Men's Tennis: Full Todd Martin Q&A

Todd Martin Q&A

Martin is Northwestern’s most accomplished men’s tennis player ever. He played at Northwestern for two years before he decided to pursue his professional career in 1990. He has competed in two Grand Slam finals – the 1994 Australian Open and the 1999 U.S. Open – but lost both. Martin’s greatest victories came from his 1994 Queen’s Club championship where he beat Pete Sampras in the final match and the 1995 Davis Cup championship where he was a member of the US team that defeated Russia.

What was one of your most memorable moments playing at Northwestern?
“It’s hard to overlook our 1990 season where we won the Big Ten. It was the first time we won the Big Ten in a long time. Maybe it was the first time a men’s athletic team had won a Big Ten championship of any sort for a while. It was such a joy to celebrate the culmination of a successful season together. Especially for a couple of the guys who had put their four years in and were creeping up on the end of it, to have that sort of is, frankly it was their last experience in competitive tennis. It was tremendous.”

How did you experience at Northwestern help your professional career?
“It provided a period of time for me of growth. Physical growth, emotional growth, intellectual growth and an opportunity to adjust to independence. And all that gets up to the point, it all speaks to what happened other than on the tennis court. On the tennis court, I got stronger, I got better, I got better competition, I had better practice, all of those things. But it would be like sending a, me turning pro at 18 when I finished high school would have been like putting an eight year old in high school.”

So you were only at Northwestern for two years, what was your decision to leave for the pros?
“One of the main reasons I chose Northwestern was I felt like it would be the best balance for me between academics and athletics both in the load of those, but also in the quality of those as well. The load as it turned out, was pretty heavy for me academically and despite splitting my focus between academics and athletics, my athletics grew and grew and my academics didn’t grow and grow. I really felt like it was a two-pronged decision, it was, one, as a competitor I was very confident that I was on the track to being prepared to compete on the world level. And the other prong, was that, regardless, splitting my focus isn’t really accomplishing everything that I wanted to. At the time, I really took the leap of faith that said, I’d give tennis a hundred percent and after two or three years or four years or five years and it doesn’t work, well then I’ll come back and give school a hundred percent and I think it would be, I almost felt like it would be the fair thing to do for either endeavor.”

For your professional career, what was one of your more memorable moments?
“One of the most memorable moments, and it’s easier to focus on that in this setting, was we won the Davis Cup in 1995. It’s a much different team atmosphere in that it’s four or five competitors that are usually at each other’s throats, taking a week off here and there to join together. It was an exciting challenge because you had to figure out how to work with people that you usually wanted to beat and so that was, it’s not the exhilarating ‘We did it, we did it, we did it,’ like college tennis because you guys work for a year or four years towards a goal, but with Davis Cup it was, I think at the end of the year we looked around and realized what we were able to accomplish by stepping away from our individual absorption of selves and did a job together.”

What did you enjoy the most about going to a Grand Slam?
“I would like to say that I was a pure enough competitor that whether I went out on the hard courts down the street where I grew up or Arthur Ashe Stadium at U.S. Open it was the same. So I’d like to think that, I’d like to con people into thinking, every time I walk onto the court it’s the same. But it does get, incrementally more exciting, and I’m not sure if it does for the guys who win those events all the time, it probably does a little bit, but for me it was always still, there was nothing better, I was disappointed when the match was over, whether I won, whether I lost, I wanted to keep playing. In athletics you talk about battles and wars, you lost the battle you won the war, and I loved winning the war, but I still wanted to fight the battles. It was never, a ‘Ah, a relief, it’s done.’ It was always, ‘Let’s play best to seven, I’m up three-one, but let’s play best to seven,’ because I like the way it feels. It was a dream, it was truly a dream come true. I think I had a pretty good appreciation of that when it was happening and now I have a tremendous appreciation of it.”

You were awarded the ATP Sportsmanship Award in 1993 and 1994, what did that mean to you?
“It was important to me. I was brought up to be respectful of the game, respectful of my family, respectful of my peers. And the fact that others thought that I did that well while still competing with my whole heart, that was important to me.”

Growing up as a young tennis player, who did you look up to as someone you wanted to be like?
“I didn’t look at anyone player and say, ‘I want to play like him.’ I would say Stefan Edberg was probably the closest that I had to a role model just from a competitive standpoint. I felt like he always competed hard, but he always competed fairly with a great amount of respect for the privilege that he had to be playing. Game wise, I liked a little bit of Lendl, I liked a little bit of McEnroe, I liked a little bit of Connors and I liked a little bit of Borg. They were all at the peak when I was growing up. In some ways that’s why I had a little bit of, I was a fairly versatile player, and I think that’s one of the reasons why. I didn’t buy into this, ‘I am going to do this and only this.’ I liked, at eight to 12 years old, saying, going out and saying, ‘Oh that’s just how I saw McEnroe do it,’ or I was dreaming, but, or ‘I saw Lendl hit that shot in the quarter finals of the U.S. Open last week.’ I liked that.”