KEY POINTS:
Every time Marina Erakovic steps on to a tennis court, far from home and familiarity, music is playing; music only she can hear. This is a private soundtrack, reverberating inside her 19-year-old head, a habit, a comfort. Erakovic lets the sound consume the rustling crowd, the thock-thock of the yellow balls, the announcer's voice calling her name, the crashing of her own heartbeat.
Sometimes it's Auckland rockers Pluto, sometimes a bit of funk, but most recently one song has been playing over and over: Read My Mind by Las Vegas indie outfit The Killers.
"I never really gave up on breaking out of this two-star town", sings Killers frontman Brandon Flowers as Erakovic lines up her first serve in Zagreb or Melbourne or Dothan, Alabama. "I got the green light, I got a little fight, I'm gonna turn this thing around." The music, she says, is more of a habit than a superstition; she's trying not to let her little mental routines become too obsessive.
This young woman is the brightest hope of New Zealand tennis, the best this country has produced in decades. She has gone further, and faster, than any other local player of her era, reaching a giddy fifth in the world junior rankings while she was still at school and winning the US Open doubles final as a junior. Now Erakovic has a new mission: to become one of the planet's 100 top female players. Gradually, it is happening; her world ranking has gone from 281 a year ago to 165, with a career high of 147 in January. It is a lonely journey.
Getting ahead in tennis means playing as many matches as humanly possible, standing on 1000 baselines, hitting one million volleys, flying across the world and staying in one average hotel after another. Every week, there's another tournament somewhere. In the past year, Erakovic has played in France, Italy twice, the Netherlands several times, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taiwan, Auckland, Melbourne, California, Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Cologne and Zagreb (where we persuaded her to stand still long enough to be photographed). She does have a travelling companion at any given time, it's either her father Mladen or one of her two coaches, Michiel Schapers or Marcel Vos.
It can, says Erakovic, be a solitary life. You're not surrounded by your family or your close friends, your true friends. You do meet nice people on the tour, and one week you might find someone you know at a tournament, but you can't really make great friends because next week they'll be your opponents.
After each day of playing or training, she spends her evenings in her hotel room or, in cities like Amsterdam where she's lucky enough to have a host family, at home reading the classics - To Kill a Mockingbird is her favourite, and she's just finished The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James' 1881 tale of a young woman trying to discern her destiny in a Europe full of intrigue and isolation. Not surprisingly, it struck home for Erakovic, who has plenty of time to think about destiny and fate and how all the parts of her fit together; her Croatian heritage, her New Zealand life, her future.
Most nights, she'll also practise her little guitar, a tennis-racket-sized instrument she bought last year; or chat online to friends on MySpace. She doesn't go out much, and doesn't drink alcohol anyway, but when she does escape it's to the movies. She loved the romantic comedy The Holiday and has, like most of us, been plagued by guilt since she saw An Inconvenient Truth. "I do sometimes worry about the amount of flying I do but what is my option? Swimming to Wimbledon?"
This week Erakovic embarks upon her biggest challenge yet: qualifying for the French Open at Roland Garros in Paris. If she qualifies, it will be her first senior Grand Slam tournament, and will hopefully set her up for Wimbledon in June as long as a nagging back injury allows her to play.
At the time of publication, Erakovics spine was behaving itself, but as she knows from experience, just a millisecond's bad luck is enough to aggravate a shoulder or ankle. "It's very tempting after you've hurt yourself to think, Why did I run for that ball? Why did I let my foot land like that? If only I hadn't taken that last stride in that particular way but once you've done it, you can't agonise. All you can do is make sure you recover as well as possible."
All this is why professional tennis players, once they reach the big tournaments, have been known to smash rackets into nets and scream abuse at umpires; a habit Erakovic hasn't acquired. "It can be hard sometimes but you know what? I like this life. I chose it. I get to see the world, I get to travel, I get to do something I have done since I was a little kid, something that's familiar. There are a lot of ups and downs, but in the end, the ups are so great you have to keep going.
"And in a way, a little injury can be a good thing. I really believe that everything happens for a reason. After a run of bad luck, you're going to get something good. I believe that."
In her first memories, Erakovic is swimming in the sunlit sea off Croatia's Dalmatian coast. The holiday island of Brac, where the family spent their vacations, is an hour by boat from Split, the beautiful city of Roman ruins and cobbled streets where Erakovic was born in 1988.
Erakovic was only 6 years old when the family left for New Zealand, so her life in Croatia is just a few snatches of recollection. We were visiting my grandparents in Serbia, and my sister Julia and I were eating breakfast. I remember Julia rushing outside to my grandparents shouting Marina ate the whole egg! It was my first egg, I guess.
To a child, life was idyllic but as the former Yugoslavia crumbled, the region was consumed in bloody chaos and ethnic cleansing, forcing her grandparents to flee Serbia. In 1994, Mladen Erakovic and his wife Ljiljana decided they wanted a better life for their daughters and contacted the New Zealand embassy in Rome. They were approved immediately - Mladen was first mate with a shipping company and Ljiljana an academic with a Masters in Economics and arrived in Auckland soon afterwards, just as Splits most famous son, Goran Ivanisevic, reached the finals of Wimbledon for his second time.
Young Marina spoke no English, and found the first six months of school difficult. "I remember being so nervous and saying to my sister, Julia, how do you spell elephant? How do you spell lion? I was worried about everything; fitting in, speaking the language. But I settled in."
Now, Erakovic doesn't feel the fieriness so characteristic of passionate Croatians. "I love going to Croatia and seeing my relatives and the beautiful coastline, but apart from that I don't have much connection any more. It's a different culture, where people speak their minds; if they don't like something, they'll let you know. They're much more forthright, I guess but it's a spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum they love to laugh, they get so happy and thrilled and excited by life as well.
"In all honesty, I feel like a normal Kiwi girl; I tend to be much more even-tempered."
Amid all the initial strangeness of life in New Zealand, the white-bread sandwiches and the endless lawns, one thing was familiar. "Tennis was something we all knew how to do, something we did together to keep our sanity", says Erakovic, who as a 6-year-old started accompanying her dad to the local tennis club in Auckland, just as she had in Split. "I took her along to Western Park [in Freemans Bay] one day and as usual, she was entertaining herself, hitting the ball into the wire mesh around the courts", Mladen Erakovic says. "A coach saw her and recommended that she goes to Auckland Tennis, and from there it all happened; she was picked up for their talented players programme."
From there, the path was set: wins at club tournaments, then regional, then national, coaching from former Wimbledon finalist Chris Lewis and his brother Mark. They helped Erakovic develop the all-round game that other coaches and senior players now praise for its diversity. She has avoided the trend for some female players to develop titanic groundstrokes at the expense of the games more delicate techniques. By 2002, Erakovic was clearly on her way to glory, becoming the only New Zealand player ever to hold all junior age titles in one calendar year: under-14s, under-16s and under-18s.
After she graduated from Glendowie College in 2005 achieving university level bursary and briefly toying with the idea of following Julia into a law degree, as her mother proudly tells me, Erakovic sat down with her father to decide what would come next.
"When I realised what kind of life tennis is", says Mladen Erakovic, "I said to Marina, Listen, nobody can decide this for you. It's your decision. You have to decide what you need to do. If you want to go to university, I'd be quite pleased. Because for the profession Marina wants, she can't have the same young life as her friends. She can't go out every night and go to the disco, and that can be hard. She realises that to achieve her goal in tennis, she needs to sacrifice the other side of life. She's quite clever on that."
A long time ago, Erakovic decided he wouldn't make his daughters life more difficult by pressuring her from the sidelines. "Like any parent watching their kid playing tennis, you want yours to win especially when you don't know much about the game; winning or losing is what you care about. But if you're smart enough, you realise it's the kid who is playing, and they will win and lose, and you have to accept it as it goes.
"But it's not easy", he says, "to be a tennis parent. I don't think that anybody realises. It's the same with any performance sport. I know parents who take their kids to swimming at four o'clock in the morning. I've seen some strange people around, sure, but mostly I see parents who really, genuinely support their kids."
That support is financial as well as moral. Until last year, the Erakovic family was spending $50,000 a year of their own money on Marina's career, which is also supported by sponsors Lufthansa, Regency Duty Free and New Zealand Tennis. That meant long hours and sacrifice for both parents. Because Mladen Erakovic was determined not to abandon his daughter to the loneliness of the road, he would divide his time between travelling with Marina and his work as a petroleum tanker captain for Wellington's Silver Fern Shipping. Sometimes he would see Ljiljana for only 20 days a year in Auckland, where she is now a PhD and senior lecturer at Auckland University's business school. Then, last year, came a lifeline.
In the scorching grandstands at the Australian Open juniors competition in Melbourne a few years back, Auckland Tennis chairman Alan Chester saw a distressing sight. "I sat and watched one of our young Kiwi lads get beaten. He was very upset, as the players are when they're young, and he came off the court and there was no support whatsoever for him; no coach, nobody. His opponent came off the court and had two coaches looking after him and was surrounded by supporters; and I thought to myself: we have to do something about this."
Chester, himself a former champion junior and present holder of 38 age-group national trophies, came home and set about creating the Seed Foundation, an innovative funding body aiming to help young stars into the big-time. "Our tennis system produces top kids, and Marina is the perfect example, but there's no pathway for them to go beyond New Zealand", says Chester, grey-haired and leather-jacketed, sitting in an Auckland cafe one showery Wednesday. "There's no point producing all these great juniors if we don't also help them kick on. It costs US$125,000 [$170,000] a year to be on the [international] circuit, and that's beyond the reach of most people.
Funded by donations from ASB Bank and private benefactors (some wealthy donors, some ordinary fans), the Seed Foundations selection panel of former top players Brenda Perry, Chris Lewis and Brett Steven identifies young players who have the magic combination of personality and natural ability. "They can't just be talented", Chester says. "They've got to be driven, ambitious and determined because without that mental strength, they'll never make it. Being on the tour is a very lonely and difficult life, especially for New Zealanders, and especially for the girls, because the vast majority of coaches are men. We're very conscious of that; it's a difficult road. They need financial help and the support of people around them."
In April 2006, Erakovic became the first recipient of Seed funding, followed by Sacha Jones, now 16, who is aiming for the world-number-one junior ranking. Chester won't give away figures but it's plain the foundation covers much of that $170,000 annual bill, as well as analysing each player's business strategies and helping them budget for accommodation, food and travelling coaches.
"We're also creating a nice little family", says Chester, who is organising a group of supporters to attend Wimbledon and ensures the players progress is constantly monitored. "None of this is any guarantee that the players we've chosen will make it", he says. "It's high-risk for us. But we have to do something. We're giving them their best shot but we know full well they're pushing their bodies to the limits, physically and emotionally."
He believes that without a system for pushing talented youngsters, New Zealand would continue losing players to America, Australia and the United Kingdom, all of which are always looking for Davis Cup recruits. "We were becoming a feeder for other countries", he says. Without Seed, the possibility of more of our top young players being snapped up by other countries is a real danger.
In 2005 the national funding agency Sport and Recreation New Zealand (Sparc) announced it would help revitalise the sport, which attracts more than 350,000 recreational players, and is working with Tennis New Zealand on a new strategic plan but tennis is not regarded by Sparc as a high-performance sport such as cycling or rowing. It's chicken-and-egg - without superstars like Sarah Ulmer or the Evers-Swindell twins, tennis can't attract the money it needs to create the superstars of tomorrow.
"The slow grind towards the top 100 can be especially brutal for New Zealanders", says New Zealand Federation Cup captain David Lewis, who represented the country in the Davis Cup throughout the 1980's and early 1990's and himself reached a world ranking of 152 as a professional.
"For a New Zealander to tour in Europe is very tough simply because you are so far away from home and family", says Lewis, who spent the past decade coaching Europe's top young players in Switzerland and Germany and has worked with Erakovic in recent years. "I remember being a young player at those international tournaments. You're staying in an average hotel in an unfamiliar city where you might not speak the local language, and if you get knocked out in the first round, it can be a very lonely time. All the European players can go back to their home bases, but you've just got to wait until you can move on to your next tournament in another city."
"Having a coach with a home base in Europe, as Erakovic does in Amsterdam-based Michiel Schapers, is enormously helpful", Lewis says, and he would like to see this country set up permanent bases in Europe and the United States, where New Zealand players could train, rest and take refuge between tournaments.
Erakovic elected not to play Federation Cup this year but Lewis hopes she will participate in 2008 he knows, like everyone in tennis, that the sport will never return to its past glory if New Zealanders don't start shining in the team events and climbing the world rankings.
"For evidence", says Chester, "just look at the ASB Classic rounds when Erakovic steps on to the court. In the first round of the tournament there's usually just a low hum among the crowd but last year and this year the stands were packed with people watching Marina", he says. "The public is craving another Kiwi champion."
Erakovic is on the cusp, as she showed at the ASB Classic this year. After defeating the world number 90, Meilen Tu, she came within two points of beating Eleni Danilidou, then ranked 36. "That would have been a breakthrough and Marina knows that", Chester says. "The chance slipped by but losing is part of the learning process, and that's what you can't learn playing tennis in New Zealand. When you get out into the world, you realise you're not a big-shot any more."
Being a big-shot has been Marina Erakovic's biggest problem. "I don't want to sound big-headed", she says, "but as a junior one of my biggest problems was that I was too good. I didn't have anybody to really challenge me in New Zealand, which meant I had to go overseas to face difficult opponents. That doesn't help you develop much. I think I was a little bit disadvantaged growing up in New Zealand, because I don't mean to blow my own horn here, but I was always better than most kids, and I never had that competition I needed. The other girls around me didn't challenge me; I was always on top but in Croatia, there's so many kids wanting success. In Auckland, half the courts are empty."
Mladen Erakovic thinks that may be one factor holding New Zealand back. "In Europe, you'd be living in the big buildings with a lot of kids, so when you got on the street you have to fight for yourself; there's competition everywhere in life. In New Zealand, much more is provided and organised, so I think that competitive edge is a little bit taken away from the kids." Which is better? I ask. Mladen Erakovic laughs. "Who is having better tennis players, Europe or New Zealand?"
Now, a lack of competition is the least of Erakovic's problems. She's quietly hopeful for Paris and Wimbledon but even if she's knocked out in the first round, life goes on - there's a family summer holiday in Croatia to look forward to.
So is there ever any romance on the tennis tour? "Sadly, no", she sighs. "I'm basically one week to the next in a different place. It's pretty hard to develop any sort of relationship that'll stand for a while. But if I want to achieve this goal, I know have to make some sacrifices. It's only a 10-year thing, after all, and who knows what life will be after that? But right now, the potential rewards are pretty good."
- Canvas
