Beside the grass court at Sydney's White City stadium, Australia's Davis Cup captain John Newcombe sits wondering which Pat Rafter is out there on court playing Frenchman Cedric Pioline. Is it the raging bull who had charged to a world ranking of 21 two years earlier? Or is it the good-natured Hereford who loves to graze at home on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, and whose ranking has now slipped to 63?
For the first two sets Newcombe witnessed the latter Rafter; he loses both sets, throwing away the second after leading 5-1. At the end of it he slumps down in the chair next to Newcombe and apologises for one of the worst "chokes" ever - the athlete's admission that he has been frozen by fear.
It is February 1997. Rafter has never before won a five-set match after being two sets down, and his career signpost now points in two directions: one way lies three-set defeat and a career as a good-looking mediocrity; the other a heroic victory in five sets, and a place among the game's elite.
Newcombe has an instinctive affinity with Rafter; both uncomplicated Aussie good blokes, both beer drinkers with a larrikin streak; both fighters. But how is he to draw out the fight he knows lies within Rafter?
Under the courtside umbrella the air turns blue as Newcombe hits Rafter with a burst of invective that will either make or break the player. "Pat was seriously wondering whether he could go with the guys in the top 20," Newcombe recalls. "I needed to say something that would snap him out of what he was thinking, and I figured the way to do it was a bit of shock tactics. It was quite brutal. I started screaming about this war of attrition. I said, 'This is a goddamn war we're in, and we're going to bury this French c***.' Pat's got a great competitive spirit, and a ball of fire down in his belly, and he needed to rediscover it."
It isn't quite Saving Private Ryan, but it saves Pat Rafter. For three sets he fights hand-to-hand in the tennis trenches, and at the end the crowd rises to acclaim an epic victory. Within four months Rafter will reach the semi-finals of the French Open, and three months later will win his first US Open.
With the acclamation of his teammates ringing in his ears, Rafter makes his way back to the locker room. He turns to Newcombe: "Mate, what's a war of attrition?" "Don't worry, Pat", says Newcombe, "You've just been in one".
From the beginning, once the Rafter family moved from Mount Isa to settle in Eumundi, there were always two Pat Rafters: the perfect little gentleman in the peak cap who always opened the car door for his mother, and the ten year-old who was once pulled off the court by his father, Jim, for stacking on a turn during a match.
"If there's a fault in Pat," says Jim, "it's probably that he does lack fire a lot of the time. I wondered sometimes if he had enough killer instinct." Lodged in his memory is the time his 14 year-old-son was playing his friend Brenton O'Shaughnessy. Poised to win 6-2, 6-0, Rafter let up, allowing O'Shaughnessy to take three games. "Why didn't you beat him 6-2, 6-0", asked Rafter's mother, Jocelyn. To which he replied: "Mum, I couldn't do that, he's my friend. Who wants to lose 6-2, 6-0?"
It exasperated Jim that his son would go for the flamboyant shot, like an angled volley, instead of a safer option. But Rafter played for the passion, not the percentages, and he wouldn't be told.
He could be stubborn. That was Rafter the bull who, once aroused, would crash through every fence put in his way. If there was one way to raise his ire, it was to tell him he couldn't do something. He was too small, the runt in the litter, the Queensland selectors said when he was in his early teens; he'd never make it. He was not picked for a national team until Newcombe selected him for the Davis Cup as a 21 year-old in 1994. Four years later he'd won two US Opens.
Rafter's long time Brisbane coach, Gary Stickler, recalls the 15 year-old playing a match on Brisbane's Milton courts, and refusing to continue the game after his opponent called his shot out. "Pat refused to budge until the referee came out," says Stickler. "There was a 10-15 minute discussion, and Pat lost the point, but he won the match. He'd worked so hard, and he wasn't going to give away what he thought was his. The determination to never give in was always there."
Rafter says: "I was pretty competitive. There were times when I'd come off the court and cry because I'd lost a match. That's just the way I was. It's something you grow out of. I think I had a competitive enough streak in me, though there was a time when I wasn't winning as much and I accepted defeat a lot more. At that age you don't know what it takes to become a champion."
From the start Rafter had decided he would play a serve-volley game, even though he was smaller than everybody else, and bigger opponents would hit the ball past him when he went into the net. "Serve-volley really came naturally to me," he says, " I often did it because I was nervous and felt the need to come into the net and finish the point. It was the way I thought you should play the game." Some experts didn't agree. At 13, he moved down to Brisbane from Eumundi to work with coach Richard Howes at the tennis centre owned by Wimbledon champion Ashley Cooper. Cooper suggested Rafter should spend more time on the baseline. "That's not my game", the boy said to the Australian great. "I'm going into the net". The bull had begun to paw the ground.
The Rafter family was built on determination. Jim, the son of a policeman had originally wanted four children, but Jocelyn loved babies, and they ended up with nine (a tenth child died as a baby). It meant that Jim would spend the rest of his life working 14-hour days to support the children.
His first job was as an accountant working for Mount Isa Mines, but once the family moved down to Eumundi, in the hinterland behind Noosa, he ran the Rafter Family food business as well as his accountancy practice, Jocelyn, too, grew with the struggle. Her mother was a seamstress who left her husband and brought up her two children on her own.
Rafter grew up to the work ethic and his brother's hand-me-downs. He'd shown a lot of promise as a soccer player, but decided to concentrate on tennis because his mother was already driving older brother Geoff to coaching with Gavin Yarrow in nearby Nambour. At his first tournament in Southport he used Geoff's racquet in the rallies, but because it was too heavy for him to serve with, he switched to a smaller one with broken strings when he served.
In 1985, when Rafter was 12, times were hard, and Jim and Jocelyn put a photograph of the whole family - six boys: Steve, Geoff, Peter, Pat, Michael and David, and three girls: Theresa, Maree, and Louise - in the local paper to advertise the Rafter Family coffee lounge and carveries. The wholesome and slightly old-fashioned family grouping now makes them look like a harder-edged, Eumundi version of the singing Von Trapps.
Soon after that Jocelyn moved down to Brisbane with Rafter to advance his tennis career - even though the Queensland selectors still hadn't picked him for a State squad. Once he'd left school he was coached by Stickler. "Pat could be a little bit casual at times, and a little bit flippant. But he was also a fierce competitor. There were days I'd take the bicycle helmet to training because the previous day the balls and racquets had gone all over the fence. It was pure frustration."
Once practice was over on a Friday night, Rafter would head for the Sunshine Coast and the surf. "Pat loved to go out and rage", Stickler says, "but he never let it get in the way of training. He'd never have girls waiting for him at the courts. He'd always do the hard work".
Seared into coach Gavin Yarrow's memory is the day that the rising Rafter came to Coolum to prepare for the Australian Open. "He'd had a huge night and he heaved a couple of times on the court. He was almost to the point of exhaustion, but he kept going. Then we went to the rowing machine in the spa. He decided he would go for the record time, and he did it. The guy gets the bit between his teeth."
The only way Rafter could afford to travel overseas in 1991 was by accepting a $30 000 loan from Geoff, and there were nights on tour in Spain that he was so broke that he slept on station platforms, and survived on bread and cheese. Days that he still remembered when he was guest of honour at a State reception at Government House in Brisbane in December, 1997, to recognise his first US Open victory at Flushing Meadow three months before. Rob Borbidge, the then premier, was there, along with a host of dignitaries and people he'd never met before. Dry as the dust back home in Eumundi, the 24 year-old Rafter turned to a friend, "Gee, mate, he said, "there's a lot of fleas here tonight".
In one sense, Rafter hadn't changed at all; he was still the boy from Eumundi who came home to eat his favourtie meat pie sandwiches, ignoring the limitless fillet steak offered by a Queensland meat company. The one grand thing about him had been his former English girlfriend, Alexandra Dixon, who had a stately home and used to take him to the opera. When she'd come to stay with the family in Brisbane she was never too keen to do her share of the dishes, like everyone else. Rafter's current girlfriend, Lara Feltham, a Sydney model, is more down to earth. But it hasn't been easy keeping a grip, given that Rafter now has career earnings of $11.5 million, with off-court endorsement income on the way to matching that. He was named the ATP Tour's most popular player of 1998, after People magazine in the US voted him the sexiest athlete of 1997.
"I think it's an ongoing struggle for Pat", says Newcombe. "It's very hard to maintain your reality once you win a Grand Slam. A lot depends on the people you surround yourself with. His family have done a great job. When he comes home he's just one of the gang."
Rafter grounds himself in the reality of the family. Steve manages his financial affairs; Pete spent 20 weeks last year travelling with him; sister Louise assists with public relations; and Geoff, who spent several years as Rafter's travelling coach, handles the merchandising.
Rafter hasn't forgotten how his parents always told him that you treated people exactly the same, whether they had a million, or a brass razoo. He himself has millions, but once he started making it, he looked to give it away.
He'd wanted to give his entire $930,000 1997 US Open prize money to Brisbane's Starlight Foundation for sick children, but he eventually settled on a $300,000 donation. Then when he played in Lyon in October 1997, he returned $75,000 in appearance money - given to star players to encourage them to play in tournaments - because he had lost in the first round. This was almost unheard of in the often mercenary world of professional tennis.
Rafter says he had arrived in Lyon unprepared. "If I had someone over at my place, like a builder, and he didn't do a good job, why should he get paid for it? That's the way I look at it. I didn't do a good job so why should I get paid for it? Now if I receive appearance fees at tournaments, I go a lot more prepared and give myself the best chance of doing well, so if I do lose in the first round, then that's just the way it goes".
This same boy from Eumundi had also become the prince of Flushing Meadow, winning what is by common consent the toughest of all Grand Slam tournaments - taking into account the heat, the noise, the cement courts, the unruly crowd, the overflying aircraft, the smell, the pollution, and the overall mayhem that is New York.
The great test of Rafter's fibre had come two years ago when he decided to sack Geoff, who had lent him money to get started on the circuit in 1991, as his coach. For a family bonded in mutual support and sacrifice, it was an emotional trauma. "When it happened the two of them hugged and cried," says a family member.
In public Rafter was still the circuit's good guy, the man who talked to everyone, from players to tournament drivers - whereas world number one Pete Sampras and number two Marcelo Rios kept themselves to themselves - but he had acquired the dog-eat-dog determination required at the top of any professional sport. He had also learned to believe in himself, according to Stickler: "Pat never really had the self-belief. He played the point to let the other player lose it; he didn't play to win it. You don't see that in Pat Rafter today."
Rafter's return to Australia this summer marked a watershed in his attitude towards those clamouring for a part of him. He was going to look after himself, and his preparation for the Australian Open, rather than be swamped by requests to do this, go there.
"I think for a while last year he changed from being Pat Rafter, tennis player, to the Pat Rafter Corporation, and he didn't cope," Stickler says. "Pat finds it hard to say no, but he's getting better at that. He learns from each new experience and moves on".
Having learned from last year's mistakes, and an early loss in the Australian Open, the barricades were raised when Rafter returned to Australia in November. Apart from a few favours for friends, Rafter disappeared into seclusion on the Sunshine Coast to reclaim his private life and rest his injured left knee.
Says fellow Australian Davis Cup player Mark Woodforde: "You can't get this far without having that selfishness. I think Pat has that shittiness in him, but people don't notice it. He's able to deal with it without pissing off a whole lot of people".
Rafter's doubles partner, Jonas Bjorkman, has no doubts that the Australian has acquired the toughness to beat even his best friend. "Pat definitely has not been nice to me the last two times we played. He beat me badly at Toronto and the US Open".
Along the road to Flushing Meadow, Rafter had also learned to do those things his father, Jim, feared he might never do - play the calculated, percentage shot that might not be pretty, but which would win the point. He learned from losses and worked out how to do better next time, just as he eventually beat Sampras last year after eight successive defeats.
"I've learned when to play percentages and when not to, depending on the opponent, and the surface and conditions", says Rafter. "You can play a flamboyant flashy sort of game, but when it gets tight you have to play within yourself. I've learned how to read the play a lot better, when to go for it, and when to hang off".
Davis Cup coach Tony Roche was convinced Rafter should serve and volley like an Australian Stefan Edberg. But he and Rafter have also spent countless hours improving the player's baseline game, to the point where it was solid enough for Rafter to win his second US Open against fellow Australian Mark Philippoussis last September.
Back in Eumundi before Christmas, Jim and Jocelyn Rafter ponder their son's chances of winning the Australian Open starting on Monday. "The best thing you can say to Pat is, 'You can't do it', says Jocelyn. Hadn't he shown John McEnroe when the American was reported as saying that Rafter was a "one Slam wonder", and that he'd never win another Grand Slam?
"Pat can win the Australian Open - if he wants to," said Jocelyn. "We just need to put a bit of iron in him, and get someone to tell him he can't do it".
