All for loveJanuary 24, 2010
Gabriela Dabrowski's father taught himself to play tennis and left his job so he could coach his daughter. He and his wife spent $300,000 to polish the girl's skills. Now the fifth-ranked junior tennis player in the world, the Ottawa teen has served notice she's ready to turn pro.Gabriela Dabrowski is in Melbourne today, preparing for the start of the Australian Open junior tennis tournament.
Last week, she was two hours away in Traralgon for a tune-up event. In the weeks before that, Dabrowski was hitting serves and volleys at competitions in Costa Rica and Mexico.
She left for the Mexican tournament on Christmas Eve, following a brief but "necessary" mental break at her Blossom Park home. The pit stop in Ottawa came after a heavy slate of events in early December, culminating in her victory at the prestigious Orange Bowl championship in Key Biscayne, Florida, a triumph that vaulted the 17-year-old to No. 5 in the world junior rankings.
When the Australian Open wraps up, Dabrowski will leave for another tournament on the southern Australian island of Tasmania, followed by a series of low-profile Challenger professional events in the southern U.S.
"The last few months have been filled with a lot of travel," Dabrowski says in a telephone interview during some rare down time Down Under. "At this time last year, well, really from mid-November on, I was based in Florida for six months. It was more about training.
"Now, it's time to start playing. My priorities have changed."
Indeed, Dabrowski is turning the corner from being a junior star to the cutthroat world of professional tennis.
Her tennis progress isn't surprising to those who first saw her natural gifts. When she was seven, she stumbled across a racquet, went to the neighbourhood public courts and shocked the 10-year-old family friend she was playing with by smacking the balls. Dabrowski's parents, Wanda and Yurek, followed up by taking her to a lesson, with little idea of what was in store.
"Normally, a seven-year-old comes to a lesson, hits a few balls and has some fun," says Tony Milo, then a tennis pro at the Ottawa Athletic Club, who now runs his own academy at Carleton University.
"From the very first ball she hit, you could tell she had something. Her eyes were so large. She was ready to go. She took it all in. The competitivess. The focus. It was always, 'one more,' 'let's do it again.' She was incredibly self-motivated, even then."
At nine, Dabrowski advanced to the finals of the Ontario under-14 girls championships. At 13, she was invited to share a tennis court at Scotiabank Place with John McEnroe, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Jana Novotna during a celebrity event. At 14, she won the title at Les Petits As tournament in Tarbes, France, the first Canadian player to win one of the world's most prestigious under-14 tournaments.
Yet with competition thin in Ottawa, Dabrowski has spent the winters of her teen years in Florida, sacrificing a typical upbringing in exchange for hitting thousands upon thousands of practice balls alongside other top juniors and select professionals at the Saddlebrook Academy in Tampa. A highlight was rallying for three hours with former tennis great Martina Hingis.
It hasn't come cheaply.
Dabrowski's parents have dropped a cool $300,000 to give her access to the world class instruction, top tournament competition, travel and equipment. Yurek also took a three-year leave of absence from his job at the Westin Hotel to live with his daughter in Florida, acting as coach, manager, hitting partner, trainer, travel secretary and racquet stringer.
In the past few months, her father has slid into the background as Dabrowksi trains at the national facility in Montreal. She's now travelling with a coach from Tennis Canada. By doing so, the family has given up some control in exchange for the national association covering her costs.
(A Tennis Canada mixup last weekend resulted in Dabrowski missing her quarter-final match in Traralgon. She also didn't play in a scheduled semifinal doubles match in Costa Rica because Canadian officials couldn't reschedule her flights to Australia.)
Dabrowski is down to earth. She knows it's a long road to the top, full of bumps and roadblocks. Winning one point at a crucial moment of one match often makes all the difference between an early exit and a decent payday. Win enough matches in low-profile tournaments and the world ranking improves, providing access to the higher-calibre, bigger money events.
Dabrowski is currently ranked 780th in the world in singles and 465th in doubles, largely because of the limited number of pro events she's played. Due to the fact she turns 18 on April 1, she's also eligible to play the major junior events throughout the 2010 calendar year.
A hectic pace, she says, is crucial to realize her dreams of one day representing Canada at the Olympics and staring across the net at players like Venus Williams and Kim Clijsters.
"I hope to win one of the junior Grand Slams (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open) and it would be nice to finish the year ranked somewhere between 250th and 300th," she said.
There were times in the past when she would catch herself thinking about the lonely life she was living. No longer. She has gained a renewed confidence by battling through tough tournaments, including the Orange Bowl victory.
"I just feel that tennis is a really big sacrifice," she says. "It's about playing matches and sucking it up. If you have a little pain, it's about holding on and playing through it. That's where it matters, especially when you're playing against players you should beat. It's just part of tennis, even the top professionals go through that. They're on the road so much. They understand what it takes."
Tennis Canada coach Sylvain Bruneau says Dabrowski has all the tools to be a top-ranked player, including a mental toughness many other naturally gifted players don't possess.
"She really wants it, she's determined to become a professional player and physically ready to become a professional player," says Bruneau, claiming Dabrowski has the potential to reach the heights of Aleksandra Wozniak, Canada's top-ranked player, currently rated 34th in the world.
"Mentally, she has made it very clear where she wants to go. There's a lot of competition and all of the players have so much talent, but you also have to be very tough mentally. It's a tough life. It's a one-on-one sport. You have to be prepared to go after it every day."
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Yurek Dabrowski didn't speak a word of English when he arrived in Ottawa from his native Poland as a landed immigrant in 1982, but he now has the gift of gab in his adopted tongue.
One of his favourite stories is his own harrowing trip to Canada, including surviving 18 hours while floating on a raft in the high seas of the Mediterranean following a shipwreck.
As a youth in his native Poland, he was a star volleyball player and sprinter and went on to carve out a career as a carpenter, mechanic, electrician, electronics expert and jack-of-all trades while maintaining a passion for car rallies and sailing.
At 28, he joined a crew of 20 on a 100-foot schooner for what was supposed to be a two-month journey from Poland to Greece -- via the Baltic Sea, North Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
From the outset, Dabrowski says, the captain failed to heed storm warnings. "It was tough, we almost died in the North Sea," he recalls.
After being rescued near Amsterdam, even bigger storms awaited them. One eventually capsized their schooner in the Mediterranean.
The crew floated for "a day and a half," sitting on the sides of an overloaded raft, when they were rescued by a French tanker 90 kilometres off the coast of Corsica.
The elation of the rescue was short lived. They discovered Poland had declared martial law while they were at sea.
"We couldn't call anyone, couldn't travel, couldn't send messages," Dabrowski says, as he pores over articles and pictures of the rescue.
The sailors were taken to Greece and, lacking support from the Polish Embassy, began stealing food until the Red Cross, a private shipping company and private citizens learned of their plight and provided assistance.
Eventually, the Canadian Embassy stepped forward. Dabrowski filed for immigrant status in February and flew to Ottawa in June 1982.
He landed a job at the then brand-new Westin Hotel, employing his various talents. In his spare time, he went back to his twin hobbies, sailing and car rallying, claiming he had little time for women in his life. He knew, however, that Wanda was the girl for him when she asked to accompany him on a car rally through Quebec in 1990.
Wanda laughs at the rally experience. She also says her upbringing didn't have as much drama as her husband's life.
"I grew up in Niagara Falls, a pretty typical Canadian family and I was one of six kids," she says. "We had a hockey rink in the backyard. I loved baseball, I skied a little bit, but I didn't excel or anything. (Gabriela) definitely gets her sporting genes from her Polish background."
When Yurek looks back at his life's journey, he can't help but laugh.
"I left Poland in 1981," he says. "I could never imagine that 29 years later, I would be in Canada, that my daughter was going to be top 5 junior in the world and I am with her playing tennis -- something I had never done before."
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The Dabrowski home is a shrine to their daughter's tennis success. A large serving bowl on a living room side table is filled with tennis balls. On a nearby coffee table, a balloon-sized neon yellow ball, signed by McEnroe, Kournikova, Courier and Novotna, is supported on a stand Yurek created from the base of a discarded gold-plated lamp.
The main floor office walls are covered with pictures of a smiling Gabriela at various tennis tournaments. Her trophies and medals fill several shelves. The bookshelf contains dozens of books on tennis instruction.
In the basement, 200 instructional tennis videos are stacked against one wall and two dozen racquets hang on hooks beside a racquet stringing machine, which Yurek says, "saves us $2,000 a year."
If Sidney Crosby left the marks of hours of basement practice on his parents' washing machine, Gabriela Dabrowski's background is stamped on her parents' walls and floors.
A wooden board, graced with targets, leans against another wall, the spot where Yurek and Gabriela practised volleys for hours on end. Until the board was brought in, they hit the drywall, now a mess of holes and black marks. The ripped carpet provides evidence of Gabriela's repeated lunging into balls.
"We broke all the lights in the first week we started," says Yurek.
When Gabriela's talent became obvious, Milo, the pro at the Ottawa Athletic Club, told the Dabrowskis that their daughter needed to go south to play against world-class junior talent.
Suddenly, they were staring at eye-popping bills while spending winters away from home. A strong student, they wondered about her education. They had to consider the social consequences of an atypical upbringing.
They have heard the horror stories of how young tennis phenoms such as Andre Agassi and Mary Pierce suffered physical and verbal abuse at the hands of their overbearing fathers. In his recent autobiography, Agassi details the abuse, often referring to his childhood on his backyard court and at a Florida tennis school as a "prison."
"What helped, I think, is that we didn't come into it with a background in tennis," says Wanda. "We went into it with a really open mind, willing to learn from anybody and everybody. We've seen all kinds of things. And you learn from it.
"And sometimes there are things I have said or ways we've behaved that we think later, 'Maybe we should have tempered that a little bit.' It's a learning journey for everybody, including us."
Through it all, the parents insist the dream is their daughter's, not theirs.
"We did this a few years back," says Yurek. "We sold the RRSPs. We told her, 'Gaby, we don't have any money.' She was at the top of the stairs and she looked at me and said, 'You're not going to take my life away.'
"What to do? We start borrowing. It's incredible. We spent about $300,000 since she started playing tennis and half is not our money."
Yurek dropped all other activities, studying tennis books, videos and all the teaching aids he could find to become a full-time coach. He reconfigured a ball-hitting machine into a serving machine for use at the public court. Wanda, a teleworker for the City of Ottawa, stayed home while her husband spent time with their daughter in Florida.
It's all beginning to pay off.
Gabriela has been offered tennis scholarships at U.S. colleges, but isn't interested. She realizes she has surrendered part of a life other teenagers take for granted. The prize for doing that has always been the pro circuit.
"I saw my Mom every two or three months (in the winter)," says Gabriela. "Maybe at Christmas and then not again until the end of February or March. There are a lot of sacrifices."
Yet while Yurek has been the tennis parent, Wanda appreciates how her connection with her daughter has evolved.
"It's that much richer when we do interact," she says. "I know she listens to me and thank goodness for new technologies like Skype. You can talk to her and see her and she can see the cat and all her homey things. The relationship is that much more focused and I've learned to adapt to a role where I'm strictly mom.
"We're trying to help her be a solid citizen. If she does become a person with a certain notoriety, I don't want her writing a book like Andre Agassi."
Gabriela's relationship with her father has also changed dramatically, now that she's on the road and he's at home.
"He has his life also and travelling with me is a lot of stress for him," she says. "He always wanted the best for me. He would help in any way he could. But when you room with the girls (as part of a Tennis Canada group), you're not talking about technique or something about tennis all the time. It's more of a mental break.
"With my Dad, he was always talking about tennis. I've told him I can only listen to so much, that maybe he needs to deliver a smaller amount."
Now that she's on the cusp of the big time, in the midst of a high-flying lifestyle full of daily pressures, she can't say enough about what has been provided to her.
"I'm grateful for the support," she says. "Without their support, I wouldn't be here. I owe it all to them.""
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