Travelling between tournaments, from country to country, barely able to feed herself, Maria Marfina of the former Soviet Union recounts her life on tour as a female tennis professional, and the gruelling cost of success it entailed.
From the age of seven, Marfina now 37, was drilled for success through painstaking methods.
“I had to play the wall day in day out, I had to try and beat the wall” she said.
“It (the ball) kept coming back and back,” she recounted.
She was lucky to have a wall to practise against; many of the children didn’t even have this “luxury”. There were two indoor tennis courts (the rest were outside in the freezing Russian winter), a wall and 28 children at her tennis club. To play inside or with the wall, you had to be one of the best players, put simply, you had to win, losing meant you were in the cold with 20 children on two courts.
“In winter we had only two courts and 20 people wanting to play on them,” she recounts.
“If you are not good, you are not going to get a place on a court,” she said.
I would suggest that if a tennis club in England employed a philosophy akin to this, they would be reported to the governing bodies extremely quickly.
Marfina developed a knack for winning, and progressed through her club and turned professional age 17.
As one of the top players in Russia she was given the staggeringly generous sum of $2000 to help her on the way, not a massive amount of money, either then or now, and it wasn’t sufficient to really kick start her professional career.
The first step of her professional career was a long trip to South America playing small tournaments with even smaller prize money. A lack of money ensured back breaking long coach trips across the continent and she was only able stay in modest accommodation. Money was so much of a problem that amenities most people take for granted weren’t accessible to her.
“It was a privilege to have a can of coke,” she said.
It wasn’t the life of fine dining and fancy restaurants the top players are used to, merely eating to survive the rigorous nature of the tour.
“We couldn’t afford food or to go partying,” she said.
The worst part however, was the immense loneliness of the tour. The continuous solitude she had to cope with was clearly hard to deal with.
“I couldn’t afford to bring a friend or a coach, so I had to travel on my own”, she said.
Such was the grind of the tour; she felt she lost a sense of identity.
“At the age of 21 I didn’t even know where my home was,”
Throughout her career she was lucky enough to play against some of the best players in the game, she remembers playing Jennifer Capriati and irrespective of what tactic she used, Capriati was far too good.
“She was like Serena Williams now, she was just too big and powerful,” she said.
The Russian retired age 25 after having reached a career high singles ranking of 350
Although she talks of the struggle of the tour, she looks back on it with complete fondness and with a smile on her face. A career she would encourage for her children if they wished to peruse such a career.
“Only if they wanted to do it,” she said.
Currently coaching the next wave of English talent, she is using her first hand experience to nurture our home grown talent to excellent success. She has coached two players to a national level, and maybe we shall see one of them reach the level she did, she is without doubt a great addition to British tennis.
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