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By Eleanor Preston
 Watching
Juan Carlos Ferrero shaping up to hit one of his trademark
blistering forehands is a fascinating sight. He stands his
ground, legs taut and eyes on the ball, and just when you
think he’s going to whack seven bells out of it, everything
goes into slow motion. At that moment, as he makes contact,
he is suddenly gentle, as though stroking a sleeping kitten.
Of course there’s nothing remotely gentle about it by
the time it comes cannoning over the net, as all Ferrero’s
opponents can testify. Of all the skills Ferrero has in his
talented hands, it’s the forehand that took him to the
top of the world rankings and won him the French Open title
last year, and it’s the forehand that may count as the
most penetrating weapon when he returns to Paris to defend
his title.
However, Ferrero is anything but a one-trick pony. There’s
the serve, the movement, the glacial coolness under pressure
and most of all the belief that it’s his destiny to
be this good.
If Ferrero is a fatalist then life has given him bitter cause
to be. For although his childhood in Onteniente, near the
south-eastern Spanish city of Valencia, was happily spent
with sisters Ana and Laura and parents Rosario and Eduardo,
the family was devastated when Ferrero’s mother was
stricken with cancer. He was only 16.
“It was tremendous blow and by far the saddest time
of my life,” says Ferrero. “I took it very badly
and I was on the verge of giving up tennis but then I thought
of carrying on for her because she liked me to play tennis
for her.”
Rosario Ferrero was the first person he thought of when he
fell to his knees on the Court Philippe Chatrier after hitting
the winning point, having overwhelmed Martin Verkerk in the
French Open final. He looked up to the skies and blew her
a kiss.
“In my mind, she was in the first row,” he says.
“I felt a lot of emotions, a lot of joy for myself,
for people around me, my family, my coach and all those people
who supported me all along my career. I thought about them
all at that moment. I thought about myself, too, because it
was the first time I was living such a situation. I was watching
the ground, and I thought, ‘This is in my pocket, and
nobody can take it away from me.’”
Ferrero is not a man to pour his heart out to strangers. In
matches his face barely registers emotion, save for the occasional
muttered exhortation in Spanish. Off the court, in interviews,
he worries about his English and so spends much of his post-match
press conferences avoiding eye contact and speaking quietly
and quickly, as though he wants to get the whole thing over
with as soon as possible. Even in his native Spanish Ferrero
is a reticent interviewee.
Since first being promoted by the ATP three years ago as one
of the faces of their “New Balls Please” advertising
campaign, however, Ferrero has been forced to embrace fame,
albeit reluctantly.
Record crowds packed the Recinto Ferial de la Casa Campo stadium
to see him win the Masters Series tournament in Madrid last
October, and more than 3,000 turned up to one of his autograph
sessions. He finds it hard to walk down a street anywhere
in Spain without a gaggle of excited teenage girls following
him.
He even has a posse of celebrity friends. As a huge fan of
superstar soccer team Real Madrid he has met the squad several
times and big-name players such as Zinedine Zidane, Raul and
Roberto Carlos, and David Beckham came to watch him play in
Madrid.
His best friends are Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia (who is,
incidentally, an old flame of Martina Hingis) and World No.
2 motorcycle racer Sete Gibernau, and his hobbies have the
jet-set smack you’d expect from a man who has earned
more nearly $9.97 million in career prize money. When he is
not watching Gibernau race bikes, he is racing them himself
or picking out another sporty number to add to his collection
of fast cars.
“I’m the same as always,” he says, when
asked how the riches and glamour of a successful athletic
career have affected his personality. “The money does
not change me, the travel does not change me, the victories
do not change me. I am the same person as 10 years ago, so
people see me as the same person as before. I think that people
see me as a normal person, that I am a good guy, not only
on the court but out of the court.”
Ferrero is anxious to remain as unspoiled as possible by the
money and success his talents have afforded him. And his recipe
for the perfect life could not be simpler: “I want to
win some matches; spend some time with my family because we
are often apart; go to watch Real Madrid play soccer and to
watch motorbikes and rallies because it is different from
tennis.”
If Ferrero is ever tempted to get carried away with his success,
he need only think back to his humble beginnings and the day
when his father handed him a racket at age 4.
“When I first got a racket I aimed at the electrical
sockets that were in one of the walls of the textile shop
my father owned,” he says, smiling. “I don’t
know how many electrical sockets I broke, but I’m sure
it was more than 20. The truth is that I loved to hit and
it didn’t matter to my dad that he had to change the
electrical sockets, because he loves to play tennis himself.”
Eduardo Ferrero is still his son’s mentor and travels
with him all over the world, alongside Antonio Martinez, the
man who has coached Ferrero since he was 9 years old and saw
him through the troubled times of his teenage years. Ferrero
boarded at Martinez’ academy in Villena, about 25 miles
from the family home and the coach remembers the Ferrero of
that time as an awkward young man, introverted and suffering
under the burden of his mother’s illness.“
From then on, we began a relationship that gradually transformed
into a great friendship and deep affection,” Ferrero
says of Martinez. “I could say that he became my best
friend and almost my second father because we were together
much of the time. Dur-ing those days my mother would bring
me to practice after school. I remember that she always prepared
a snack with milk for me and that I had to do homework during
the car ride that took almost half an hour.”
He still lives at the academy, which is now run in his name
for promising youth aged between 14 and 21, sharing a modest
apartment with Spanish satellite player Israel Matos. A playboy’s
life in some sun-drenched tax haven is not for Ferrero.
He is such a homebody that at 14 he turned down an offer most
budding tennis players would kill for when he was asked to
go and work at Nick Bollettieri’s academy. He said no
to that offer, and a similar request from the Spanish Tennis
Federation’s Center of High Performance in Sant Cugat,
because he could not stand to be away from home. “I
didn’t want to go because I was much more comfortable
in Villena, with my family and my friends,” he says.
Indeed, Spain could scarcely hope for a more fervent patriot
or Davis Cup servant. He was the hero of the hour in 2000
when he beat Lleyton Hewitt in the deciding rubber of the
Davis Cup final in Barcelona, a moment that shares equal billing
with the French Open in Ferrero’s personal pantheon
of achievements.
On that occasion the Spanish crowd created a memorably voluble
atmosphere. Oddly, for such a man so determinedly low-profile,
Ferrero thrives in the noisiest, most daunting arenas in the
world—he thrills at playing Davis Cup, thought nothing
of taking on Andy Roddick in the cauldron of the Arthur Ashe
Stadium and regards the Court Philippe Chatrier as his backyard.
“I like to play in front of big crowds and in big stadiums,”
he says simply.
For a man bred with clay in his veins, they don’t come
any bigger than the Stade Roland Garros. Time will tell whether
he is ready to make it his own once more. |
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