player – Tennisarchives.com

General First namePavel
LastnameKorda
GenderMale
CountryCzechoslovakia
Date of birth1935-12-12
Place of birthPardubice, Czechoslovakia
Date of death2019-05-01
Place of deathPraha (Prague), Czech Republic

About

The following interview with Pavel Korda was published in the Czech online newspaper iSport on 12 December 2015, Korda’s eightieth birthday. The original article can be accessed here:
Trenérská legenda Korda slaví 80! Vzpomíná na Lendla i Kodeše | iSport.cz

Interviewer: Jan Jaroch

They called him ‘Statni’ [‘State’] after the title of his position: coach of the Czechoslovak national tennis team. Someone even had the privilege of calling him ‘Hunac’, because of the lush growth on his chest. Almost all Czechoslovak tennis stars passed through his hands. With Jan Kodes, he won three major singles titles, and led the Davis Cup team to the salad bowl in 1980. Ivan Lendl only asked if he could address Korda informally after he had turned fifty. Pavel Korda is a true coaching legend. Today, he celebrates his eightieth birthday.

He is still a vital man, a fountain of tales and a witness to the most famous stories in national tennis. On the way to the interview, he ran for the bus as if he were twenty years old. “And then I almost couldn’t get on it,” laughs the man who once defeated Rod Laver at Stavnice.

JJ: Who among the tennis players who passed through your hands had the most talent?

PK: Some were talented in technique, others physically and still others were fierce in temperament. It’s important to combine all of that together. But if you ask me, Pavel Slozil was such a clean tennis talent, such a little pixie, but with wonderful legs. Jan Kodes was also a talented athlete, he had tremendous willpower. And he could have been even better.

JJ: In what sense?

PK: He is naturally left-handed, and if he had played tennis with his left hand, I think he would have been even more successful. But he took the racket in his right hand after his older sister Vlasta, with whom I used to play mixed. You know, the younger sibling always copies the older one. Jan also had a great left foot, he played football for Dukla Karlín and kicked the ball with his left foot, but he had his right hand for balance.

JJ: Did you try to encourage him to play left-handed?

PK: That wouldn’t have worked then. It was too late.

JJ: You coached Jan Kodes for over seven years. Are his three Grand Slams also your greatest coaching successes?

PK: When they told me five or six years ago that I was a coaching legend, I thought it was actually true. I am old enough for that, so I can tell you that it does me good. After all, I am still the most successful tennis coach in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. You can’t be mad at me for that.

David Kotyza (Petra Kvitova’s coach) has two Wimbledons, but I won one Wimbledon with Kodes and twice in Paris. I coached him for 42 Davis Cup matches, 31 of which he won. From the age of ten until she was ranked sixth in the world, I coached Regina Marsikova. I also coached Pavel Hukta. I was always successful, I didn’t realize how much I had achieved. But since I left the association in 2010, I have noticed it more.

JJ: You are known primarily as a coach, but at one time you were also the second-best tennis player in the country…

PK: My mother introduced me to tennis. She was a figure skater in Pardubice, but she suffered two serious sprain injuries and took up tennis. Her father was a wholesaler, he built a large crematorium in Pardubice. When we moved to Prague, she went to play at SIA, which was the Social Club for Engineers and Architects. There I collected balls for engineers for two crowns an hour, and that’s how I learned about tennis.

But my father wasn’t very happy about it. He wanted me to play football, like my younger brother Petr, who is five years younger than me (Petr Korda, senior, father of Petr Korda, former Australian Open champion). I played football for the student and youth team of Slavia. I saw Josef Bican training there. It was a great experience! But I couldn’t kick very well with my left foot and I preferred tennis.

JJ: And you rose to become one of the best tennis players in the country.

PK: It helped me that when I was about sixteen, my mother took me to dance master Land in Lucerne, which also benefited my tennis. I stayed there for a long time, and in the end, I even worked as an assistant for Mr Land. It was great physical training. The same goes for basketball, where I played in the second league with Spartak Dejvice. I played on the wing, and Jan Kukal, another successful tennis player and coach, played in the centre.
JJ: What was the life of a leading tennis player like in the early 1960s?

PK: I studied surveying at a vocational school, then I drew maps. They allowed me to work from six to two. I arrived at Stvanice at half-past two, we watered the centre court and then trained until the evening. We also went to Klamovka, where I had two hours a week twice a week as the second-best player in the republic and a Davis Cup player.

When I tell someone about it now, they just laugh. I didn’t have any breaks at work either. On the contrary, I worked to the standards, and as a representative I had to work ten percent more than the others. I got up for work at ten minutes to five. When we played a Davis Cup tie against Egypt in 1962, I didn’t get time off until the following Wednesday. I never even had my own coach

JJ: But your playing career also had its peaks, right? You beat Rod Laver at Stvanice in 1961.

PK: Back then, Prague played matches against Sydney or Melbourne, I don’t know why. I beat Laver 6-2, 6-4. And he won Wimbledon three weeks later. But I had a strange forehand, I held the racket as for the backhand and I was great against lefties. I never lost to any of them. I cut their backhand chop and went to the net. Laver tried to lob me, but I had an excellent smash and a twist serve. That’s how I beat others – Neale Fraser, Christian Kuhnke.

I once gave Niki Pilic such a lesson in Split that he cursed at me every time we met thereafter. I also think highly of the title I won in Linz in 1959. I received five thousand shillings for the win and bought a suit that I then got married in.

JJ: Was your win against Laver your greatest match?

PK: I consider my greatest match to be the five-set match I lost to the West German Wilhelm Bungert in the Davis Cup in 1961. I came from two sets down to equalize at two sets-all, and for the first time I experienced a standing ovation. I was already having cramps, the ball boys had to go to Strossmayerák to get a Frenchwoman to massage me. I played the fifth set in a coma, I don’t remember anything about it. Only later did my later protégé Jan Kodes, who was acting as a ball boy during that match, tell me that I was ahead 5-4 and 30-15 in the fifth set…

JJ: You have been a state tennis coach since 1970. You closely followed the career of a young man named Ivan Lendl.

PK: Yes, but I never coached Ivan. I know coaches who boast that they trained Lendl just because they met him at the NHKG club in Ostrava, but they never actually coached him. Neither did I. However, I did have him on national team selections. I first saw him when he was sixteen. He ran the hundred metres in fifteen or sixteen seconds. And he dragged his left leg behind him. He didn’t know how to run. And that was during the hundred metre run in the tunnel in Nymburk, when he had good shoes. But he learned.

Ivan was extremely intelligent, like his father. He could concentrate terribly well and squeeze everything out of himself. I experienced matches after which he came out of the shower and all you had to do was poke him with a finger and he would drop. He had a great talent for that – being able to force himself, to squeeze every last drop out of himself. Others would ease off at the first problem, he would turn it on even more. Berďa [Thomas Berdych] could be better at doing that. He’s a good boy, but mentally weak. That’s just how he is. He can’t force himself mentally to really go for the ball. If he could, he would definitely be better.

JJ: But Lendl was often beaten by his mother Olga.

PK: I played with Olinka [Olga Lendlova] in the final of the junior mixed competition in Pardubice. She was a great woman, but she was sadistically strict with Ivan. I had him on the team for the King’s Cup. We played in Chrudim and his parents came to watch the match. I waved goodbye to them and Ivan then took me to his room, where he was tidying up and putting his clothes in the wardrobe. “My mother forced me to do this,” he said to me. And suddenly he had a reaction, threw all his clothes out of the wardrobe and started kicking them around. I immediately told him to tidy up again. He did it in ten minutes. There were moments when he was really angry with his mother, but I couldn’t blame Olinka.

JJ: Later, however, Lendl admitted that without his mother’s strictness he would not have made it so far.

PK: He told me that at the world champions’ dinner in a restaurant on the Champs Elysées in Paris. I was sitting next to Anna Kournikova and suddenly the door opens and there’s Ivan in a tuxedo. He had just flown in from London by helicopter. He saw me at the table, came over and had a ten-minute monologue with me. I was so red. I said: “Ivan, everyone is waiting for you.” He said: “State, they can start when I get there.” That’s when he told me for the first time that if his mother hadn’t been so strict with him, he would never have been the number one player in the world. And he’s right.

You know, Ivan used to be very reserved, but he’s a great guy. When he was about 51, he played an exhibition at Sparta, and I went there with my wife. He was a completely different Ivan Lendl. We sat down together, he looked at me and said: Hunac – that’s what only he and Tomas Smid could call me, because my chest was a little hairier. The others called me Státní [‘State’]. So he said to me: “Hunac, can I ask you something? I’m 51 years old, Hunac, can I call you by your first name?” I was embarrassed and it was the first time in my life that I saw Ivan so pleasantly moved. He went back to America and for some time he called me twice a week so that he could address me informally.

JJ: Did you meet the young Martina Navratilova?

PK: She trained with us. We played three-on-three football in Podolí in the gym near the swimming pool. Martina also went there and kicked beautifully with her left foot. I always supervised the training myself. Once Jirka [Jiri] Hrebec, who was a bohemian type, returned from America and Pavel Huka poked fun at him: “Welcome back from America, did you get injured? You’ll need some physiotherapy.” And from that moment on I never saw Jirka train again. He went to Red Star with the other athletes. But if I went there, he wouldn’t do any exercise.

JJ: He didn’t like authority, did he?

PK: Jirka was a strange but excellent boy. He didn’t wear a jacket at the Davis Cup, he wore canvas trousers. His hair was long, reaching down to his shoulders, but if I had ordered him to cut his hair, he would have quit tennis. I have never ordered any player to do anything, because then they would refuse. You have to convince them to do it, that they want to do it themselves. And I was successful in that for the entire 41 years that I was an employee of the federation.

JJ: Have you ever had a fight with a player?

PK: Only with Franta (Frantisek) Pala, when he was a junior. There was a match between Stvanice and Sparta. The night before the match, I got stomach flu and went to play with Pala at ten in the morning. I gave him a hit in the first set when I still could. But then I barely reached a drop shot and fell into the net from exhaustion. And he called out to me: “Oh, yeah, the national team is counting falls here.” That was the first and last time in my life that I threw a racket across the entire court. Then Franta and I had a big fight in the locker room. But we made up again.

JJ: What was Tomas Smid like, your other famous protégé in the Davis Cup?

An incredibly talented boy, he also played excellent football and skied because his father was a physical education teacher in Pilsen. Tomas could do anything, but he wasn’t the training type. He went to train, chose a young player, beat him 6-2, 6-2 and then left. Only for the Davis Cup ties did he train in the way that everyone else did, and then he always played extremely good tennis for the next three or four tournaments.

JJ: You come from the famous Korda tennis dynasty. Ironically, you never coached your nephew Petr, the 1998 Australian Open champion.

PK: I was a coach in Luxembourg at the time, Petr was taught tennis by my brother. And I taught my brother to play tennis. I was about sixteen, and that’s when I first tried coaching.

JJ: Would you say there is a school of Czech tennis?

PK: Definitely. We are an intelligent nation, even if we sometimes screw up the things we do well. We had and still do have a lot of great methodologists, our game is all-court tennis. That’s why I like Federer, the greatest player of all time. Even if Djokovic won more Grand Slams, he would be second for me. And do you know why? Because he only goes to the net to shake hands.

Our tennis was and still is great. Just take Petra Kvitova, Safarova, Berdych, the Fed Cup, the Davis Cup. We are an extremely skilled nation and thank God that we have that in tennis. I hope I’ve helped a little bit.

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