something he read about reward systems, he set up ten targets on the courts in Kaluka, gave Sabrina 70 balls and promised her ten roubles every time she hit a target. He has stopped doing that now because it was getting far too expensive.
Oleg is aware that he is essential to his daughter’s success. Last week he succeeded in securing Maria Sharapova’s old coach’s help in training Sabrina. He expects that within the next four to five years the family will move to Europe or the United States to train, just like Sharapova’s, Safin’s and Kournikova’s. In fact, he already has his sights on German and French academies. ‘We share this project and we are prepared to sacrifice everything,’ Oleg tells me.
Sabrina with her father and mother, and the author
This attitude is not uncommon in Russia. There are thousands of ambitious parents who are willing to sacrifice everything for their children’s success. As Mikhail Ivanov told me during our conversation in Moscow: ‘Take away the parents, and you have no Russian tennis success story. In the US they describe the Williams sisters’ father as extreme and perhaps even raving mad. In Russia that kind of parent is quite normal. There are always ambitious, fierce and goal-oriented parents behind our top players. Without her parents, Svetlana Kuznetsova would never have escaped from St Petersburg. Without her mother, Elena Dementieva would never have got anywhere near the level she is at today. The list is endless.’ After my day trip to Kaluka, I return to Moscow and decide to spend the next couple of days testing Ivanov’s conviction. It quickly transpires that he is right. Take a look at the following list of Russian players whose parents have been crucial to their success:
Player: Dinara Safina
Parents: Rauza Islanova, herself a former top player, and Mikhail Safin, manager of the Spartak Tennis Club, also a former athlete.
Parental influence: Rauza took responsibility for coaching Dinara until she was thirteen years old. Both Rauza and Mikhail then prepared the way for her to go to one of Spain’s best tennis academies.
Player: Elena Dementieva
Parents: Viatcheslav and Vera, both tennis players.
Parental influence: Her parents tried in vain to get seven-year-old Elena into the Dynamo Sports Club and the Central Red Army Tennis Club. They eventually succeeded in getting her into the Spartak Tennis Club. Vera gave up her job as a teacher to dedicate herself 100 per cent to her daughter’s tennis career. She has a reputation for controlling everything in Elena’s life, from what she eats to who is allowed to speak to her.
Player: Svetlana Kuznetsova
Parents: Alexandr Kuznetsov coached six Russian Olympic cycling winners, and Galina Tsareva was six times world cycling champion and holder of twenty world records.
Parental influence: Because of her parents’ great careers in the sport, Svetlana was first tried as a cyclist, although she was eventually allowed to choose tennis. One of her greatest strengths today is her endurance, which may in part be due to that early cycling training. Her parents followed her closely and got her into an academy in Spain at an early age.
Player: Vera Zvonareva
Parents: Igor Zvonarev, who played in the Russian bandy championships, and Natalya Bykova, Olympic bronze in 1980 in field hockey.
Parental influence: Vera’s parents sent her to the Chaika sports club and found her one of the country’s best coaches, with whom she still works closely to this day.
Player: Nadia Petrova
Parents: Victor Petrov, Russian hammer thrower and athletics coach. Nadia Ilina, bronze winner in the 400 metres team race at the 1976 Olympics.
Parental influence: Nadia was introduced to tennis at the age of eight and actively coached by her mother. Her mother travels with her around the world even today.
Player: Elena Vesnina
Parents: Sergey Vesnin and Irina Vesnina.
Parental influence: Elena was introduced to tennis by her mother at an early age. She is coached today by her father and the famous Russian coach, Boris Konuyushkov.
Player: Alisa Kleybanova
Parents: Mikhail Kleybanov and Natalia Kleybanova.
Parental influence: Alisa was introduced to tennis at the age of four and coached by her mother for the first nine years of her career. Her mother took her to trial coaching sessions at different academies in France, but eventually found a Romanian coach for her in Italy.
Player: Maria Sharapova
Parents: Yuri Sharapov and Elena Sharapova.
Parental influence: Maria was four when she started playing tennis. Her father, a former Siberian oil worker, took Maria to the United States when she was seven, without a penny in his pocket. He drove a taxi to make ends meet while trying to convince American coaches of his daughter’s potential. He succeeded, and Maria was admitted to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Miami.
Player: Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova
Parents: Sergey Pavlyuchenkov and Marina Pavlyuchenkova, both tennis coaches.
Parental influence: Anastasia’s parents got her into an academy in France at the age of sixteen. Today she is coached by her father Sergey, and her brother Aleksandr is her sparring partner. The entire family follow her around the world.
Player: Anna Kournikova
Parents: Sergei Kournikov, a Greco-Roman wrestler and professor at the University of Physical Culture and Sport in Moscow. Alla Kournikova, a 400-metre runner.
Parental influence: Anna’s mother took her to the Spartak Tennis Club at the age of seven and to Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy when she was ten. Every week she pushed hard to secure extra coaching for Anna and worked behind the scenes to find sponsors.
Looking at this list it’s pretty clear that the best Russian women tennis players have all been spurred on by fiercely ambitious parents. Anna Kournikova’s mother inspired an entire generation of parents to make their children into tennis giants. All those parents had grown up during the Soviet era, unable to travel, to see the world or to earn serious money. That prison created a Molotov cocktail of pent-up ambition, which blazed up on the tennis courts. These parents drove their daughters to train incredibly hard at an early age, secured the best coaches for them and worked like crazy to raise the money that would give their girls a place at the best tennis academies in the world.
There are many contributing factors to the story of Russian tennis success but in the end it all seems to come down to those determined parents; their appetite and ambition. This not only explains the reason for the dominance of Russian girls in international tennis – it also gives us a clue as to the reason for the recent failure of British tennis.
Failure after failure
In 2009, Wimbledon, the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, was held for the 114th time.
In the stands sat the British Minister for Sport and Tourism, Gerry Sutcliffe. He had seen eight out of nine British tennis players crash out in the first round of Britain’s own tournament and was ‘embarrassed’.
He immediately ordered a post-mortem of the failure, demanding to know why the 60 million pounds worth of funding which the Lawn Tennis Association had been given had failed to produce results.
Sutcliffe’s enquiries came to the obvious conclusion: in light of this massive financial support, unequalled anywhere else in the world, it ought to be possible to deliver significantly better results. Shortly afterwards things got even worse, when the British national team suffered a Davis Cup defeat to Lithuania.
Tensions had actually been building prior to this point. A few years earlier the Lawn Tennis Association suspended the funding of two of its best junior players, following them publishing pictures of themselves on the social network Bebo, eating junk food and washing it down with alcohol.
‘Either they must behave like professional athletes or find something else to do. The sad thing is that I don’t think they always understand the unique opportunity they have been given,’ thundered the LTA’s chief executive, Roger Draper, over the incident.
Various reasons have been offered for the ongoing fiasco of British tennis. Back in the 70s and 80s, for example, the excuse for the lack of results was that the weather in Britain was not tennis-friendly; as soon as they got more indoor courts things would be different. But although the British now have plenty of indoor courts, the best facilities, some of the best coaches and certainly the best funding, they have still not succeeded in producing one single top player apart from Andy Murray. Why?
You can’t buy your way to hunger
The LTA’s National Tennis Centre is at Roehampton in south-west London. It is here that Britain’s young tennis hopefuls train in state-of-the-art facilities. There are well-kept tennis courts and rows of treatment rooms providing everything from physiotherapy to dentistry. The corridors of the centre are full of young British tennis players dressed head to toe in Nike, with trendy Wilson bags full of rackets over their shoulders and iPods in their ears. The National Tennis Centre feels sleek and professional – it’s not hard to imagine tennis superstars being groomed here. And yet, so far this hasn’t been the case.
On one of the indoor courts behind the thoroughly modern fitness centre I find Olga Morozova, racket in hand. She is training a Russian boy and girl. Both have come to London with their mothers for the express purpose of receiving Morozova’s prestigious coaching. Her matter-of-fact instructions and no-nonsense feedback fly across the net to the young players, who obey with alacrity. I have spoken to her many times on the phone during the last few months while studying the meteoric rise of Russian tennis. ‘When you have been to Moscow and seen it with your own eyes come and visit me,’ she kept telling me. ‘But not before.’
Morozova is a Russian tennis legend. She was the first Russian to reach the singles final in a grand slam – in 1974 she made it to the finals of both Wimbledon and the French Open. After retiring from professional tennis in 1977 she became coach for the Soviet national team and then for the British junior team. Today she lives outside of London with her husband Victor Rubanova, formerly coach at the Spartak Tennis Club for, among others, Anna Kournikova.
‘It has to do with hunger,’ she says as we stand talking by the net. ‘That is why the British players fail. They have no incentive to come to the fore, and you can’t buy yourself hunger. Neither the British parents nor their children are ready to make the necessary sacrifices.’
And with all this available funding, the trappings of success seem to come to young British players too soon. They can have a great time travelling first class on the British ‘tennis cruise’ without really having had to work for that privilege.
Wimbledon legend Martina Navratilova gave a similar explanation recently in an interview: ‘British players get coaching facilities served up on a silver plate without having to prove that they are willing to invest what it takes to become a champion.’
And four times grand slam winner Kim Clijsters said: ‘You have the best facilities you can have here in England. Most of the girls who make it to the world elite never had such facilities when they were growing up. I don’t think it’s necessary at such a young age to spoil kids or to treat them like stars.’
The most successful British female tennis player is Elena Baltacha. Not a particularly English name as I’m sure you can tell. She is actually from the Ukraine, where her father was a professional football player and later coach. The best British player over the last ten years, Andy Murray, has not had a typically British tennis upbringing. Apart from having had most of his tennis training in Spain, his mother – in almost Russian fashion – has always played a vital role in his career. Judy Murray has been heavily criticised in Britain for having pushed her two boys, Andy (number three in the world) and Jamie (Wimbledon mixed doubles winner) so hard. The fact is, however, that their performance shines brightly in the otherwise starless firmament of British tennis.
Judy Murray has also observed the lack of British hunger in the sport. She was recently quoted in several British newspapers saying: ‘You occasionally see the British junior players out there on the big stages at the junior grand slams, and they look like deer caught in headlights. If that’s the case, if you look scared to be out there, maybe you should be thinking about doing something else rather than playing tennis. In many ways, our kids are spoilt by the opportunities they have. We have to find a way to make them hungrier, to set goals which we then help them to achieve.’
Olga Morozova is now talking to the mothers of the two Russian players she has just been coaching. The mothers are avidly taking notes as Morozova explains the areas in which the children need to improve. One of the mothers gets a call on her mobile. It is the father calling from Russia to ask how his son did with his backhand.
‘Of course, it has to come from the parents,’ says Olga. ‘It would never occur to any four-year-old child that they should train for their tennis five days a week. For example, we have an English friend whose son plays field hockey and is pretty good. One day I asked him why he didn’t bring his son along to tennis. He hesitated for a moment before saying. “Yes, but I’ll have to ask him first.” “Ask him what?” I replied. “He’s six years old.”’ Olga bursts out laughing.
‘No, that’s not the way to do it. You must present the game to him and inspire him to like it. That’s your responsibility,’ she says.
As far as Olga is concerned, everything depends on the parents’ commitment.
‘It’s not enough for the child to have an appetite,’ she says. ‘It must apply to the whole family. I attach great importance to telling the parents what it takes, explaining why they must play with their children every day and get them to coaching five times a week. Being a tennis parent is tough, and there are masses of English parents who can’t be bothered. They’re lazy.’
I see evidence of this first hand at the second training session of the day. In contrast to the Russian tennis mothers, who show their children’s training logs to the coach and discuss the day’s programme, one English mother just sits on a bench reading a book. When I ask how she sees her role as a tennis mother she replies: ‘I like to see that he enjoys playing tennis and try to encourage him as much as I can.’ Ten seconds later she looks up from her book and says: ‘But I hope they’ll be finished soon so that I can get to the hairdresser.’
This is why Britain’s development of tennis talent trails so far behind the Russians. We might look upon the single-minded commitment of the Russian parents as extreme, but there is no doubt that it achieves results. Their commitment; their willingness to invest time and energy in their children’s careers far exceeds that of most British parents. Time and time again during my travels in the Gold Mines, passionate and ambitious parents turned out to be fundamental in fostering top performance.
Korea’s golf dads
As with Russian and tennis, on the face of it South Korea doesn’t seem like an ideal environment for people to master golf. In the winter, the climate is more reminiscent of Siberia than Florida. The green fees are the highest in the world, which you would have thought would scare most people off. And despite national interest in the sport there are still fewer than 200 eighteen-hole golf courses serving a population of 50 million. By way of comparison, Florida alone has more than 1,300 courses.
As usual we find a wealth of spurious explanations for the South Korean’s success. Some people trot out the tired idea that South Koreans are born with special golfing genes. Others say that the country’s history as a battlefield for superpowers (Japan, Russia and China) has built an overwhelming survival mentality into the South Koreans, while a third explanation is that after decades of needlework, Korean women have especially strong hands. The secret is much simpler than this. It comes down to the parent factor.
Korea is full of golf dads. One of the first things many fathers do with their daughters is take them to a golf course to test their skills. If they show potential, the fathers are ready to sacrifice everything. Just as Se Ri Pak inspired every one of the nation’s girls to pursue a career in golf when she won the Rookie of the Year prize in her first season on the LPGA Tour, her father Joon Chul Pak inspired an entire generation of parents to go for it lock, stock and barrel. He was a construction technician from the city of Daejeon. He had played amateur golf and when he caught a glimpse of potential in his eleven-year-old daughter he pulled out all the stops to make her the world’s best. One of the stories most frequently told about him in South Korea is about how he dealt with Se Ri Pak’s childhood fear of cemeteries. In order to put a stop to her phobia, he put up a tent in the local cemetery so that he and his daughter could spend time living among the gravestones. After dark he told her ghost stories until suddenly one night she said: ‘I feel warm here.’
‘Then I knew that she was strong enough. We packed up the tent together and never returned to the cemetery,’ he said later. ‘People said I was crazy, but I wanted to develop her self-confidence and toughness.’
Every day during my stay in Seoul I heard similarly incredible stories about how far South Korean parents are prepared to go for the sake of their children’s golfing careers.
When she was nine years old Ha-Na Jang’s father Chang Ho sold his furniture business in order to train his daughter full time. In 2009, aged seventeen, she became junior world champion. At that time, her father estimated that he had already spent a million dollars on her golf career.
Jiyai Shin was once number one on the world ranking list, but her path to success was far from easy. Her family always had to struggle to make ends meet and her mother was tragically killed in a traffic accident. Jiyai’s father then decided to give up his job as a priest and become a golf dad. He drove Jiyai from one golf tournament to another in an old van, stopping at the cheapest motels he could find along the way. Today he is able to relax, lean back and say ‘Mission accomplished.’
With their extreme dedication the South Korean parents seem to be balanced on a knife edge between madness and genius. Those who endorse them believe they are doing their children a huge service, while critics maintain that they are living out their own pent-up ambitions through their children, who are therefore never allowed to develop their independence or make their own choices.
But as Robin Symes, head of one of Seoul’s golf academies, said to me: ‘Far be it from me to judge what is right and what is wrong, but one thing is certain: if other countries want to match the South Korean women they need to take a good long look at what is going on here. There is no doubt that there are lessons to be learned from parents here.’
Choose the parents, not the kids
If you took the ambitious parents out of the overall equation, I am convinced that the production of top golf players in South Korea and top tennis players in Russia would grind to a halt. With their willingness to sacrifice everything for the success of their offspring, they have created these Gold Mines.
This makes perfect sense in the context of the other things we have learned about high performance. We have already seen that early starts are an ever-recurring theme in the stories of top performers. There is every indication that the training that you do consciously or subconsciously from between the ages of three and twelve has a decisive impact on the level of proficiency you will be able to attain in a given activity. And who holds the most influence over you at that age? Your parents, of course.
We must remember that adult life hems us in with many more obligations and responsibilities. Childhood is the period during which we have the most time at our disposal to develop and practise. It is certainly a time to be enjoyed, but it is also an ideal training period, an opportunity to build character and invest in the future.
The South Korean and Russian parents’ methods may seem extreme and even draconian, but they are not wrong as far as one thing goes: if children are to become really good they must train an awful lot. Top performances are by their very nature something extraordinary. It therefore takes something extraordinary to create them, and in many cases part of the winning cocktail consists of ambitious and dedicated parental involvement.
A good example of this is Géza Szilvay, a Hungarian violin educationalist who founded the East Helsinki Music School in the 1970s. Here he taught 200 randomly chosen five-year-old children three or four times a week in a tumbledown old building in the Finnish capital. Today, more than 30 years later, 95 per cent of those children have become professional musicians and 5 per cent of them are highly proficient amateurs. Géza has continued to teach the violin, now at the East Helsinki Music Institute. The interesting thing is that the entry requirements for the course related not only to the children, but also to their parents. Géza interviews the parents of interested children, looks them straight in the eye and asks them a simple question: ‘Are you willing to invest an hour to an hour and a half every day for the next five years teaching your child at home?’ If the parents’ reply is convincing, their child is admitted.
The implication is that, at least in Géza’s mind, the parents and their commitment are a better indicator of a child’s potential to become a successful musician than any of the qualities of the child themself.
It is not only in the tennis world, however, that we find ambitious, dedicated parents behind top performances. Even perceived geniuses like Tiger Woods, Picasso and Mozart had the backing of ambitious parents. As the American psychologist Ellen Winner concludes in her comprehensive study of talented children, The Driving Parent: ‘No matter how gifted children may be, they do not develop their gifts without a parent or surrogate parent behind them, encouraging, stimulating, and pushing.’
You learn to love what you do
It stands to reason that no three-year-old child will volunteer to sit down and play the violin several times a day. The same applies to children who are singled out at the age of seven to become ballet dancers. I don’t believe for one moment that all those children would go along with such a rigorous regimen on their own. No doubt many children end up in ballet schools because their parents had the dream of them becoming ballet dancers.
This parental ambition is vital – how else is a child to know what it takes to become good at something? And as we have seen, to really master something we need to spend at least 10,000 hours practising it. Left to their own devices a child might take a long time to discover what activities they feel really passionate about – or they might never. In either case all those valuable early years of practice time could be wasted.
A child cannot make the decision to become a top performer themselves. There is no way they can have any idea what they are letting themselves in for. But that is not the same as saying that children do not eventually share the ambitions which were initially their parents’. Many children come to enjoy the activities their parents chose for them because of the satisfaction inherent in mastering them.
They build up passion along the way or, as the South Korean golf coach Won Park puts it: ‘You learn to love what you do.’
Ambitious parents definitely challenge the conviction that children should be able to choose what they want to do. In answer to my question as to who had decided that their daughters should play golf, the South Korean parents often pointed to themselves as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
As one of them said: ‘If I don’t push my children to play golf and hit balls for hours on end on the driving range they will never find out whether they can be good at it.’
A statement like this can be an enormous provocation to parents who believe that children should be given the freedom to pursue their passions. The problem is just that if you ask a child to do what he or she wants to, they may very well choose to go on Facebook or play on a games console for hours. The counter argument is that in the long run you cannot push your children to do something against their will. This may well be true, but I can still tell you one story after another about Russian tennis girls and South Korean golfing girls who, no matter how strict, insistent and demanding their parents were, are still dedicated to them and deeply grateful for the qualities they have instilled in them. There is no trace of bitterness or regret whatsoever. Even the girls who failed in their golfing careers despite huge investment on the part of their parents were thankful for what they had been given. One such person was Adio Jung, who I met in Seoul.
‘Today I am the host of Korea’s most popular golf television show,’ she told me. ‘The only reason I can do the job is because I know what the game is all about. And how is that? Because my parents pushed me to train for hours every day for many years.’
It’s not always passion that fuels perseverance. Just as often it’s the other way around – perseverance fuels passion. External motivators like family expectations and internal ones like passion often work together, in symbiosis. In other words: it’s possible to do something because your parents say you should do it but to then gradually learn to love it.
The parenting dilemma
In 1985 the psychologist Benjamin S. Bloom carried out a comprehensive study of 120 men and women considered to be America’s top performers in a range of disciplines – everything from swimming and tennis to mathematics, neurology and music.
Along the way, Bloom and his team discovered a number of distinct common traits in the immediate environments in which the performers had grown up.
For one thing, their homes appeared to have been extremely child-focused. The children were very important and their parents were willing to do a lot – almost anything, in fact – to help them.
It’s interesting to reflect on. Perhaps the parents we refer to as ambitious are in reality simply those who get most involved with their children. And perhaps the worst parents are those who remain passive, perhaps in order to avoid responsibility.
As the successful tennis dad, Piotr Wozniacki, told me: ‘The most important thing is that you have time for your child and that you invest in them.’
Another example is the Korean/American golf star Michelle Wie who charged her way into the world elite as a teenager. When her results began to wane after a fantastic rookie season, her South Korean parents were accused by the American media of being the reason for her decline – the suggestion was that they had pushed her too hard. However, nobody accused her parents of pushing her too hard while she was playing a fantastic game and earning millions of dollars during her rookie year.
It is here that we find the great dilemma in the discussion about parents pushing their children. On the one hand we might think that Michelle Wie’s parents pushed their daughter too hard. On the other, we know in our heart of hearts that it was thanks to the many hours of training accrued in her youth that she became good enough to beat half the men in the qualifying round of a PGA Tour in January 2004.
Giftedness expert Ellen Winner of Boston College experienced precisely the same dilemma when she visited China in the late 1980s. She was ‘flabbergasted’ by an afterschool programme in which first graders were required to choose an art form such as calligraphy or traditional ink and brush drawing which they were then required to continue practising for six years. In her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities Winner describes how she asked a teacher: ‘What happens if a child changes their mind or says that they didn’t choose the right thing?’ The teacher looked at her as if she was mad and said: ‘That never happens.’
To begin with, Ellen Winner was appalled by the fact that children were expected to stick with something that had been thrust upon them at such an early age, but the more she thought about it the better she understood the logic behind it. As she explained: ‘It was like an arranged marriage. But then I thought, “There’s something really great about this, because these kids are really gaining mastery. And when they see that they’re becoming good, they develop motivation.”’
Back to Benjamin Bloom and his studies, which also showed that the parents of successful children greatly valued virtues like self-discipline and a strong work ethic. They tried to instil these qualities in their children – work before play, keep promises, keep pursuing your goals and so on. These qualities recurred in parents time and time again.
Rauza Islanova is a great figure in the Russian tennis parenting elite. First her son, Marat, became the number one male tennis player in the world, then her daughter did the same in women’s tennis. As she told me when I visited her in Monaco: ‘My kids know that I don’t accept sloppiness. For instance, I don’t hesitate to cancel a training session if they don’t have water with them. That’s poor preparation. To me, it’s a question of engendering quality. It’s not just a question of going out and training. You must think, and relate to what you are supposed to be doing. How can I win my game today? How do I win that next point? I have taught my kids to live and train quality-consciously.’
The parents in Bloom’s study also played a key role when their children improved and needed greater challenges. Children are frequently satisfied to be good at what they can already do. In that kind of situation it is largely the parents’ responsibility to push the children out of their position of security so that they can continue to develop. At some stage the children in Bloom’s study reached a level where they needed really competent teachers and coaches, which meant that their parents had to dedicate a lot of time, energy and (frequently) money in finding the right teacher and in driving their children to and from lessons or training. This is what Won Park calls ‘shopping’ – ‘The good parent does his or her research and finds the best golfing coach in their area, the best physiotherapist and the best sparring partners, in exactly the same way as you look for the best doctor or the best dentist.’
On my visit to the Spartak tennis club in Moscow I heard repeated mention of Anna Kournikova’s mother, who is a role model to other ambitious Russian parents. Although she didn’t know much about tennis herself, she consistently pushed hard to secure her daughter the best conditions. As Katya Cherkasov, who trained with Anna Kournikova at Spartak, explained: ‘Anna’s mother always asked the coach if her daughter could have some extra coaching after the others had gone home. My parents never did.’
If you don’t go to football training, we’ll take you off the team
Benjamin Bloom’s study shows that external factors can be extremely effective sources of motivation. Particularly in the early stages of taking up a discipline, children are dependent on this kind of external help; they need it if they are to stick with something and become really competent.
As coach Douglas Koh explained when I visited him at the Paradise Golf Academy in Seoul: ‘To my mind there is no doubt that parental pressure is important when children are small. At that stage they are not able to motivate themselves. They need to be pushed. Then over time, they become less and less dependent on it.’
This is obvious even among the very best performers. Bloom noticed that their parents encourage them to train and from time to time they use threats and sanctions. However, the purpose of this pressure is to stimulate the child’s intrinsic motivation. The parents Bloom observed did not say: ‘If you don’t practise the violin today you won’t get any pocket money.’ It would be something more along the lines of: ‘Oh well, we’ll sell the violin.’ Nor did they say: ‘If you don’t go to football training today you’ll be grounded all Saturday evening,’ but more likely: ‘Okay, then we’ll take you off the team.’
The point is that if the child really didn’t care whether or not they played the violin/football, the threats would have no effect.
This may all seem controversial and contrary to traditional principles of upbringing, particularly in the Western world. But we must remember that very few people will feel that an activity is fun if they do not feel they are good at it. And to get good at anything you have to work and push through obstacles, which is demanding and involves discomfort. It is in this kind of situation that young people need to encounter their parents as towers of strength who say: ‘Perhaps you don’t want to do such and such right now but you’re going to do it anyway because it’s important, and afterwards you’ll be glad you did it.’
As Rauza Islanova puts it: ‘If we agree that Marat is going to go running a certain number of times to get into shape, then I expect him to do so. Even if it is suddenly no longer much fun, I don’t let him off.’
Overriding children’s preferences is important if they are to gain the self-confidence that is derived from feeling really good at something. In her controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Chinese mother Amy Chua writes: ‘Western parents worry a lot about their children’s self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s self-esteem is to allow them to give up. On the flip side, there is nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t. My goal as a parent is to prepare my children for the future – not to make them like me all the time.’
Pushing your children has become taboo
Not many topics cause more controversy than parents who push their children, and people react in very different ways when I tell them about my observations in the Gold Mines. Some are angry, some are impressed and some nod their heads in recognition.
I often hear critics argue that for every Tiger Woods, Dinara Safina and Se Ri Pak, 1,000 other children with pacing parents never made the top but were devastated by the unremitting pressure to which they were subjected. Tennis has many stories of failure as well as of success – Steffi Graf, Mary Pierce and most recently Jelena Dokic all felt obliged to confront their fathers over the harsh training that they went through as children.
It is important to understand that not all pressure is the same. There are good ways to push people, and there are bad ways. In my experience, when things go wrong, it is invariably due to a misunderstanding of what constitutes helpful pressure. In Britain Judy Murray has taken a lot of stick for having pushed Andy and Jamie Murray to the top of their sport. But as Judy says: ‘There is a big difference between people who push their kids to do things, and people who push to make things happen for their kids.’
All these sensationalised, negative stories have made a lot of parents reluctant. Pacing as a concept has become taboo. As a result parents wrap up their children up in cotton wool out of fear. They are known as helicopter parents, and serious cases as Black Hawk parents, after the American military helicopter of that name – they hover constantly over their children without giving them a sense of responsibility, discipline or consistency.
Some people are likely to be of the opinion that these South Korean and Russian parents are driven by frustrated ambitions of their own, while we are driven by family values and the love of our children. I’m not so sure that is right.
During all my journeys around the world I didn’t comes across any cold, egocentric or callous parent-child relationships. On the contrary. They were close, warm and touching. This does not, of course, mean that there are no examples of the opposite – no doubt there are. But just because you push your kids doesn’t mean that you are doing it for yourself and not for them. These parents are at least as driven by love of their offspring as non-pacing parents.
The main evidence is that much of what they do with their children is extremely demanding and exhausting. It is not easy for these parents to get their children to do something they don’t always want to do. It is not easy to insist that they cannot miss training, or to convince them that they have abilities they did not know they had. And above all it is hardly pleasant to abandon some of their own career ambitions to focus on their children. In other words: it’s not that pacing parents don’t care about their children. It’s just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children.
Much easier not to
Things tend to go wrong for parents when they pace their kids too hard and without love, or at the other extreme, with over-protectiveness and dishonesty. This second group are afraid to be too demanding of their children, and shield them from what they perceive as hurtful truths. This is the sad story behind the young people who appear on TV talent shows, only to be told by Simon Cowell what their parents never dared tell them: that their singing is awful and that they have a hell of long way to go to be anywhere near good. This kind of harsh truth can be devastating after a lifetime of being insulated from certain realities, and is the result of what is commonly called mistaken consideration. Furthermore, how can your children be certain that you’re not lying when you praise them if you don’t also tell them the truth when it is not so pleasant to hear?
As Rauza Islanova expresses it: ‘I push my children all the time, and I’m really honest. “If you want to be good, you must do this or do that,” I say. I don’t threaten to kill them if they lose, but I do keep on asking them: “Why did you lose?” What was it that you didn’t do well enough, and how can you train to solve that problem? I insist that they don’t just accept their defeat but try to understand why they lost.’
Many parents act as though honesty will have a negative impact on their children’s self-esteem. As the tiger mother, Amy Chua says: ‘Parents frequently have conflicting feelings about achievement and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. They assume fragility, not strength, and as a result they behave that way.’
We are modern, civilised people who want everything to run smoothly. However, becoming seriously good never happens smoothly. Conflicts arise, honest feedback is required and there is a marathon of hard work involved which, once in a while, will make you want to give up and do something else. Enzo Calzaghe, the father and coach of boxer Joe Calzaghe, told me this: ‘Were there times during those 25 years when he’d had enough of me? Sure there were. And were there times when I was sick and tired of his ways and attitudes? You’d better believe it. But what brought us through was love and loyalty. It’s just like a marriage. You don’t survive 25 years of matrimony without fighting. But just because you fight, does that mean you have to get divorced? No, because the love is there. So long as there is love, you’ll fight it through together. If you don’t have a strong bond between you, one of you is going to bugger off as soon as you run into problems, as soon as the going gets tough.’
People who sceptically ask pacing parents the question ‘Who are you really doing this for?’ are often those who go to wine-tasting on Tuesdays and yoga classes on Thursdays while their children play tennis matches or practise the violin. They are often the same people who don’t attend their son’s football match on Tuesday evening because it’s too cold, dark and rainy. Perhaps these parents are the ones who should be asking the question: ‘Who are you really doing this for?’
What one has to understand is that pushing children in a constructive, helpful way demands time, commitment and persistence. Not bothering is much, much easier.
What you should never forget about
PARENTING
1. Parents are often a better predictor for how their children might grow their potential than the children are themselves. Behind most top performers you’ll find encouraging, stimulating and demanding parents.
2. There are different kinds of pressure. You can certainly push kids in bad ways, but you can also push them in good ways. I admit the balance is hard to find, but we often confuse egoistic and bullying parents with dedicated and engaged parents who are taking responsibility for establishing dreams and ambitions in their children.
3. The parents who criticise the idea of pushing children hard and who say they simply want their children to follow their hearts are often the same parents who go to wine-tasting on Tuesdays and yoga classes on Thursdays while their children are engaged in other activities.