Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach whose focus on developing ground strokes through ceaseless repetition helped turn four of his students — Tracy Austin, Pete Sampras, Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova — into No. 1-ranked players in the world, died on Monday in West Carson, Calif. He was 85.
Stephanie Lansdorp, his daughter, said his death, in a nursing facility, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest.
Lansdorp, who was based in Southern California, worked one on one, mostly with young players — Austin started lessons with him at 7, Sampras at 10 — to build their muscle memory by drilling them on their forehands, backhands and other strokes and on their footwork.
“He wanted to do it over and over and over again, and he had methods to get there — he had a knack,” Austin said in an interview. “You knew if Robert was pushing you, it meant that he knew there was more to you. He was tough, but there was a soft side to him. He thrived on making people better.”
When Austin won the women’s singles title at the U.S. Open at age 16 in 1979, she became the youngest women’s champion in tournament history and the first Grand Slam champion tutored by Lansdorp.
“We made our names together,” she said.
After Austin’s victory over Chris Evert, Lansdorp told reporters: “There’s room for improvement. There’s only one way to go — up.”
In all, Austin, Sampras, Davenport and Sharapova won 24 Grand Slam singles titles.
Lansdorp did not nurture only elite players; he also schooled others at various levels, including those who wanted to make their high school and college teams.
“I never look at a kid and say, ‘I’m going to make this kid No. 1,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “It’s like a year-by-year process. I’m excited by the progress they make. They don’t always know that, because I’m not generous with compliments.”
He employed drills like “20 at the base line,” which called for his students to hit 20 consecutive ground strokes within the lines — and to start over if they missed.
“It toughened you up,” Austin said.
Sampras said Lansdorp intimidated him with his size — he stood 6-foot-3 — and his gruffness.
“One of Robert’s favorite tricks was hitting these big topspin shots right at me, jamming me,” 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 weighed two hundred plus, hitting with a skinny 12-year-old.”
Robert Herman Lansdorp was born on Nov. 12, 1938, in Semarang, Indonesia, during the archipelago’s waning years as a Dutch colony. His father, Herman, was a Dutch Goodyear executive who was born in Indonesia; his mother, Hilda (Skinner) Lansdorp, who was also Dutch, managed the home.
Robert spent his first eight years in Indonesia. As he recalled on his blog, he was poisoned at 3 by a chauffeur who had been fired by his father, and during World War II, his father was interned at a concentration camp run by the Japanese occupiers. He was eventually freed.
After the war, Lansdorp wrote, fearful Dutch families gathered in an empty Japanese concentration camp where, one night, “the Indonesians came to one part of the camp and massacred hundreds of Dutch men, women and children. We were waiting for our turn when an English patrol set us free. Hooray for the English!”
His family fled to safety in West Java. They stayed there for a year and then moved to the Netherlands, with the help of the International Red Cross.
After two years, his family returned to Indonesia, but it was no safer for Dutch people, and the Lansdorps returned to the Netherlands when Robert was 12. He started playing tennis at 13.
In 1960, the family moved to California, and his tennis prowess earned him a scholarship at Pepperdine University in Malibu. He was an all-American in 1962, his first year on the school’s tennis team, which he played for until 1964. He did not graduate.
Although he was a good player, he didn’t feel he could thrive as a professional.
After what his daughter said were one-day stints as a bank teller and a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, Lansdorp decided that he had a future in teaching tennis.
“I could instantly tell how people were hitting the ball right and how they were hitting it wrong,” he told Los Angeles magazine in 2005.
He taught first at Morley Field in San Diego, and then at the Jack Kramer Club in Rolling Hills Estates, the West End Racquet & Health Club in Torrance and the Riviera Tennis Club in Los Angeles.
Sharapova was 11 when she started taking lessons from Lansdorp in 1998. Her father, Yuri, wanted her to hit ground strokes that were as good as the ones Lansdorp had taught Davenport.
When Lansdorp first watched Sharapova play, she “had this horrible concentration and there were problems with her forehand,” he told The Guardian in 2005. “She was not very good on hitting 100 balls forehand crosscourt in a row. Once I see that ball is hit cleanly, I will have the player repeat that over and over.”
It was, he added, “just a matter of making her do things that she never liked doing.”
The United States Tennis Association gave Lansdorp a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and honored him in 2014 as a Team U.S.A. Coaching Legend.
In addition to his daughter Stephanie, an all-American tennis player in 1998 whom he had taught, Lansdorp is survived by a grandson; two step-grandchildren; two great-grandsons; a brother, Albert Lansdorp; and a sister, Louise Lansdorp. His marriage to Susan Proctor ended in divorce.
Lansdorp credited one of his less renowned students, Walter Redondo, with helping bring attention to his coaching. Lansdorp was not well known when Redondo started taking lessons with him in 1968, but his profile as a coach rose with Redondo’s victories on the junior tennis circuit, where he became the top-ranked 16-year-old boy in the United States in 1974.
“Walter Redondo was the most talented boy that I ever worked with,” Lansdorp said at an event in his honor held this year at the Jack Kramer Club. “I didn’t really know what I was doing, but with Walter, whatever you told him to do, he would do it, because he was so talented.”
Redondo, who is now an abstract painter, recalled that as Lansdorp pushed him with drills on the court, “he was able to develop my person, so I didn’t mind the discipline of it all. And our relationship deepened, on and off the court, so my trust in Robert was like that of a father.”
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