Helena Sukova talking about the effects of communism on her career development. I've highlighted her comments at how the big 3 (Martina, Ivan, and Hana) escaped this.
Look, I don't ask anyone to feel sorry for me since I wasn't allowed to do something in that era. I don't even think about it. I don't think that I could have had, as far as my childhood or my start as a tennis player somewhere outside of the Czech Republic, better conditions for my tennis growth, better people around me, at least as far as my closest surroundings.
----It's different, though, when you enter the international tennis scene. I am profoundly convinced that when it comes to self-confidence, to how you manage to move around in the big world of tennis, then we were at a disadvantage.
----It started with seemingly silly things, like they sent you out into the world, and still sometimes from really humiliating passport and visa formalities, and in the process they furnished such sums of money that it was barely enough for a decent bed and a hamburger. The worst was the feeling that whether you liked it or not, you were confronted with a world where certain things were commonplace and you didn't have them. As soon as players whose results are no different than yours, or are even worse, can afford what you can't, and it's basically the normal standard, nothing exceptional, you can't feel good, much less masterful or self-confident.
----I wouldn't wish on anyone those embarrassing situations when immediately after you finish taking part in a tournament you dash for the check and then race to the bank, lest it close. Because otherwise, you're threatened with debt at the hotel because you don't have any cash. That isn't any indulgence; it's the normal feeling of a person who simply doesn't feel comfortable under those circumstances. Any Czech tennis player from those days will confirm that that just terribly annoyed him. It was degrading, and even more absurd was that almost everyone thought that I was a millionaire, thought of how much money I had stashed away, and I don't know what. It went so far that at the airport they sometimes searched us like smugglers. Once, they literally wanted us to strip naked...
----It also annoyed me terribly when they sent us abroad with coaches or officials abroad who absolutely could not help with anything. I knew very well that next to me was a person who was useless to me, but I couldn't even peep. At least until a certain time.
----A whole separate chapter were the opportunities connected to the sponsors' interest. The fact that I was from Czechoslovakia meant that I automatically had less value for them than, maybe, an American. As far as I know, for example, Jennifer Capriati- whom they said was a wunderkind- made a million dollars even before she could win anything at all. We could play like gods, but no one paid much attention to most of us, and the thing is that our offers weren't by a long shot comparable to those which players from, for example, Western Europe or the USA received.
----Of course, that is also related to media interest. The center of attention for most journalists were their own "horses", whereas in Czechoslovakia our journalists (apart from very few exceptions) were not allowed to go abroad with us.
----All of this, then, has an impact on you, how you feel, how confident you are, how you deal with other people. Sometimes we were overly deferential where it wasn't necessary; we lacked more self-confidence and I think that for an athlete, that has an impact on your psychological growth.
----Martina Navratilova, Ivan Lendl, and Hana Mandlikova ultimately solved that by leaving, which substantially eased their path to reaching athletic heights, and hardly anyone realizes that fact these days...
----To make it clear: nobody stole my childhood or youth, but if I have often been plagued by a lack of self-confidence, even though Honza Kurz claims that I had a surplus of it, I think the roots of why I sometimes lacked it came from that era.
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