Mark Philippoussis ‘I JUST WANT TO MAKE MY SON PROUD’ MASTER OF COURTTHETHECO
The former tennis champion says his only priority now is his family
From the mid-’90s to early 2000s, Mark Philippoussis was a tennis legend. Dubbed “the Scud”, Mark tore through his opponents on the court and rose through the ranks as fast as one of his deadly serves, reaching world No. 8 in the rankings and winning the Davis Cup twice.
But as much as he thrived on the court, his love-life and flashy lifestyle – he once admitted to buying a new car every month – appeared to take priority, leading many to believe his true potential was never reached.
However, talking to Woman’s Day, the SAS Australia star, now 44, says he holds no regrets.
“Look, I was a kid. I worked very hard, it was my money and I spent my money,” Mark tells. “There’s nothing I regret at all. Looking back now, the perfect way to learn is through action, and I learned a lot.
“It was a huge growing time for me, my focus was to get on the court and playing above anything else. But now, it’s showed me as much as it is important to focus on that stuff, you need to focus on other things and be more open, particularly now as I’m a father and a husband,” he says.
NEW LIFE
Mark now lives in the quaint coastal suburb of Jan Juc in regional Victoria, with his wife of eight years Silvana Lovin, 35, and their two children, Nicholas, seven, and threeyear-old Maia.
And while he acknowledges his life looks very different to his days of playing ng tennis around the globe, e, he couldn’t be happier pier with his family taking up the spotlight.
“Of course my life looks different, it should look different,”
Mark admits.
“A typical day for me now is just waking up and making sure th the kids are up and ready, and the little guy is getting organised for school.
“My priority is just my family now and to be the best partner and father that I can... whatever time I have to myself, I spend it focusing on the things that I want to focus on.”
Having just launched his own luxury clothing line,
As We Create, Mark says he’s
‘The way to learn is through action, and I learned a lot’
devoted dev the last 1 14 months to the brand b d and dh hopes to achieve big things with it.
However, seeing his kids succeed, particularly his son Nicholas, who’s picked up a penchant for sports just like his father, comes first.
“He plays basketball and soccer, I get him surfing three times a week – I only get him on the [tennis] courts once or twice a week, but it might change,” he says.
And if Nicholas decides to go professional like his dad, Mark promises, “I will help guide him as much as I possibly can.
“He does have that natural competitive side, so whatever he decides to do, I’ll be there for him in every way. I’d want to prepare him as much as possible.”
One way of preparing his son, he says, was watching him push himself to his absolute limits on SAS.
“I didn’t want to sit on the
couch and watch the show with my son, knowing
I could have pushed myself that little bit further. I just wanted to show him that
I can do anything,” he says.
It’s clear that his son looks up to his champion father, too.
“He’s sits all quiet when he watches and then asks a lot of questions, and if I end up in a discussion with my wife he swooshes up, saying, ‘Daddy, shoosh, can you wait until the commercial break,’” he laughs. “It’s so nice... he never got to see me
Winning the Stella Artois Championships in 1997.
play tennis. It’s important for him to watch this so he can understand the struggle. It’s about falling down but always getting back up and staying positive. That’s life.”
It’s 1987 and everybody is doing the Locomotion with Kylie Minogue. Teenage girls all wanted her big blonde perm, and in a few short years, quite a few of them would also idolise Tania Lacy – the fresh-faced girl dancing in the background of that famous music clip.
But even then Tania was far more than a back-up dancer – the 23-year-old also choreographed Kylie’s Locomotion music video. “It’s still not something I know if I should be proud of,” she quips in her new live-streamed comedy show Catch A Falling Star.
Now 56, Tania’s brilliant return comes after many years out of the limelight, and she pulls no punches in a searing performance that details her rapid rise to fame and terrible descent into heroin addiction and poverty just three years later.
“People say you choose fame
– I would say fame definitely chose me,” she says. “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I had this really awesome job as a famous person. I used to be on the front pages of the newspapers. I had followers, but they were real people. I’m talking real fame.”
FACE IN THE CROWD
To understand how it went so horribly wrong, you have to rewind to the beginning. Just a few months after Locomotion, Molly Meldrum hand-picked Tania out of a crowd of dancers on his legendary ABC music show Countdown and asked her to open the show. She then went on to become a roving reporter on a new Saturday morning show called The Factory.
Tania soon became the standout star for crazy stunts like crashing a Sylvester Stallone press conference, or breaking into Simply Red star Mick Hucknall’s dressing room, or getting Motley Crue to autograph her underwear live on air.
Even rising star Nicole Kidman copped it when Tania bailed her up to tell her BMX Bandits was her best work ever!
“I became the naughty child of Australian television,” she explains in Catch A Falling Star, revealing that she also tried cocaine and speed for the first time after her fame exploded and she started mixing with rock stars and celebrities.
“I broke all the rules and in doing so, spoke to a generation. I was called a wunderkind. They created a monster, a famous one.”
Her own big-budget show followed on the ABC with Tania and Mark Little, who played Joe Mangel on Neighbours, joining forces to co-host Countdown Revolution, which was filmed live in front of hundreds of screaming fans every weeknight in 1990. It was a heady experience for Toowoomba-born Tania, who had her childhood dream of becoming a prima ballerina shattered when a teacher at the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts dropped her during a ballet move – and snapped her leg in half.
Fast forward a few years and Tania had become a hero to a generation of Australian teenage girls. TV and radio star Meshel Laurie, 48, reveals she and her girlfriends grew up idolising Tania, who she says was “literally everything I wanted to be”.
Shockingly, it all came crashing down just 11 months after Countdown Revolution began.
Overnight, Tania went from fame and riches to drug addiction and the dole after she and Mark staged a now-infamous mock strike live on air and were sacked on the spot. Now, Tania admits that was one of the biggest regrets of her life.
STRUCK OUT
“I don’t know how people say they have no regrets because I have so many regrets and I 100 per cent regret putting on the strike,” she says.
“If I’d known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have done it.”
In her show,which is currently being streamed online, Tania says that becoming famous “was like my life became a giant disco and the music was pumping at full volume”.
“Fame promises and it delivers. Everyone wanted to party with me at my disco and they were buying the drinks. There were cocaine sliders in the toilets. Free stuff. My own VIP area. And best of all, my life was always going to be like this.”
She was feted everywhere as the coolest kid in town, interviewing international rock stars on Countdown Revolution and partying with them off camera. She remembers doing cocaine with countless Aussie and international stars.
“I think I just got swept along,” she says. “It wasn’t like an active choice. It was just something that was in that world and
I was the wrong person to be doing it. Already I had undiagnosed mental health issues, and those
‘People say you choose fame – I would say fame chose me’
drugs really screwed around with my brain.” When it came, the crash was brutal. “It was very public and humiliating. I went from enfant terrible to enfant unemployable. I was told I’d never work in this town again,” she recalls. “The invites stopped. I thought the phone was broken because no-one called.” In the depths of despair, Tania was introduced to heroin by a boyfriend, and she welcomed the drug like a painkiller – until she got a grip and checked herself into a psychiatric ward for treatment a few months later.
‘The crash was brutal. It was very public and humiliating’
RISE & FALL
Fast forward a few years, and a now clean and sober Tania wrote a short film called Titsiana Booberini, which became a worldwide cult hit.
But it wasn’t long before Tania’s life once again took a downward spiral after a dispute with former friend and director Robert Luketic over the writing credit.
He offered her a role in one of the three Miramax films he was contracted to direct. When the two friends fell out, it escalated into an ugly feud and Tania, who had been in talks with Ellen Degeneres to star in a new show as well as the promise of a role in one of Robert’s films, suddenly found herself blacklisted in Hollywood.
“I suffered PTSD from the whole experience,” she says.
The one positive to come out of her time in LA was that Tania met her husband, graphics designer Ole Sturm, just after he finished working on Mission: Impossible 2.
“It was meant to be – we met in May and married in November,” smiles Tania, who returned to Melbourne with Ole where they had their “beautiful boy” Per, now 15, who like his mum has had to face his own challenges after being born with a cleft palate, which required surgery when he was just 10 weeks old.
“My husband and son make me stronger and a better person.
“Certainly that has been a huge part of my recovery. And I’ve gone back to stand-up comedy because making people laugh makes me feel better,” Tania says with a smile. “I love making people laugh... and it’s better than any antidepressant!”
Stream Tania’s confessional comedy show Catch A Falling Star
at res.cthearts.com