‘I lived the life you dream about but forgot why I played’
Mark Philippoussis is back in love with tennis now it no longer ‘beats him up’, he tells Charlie Eccleshare
If Pete Sampras was the tennis equivalent of Manchester United’s winning machine in the 1990s, then perhaps Mark Philippoussis was its answer to Liverpool’s “Spice Boys”. Similarly glamorous and attentiongrabbing, Philippoussis was a fine player who reached two grand-slam finals and twice won the deciding rubber to deliver the Davis Cup to Australia. Philippoussis’s go-forbroke style was built around a serve so fearsome it earned him the nickname “Scud”, in homage to the missile.
Away from the court, Philippoussis was known for his colourful love life, which at times resembled the kind of far-fetched soap opera produced in his homeland. Fellow player Anna Kournikova, singer Delta Goodrem and no-one’s-quite-sure-what-shedoes Paris Hilton are among the women Philippoussis is said to have dated. “I lived the life you dream about,” Philippoussis once said.
It would be facile to suggest Philippoussis’s life away from the court affected his performances on it, but as the Australian Open approaches, does the former world No 8 have regrets or advice for young Australian players such as Nick Kyrgios? “Something I’ve realised now is that you work incredibly hard to try and fulfil your dreams of becoming a professional tennis player, and then you do,” Philippoussis told The Sunday Telegraph. “And, unfortunately, it’s very easy to forget about the reasons you started playing in the first place.
“You get caught up in all the politics and everything like that. It’s important to remember why you fell in love with the sport, which for me was just the pure thing of getting on the court and playing.”
In retirement, Philippoussis has rediscovered this love for tennis by playing exhibition events and competing on the veterans’ Champions Tour, including at the Royal Albert Hall this month. “These events have absolutely got me back in love with tennis,” he says. “You don’t have the added pressure, you’re going out and enjoying yourself. You’re still competing but it’s also about entertaining the crowd, about seeing the players again, having fun in the locker room, enjoying each other’s company. We’ve become better friends now because when you’re finished you drop that shield.”
Philippoussis was not always so content. There was a time when he must have felt like the most unlucky man in tennis, as three knee surgeries between 1999 and 2001 left him so debilitated that he was in a wheelchair for three months.
Shortly before the first operation was the 1999 Wimbledon quarter-final against Pete Sampras, when an inspired Philippoussis won
the first set but hurt his left knee in a nasty fall and was forced to concede defeat. “Bad luck, you were kicking my a---,” Sampras told Philippoussis.
Looking back now, Philippoussis says: “I was hitting the ball great, and physically in a great place. And the draw was pretty good. Who knows? It was a beautiful day on Centre Court, blue skies, I felt very comfortable. It was one of those things.”
Philippoussis has also had to come to terms with another painful Wimbledon memory – the straightsets final defeat by Roger Federer in 2003, which secured Federer his first grand-slam title. “To be quite honest with you, I expected to win that match,” Philippoussis says. “But the first-set tie-break was everything.”
Philippoussis was just 26 at the time – only five years older than Federer – and a Wimbledon title could have acted as a springboard to greater heights. As it is, reaching the final remains a source of huge pride, given the injury hell he had been through.
Ultimately, though, the injuries became too much to bear and, despite a series of attempted comebacks, Philippoussis last played regularly in 2006. “You wake up and it hurts, and it’s a grind,” he says. “You go into the bathroom and it’s aching and it’s sore. How can you get into the mindset of preparing for a match when it feels like someone beat the s--- out of you while you were asleep?” Philippoussis’s life now is far removed from his early twenties. He enjoys a much more sedate existence which is centred around his wife, Silvana Lovin, and their young children, Nicholas and Maia. The family live in California but plan to move home to Melbourne next year. As well as playing semi-regular events, Philippoussis is a keen surfer and is involved in various different fashion projects. His own clothing line, Phlip Apparel, included Justin Bieber as a client before it closed down. Philippoussis has also had to contend with the arrest of his father and former coach Nick on child sexual assault charges. Nick Philippoussis entered not-guilty pleas but the case has now been dismissed after he suffered a serious stroke in jail that left him incapacitated. For Mark Philippoussis, the next big decision will be whether to follow his one-time Davis Cup team-mate Lleyton Hewitt into coaching. “I have no plans to go full-time on the tour, but I am open to some events during the year,” he says. Given all that he has been through on and off the court, you imagine Philippoussis would have more than a few pearls of wisdom to impart.