No girlfriends. No booze. Just tea and Yorkshire grit: how our new tennis hero is beating the world
As Kyle Edmund, 23, stuns fans by powering into the semi-finals of the Australian Open ...
‘He deserves every success he gets’
LIKE any proper Yorkshireman, Kyle Edmund is a creature of simple tastes.
He rarely sets foot on the celebrity circuit, has little time for posh food, and turns a delicate shade of pink whenever his pale skin encounters tropical sunshine.
Before Christmas, the teetotal 23-year- old celebrated the end of the tennis season by treating himself to a day out in Harrogate, touring the headquarters of Yorkshire Tea, before sitting down for what he called ‘a good cuppa’.
After that, Edmund drove to the village of Tickton, just outside Beverley, where his businessman father Steven, 49, and mother Denise, 50, live in a modest £350,000 bungalow where he was raised with his sister Kelly.
There could hardly be a greater contrast with the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, Australia, where he yesterday became the toast of British tennis by earning a place in the semi-final of the Australian Open and cementing his status as the successor to Andy Murray.
Edmund stunned world No 3 Grigor Dimitrov — who has earned £11 million in prize money, once stepped out with Maria Sharapova, and now dates pop star and X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger — in four gruelling sets, winning 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.
The result sets up a semi-final at 8.30am UK time tomorrow against Croatia’s Marin Cilic. It also leaves Edmund — who boasts zero celebrity ex- girlfriends, and career earnings, before this week, of around £1.5 million — just two victories away from becoming the tournament’s first British men’s singles champion since Fred Perry in 1934.
It’s a remarkable rise for someone who, until recent days, was largely unknown outside the tennis world. Nicknamed ‘Kedders,’ Edmund is said to be a big fan of cricket, Formula 1 and Liverpool FC, but has talked of enjoying little in the way of a social life because of the potential impact on his tennis.
After a brief romance with a girl rumoured to be linked to the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) last summer, he’s single, and once joked of girlfriends: ‘I have been told they are trouble.’
Yesterday, displaying the sort of understatement that has become his trademark, he used his victory press conference to declare himself ‘just very happy’ to have ‘held my nerve’ during the last game of the match, when he won a series of lengthy baseline rallies.
There was a similarly low-key response from his parents. While Kyle wows Australia, they have decided to spend most of their time back in Yorkshire to help 21-yearold Kelly, who graduated from Northumbria University in the summer, hunt for a job.
They are, however, keeping in touch via telephone and Skype, and say they are ‘going to be watching on TV’ when Kyle plays in his first Grand Slam semi-final. Even if he wins a place in Sunday’s final, work may still prevent them from travelling to Melbourne for the match.
‘We are trying to keep it a normal conversation when we talk and keep it to what’s going on at home,’ Steven, a chartered accountant who runs a renewable energy firm, told the Mail. ‘We don’t turn his next match into a big event and we’ve tried to do that for many years.’
The Edmund family have been keeping their son grounded since 2005, when he first picked up a tennis racquet aged ten at the David Lloyd club in nearby Hull.
Kyle was born in Johannesburg (his dad came from Bridgend but was raised in Zimbabwe, and Denise is a South African) and moved to the UK aged three.
He showed talent at cricket and swimming, but had energy to burn at weekends. ‘My mum said to me: “I’ve booked you in for tennis
lessons on Saturdays”,’ he recalled this week. ‘Mum just wanted me to do something because I was annoying her.’
Edmund’s first coach, Richard Plews, said yesterday: ‘What was characteristic of him was his single-mindedness . . . he always backed himself.
‘It doesn’t surprise me to see him where he is now. He’s completely recognisable from the kid: not only talented but he’s kept his feet on the ground . . . he deserves every-thing he gets.’ Soon, Edmund was hitting with Plews every morning, before heading to Beverley Gram-mar School in time for lessons. ‘We would get up at 5am to be at David Lloyd’s for 6am,’ Steven once recalled. ‘It has been pretty full-on since then.
‘When he was 13, we decided to take him out of mainstream education and put him in a full-time tennis academy. It was Kyle’s decision. We could see he was talented, so you have to go with it.’
So Kyle spent weeknights first at the National Sports Centre at Bisham Abbey and later at the LTA headquarters at Roehampton, only seeing his family at weekends.
Unlike Andy Murray (who spent his teenage years in Spain), or British women’s No 1 Jo Konta, who arrived in the UK aged 13, this makes Edmund almost entirely a product of British Tennis, which has long had a reputation for producing players who fail to convert talent to success.
Speaking in 2013, Edmund said he struggled with the separation from his family, but added: ‘You mature and get used to it.’ It has helped having Andy Murray as a mentor. Edmund was a teenager when he was invited to stay with the British No 1 so they could train together. The pair have become friends.
Edmund was one of only a few ten-nis players invited to Murray’s wed-ding — he had to miss the event because of playing commitments. Both men were in the team that won the Davis Cup for Great Britain in 2015, the first time in 79 years.
Murray, who is recovering from a long-term injury, was among the first to congratulate the young star on his latest win on Twitter.
But not all of Edmund’s interac-tions have been so pleasant. He’s suffered serious abuse. Steven revealed that he ‘gets abuse every time he loses . . . because somebody has lost money. Usually it’s a threat to break his legs or his arms. Now and again he’ll get a death threat’.
Only last week, a fan of one of his defeated opponents declared on Twitter: ‘Hope you get cancer.’
On court, Edmund started to gain a reputation aged 16, when he was the oustanding player in the British team that won the junior Davis Cup. The following year, he won the Boys’ Doubles at the U.S. Open.
He turned pro at 18, played at Wimbledon and The Queen’s Club that summer, and bought a flat near the ‘home of tennis’ with his early prize money.
The past five years have seen him progress up the world rank-ings to 49th (he will be nearer 25th when yesterday’s result is taken into account).
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. There were spells out through injury, and he has gone through at least four coaches, for a time gain-ing an unwanted name as a player who lost too many close matches.
His recent success coincides with changes behind the scenes. Late last year, Edmund joined Star-Wing, a management group that looks after established tennis stars Stan Wawrinka and Gael Monfils.
He also relocated to the Bahamas, where he spent the close season training at a tennis centre opened by former world No 1 Lleyton Hewitt. To the dismay of some fans, this made him a tax exile — though supporters point out that with tour commitments he spent so little time in the UK that it was illogical to remain domiciled here.
He also signed a sponsorship deal with Nike, which could earn him a seven-figure salary, on top of the astonishing purse of at least £500,000 which he stands to earn from his fortnight in Melbourne.
After a winter in the gym, in Australia he has started to display the fruits of serious work with fitness coach Ian Prangley. His strength, coupled with a powerful grip that imparts extra topspin, has given him what pundits predict could become the most devastat-ing forehand in the game.
Edmund has also acquired a new head coach, Fredrik Rosengren, a Swedish guru specialising in devel-oping mental toughness. Rosen-gren said that he’s worked hard on making the shy young man ‘play to win, not to play to avoid losing’.
Edmund has responded by winning a string of matches, includ-ing two in Melbourne that went to five sets, in temperatures that hit 40c (104f). He’s also become more animated, pumping his fists and puffing his chest in a display of old-fashioned Yorkshire grit.
The new approach has certainly worked wonders so far.
Mike Dickson: Pages 82-83
‘Play to win, not to avoid losing’
BACK home, one of Kyle Edmund’s favourite possessions is a cricket ball that he once smashed through the windows of the science block when playing a match-winning innings for his school in Yorkshire.
He was to follow, however, not in the lineage of the many celebrated cricketers from his county, but his now fellow Grand Slam semi-finalist Roger Taylor, son of a Sheffield steelworker.
There was a clue to Edmund’s future, however, in that ability to hit sixes.
It showed that there was something in his physical make-up that allows him to crunch a tennis ball with such ferocity that his forehand is fast becoming one of the more talked-about shots in the world game.
Edmund showed promise as a cricketer but ceased to take it seriously around the age of 12 and concentrated on tennis. As he reflected yesterday: ‘I think I chose tennis because it was an individual sport, I had more ownership. But I loved other sports.’
These include football and in particular Liverpool, whose training ground he visited before Christmas. He is also a big fan of the Isle of Man TT races and still watches a lot of cricket.
‘I was in a restaurant the other day and Ricky Ponting walked in,’ he said after making the Australian Open semi-finals. ‘He’s one of the biggest Aussie legends and I was like, “Oh, there’s Ricky Ponting”. Fidde (his Swedish coach Fredrik Rosengren) had no idea who he was.’
It is the good fortune of British tennis that he chose to plough a more individual path. The domestic game struggles to raise an acceptable quorum of top-100 singles players of either gender, but when they have come along this century they have often been high-end items.
The luck behind the luck is that Edmund’s parents, Steven and Denise, chose to relocate to the UK when Kyle was two.
Steven was born in Maesteg in Wales before moving to South Africa with his parents and meeting his wife. They then settled on living in the village of Tickton, near Beverley, as he established an IT business. Once a level of tennis talent be became evident, Kyle started t training in the Hull area, where he was introduced to John Black, a no-nonsense coach.
‘I first met him as a 13-yearold, he was maybe No 10 or 11 in the country,’ recalled Black yesterday. ‘We had a hit and he m missed a ball, I said “15-0”, he sa said “I didn’t know we were scoring,” and I said “You’re always scoring in this game, son. Every single ball counts”.’
Black quickly noticed the ability to hit the ball hard: ‘I thought he had a very fast arm. His dad’s a big guy, his mum’s athletic. He was quick and strong. We did forehand development drills four mornings a week, 6.30 to 8am.
‘He could do anything with the ball, manipulate the speed and shape of the shot.’
Edmund is not a natural extrovert. He has always been, and remains, notably well-mannered.
‘He was quite a quirky kid, quite quiet and reserved. I am the opposite. I tried to bring him out of his shell. He was such a good boy, very humble. You just had to be careful because he could get down on himself if he made a few mistakes in a row, his head could drop quite quickly.
‘Tennis is a losing sport, that’s what happens most weeks. But I would say to him, “It’s OK to lose the battle, the important thing is not to keep making the same mistakes”. He was quite a serious young man, in a positive way, very focused, not easily distracted. But you don’t know until you see someone compete. And when I did, I could tell that he was learning quickly.
‘Most kids, they train one way and compete another. But with Kyle there was a good correlation between the two. He trained hard and started to compete hard.
‘Steve (his father) and I had this phrase, “You give Kyle a taste and then he takes a bite”. He has to feel comfortable, feel that he fits in. Once he knows he does, then he is brave and he goes after it. ‘It’s like a bungee jump. Kyrgios will just leap. Kyle will check the rope first, ask whether it might break. But once he starts to believe he belongs, look out.’ Black and his young player were soon travelling around the lower echelons of the international junior circuit and his progress was swift, although you might not have known it from his first professional outing, as a callow 15-year-old.
He played in the opening round of the qualifying for a $10,000 Futures event at Bournemouth in April 2010 and lost 6-0, 6-0 to a Swiss player called Raphael Lustenberger.
On the Under 18 circuit, his biggest achievement became the starring role in Britain’s winning junior Davis Cup team of 2011.
He was already known for his trademark shot. His GB contemporary and colleague from then, Luke Bambridge, tweeted yesterday a list of standard childhood fears, before confessing that his own personal trauma growing up had been the Edmund forehand.
Black believes that shedding some natural inhibitions has been key to his recent progress.
‘Kyle’s such a good pro and a good lad that he didn’t want to be disrespectful,’ he said. ‘He didn’t want to get in people’s faces. Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to p*** people off.’
Edmund’s trajectory has been not entirely dissimilar to that of Tim Henman, who was watching on Rod Laver Arena yesterday.
Henman was also 23 when he reached his first Grand Slam semi-final (Wimbledon 1998). He went on to make five more and spent eight consecutive years finishing the season inside the top 10.
It should be said that these kinds of prediction have not been made for Edmund prior to this fortnight, although expectations are now likely to be recalibrated.
“Once he starts to believe he belongs, you better look out”