Tracy Austin, tennis

Tracy Austin Holt is the youngest ever U.S. Open singles champion and youngest inductee of all time in the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Austin won her first professional tournament at age fourteen in 1977. Over her professional tennis career she won thirty titles including three Grand Slam’s winning two Grand Slam singles titles at the U.S. Open 1979, 1981 and one mixed doubles title at Wimbledon in 1980 with her brother John. It was the first brother and sister team ever to win a Grand Slam event. Her tennis career was slowed after back injuries and recurring sciatica began to impair her mobility on the tennis court. By 1983 before her twenty-first birthday Austin’s tennis career due to injuries was waning. Though in 1988 she began the road to a successful comeback reaching the semi-final of the 1988 U.S. Open Mixed Doubles with partner  Ken Flach. Her comeback was ended by a near fatal car accident in 1989. The car accident damaged her knee and inhibited her from training intensely enough to continue to compete at the elite level. This life change eventually redirected Austin’s professional career into television commentating.  She currently is an analyst covering major tennis events for The Tennis Channel through-out the year and the BBC during Wimbledon.

Tracy Austin Holt long ago made her career transition from player to commentator although she keeps her tennis skills sharp.

SZ: One of your big world impacts was when you became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Open. As an adult besides family and children what accomplishments to date are you most proud of?

TAH: Starting a new career in television after retiring from professional tennis and finding a nice balance staying stimulated between working and raising a family. Trying to strike that balance is very tough and everyday I’m constantly trying to balance everything. I’m really into trying to be centered and balanced. There are adjustments I have to make everyday in achieving that balance.

SZ: There’s not a lot of lull time. You also have foundation that puts on charity events.

TAH: For twenty-seven years I had a charity event for under privileged children that is no longer going because the two gentlemen that ran it passed away. But for those twenty-seven years it was a huge impact for needy families. The money raised provided services for dentistry, psychology and health needs. That was very important to me for all those years. More recently I’ve participated in about five tennis celebrity events to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis research because my brother John has M.S. I believe that if an athlete has a platform and is able to give back it’s certainly very rewarding I was telling my husband the other day that I need to stay in shape because I  still participate in tennis exhibitions, I stay knowledgeable because of my commentating job, then there are the different needs of being a mom, and wife. I am leaving for Singapore later this week to cover the 2015 WTA Finals. I will be away for eleven days which is great for my commentating career but tougher for the family. I’m constantly trying to find that right balance.

SZ: Even though juggling multiple responsibilities can be overwhelming it’s nice that you are able to continue to use all your skills, knowledge and insight. These opportunities keep life interesting and stimulating.

TAH: The key like anything else in life is to find a balance. Yes, I do commentating but not too much. I keep my foot in the door so that I’m engaged and knowledgeable so I’m very much a part of it, but the majority of my time is spent at home.

SZ: What is your commentating schedule for the most part?

TAH: I work for The Tennis Channel through-out the year mostly in the studio but attend the Indian Wells, the BNP Paribas Open, as well as the Miami Open. I cover some of Wimbledon for the BBC, and usually work at the U.S. Open.

SZ: Do you have a favorite tournament?

TAH: I love Indian Wells. I just love how relaxed it is. It’s like a mini Grand Slam in a beautiful location. That’s probably my favorite.

SZ: What’s a typical day like when you commentate?

TAH: There isn’t a typical day. For example I just received my schedule for Singapore and I don’t start working until 4pm on some days. There is a lot of research and I must say research is so much easier now than it was fifteen years ago with the internet and the WTA/ATP websites. Before the internet trying to extract information about player’s head to head’s and all that it just wasn’t readily available. Now I can read about what a player says, and how they felt after each match. I enjoy doing that type of research and preparation. When I work from the studio in Los Angeles I am now commentating on the men’s matches as well as the women’s and that’s opened up a whole new category for me which is exciting.

SZ: Are you assigned certain objectives or an agenda in match reporting?

TAH: No, it’s never like that. The network will tell me I am going to cover certain matches and sometimes they pair me with another commentator. I frequently work with Paul Annacone and we’ve worked together enough that we have a feel for how much we each talk during a match. We do have a meeting about forty-five minutes prior to going on air. During that meeting we discuss about what we will talk about on camera and assess whether we need a graphic to illustrate certain information. For example; right now there are four spots left on the road to Singapore, so we may create a graphic that highlights the first four players (out of eight who have the most points) in yellow, then show the next four players and their point total leading into the tournament, followed by the next eight players that have a possibility of qualifying and the conditions that it would take for them to make it into the final eight. That creates a fluid discussion as we simplify the information for the viewer yet highlight why the matches are important to the players.

SZ: This summer you played in the Wimbledon Ladies Invitational doubles event. During the year you play in several tennis exhibitions. What do you do to stay physically fit and tennis sharp?

Austin stays active playing charity and WTA legends events as well as commenting for The Tennis Channel, and BBC during Wimbledon

TAH: I play a couple of times a week just because I enjoy it. Playing a few times a week also makes it easier when I play events. I also played the U.S. Open this year.

SZ: Do you go to the gym?

TAH: My life for so long was, “I have to go to the gym, I have to do this, I have to do that.” These days I take hikes, walk, swim, go to yoga sometimes, and stretching class. My exercise is not set in stone and I like it that way.

SZ: Nothing like a TRX class or pilates?

TAH: There are certain parameters that I have with my body at this stage of my life. I do some yoga but it’s in the effort right? In the trying.

SZ: Yoga is the most uncomfortable….

TAH: It’s very difficult but in the trying I feel better the next couple of days, then stiffen up again. Or I will be in a yoga class and look up at others in class and think, how did they get their body to do that? But that’s okay. We are all good at different things.

SZ: In your book, “Beyond Center Court: My Story” at age two your mom enrolled you in a program with Vic Braden at the Jack Kramer Tennis Club, in Rolling HIlls. You credit Vic Braden for making tennis fun for you. What do you remember about the experience that made it fun for you?

TAH: Vic had such a large personality. It wasn’t about enrolling me in his class because I basically just rolled out the pro shop door to play with Vic. He was just a lovely man with an infectious personality which drew me to his court. There were lots of kids, lots of balls and lots of games. He just made it fun. It wasn’t about perfect technique or perfect footwork. It was about engaging the kids with a lot of laughs, a lot of smiles and I just got hooked.

SZ: Most kids pull away from demanding expectations. Reflecting back to the early days when you were coached by Robert Lansdorp, how did Lansdorp’s “tyrant” coaching style help mold/motivate your tennis skills and contribute to your young playing success?

TAH: I think Robert’s personality and his persona drives a lot of kids away because it’s very demanding. He is a tyrant. He demands perfection from players but also from himself. I’ve never seen the guy give less than one hundred percent in any lesson whether that player was nationally ranked or a casual player. I respected him immensely and I respected that he wanted everyone to become better. That’s what his goal was in every single lesson. I wasn’t pushed by my parents, I was self driven. I recall feeling like no-one was going to get in my way. I wanted to go in the direction I was going. I woke up everyday with goals and with the desire to become better. I felt that when Robert was pushing, working me hard it gave me  confidence that he thought I could do more. That’s how I interpreted it. I think others may take his coaching as being critical but to me I saw it as a positive that he had confidence that I had more there.

SZ: His pushing was in alignment with your inner belief that “I can do this.”

TAH: Yeah, I mean I felt that he wanted the best for me. If he thought I could do more that gave me confidence that I could do more. When you think you can….it’s like certain people come across a coach and that coach says the right thing, then all of a sudden, the person goes, “Wow, okay this person believes that I can win Wimbledon.” Hana Mandlikova coached Jana Novatna to the 1998 Wimbledon singles title and a career high ranking of number two in the world. Because Hana thought Jana could win Wimbledon, Jana believed she could win it. All of a sudden Jana was a changed player.

SZ: Your son Brandon Holt is going to attend and play for USC next year. A hot topic in junior tennis these days is the issue of gamesmanship, poor line calls, coaches intimidating opponents etc. As a parent have there been times when your son has had to deal with this issue while playing an opponent?

TAH: This is a timely and appropriate question. It’s an issue everyday. There are some kids that actually play tennis and complete matches without cheating, without swearing, without throwing their rackets, and without medical time outs There are plenty of those kids but unfortunately in my opinion there are way too many kids that are pulling a bunch of shenanigans on the court. The disruptive kids use everything. It’s just disappointing and I’m very vocal about this. I’m very vocal that if you are fourteen years old and are still cheating, throwing your rackets, swearing wildly which my husband was at a match and the kid yelled, “F ***” as loud as he could while a grandmother and her six year old granddaughter were sitting watching the player’s. That’s when my husband decided to get on the Southern California Disciplinary Committee. Because you know who’s fault it is that at fourteen years old kids are still behaving like this, it’s the parents. They have not come down on the child for his/her behavior. If my son ever thought of pulling these shenanigans it wouldn’t happen because the chance of these kids becoming professional tennis player’s are so slim that I want to build a great human being instead of a mechanical tennis player with bad manners.

SZ: I watched an ESPN documentary on Roger Federer and one of the statistics they cited was that he has won more sportsmanship awards than any other professional player.

TAH: Apparently as a child he wasn’t a great sport as his parents at one point took away his rackets. They let him know that poor behavior wasn’t going to be allowed to continue. The boundaries were set. Whereas clearly there are junior players doing rotten things on court, bad manners, bad sportsmanship, and creating distractions to change the momentum of the match. They are clearly not being given any boundaries. The only thing important to their families is the “w.”

SZ: What’s your advice to parents that are on the end of their child being cheated in matches?

TAH: There’s nothing you can do. I mean you can go ask for a lines person. But what happens is the umpire comes onto the court for two games and then they leave. Because there are very few umpires at these junior tournaments. My husband suggested paying more money for entry fees so there can be additional roaming umpires at tournaments. My third son chose not to play tournaments because the experiences were so bad in the first few tournaments he said he didn’t want to continue. I told him okay because I am not sure I wanted to sign up for this again either.

SZ: But that’s huge….

TAH: But it’s not going to change. It’s not going to change cause they aren’t coming down hard enough on it.

SZ: If the USTA would provide for umpire money for tournaments I think there’s an opportunity for change. I would like to see the USTA say, “Hey this is where money needs to go so we attract, develop and keep really good players in our sport.” We are losing talented players to other sports.

TAH: I know so many players that have been lost from tennis and my third son is one of them. I’ve already gone through the tournaments with my second son and I’m now like, okay that’s fine. It takes a certain mentality to stick it out. First of all it’s a one on one sport so that’s more difficult than some of the team sports. Players are responsible for calling their own score, their own lines, then all of a sudden someone throws in
cheating, medical time-outs, bathroom breaks and everything else. My son played a match where his opponent called seventeen lets in the match. There aren’t seventeen lets in a month when you play. It’s just crazy.

You have to make an impact on the parents to create change because they are the ones that need to change their child’s behavior, when the child is ten, eleven or twelve. If a child is still acting up at age fourteen I’m not blaming the child because the child has obviously gotten signals from the parent that what he/she is doing is condoned in their house. If the parent were to change the messages then the child is going to change his/her behavior. I believe change starts at the top like everything in parenting. Words say so much but modeling says a lot. If you are modeling bad behavior or condoning it, without saying a word that sends a message.

SZ: I still don’t understand why the rules allow for bathroom breaks during a set. At the end of a set sure.

TAH: We can go on with this discussion for days.

SZ: Along with your son Brandon, which junior players should fans keep an eye on for the future of the game?

TAH: Taylor Fritz obviously as he just won his first Challenger. It’s only the second Challenger that he’s ever played. So Taylor has a huge upside. I think this group of young men, the Tommy Paul’s, Frances Tiafoe’s, Jared Donaldson, Taylor Fritz, these kids have a real opportunity to make a big impact. Now who knows, they are working very hard and they have great promise which is very exciting.

SZ: Tracy thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this interview.

*Featured guests are not current nor former clients of Susan Zaro

*This article can also be read @ Examiner

Aaron Zigman, film composer

Aaron Zigman is an award winning composer who has developed over fifty film scores for major Hollywood directors and studios. He combines his classical background and training with strong knowledge of contemporary music. Some of Zigman’s film scores include The Notebook, Bridge to Tarabithia, The Proposal, and most recently he worked on Mr. Right and I Saw The Light, the Hank Williams Story. Both movies were shown at the recent Toronto Film Festival.

A native of San Diego, Zigman began training as a classical pianist at age six. While in his third year at UCLA, Zigman signed a four year song writing contract with Almo- Irving. In the mid 1980’s he broke in as a studio musician working with producers, Don Was, Gary Katz, Steely Dan and Stewart Levine. From this experience he got a foot in the door and started to get a name for himself as a producer/writer and soon wrote the pop hit, Crush On You for a group called The Jets. In the 1990’s he entered the film industry, with his work being featured on film soundtracks for Mulan, What’s Love Got To Do With It, Bird Cage, License to Kill, Caddyshack and Pocahontas. It was inevitable that Zigman’s lifelong devotion to classical music would eventually lead him to the film scoring stage.

SZ: I was looking at your website and listening to some of your pieces this past week. Your music is just beautiful.

AZ: Thank you I just wrote a seventeen minute piece for cello and piano. It’s a serious concert work.
We had our first concert at the United Methodist Church in Palos Verdes. It was the finale and received a standing ovation. Cellist Andrew Shulman and pianist Robert Thies will be performing my work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Sunday, October 4th. The classical station KUSC will be broadcasting the performance live.

SZ: That’s exciting.

AZ: It’s very exciting. The cellist, Andrew Shulman was the principle for the London Philarmonia Orchestra at the age of twenty-one. He worked with that symphony orchestra for fifteen years then came to Los Angeles for the L.A. Philharmonic and then started working in the movie studios. Currently he’s the principle for the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.  Andrew concertizes every two weeks and is an incredibly savant cellist. Robert Thies will perform on piano. Even though I’m a very accomplished pianist, it would have taken me six or seven hours a day of practicing to be able to play this piece. That’s why we have concert pianists who dedicate their life to performance art.

SZ: It’s nice for you that you’ve achieved recognition in your field so you have access to these artists that are at the top of their field. What a wonderful place to be.

AZ: I was commissioned to create this piece of work. When I write a piece of this magnitude it’s wonderful to work with musicians who are so experienced they can take the piece to a whole different level.

SZ: Once you’ve written a piece like the one you are describing…

AZ: The process is a collaboration with the artists. Once it’s written I send the material to them and they practice it. First they spend time with the material and work out their parts. Later we meet and start to rehearse.

SZ: Once you’ve written and performed this piece at a later time can you take the material and ….

AZ: Oh yeah, it can be programmed in any orchestra.

SZ: Few people probably know that you are an accomplished tennis player and could have played in college at the Division 1 level. What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuit and talents to a full time music focus?

AZ: I was an accomplished junior tennis player up to around fourteen years old. At fourteen or fifteen I made the decision to venture off to make my life 100% music even though I kept playing through my first year in high school. My high school Point Loma High School had a good team. We had Kelly Jones who became a top professional doubles player. That year we got to the finals of C.I.F. . I think if I had been in really great tennis shape we would have won. I lost to a player who I’d beaten the year before in junior tournaments. I just stopped practicing tennis but I was still playing on the team for the first year and a half of high school. Then I quit because I could not put any more time into tennis.

SZ: What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuits and talents to a full time music focus?

AZ:  I’ll tell you exactly the defining moment. At fourteen years old I was at Yale University playing with the Yale tennis team because they were recruiting guys like me who were ranked top in Southern California. I was in my second year of the fourteen’s. I was invited to go on an Ivy League tour. I played with Princeton, Yale and Harvard. When I was visiting Yale one of the team members knew my interest in music and invited me to attend a piano recital. That night there was this amazing pianist who played a free form style of jazz. He played very much in the style of Keith Jarrett. Jarrett had a hugely successful album around that time in the 1970’s called the Köln Concert. It was his tour de force record. So this pianist was playing wild stuff and at that time my facility was almost that good but not quite. By the time I was sixteen I could rip something like that out. But it was during that Yale performance that I had my epiphany.  It was so cool. I was very much into jazz at fourteen and fifteen years old. I was into Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, and Keith Jarrett at that time. It was after that recital I said to myself “I am going to make music my life.”

SZ: Are there lessons that you learned playing competitive tennis that carry over into your work as a composer?

AZ: When you play competitive tennis you are competing against someone else and you have to win. Playing music at that age I didn’t have to win I had to become better within myself. When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace. I realized at that time I wasn’t competing against anybody and it was much more doable for me in the sense of an emotional response. Now I am in a business where I am one of the go to guys for film composing. The thing I learned from playing tennis is that I know what competition is. I can handle rejection. You cannot do what I do for a living without having a thick skin. With that said it still does hurt when I lose a film to another composer when I believe I should have gotten the opportunity. So there is competition. It’s almost like I’m back in tennis competing in a way. There are usually about twenty composers vying for the number one spot for a big or medium film.

SZ: What a great place to be. I’d rather be in that spot than the guy in the twenty-first spot.

AZ: My gratitude is that I am almost always on the list of composers who are considered for a movie. I just completed a documentary piece for Antoine Fuqua for the Suge Knight documentary. You know I don’t do a lot of television but this was for Antoine Fuqua one of the greatest directors in the world. He directed South Paw, Training Day, The Equalizer and many more movie hits. Antoine Fuqua is a guy I couldn’t say, “No” to do a thirty-seven minute documentary on Suge Knight. I had to write and deliver the music within a week. It turned out really well. My hope is that I can work for him one day on a big feature.

SZ: Do you have techniques to quiet your mind or environment to access your creativity I would imagine there is some pressure to turn out creative work when there is a dead-line.

AZ: That’s a really good question and sometimes it’s very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it. I just completed a five month run on two movies one called Mr. Right with Anna Kendrick, which will be released Nov. 27th and “I Saw The Light,” the Hank Williams story. Both movies were in the recent Toronto Film Festival. In fact Mr. Right closed the festival.

SZ: What do you do if anything to quiet your mind. There’s a lot of pressure when you have a week to deliver a large volume of work. How do you access that creativity?

AZ: Sometimes I just listen to classical pieces of music to take me away from my work. I’ll go on-line and type in Opus 69 #3 Beethoven with Glenn Gould and Lenard Rose playing a recording that was done in 1975. That’s what I kind of do to wash away the notes that I’ve been working on all day. As human beings we need to sleep so that’s kind of one of my little tricks. I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.

When I create I don’t think in technical or mathematical terms until the idea is formulated Musical composition is formulated in improvisation. Once a pianist like myself sits down and begins to play and start thinking about what I am writing all of a sudden a little tune will emerge, a little spot light and I’ll go, “That’s interesting.” Then I formulate and keep playing then all of a sudden I’ve created sixteen bars of music that I’m writing out. Then that improvisational experience is turned into a mathematical one. Before my little dots go on my score there’s a lot of thought, preparation and revisiting.

Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken. Composers can do things that weren’t allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules. As you well know there was a riot in Paris when The Rite of Spring was played. It was a piece of music people couldn’t handle. They were enraged by it and then somehow the piece became accepted. I like to adhere to form and symmetrical writing but it’s very…

SZ: There’s more flexibility within the art form.

AZ: The best way to get the best score out of me is that I watch the movie without music.  A lot of times I walk in after the film has been shot and the music editor or director has already laid in the pieces of music that they like or think that works well with the film. So they say,”We kind of want this but in your own voice.” If I see a cut in its’ raw form I say, “If you temp this you’re going to spoil what could have happened. Just let me  demarcate where you want the music.” We will have a music editor in the room and we all agree where the starting part for the music will be and no-one puts any temporary music in and they just let me write the score. That was how I worked on The Notebook. The only score that Nick Cassavetes, the director, temped was a scene which was one of the bigger moments in the film when Ryan Gosling is kissing Rachel McAdams in the boat during a deluge of rain. Cassavetes temped that piece from Out of Africa. It took me four or five drafts to get him to love what I was writing because he was so attached to that piece of music.

SZ: Do you go on set to watch the filming?

AZ: All the time. I’ve probably done this on fifteen or twenty films. I did it on The Notebook. The landscape in South Carolina is breathtaking in certain seasons. I wrote the opening piece before the movie was completed. The solo piano piece during the opening sequence was written before they were even half way done shooting. They edited the sequence to my music instead of the other way around.

SZ: I read where you said, “Visualize the future you want for yourself and one of the key ways to getting there is networking and creating relationships.” How did you know or develop what you wanted for the future?

AZ: You decide what relationships are going to be worth it. You look at a director and think this guy is innately a great director and he’s got a bright future. You try and nurture the relationship. This day and age we have to do a little more networking than we used to do. All that does is make sure you befriend the people you are working with on a project so you hopefully carry it over to the next one.

SZ: What is your advice to young composers trying to break into this business?

AZ: You have to be involved in student films. Work on gratis unless you’re going to a school like USC which has a very good film/music department. Berkeley and a few others are good as well. In my opinion USC is probably the strongest in the country so if a student goes through the USC program then they can work on shorts for composers. That way they can develop a reel to show people what they can do. Another suggestion for young people is to find some Indie film where the budget is 2mil and the film makers aren’t going to be able to afford someone with my experience. Although if the film is 2mil and I think it’s going to be the next Oscar contender I will probably do it. If it has great content I will do it.

SZ: Aaron thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to speak with me.

*Featured guests are not current nor former clients of Susan Zaro
*This article can also be read @ Examiner