Trials and tribulations of handling the locker-room losers

Persuading defeated players to attend post-match press conferences can be a thankless task but there are worse ways to make a living

Tim Henman is not having a good day. He is sitting in the corner of the locker-room with his head in his hands and covered by a towel. He is probably reliving his last hour of tennis, having just lost to a player ranked over 100 places below him.

I do not think I am going to have a good day, either, because my job is to ask him to attend a packed press conference, and explain just why he lost. Now is not the right time. Cocooned in a private world, Henman is nursing the wounds of a defeat too recent to recount without adding salt to the injury. He needs his space.

Four years spent trying to transform distraught, emotional wrecks under post-loss towels into press-friendly interviewees, have taught me that much. But, with newspaper deadlines approaching, Henman has to be in the press conference in less than 30 minutes, or the media will be forced to report the match without including his version of events. If that happens, I can probably start looking for another job.

By now, Henman is towelling himself down and flicking through the pages of Ceefax, searching for a report of his demise. The report appears and his grimace changes to a grin. "Henman crashes out," he reads aloud to his Davis Cup team-mate, Jamie Delgado. Delgado grins back. "Crashes!" Henman repeats, laughing. The moment to approach is now. "Excuse me, Tim," I ask. Henman turns. He knows what I want. "How long do you need before your press conference?" "I'll do it now," he says, putting on some clothes.

"What went wrong?" "When did you feel the match started slipping away?" "How will this affect your chances at Wimbledon?" come the barrage of questions. Henman, who has heard it all before, neatly handles everything thrown at him. After the television and radio stations have had their turn, he calmly heads off for lunch.

Fortunately, Henman is the ultimate professional and he knows that press conferences are part of his job. Even after the most painful of reverses at Wimbledon, he will always face the music. With a player like Henman, all I've got to worry about is the clock. The same could not be said of my baptism of fire into the tennis world a few years ago.

Boris Becker was wearing nothing but a tiny towel wrapped around his waist at the time. The German had just showered after winning a first-round match, and my job, as the work-experience gofer of the tournament's media operation, was to persuade him to do as many post-match interviews as possible.

I crept over to where Becker was standing, watching television, with his enormous back to me. I was just 12 years old when Becker won his first Wimbledon title in 1985, and I'd never spoken to a tennis player before. "Excuse me, Boris," I said, trying to sound confident. Becker turned, staring at me with those blue, piercing eyes. It felt as if they were burning a hole right through me. It's a stare that he had successfully directed at countless opponents over the years; a stare designed to intimidate; a stare that does intimidate.

I pressed on, showing him my note-pad filled with a long list of names of journalists who had requested interviews. He scanned the list intensely, as if searching for spelling mistakes. A few seconds passed that seemed like an eternity. Eventually, his eyes thawed. "I'll do one," he said, smiling briefly before turning back to the television. I had graduated.

The tennis circuit is like a big, travelling university (picture a campus with young, good-looking people living, working and playing together in luxurious locations). Inside the player lounge at each tournament is a scene akin to the average student union, but without the alcohol.

Henman and the American veteran Todd Martin are often locked in a battle on the pool table, Yevgeny Kafelnikov can usually be heard telling anyone who will listen about his latest golfing triumph. Roger Federer, the Swiss youngster, will be taking on all-comers on video games installed to entertain the players between matches.

Goran Ivanisevic, known almost as much for being the only player to retire from a match because of "lack of equipment" (he smashed all his rackets during a tournament in Brighton) as for his Wimbledon win last year, is just as crazy off the court, with even more of an eye for a joke than he demonstrates in interviews.

A couple of years ago, when Serena Williams reportedly requested a wild card to enter a men's tournament because the competition on the women's tour was not tough enough, Ivanisevic had a proposition for her. Waiting until the locker- room was at its busiest, the Croatian announced in his deepest baritone: "Guys, Serena wants a wild card. I have a wild card. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get together a committee of five players. If she can come in here and prove to us that she's got the right equipment, then I will give her my wild card."

But it is not always fun and games. When a player loses a match he should have won in the final set, the last thing he wants to do is talk about it, so the last person he wants to see is me. Most, given time to cool down, will eventually grant a time of 10 minutes when told they are requested by the media. One or two, though, in the heat of the moment, have just snapped, including Ivanisevic.

After one particularly painful defeat, I found him sitting in a corner, staring at the ground. After a few minutes, with the clock against us, I asked him if he was ready to come to his press conference. He glanced up, grabbed the collar of the tennis shirt he was wearing, and ripped it in two. "Do I look ready?" he asked. I was tempted to say that I would take that as a no, but thought better of it. When I returned 10 minutes later, he was changed and ready to go.

One normally amiable top 20 player went a step further at a tournament in Austria a couple of years ago. After losing to an unheralded opponent, he avoided me and headed straight to the hotel. When I called him to remind him of his responsibilities and the fine that would accompany a no-show at the media conference, he told me to stay out of his face and slammed the phone down. The following week, at another tournament in a different city, he apologised, but informed me that the minute after he had hung up the phone, he had smashed up his hotel room. He added, half jokingly, that had I not kept out of his way, that hotel room could have been me.

Travelling the tennis circuit, though glamorous to the outside world, can be a gruelling affair. A five-week road trip following the indoor circuit means working 16 hours a day, every day for five weeks. For most, the novelty of airports, hotel rooms and lugging life around in a suitcase soon wears off, especially when those suitcases miss a flight connection and end up in a different country to the owner.

But there are worse ways to make a living and every day presents a new challenge. As I return to the locker-room on my next mission, a familiar figure is sitting in the corner with his head in his hands and covered by a towel. Greg Rusedski is not having a good day, either.

David Law, a freelance tennis writer and member of the BBC Five Live team at Wimbledon, is a former ATP Tour media communications officer