Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach who took players like Pete Sampras and Maria Sharapova to world No 1

Despite a gruff manner and the ferocious work ethic he instilled, he was widely liked and respected for his straight-talking style

Robert Lansdorp, who has died aged 85, was one of the greatest junior tennis coaches of his generation; across four decades four of his charges – Pete Sampras, Maria Sharapova, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport – went on to become world No 1s.
His implacable determination and insistence on deep penetrating groundstrokes helped to make the South Bay area of California a hotbed of tennis, and in one year, 13 of his players qualified for the US Open. Despite a gruff manner and the ferocious work ethic he instilled into his pupils, he was widely liked and respected for his straight-talking style and his loyalty.
Robert Herman Lansdorp was born on November 12 1938 into a Dutch family in Semarang, Indonesia, where his father Herman was an executive with Goodyear Tyres. Robert, one of three children, endured a traumatic childhood, poisoned aged three by a chauffeur whom his father had sacked. He later said that he only survived “because I apparently was a little piglet and ate a lot.”
When the Second World War broke out his father was imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp and his mother Hilda, née Skinner, who had false papers claiming that she was Danish, stuck to her story under torture and was eventually released.
After the war, the Indonesians battling for their independence massacred hundreds of Dutch expatriates sheltering together, and the terrified Lansdorps only escaped in the nick of time when they were liberated by a British patrol who shipped them out to Djakarta and on to the Netherlands. Despite a brief return to Indonesia the family soon returned home after a spate of killings and shootings.
Robert, a lively athletic boy, began playing football and hockey at school, but when a friend took him to a group tennis session aged 13 he was immediately hooked.
In 1960, the family emigrated to San Diego in California and Robert’s tennis blossomed with year-round training and good coaches. He began playing tournaments, and when he beat the No 1 player from Pepperdine University, he was offered a tennis scholarship there and became an All-American college star, although he never graduated.
After several false starts, including a brief stint selling encyclopaedias door-to-door before being sacked for walking dirt into a customer’s house, he began working as a professional tennis coach in 1967, first at Morley Field in San Diego then for eight years at the Jack Kramer Club in Rolling Hills.
He quickly made the club famous as a launchpad for numerous champions, including the tiny but ultra-competitive seven-year-old Tracy Austin, her brother John, Eliot Teltscher, Anna-Maria Fernandez and Brian Teacher, who all reached the world’s top 20. Lansdorp’s stock soared in 1979 when, Austin became the youngest ever US Open champion at 16, her single-mindedness and relentless “groundies” reflecting his obsession with consistency and pace.
“I almost changed Tracy’s two-handed backhand to a one-handed because that’s what everyone was doing,” he confessed later. “But her two-handed backhand was so well-timed. Thank God I never changed it.”
He became the go-to coach for developing groundstrokes hit flat and deep, a technique known in tennis circles as “the Lansdorp Forehand”. He expounded his methods in an interview with the broadcaster Lee DeYoung.
“Consistency, placement and power, those are the three things you have to have,” he said. “If you have to miss one of those three, miss the power. Because if you’re consistent and you place the ball well – in the women, not in the men – you could still amount to something. If you have a lot of power but you’re inconsistent, you’re never going to make it. So, to become great, those are the things that you have to have.”
After moving to the West End Tennis Club in Torrance, California, he mentored several future champions including Pete Sampras and Lindsay Davenport, instilling the heavy serves and bludgeoning groundstrokes that became their trademark. Thanks to his strategy, the once heavy-footed Davenport learned to outhit more athletic opponents, including Martina Hingis in the 1998 US Open final and Steffi Graf in the Wimbledon final the following year. She held the world No 1 ranking for a total of four years.
Lansdorp moved to the Riviera Tennis Club in Pacific Palisades, where he guided the fledgling career of the 11-year-old Russian, Maria Sharapova. Her father Yuri wanted Maria to hit the ball like Davenport and Lansdorp built her confidence, feeding her hundreds of thousands of balls at high speed until she could handle any level of power.
“Yuri was smart,” Lansdorp recalled. “and it wasn’t long before Maria had the same groundstrokes as Lindsay – fairly hard, flat, penetrating strokes. That’s the way to play.”
Lansdorp received widespread recognition for his coaching prowess including the US Tennis Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, though he remained outspoken, criticising the Association’s 2012 mandate that players below the age of 10 should only play on miniature courts with lightweight green-dot balls. He insisted that this was “wrong for the very talented kids”, citing Maria Sharapova, Monica Seles and the Williams sisters as being very competitive with standard courts and equipment from the age of seven.
Renowned for his dry wit, Lansdorp was well aware that as he specialised in developing junior players, other coaches would reap the financial rewards of his painstaking training methods years later. In 2004, he joked: “I’ve never received anything from one player. Not even a $500 gift. They’re all multi-millionaires but I’ve never received one thing. And I’m telling you, if Maria doesn’t put a Mercedes convertible in my driveway, I’m going to shoot myself.”
His marriage to Susan Proctor, herself a good tennis player, ended in divorce in the mid-1990s. He was proud that their only daughter Stephanie inherited their love of the game, becoming a gifted college player and later an accomplished coach at the West End Club.
Lansdorp, who is survived by his daughter, continued coaching on a friend’s court in Palos Verdes until weeks before his death, attributing much of his success to the discipline he had imbibed from his tough, no-nonsense father.
“People think I’m this rough, tough guy, and I am, but I’m fair,” he said. “To create great players there first has to be discipline. Forget the talent. If you don’t have discipline, you’re not going to succeed at anything. All my lessons are based on discipline.”
Robert Lansdorp, born November 12 1938, died September 16 2024