HOW JO KONTA TURNED FROM WEAKLING TO WONDER WOMAN
Adeserted outside court amid the concrete expanse of Flushing Meadows one evening five years ago, and Britain’s Jo Konta was leading someone called Olga Govortsova.
Having battled through the qualifying event to make the second round proper, Konta was leading 5-2 in the deciding set when the big freeze set in. twenty minutes later she had lost, 7-5 in the third.
After match point Konta flung her racket away in anger and quickly fled the court in tears, striding through a handful of reporters who respectfully parted the way like mourners at a funeral.
this is how many matches used to end for the player who will today walk out on to Centre Court to tackle the great, now veteran, Venus Williams.
the truth is that these endings came as little surprise. the British former player Naomi Cavaday told yesterday how she recently looked up her analysis of a comfortable victory she had over Konta at a low-tier event at Wrexham in 2009.
‘You think you can spot a player but I dug out my notes the other day from my match against Jo and I had just written “Weak forehand, weak mentally”,’ said Cavaday with an ironic chuckle. ‘she was stressing from the first ball.’
so how did today’s semi-finalist transform herself into the rounded technician and competitor, who has already come through three extremely tight matches under the greatest pressure at Wimbledon?
two years on from that night in New York, Konta was still treading water with a ranking around the 150-mark, about 100 places below the much more puntable Heather Watson. Laura robson, another who had been tipped for greater things, was by now contending with a serious wrist injury.
WHeN it came to Konta, those in charge of the purse strings at the Lawn tennis Association had told the performance department they needed to cut back on funding for individual players.
there had been little return on what one LtA insider says had become a six-figure annual support package for Konta and her financing was cut back to the bare minimum.
the player, to her credit, took matters into her own hands and raised enough herself to move largely to Gijon in spain in the late season. there she started working with the relatively low profile but highly rated coach esteban Carril. equally importantly, he put her in touch with a London-based friend and compatriot, Juan Coto, who worked as a mental coach mainly for people working in business and finance, but also in sport.
together they began to harness the dormant physical talent in Konta that long-term observers of the British game had always suspected was in there. It is still remarkable to reflect that even by June 2015 the player was still ranked only 147. that was when the wins started to come, in a trickle during the grass-court season and then a postWimbledon flood, which saw her reel off 16 consecutive victories.
the player who used to panic on the big points was now equal to the situation and she has become ruthless, too. she is aware of how weak tennis officials are and is unafraid to change momentum by taking her time between points or at toilet breaks, stretching the spirit of the rules.
Konta reflected on Coto’s input after she beat No 2 seed simona Halep on tuesday.
‘Juan was a tremendous influence on me,’ she said. ‘that went beyond my tennis career. He was someone who approached his work with me in a very holistic manner. It was more about me as a human being than necessarily a tennis player. I think he did a tremendous job with me in working on my happiness as a person, as a human being. He looked to help me enjoy something that I’ve loved since I was a little girl and to try to be the best at that.’
the association ended tragically, as Coto took his own life in November last year.
Not long afterwards Konta sprung a surprise on the tennis world by splitting up with coach Carril. the reasons behind this have never been fully explained by either side. the timing was strange, however, as she had not long been named the Most Improved Player on the WtA tour for 2016 and only narrowly missed out on a place in the season-end WtA Championships for the top eight women.
But here we see just one parallel
with Andy Murray. The two share a relentless appetite for hard work and self-improvement and through the Scot’s career he has been utterly unsentimental in his hiring and firing of coaches.
Dispensing with Carril for whatever reason — financial disagreements are often a factor in these things, but that has never been confirmed — did not look the smartest move.
Yet within weeks she had paired up with Wim Fissette, an articulate and self-confident Belgian, to work alongside her hitting partner, the former British player Andrew Fitzpatrick. She also now works with another sports psychologist who was an associate of Coto, called Elena Sosa.
Fissette, who had worked with Kim Clijsters and Victoria Azarenka, has continued Carril’s work and made Konta even more assertive as a player.
Already this year she has won two titles and the level she reached against Halep on Tuesday will have had people blinking in disbelief.
A lot of people, too, as a massive 7.4 million viewers watched the climax of her battle against Halep.
It is all a long way from the deserted boondocks of Flushing Meadows or the draughty tennis halls of Wrexham.