
Can you have a normal youthful childhood, Birthday parties,going to beach with your friends,proms,parties , family holidays ha ha forget it the closest family holiday your going to get is Mum or Dad entering you in another tournament interstate or overseas.Or maybe if you get lucky they will send you to another country to train and live.Just in New Zealand I have heard from parents how they have taken a second mortgage to pay for their child's tennis.A huge financial investment with no real Statistics for success for a country like New Zealand and nine times out of ten will most likely be a poor investment if you are looking at making money.I will discuss location as an issue in a later post. Now the Williams sister's are a success and its thanks to their father Richard yes the obsessive parent!So as the story goes , their father, Richard, upon learning of the lucre that women's tennis offered, decided to make his next two kids into tennis pros. That his wife, Oracene, didn't want any more children was a minor obstacle—he simply hid her birth-control pills. He taught himself the game, coaching his proteges on rotten courts where their sessions were sometimes interrupted by gunfire before shipping them to a Florida tennis academy for refinement. While his girls racked up Grand Slams (17 singles titles and counting), he made headlines with his histrionic antics at tournaments, erratic ramblings, and general weirdness—he insisted on meeting his daughters' first hitting coach at a public car wash because he believed the FBI had bugged his car and house.And now the rest is history!
It seems that obsessive and demanding parents do come into the news for all the wrong reasons.Dogmatic Damir Dokic ,he himself nearly won a grand slam getting himself ejected from three out of four grand slam tournaments, he's threatened to kidnap daughter Jelena Dokic and drop a nuclear bomb on Australia.But hey come on Jelena Had her best ranking when he was in control!

And what about Yuri Sharapova who had his degree of "craziness" was caught making a throat-slitting gesture from the stand that Anastasia Myskina refused to play in the Federation Cup if her countrywoman was named to the Russian team.Read that story here
And Maria has had grand slam success , so I guess another win,win story for the Crazed parent syndrome.What about Mary Pierce's father Jim Pierce screamed, "Kill the bitch!" during one of his daughter Mary's matches.Stefano Capriati, Mike Agassi, and Roland Jaeger were all trained as boxers and in some instances i guess were "punch drunk" in some of their methods.But again their children met with success!

And the list goes on if you have a crazy tennis parent story please leave as a comment on this article and I will publish it, I could keep going and this is just the international examples , boy have I seen some Parents lose it at a local junior tournaments that have resulted in Car Park showdowns with the opponents parents.
What i guess I'm trying to say is be realistic of course there are many success full parents and players that create little drama , not everyone will go onto win Wimbledon or be ranked in the top 100 even and if your from a country like New Zealand more probably not , however it does take a certain obsessiveness if you like to call it that to become a World Class tennis player. It takes total Focus,sacrifice and dedication from both child and parents.The underlying feature here is that your child has to want it ! if they do then as a parent provide what ever support they need.
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