At Grand Slam tournaments, her brother is usually the German solo entertainer by the second week at the latest. How difficult is this role?
There’s not much we can do about it other than make the sport more popular and hope that something will happen in the next 20 years. But I think German tennis is not doing so badly. Sure, we don’t have Grand Slam winners like Steffi, Boris or Michael. But we have a lot of good players. There are always phases like this. Switzerland had a golden phase with Federer, Wawrinka and Hingis. It will be decades before such players come back. There are also countries that constantly bring out good players. Like Spain, the children play tennis outside 365 days a year, the school system is different and the opportunities are different. But I hope that maybe I can get more children into sports with events like this. And maybe one day there will be a German Grand Slam winner who is not called Zverev.
What could be changed in the system to make German tennis more successful again?
To really make a difference, you have to make radical changes, not baby step here, baby step there. You need an idea or a five-year plan and then everyone has to say: We’ll take the risk, trust the plan, implement it and see what happens. At the moment everyone is saying we have to do something, but nobody has the courage to say: I’ll take responsibility.
If baby steps are not enough, what should a giant step look like?
First answer the question: What is German tennis? I can tell you what American tennis is like: giant serve, giant forehand, lots of hard court tournaments. The Spanish school is running around forehand, lots of sand, lots of topspin, lots of work, work, work… There used to be the Swedish school, with lots of volleys and slices, the Eastern Europeans with clean technique, standing to the side. But what is the German school? It starts with six months of playing on the world’s fastest surface, that’s the German carpet, the other six months on the slowest surface in the world, the German cinder. This is complete confusion for the kids, who have to change their tennis every six months. Then we have the school system: Children can’t sit in school for eight hours and then play tennis.
You also say that the attitude towards sport in other countries is very different.
I like to tell the story of how I was sitting on the plane next to an elderly lady from Germany who eventually asked me: What do you do for a living? I said I play tennis and she asked: Don’t you want to do something decent, study or do a bank apprenticeship. At some point I told her what I was earning and that it was a job that I could do something with. Same situation on the plane in America: As soon as you tell people I’m a professional athlete, they say: Wow, we wish you the best of luck.
2023-08-25 17:51:36
#Mischa #Zverev #brother #wanted #defeat
