Mark Philippoussis - "Scud" - is the player  Australian tennis fans are willing to become their  next star. Behind him are years of coaching and  promise. And a driven father called Nick.
By Gerard Wright.

 IF THIS story has elements of a fairytale, it is because that, sometimes, is how a child learns and a  father remembers.

 It starts a hemisphere away from the heartland of Melbourne tennis: not Templestowe, in the outer   north-eastern suburbs, with its backyard blocks big enough to accommodate a court and a grandstand; not Ringwood, where Pat Cash grew and flourished on his family's backyard court; not Sandringham by the bay, where there is the time, the money and the inclination to acquire the tan that goes with the sport.

 The first chapter is written on an en-tout-cas court in Yarraville, an inner-western suburb; largely migrant, wholly unfashionable, next to an old ice-skating rink.  The father and son play there morning and night. On the cold mornings they don gloves to hold their  racquets. When night arrives early, coins are fed into a meter to keep the court lights burning.

   When Nick Philippoussis woke every morning at 6am, there was his son, in his slippers, ready to play   tennis. When he came home from the bank at 4.30 every afternoon, there was Mark at the front door to greet him, ready, again, as ever, to play tennis.

 The first racquet was a wooden Oliver, bought with three new balls for $7.99 during Nick's lunchtime  from a nearby sports store in Port Melbourne for his six-year-old son.

 By the time he was 10, the boy was a fan of Boris  Becker, who had just won Wimbledon for the second  time. Same serve-and-volley game, same Puma outfit, from shirt to shoes to racquet.

  So there stands Mark Philippoussis, a Greek-Italian boy with green eyes, on his playground.

  Soon his body will grow and play will become work. He will make Tony Roche, Australia's most    respected tennis coach, think of Becker when he first sees him play, and reduce, one memorable  Saturday night, an Australian centre court crowd to  sonic jelly, held in the palm of his hand as easily as a  tennis ball. He will earn, to the end of 1996, $1.1 million in prizemoney and much more again in   endorsements.

 He will collect toys like a blue Ferrari, a furnished  apartment in Monte Carlo, a mobile phone, the   18-year-old Parisian actress-model. He will appear at haphazardly-staged media events in his home town and ignore the queries that are thrown at him and, when he has to say something, offer meaningless answers to gently-lobbed questions. His name will appear on the CV of half a dozen different coaches and fitness advisers, whose methods are not in accord with those divined by him and his father.

 They will come and go, some noisily, like the American super mentor Nick Bollettieri, some stoically, like Peter McNamara, whose two stints at  the controls lasted a combined eight months.

 He will flirt briefly with the tennis top 20, then it and he will part company. No one doubts that it will soon be a permanent engagement.

 Nick Philippoussis talks. He wanted to teach his son how to volley. "I set out to make it fun," he says.

  He speaks clearly and slowly, as though to the player who was once a child. "When you are on the net and expecting a volley, just pretend that you are a part of the net, and the net is your castle.

 "You are the prince, waiting for the princess. The  ball is the princess ... Now, what would you do when  the princess comes to the door of your castle? Will  you wait for her to come up, or will you go down to meet her?

 "The best thing to do is to go down and meet her,   isn't it?"

 The boy's voice, recalled by the father: "Yes."

 "I'm sure," says Nick Philippoussis, back in the  present, "that if I was putting a bucket of balls at the  net and telling him to keep his feet working, he  wasn't going to enjoy it as much if I was pushing him,  not leaving him to enjoy every minute. He was  counting the tennis court as one of his big toys."

 To read the preface of this story requires a trip  across the equator to ... Turkey. There, at an Italian   boarding school in Constantinople, the 13-year-old   son of a Greek businessman receives thrice-weekly  tennis coaching sessions from an "oldish guy".

 Nick Philippoussis returned to Athens when he was  15, the lessons buried in his mind. Later, he played  third-division soccer on Sundays,  semi-semi-professional.

 THE events that shaped his life mark him more as  European than purely Greek. His wife, Rossana,  comes from the northern Italian city of Trieste,   although they met in what then was Yugoslavia. He  was staying with his brothers in Switzerland when he  fell in love with an Australian program called   'Skippy'.

  "I was seeing such beautiful bush and water,  kangaroos and koalas . . . I said to my wife, 'that's   the place to go . . . to Australia'."

 Nick and Rossana Philippoussis migrated to Australia  from Greece in 1973 with their seven-year-old   daughter, Anna Maria. They ended up in  Williamstown, which has water and seagulls and a  view of the Melbourne city skyline to the east over   Hobsons Bay, but no bush or wildlife to speak of.

  Nick Philippoussis arrived in Australia with five   languages - Greek, Italian, French, German and  English - and added another, a Yugoslavian tongue   he feels safer not to specify, after he began work at   the then Bank of NSW branch in Yarraville.

 An accountant by training, he became assistant to  the manager, handling loan applications from  non-English speaking clients, before the calls from  what had become the Westpac head office for him   to undertake a management training course became   too loud to politely ignore.

 How could you manage a bank branch and still be  home by 4.30 every afternoon? He resigned in 1991  and bought a taxi, drove it in the mornings after   practice, then was home in the afternoons, ready for   more when Mark returned from school.

 He remembers talking to businessmen as he drove   them to Melbourne airport. They would tell him that   he didn't look like a taxi driver. He told them what he   used to be.

  " 'I resigned because I had my kid playing tennis',   and people were laughing at me. Now, they
  remember the name: 'Bloody hell, he took a chance'."

 IN HIS time, now past, if the evidence of his failure   to get through the qualifying rounds for the Sydney  International a week ago on the outside courts at  White City is anything to go by, Pat Cash was  regarded as the quintessential Australian tennis  player.

 He could trace his lineage, for one thing, to an Irish  bushranger, Martin Cash. He won Wimbledon, for   another, in 1987. He was handsome, brash and  blue-eyed, with a fuse you could almost see   smouldering whenever he took the court. And any  shortcomings in his play from the back of the court   were compensated by astonishing reflexes,  anticipation and speed at the net.
 
 He was the last of that line, which began with  Norman Brookes and Jack Crawford before World  War II, then continued virtually uninterrupted for the   next three decades through, among many others,  Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Rod Laver and John  Newcombe; the last Australian to win a Wimbledon singles title. The last to live and die by death or glory  charges to the net behind a big serve. Anglos all,  from old Australian places: Sedgman from Coburg,  Hoad from Glebe, Laver from Rockhampton, Newcombe from Lane Cove.
 
That was then. Success was taken for granted.   Crowds were well-behaved. They applauded winning  shots and cheered on the big points. But they didn't   wear banners proclaiming their favorite player as   "My Sex God", as happened with Pat Rafter two   summers ago. Neither did they transform the  centre-court atmosphere of what is now known as  Melbourne Park to a time and place when Festival  Hall hosted the big fights and they were the only   show in town.

  They do that for Mark Philippoussis, AKA The  Scud. He is bigger than they were, at 194
  centimetres and 92 kilograms. He hits the ball harder  and makes you look at the game differently.

 At the service line, he rears, swings, connects. At an  indoor venue like Perth's Burswood Dome, where  Philippoussis played in the Hopman Cup, it resounds,    thok, like a squash ball that has been mishit. Then   you see that his opponent, the noted fireballer, Goran  Ivanisevic, is trudging to the opposite side of the ourt, and that the crowd is silent for a moment,  during which the chair umpire intones the score   "thirty-love". Then there is a collective intake of  breath, followed by applause. The four-second delay  is the time it takes for all eyes to swing to a digital  readout on the courtside automatic timer which  records the speed of each serve: 219, 209, 202.Three different serves, three different speeds, all of   them over 200 kilometres.
 
 When Mark Philippoussis plays the game in this way,  tennis is reduced to three intangible elements:
 guesswork, form and luck.
 

 If Philippoussis is in form and his serve is finding the  range, his opponents guess which way it is going to  go. Occasionally their racquet and the ball arrive at  the same place at the same time. If it isn't a fault, it's  an ace or a mishit; rarely, if ever, a clean return.

  Once, in a later match, Guy Forget stuck his racquet   in front of his chest, like a tailender dealing with a  Curtley Ambrose special. There never seems to be  time to see and react, not when there is around 0.36 seconds to pick up the direction of the ball and then  respond.
 
  Despite all that, the nickname remains Scud, rather than "Blur". It was bestowed by Newcombe, the
  newly-appointed Davis Cup captain, during practice  for a Davis Cup tie in the Russian city of St
  Petersburg in February 1994. His teammates were    having trouble with Philippoussis's impressions of a  rocket launcher, team manager Mike Daws recalls,   and team coach Tony Roche asked the kid to back   off during a doubles match so that his countrymen  could work on their return of serve. Philippoussis  obliged until the score reached  40-30, when he served another ace.

  "Why did you do that?" Roche asked. "I always do   that at 40-30," Philippoussis replied.

 Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. When  mood and form coincide, all the hope and hot air that  has accompanied Philippoussis from the outer   satellites of the tennis world to the centre courts of  Wimbledon, Flushing Meadow and Melbourne Park  leave even the best player of this generation, Pete  Sampras, as a leaf in a surge of stormwater.

 On the Saturday night of 20 January 1996 the   scoreboard read 6-4  7-6 (11-9) 7-6 (7-3). Two hours and 14 minutes of  disbelief and then delirium. The first number on each   line belonged to Mark Philippoussis. The second  belonged to Sampras of the United States, the world  No. 1, and winner of the previous three Wimbledon   championships.

  Sampras saw 29 aces and two break points. Many of   the former whistled by him at 200-plus kilometres per   hour. The latter appeared so rarely and vanished so   quickly as to be almost an illusion.

 The correspondent for London's 'Guardian'   newspaper, David Irvine, found himself describing it    as one of the three most dominant performances  ever in men's tennis; the other two were both in  Grand Slam finals - John McEnroe at Wimbledon   over Jimmy Connors in 1984, and Stefan Edberg  against Jim Courier at the US Open in 1991.

  "The thing I learnt today," Philippoussis said later,  "(is) that I now believe I could beat anyone in the   world."

  This is why Fila, an Italian clothing company,   invested $1 million in him over five years (since  re-negotiated and increased) before the Wimbledon  junior championship final in 1994, in which   Philippoussis was runner-up. It was then the richest   clothing deal ever struck for an Australian player.   Last year it is believed to have paid him around   $400,000. His racquet deal with Dunlop is  conservatively estimated at $150,000 a year.

  This is what Nick Philippoussis shaped after his son   came home with his papers stamped at the end of an  unhappy, Tennis Australia-funded trip to Asia when   he was 15; a short saga of tantrums and tanked   tennis matches.

  AS A result, Philippoussis was suspended from the  Victorian Institute of Sport tennis program for three  months. What followed might well be the defining   moment in the father-son relationship, and the career   as well.

  "You gave me the best enjoyment of my life, coming   through from six tournaments. Winning the Masters, 14s and 16s. We've had a great time   "Now, if you want to stop tennis, it's OK with me,  don't worry at all. But, if you want to play tennis, we  are going to go out on the courts every afternoon and   I'm going to make you work hard. I'm going to make   you work so hard that you're going to sweat, and   your sweat is going to come out of your arse, dripping down.
 
 "After that, I'm going to make you run again. I'll    make you push and you are going to hurt and cry.    (Then) I'll push you again. I'll make you one of the   toughest guys there is in Melbourne."

  That summer, Mark Philippoussis dominated the  domestic satellite circuit, the lowest tier of  professional tennis. The journey had started.

  It takes him to Hong Kong, Russia, Italy, Germany,  Japan, Malaysia, France, England and the United  States; around the world in 80 tournaments.

  Just after Christmas, 1996, it deposits him at the  Burswood resort in Perth for the Hopman Cup.
   There, at 2am on the first day of 1997, the Burswood  showroom becomes the country's biggest karaoke  venue, or at least the only one still open. The Fab   Four, a Beatles cover band, are about to say Thank   You and Goodnight. Before they go, they attempt   'Hey Jude'. The audience joins them on stage or sits   at the edge of it, 30 or more in a row, bellowing a   chorus penned before many of them were born.

  There in the middle is Philippoussis, 20 years and two   months young, black tie and dinner jacket long since discarded. Holding his hand is Mary Pierce, 22 next  Wednesday, the arch drama queen of women's  tennis and the 1995 Australian Open champion. Herturquoise gown matches her finger and toenail polish.
 
 Tennis courts, tennis clothes and tennis matches  make them look like adults. Now they look like kids   again. They sing, yell into each other's ears and laugh. Nah, nah, nah NAH NAH NAH NAH. . .

  Don't let this be the place where the rumors start.  They exit separately, Pierce unaccompanied, if not   unnoticed; Philippoussis in the direction of the casino   and thence, onwards and upwards, into another   green year.