Teenage Nadal was wake-up call I needed
- The Australian
- January 22, 2011
THIS week I told you about choosing tennis over football as a teenager. But following that I also had another huge call to make, one that is a big reason why I am playing a third-round match at the Australian Open today.
Some of you probably know that Rafael Nadal and I have been competitors and good friends since our teenage years, but you may not realise he was a major influence in my decision to leave home at 15 to move to Spain.
As juniors, our countries used to play against each other in team competitions such as the European Winter Cup, though I never actually had to play him as I was a year younger and played No 2 for Britain while he led the Spanish team. But we weren't holding tennis racquets when he said something that led to me moving to Barcelona.
Instead, we were part of a group of guys playing racquetball.
I was asking all the guys in this group who they were practising with and when Nadal said Carlos Moya, it was a big wake-up call.
Back home, because we never had the opportunity to play sport in school - something I think should change given there are great opportunities for people to make a living out of sport - I could only practise for 90 minutes, four days a week with my coach. Yet here was a rival hitting with one of the world's best players and training four or five hours a day for five days a week.
I realised I was not doing enough and knew I had to move. It wasn't something I wanted to do and I knew it would be tough because my older brother, Jamie, had moved to an academy at Cambridge when he was 12 but it didn't really work out for him. He got homesick and wanted to come home. I know my mum and dad were a bit worried about my decisions because they just wanted us to be happy, but after deciding I wanted to play tennis instead of football I needed to give it everything I had.
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