In Mt. Isa, a small mining town at the interior of Queensland , OZ, where Pat was born and grew up. Patrick was always dusty and dirty from the mines, the town was small enough that everyone new each other and no one had a lot of extra money.

Patrick was the 7th of 9 children, his mother used to do most of her clothes shopping in bulk at the local equivalent of the K-Mart According to one source Mrs rafter used to get Lacoste symbols and sew them onto young Patrick´s plain white shirts His sneakers were handme-downs and looked like they had lasted forever In Mt Isa, Pat learned to play tennis the way many Australians champions before him did, on a dirt court with no formal coaching beyong his own family, Pat hit a ball against a concrete wall When Pat was 7 his family moved from the mining town to a umbe of different homes in and around Brisbane, his parents, Jim and Jocelyn Rafter opened a restaurant, it was a family business .Pat and the rest of his brothers and sisters worked as busboys and waited on tables .He reportedly was a hard worker not a complainer, he loved the ocean and spent nearly as many free hours at the beach as he did on tennis court.

Excerpt from Tennis Magazine