Robert Lansdorp, Coach of Tennis Champions, Is Dead at 85

Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach whose focus on developing land blows through an incessant essay helped convert four of his students, Tracy Austin, Pete Sampras, Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova, players No. 1 in the world, died Monday in West Carson, California. He was 85 years old.

Stephanie Lansdorp, her daughter, said her death, in a nursing center, was caused by cardiopulmonary judgment.

Lansdorp, based in southern California, worked, mainly with young players: Austin began lessons with him at age 7, Sampras at 10, to build his muscle memory through drilling and feet game, the setback and the other hands.

“I wanted to do it again and again, and I had methods to get there, I had a special ability,” Austin said in an interview. “You knew that if Robert was pushing you, Mean who knew there was more for you. It was hard, but there was a soft side for him. Through people better.”

When Austin won the title of female singles in the US Open Age 16 in 1979, he became the youngest champion in the history of the tournament and the first Grand Slam champion tutoring by Lansdorp.

“We made our names together,” he said.

After Austin’s victory over Chris Evert, Lansdorp told reporters: “There is room to improve. There is only one way to go:

In total, Austin, Sampras, Davenport and Sharapova won 24 Grand Slam Singles titles.

Lansdorp did not foster elite players only; Hi, they also educated others on several levels, including those who wanted to make their high school and university teams.

“I never look at a child and say: ‘I’m going to make this child no. 1’ ‘He told Los Angeles Times in 1999. It’s like a process year per year. I am excited by the progress that they.

The exercises used as “20 on the baseline”, which required that students reach 20 consecutive land blows within the lines, and begin if they were lost.

“It hardened you,” Austin said.

Sampras said that Lansdorp intimidated him with his size, was 6 -foot 3 inches and his abruptness.

“One of Robert’s favorite tricks was to get to the thesis Big Topspin shots in me, getting stuck,” Sampras wrote in “A Champion’s Mind: Lessons from A Life in Tennis” (2008, with Peter Bodo). “And remember, this is a very big man who made more than two hundred, beating with a 12 -year -old skinny.”

Robert Herman Lansdorp was born on November 12, 1938 in Semarang, Indonesia, duration of the menu of the archipelago as a Dutch colony. His father, Herman, was a Dutch candy executive who was born in Indonesia; His mother, Hilda (Skinner) Lansdorp, who was also Dutch, directed the home.

Robert spent his first eight years in Indonesia. As he recalled in his blog, he was poisoned at 3 by a driver who had fired for his father, and his father was admitted to a Japanese concentration camp doe occupation of Indonesia in World War II. It was possible released.

After the war, Lansdorp wrote, the fearsome Dutch families gathered in an empty concentration camp where, one night, “the Indonesians arrived at a part of the camp and massacred hundreds of Dutch men, women and children.”

“We were waiting for our turn when an English patrol freed us,” he added. “Hurra for the English!”

His family fled to a safe place in Occidental Java, where they stayed for a year before moving to the Netherlands with the help of the International Red Cross.

After two years, his family returned to Indonesia, but it was not safer for the Dutch, and the Lansdorps returned to the Netherlands when Robert was 12 years old. He started playing tennis at age 13.

In 1960, the family moved to California, and his tennis skill earned him a scholarship for the University of Pepperdine in Malibu. It was an All-American in 1962, his first year in the school tennis team, which played until 1964. He did not graduate.

Althegh was a good player, Lansdorp did not feel he could prosper as a professional.

After what his daughter said one day as a bank counter and an encyclopedia seller, he decided that he had a future in tennis teaching.

“Instantly I could say how people were hitting the ball well and how they were hitting it badly,” he told Los Angeles magazine in 2005.

Lansdorp first taught in Morley Field in San Diego and then at the Jack Kramer Club at Rolling Hills Estates, the West End Racquet & Health Club in Torrance and the Riviera Tennis Club in Los Angeles.

Sharapova was 11 when he began taking Lansdorp lessons in 1998. Her father, Yuri, wanted her to hit terrestrial strokes that were as good as those that Lansdorp had taught Davenport.

When Lansdorp saw Sharapova play for the first time, she “had this horrible concentration, and there were problems with her right,” he told The Guardian in 2005.

“She was not very good by hitting 100 right -wing balls in a row,” he said. “Once I see that the ball hits cleanly, I will make the player repeat that and more.”

It was, he added, “just a matter of making him do things he never liked to do.”

The United States Tennis Association awarded Lansdorp an Achievement Award for Life in 2005 and honored him in 2014 as a legend of the US team coach.

In addition to his daughter Stephanie, an American tennis player of 1998 whom he had taught, Lansdorp is survived by a grandson; Two Steps grandchildren; Two great -grandchildren; A brother, Albert; And a sister, Louise Lansdorp. His marriage to Susan Proctor ended in divorce.

Lansdorp accredited one of his less recognized students, Walter Redondo, with the help of attracting attention to his training. Lansdorp was not well known when Redondo began to take lessons with him in 1968, but his profile as a coach increased with the victories of Redondo in the Junior tennis circuit, where he became the 16 -year -old boy best classified in the United States in 1974.

“Walter Redondo was the most talented child I have worked with,” Lansdorp said in an event in his honor held this year at the Jack Kramer Club. “I really didn’t know what I was doing, but with Walter, whatever you told him, he would, because he had a lot of talent.”

Redondo, who is now an abstract painter, recalled that when Lansdorp pushed him with drills on the court, “I was able to develop my person, so I didn’t care about the discipline of everything.”

“And our relationship deepened,” he said, “on and off the court, so my confidence in Robert was like a father’s.”