Hailing from the mighty Wairarapa, what's the tennis scene like in Masterton and how does one end up on the ATP World Tour from there?

I wouldn’t call it the epicentre of global tennis but it has a strong core community and some passionate people helping out. I was lucky to begin with for two reasons - I grew up on a farm that had an old asphalt tennis court by the house, and I have an older brother. My parents would go out for a hit in the summer evenings and of course my sister, brother and I would all want to join in. Being almost three years older than me, Josh was always significantly better, which provided a big pull on me to improve.

Describe your life on the ATP tour these days. What's a day/week/month in the life of Marcus Daniell encompass?

Hotel rooms, airports, airplanes. With a generous dose of tennis courts. The ATP Tour is the longest major sports season, spanning from the first week of January until the first week of November. This means I spend around 40 weeks of the year on the road. Seeing different countries and cultures is a real buzz, but the travel part gets incredibly tiring, especially if you’re 6’3 and can’t afford the business class upgrade. Need to win a few Grand Slams first!

So... at what level does a kiwi tennis player have to get before the money side of things becomes sustainable? Gotta imagine there's plenty of sacrifice before the career starts being able to sustain itself financially, especially coming from NZ.

There are huge barriers to entry for any aspiring tennis player. There are many tens of thousands of kids pursuing the dream of becoming the next Federer. We only see a dozen or so of these kids at each age group in NZ, so they never get a clear picture of the global level until playing in Europe or South America. Before anything else you’re fighting against the numbers in a sport where only the top 0.1% survive long enough to have a profitable career. The other biggest barrier is financial. It’s incredibly expensive to pursue a professional tennis career.

Even if you’re competing at the lowest levels of pro tennis you still have to spend 30-35 weeks of the year on the road, which means gargantuan travel and accommodation bills (especially if you’re flying to tournaments from NZ), without taking into account the fact that you need to pay a coach to help you improve (this is utterly necessary for every player trying to climb the rankings). In some countries the governing body will subsidise many of these expenses for players, but Tennis NZ doesn’t have massive resources and doesn’t help at all.

This means that in NZ you have to be lucky enough to have a family or a community who can support you until you’re making enough prizemoney to cover your expenses. When I was playing in the lower levels my yearly tennis expenses were around $45,000 per year. Now they’re up at around $100,000 per year, which shows you approximately how much prizemoney you have to be earning just to break even!

How does the process of finding a doubles partner go? Like, what goes into that decision and how flexible do you need to be with it?

It’s weirdly like trying to find a girlfriend. Before Tinder. You get on the grapevine and see if there are any unhappy partnerships out there or any guys who are also looking for a partner and then get on Whatsapp and explore the possibilities.

What makes a great doubles player as opposed to a singles player? Obviously the singles get the glory but it's not like the doubles are just full of failed singles jokers either.

It’s actually quite a distinct skill set. The top singles guys are obviously ridiculously good tennis players, but it’s very common to see them lose doubles matches against solid doubles teams. Volleys and serve play a much bigger role in doubles, as do quick reactions and positioning around the net. Famous tennis players who I’d feel extremely inferior to on a singles court actually don’t bother me at all on a doubles court.

You teamed up with Michael Venus at the last Olympics. How massive was his French Open Doubles title for the sport in Aotearoa?

That was an absolutely enormous achievement. To put it in perspective, we haven’t had a grand slam champion since Wilding, which was before World War I, when professional tennis was not professional tennis. However I fear that his achievement hasn’t had the impact it deserves in NZ. Tennis is still considered by High Performance Sport NZ not to be a high performance sport. Tennis has one of the largest global TV followings of any sport in the world, and some of the biggest global athletic superstars. For it to be considered purely recreational in NZ is a joke. I truly hope that Tennis NZ can leverage Mike’s stunning success into better recognition for the sport in general.

Having made the third round at both Wimbledon and the Aussie Open this year, as well as peaking at your highest ever doubles ranking a few months back, how close do you feel you are to replicating something like what Venus achieved? Is it a matter of getting on that lucky run? Finding the right partner?

Definitely. I feel like I’m in a partnership that has big potential. We’re improving week by week and have beaten some of the best teams in the world this year. We had a big chance to go deeper at Wimbledon but it wasn’t to be. It’s a matter of putting yourself in those big situations enough times that it becomes comfortable and normal, and if you keep pushing and pushing the break will come. For Mike it came all at once and catapulted him into the upper echelons where it’s easier to stay there than to get there. I’m gunning for the same thing and Mike is an inspiration for that.

Talk about a few highlights of life as a tennis pro. Winning the title in Auckland a few years back has to be up there, surely? What else do you hold close?

Winning Auckland as a wildcard was special. Every time I step out on the court to represent NZ in Davis Cup is special. But the most awe-inspiring, emotional and humbling moment of my career was walking through the tunnel and into the roar of the Maracana with Team NZ at the Rio Olympics.

How do you see the development of tennis going in New Zealand? Any ideas to improve things?

To be honest I find it frustrating. We have a surfeit of athletic talent in NZ and we have some good coaches who have their hearts in the right place. However we also have some petty, territorial coaches and administrators who are more concerned about their ego and clutching on to players than the development of the sport. This negative culture and a lack of federation support has caused our biggest singles prospect of the last five years to defect to the UK. In saying that, there has been a recent change of administration in Tennis NZ that may bring some positive change.

The best decision they’ve made in the past ten years was to bring Simon Rea back into the fold from Tennis Australia – Simon is one of the hardest working, passionate and knowledgeable tennis people I know. He is single-handedly transforming the performance side of Tennis NZ and I look forward to helping him create a better culture.

The one development that I personally believe is desperately needed is a national academy. It was decided years ago to have regional performance centres instead of a national centre. This is ludicrous – we have a bit over 4 million people living in NZ. The last thing we can afford to do is split that already tiny resource into 5-7 even tinier resources. In much the same way that my older brother pulled me to a higher level, having a national academy would pool all of the best players in NZ into one location, where the competition would constantly raise the bar rather than each region having kids feel like a big fish when in reality they are competing in a minuscule puddle.

Is it true you were a pretty promising football player too in the younger days? How far did you get there and was it a matter of having to pick one sport to focus on after a point?

Yeah I probably played more football than tennis until I was 15. I was in the NZ team for both football and tennis, playing one in the summer and one in the winter. But at the end of that year the football federation said that I would have to give up tennis in order to be eligible for next year’s team that traveled to Argentina, and at the same time the tennis federation told me I’d have to give up football in order to stay in next year’s NZ team too. So I had to choose, and when I was sleeping on the cold floor of a one star motel in the boondocks of Korea trying to earn an ATP point and $50; I definitely questioned my choice. Now I can look back and say it was all worth it.

Obligatory Federer question now. As a fellow practitioner of the sport, what exactly is going on for Roger to be battling for grand slams again at his age? The dude's incredible...

I have a theory: Roger is an alien. This is the only way I can comprehend how good that guy is at tennis.

Finally, give us one bit of wisdom or inspiration that you've gained travelling the world and playing tennis that you think is worth spreading?

There are so many clichés that I scoffed at when I was a talented junior that turned out to be true, but the one that made the biggest difference to me is that nothing can be achieved without hard work, and this takes on a very specific meaning to me – it’s a noticeable fact the guys at the top of the tennis world spend significantly more hours in the gym and more hours with coaches thinking about tennis, but the biggest difference is that they focus twice as hard while on court.

So, while a junior or a futures player might spend the same amount of hours on court per day, they’re getting half as much from each session. I didn’t really understand the idea of 100% engagement until I was about 23 and received a giant bollocking from my coach who is a bit of a genius in this area. I thought I was working super hard because I trained 5-7 hours a day and was physically exhausted all the time. What he made me realise was that one hour of supremely mentally engaged training is both more valuable and more taxing than four hours of running around without being 100% there.

When I finally fully internalised this concept I could only do around 45 minutes on court before dying. I increased my stamina bit by bit, and now when I step on court I can very quickly see if my practice partner is a player or not by how long they can maintain extreme mental intensity. This aspect of tennis is almost impossible to pick up on unless you’ve been on court with or against a top level pro, but when you get to the level where everyone can hit beautiful shots it’s the thing that separates the good from the great and the great from the aliens.

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