My name keeps getting grouped in with Jelena Dokic’s and I’m not a fan of the categorisation, even though I obviously see the parallels.
The media has turned Jelena Dokic’s case into a women’s rights and domestic abuse matter, which it is. It’s quite remarkable what she has survived. But that narrow definition of ‘Survivor’ has conveniently overshadowed other forms of abuse taking place in the junior sporting world. The cruelty I am referring to is the manipulation and exploitation of talented children by their either extreme, delusional, ignorant, or naive sport parents. Parents who aren’t as easy to spot or on the same scale as Damir Dokic, but who are causing untold harm all the same
When I first started writing my book SMASHED (out Jan 14, 2025), I hired an editor who was trying to influence me into writing it as an autobiography rather than it having an exposé element to it. I read bits and pieces of other tennis autobiographies, and it was obvious to me that by making the story focus on a singular and extreme case of tennis parenting, it inadvertently gave other parents too much leeway to excuse themselves from less obvious forms of abuse. And since the tennis world clearly turns a blind eye when it comes to players being physically brutalised by their parents, what hope would junior athletes have who were being mistreated in a ‘nicer’ fashion?
It must be understood that the human mind specialises in spotting differences rather than seeing similarities when it comes to watching resemblances of their own behaviour in someone else. ‘I’m not as bad as that’ is one of the most common yet dangerous thoughts a human being can have, as it stops a person in their tracks from looking at their own conduct of behaviour. This very thought kept me in the cycle of addiction for far longer than I needed to be. For example, since I wasn’t the type of drunk who slept on a park bench with blown out sand shoes, scoffing liquor out of a brown paper bag, I never considered myself to be an alcoholic. In fact, I would have found the accusation to be a total insult and pissed all my money away on an upmarket 3-day-bender just to prove that I wasn’t a garden variety drunk. I found enough differences between me and the ‘stereotypical alcoholic’ to convince my own mind that I had absolutely nothing to worry about, while I was quite literally, drinking myself to death.
The same is true with the Jelena Dokic story. Of course, all tennis parents aren’t vodka-guzzling, chain-smoking, domestic-abusing terrorists, and therefore, milder forms of abuse will seem thoroughly wholesome and PG by comparison. And therefore, continue to happen to innocent children in plain sight.
The heady combination of a talented child athlete and sports such as tennis, create a powerful vortex that can make honourable adults lose their manners and morals in the span of a few years. This once highly regarded game quickly reduces to backyard Pitbull fighting, the aggressors-egotistical parents-gambling with their childrens’ lives in a dog-eat-dog contest. So, while it can be cathartic for authors to tell our stories, and for media to cover them, a 360-degree view of all areas of mistreatment is essential, which becomes hard when torture is defined as the benchmark of abuse.
