The making of Morten Frost

 

LAST year, the Padukone Academy had invited Tom John, Morten Frost's trainer in London, for a short stint at the academy. Tom worked with the legendary Frost from 1989 to 94, when he was the best in the world. He is now working as coach with the royal family in Brunei, but entertains thoughts of returning to India.
He recalls what went into making Frost the champion he was:

I was involved with Morten for two-three years when he was in England.
Morten had a very different outlook. He would do a lot of running... then he would play a lot of games... maybe 15-20 matches in a day. And he had that rare ability to... he would let (England No.1) Steve Baddeley get to 12, 13, and not let them win the game. And he had that ability to shut the door on them. And he would never lose. They would be leading 13-3, 13-4, sometimes 13-0.

These fellows will think they're playing well, and fighting like hell, and then the next game Morten would say to me "0" and these fellows would think: "Next game I'm going to get you". They'd think Morten wasn't playing well, but Morten's just practising. He hated losing. Lost rarely in those situations. He sometimes beat a player to 0, to see if he could do it. But he played and played...

His game depended on being solid, you know. He was like a brick wall when he played all those Chinese, Indonesians. So when he wanted to be like the Berlin Wall, he had to...

The strength of Morten was, unlike any other player, he studied each player.
If you ask Morten, what would you do to play Suprianto? He would say: I would serve there, because he doesn't like it; I would hit this short because he doesn't like it... he knew how to play every player. And he kept a diary on every player's strengths and weakness. And it was about THAT thick.

You could ask him how do I play Kurniawan? He would say, serve short, flat, deep... he had so much detail, and that's what he passed to Gade and Rasmussen. Unfortunately they were injured and things like that. But that is an area our players are pretty useless. They rely too much on the coach, they like to blame the coach, the coach also likes the players to be reliant on them. The coaches don't like independent players. They don't know how to deal with independent players.

Morten would run about six miles a day. Then he would play 10-12 games, quality games with world class players.

He didn't like routines -- he hated multi-feed. But I used to make him do a little bit. But his reasoning you could understand. He used to say the shuttle doesn't always come from the same angle. So if you had to keep Morten happy, you had to run around the court.
But when a player gives you a good reason, it is valid, you see.

Morten would see the girls sitting there, he'd say, come, four of you, and I'll see which one of you does the mistake. And he would play the shuttle around the court. And he promised them one pound for every point they won.

He used to give international players in England a 14-0 start. And if they won, the bet was they would take the money. And most of the players would take the bet, but they made very little money.

After that they found they couldn't win, so they never took the bet.
But that's how you train not to make errors.

I learnt a lot... he was always half-an-hour early, never late... He was the best in the world, I was training him, I had to be good. And one hour of feeding him was like three hours of feeding any other player.

I've trained with Yang Yang and the Malaysian team. Chinese training is sheer hard work, lot of multi-feed, it's work, work, work. There's no science to it. They get results because from young age... they increase their pain threshold, their ability to work hard. They also know that for the five who are playing, are another 20 waiting to take their place.

Morten was living in England for tax reasons. Prakash, Frost, their relationship was strong. Morten is not a popular person, because he kept to himself. Prakash was on top, Morten was coming up, and provided him good practise and eventually found a way to beat him.

They both learned from each other. If Morten hadn't trained with Prakash, he might have taken one more year to beat him... he would've found a way. Then Prakash had a knee problem...

You look at Morten and Abhinn Shyam.... there's a lot of similarity in the game, but Morten had a few more weapons. Abhinn can play at one pace, whereas Morten could increase pace, smash... with Prakash, it was all here in his hands.

1982 or 1983 Misbun was playing well, everyone rated him favourite, and Morten watched every match of Misbun's, sitting high in the stands. He'd write down 10-15 lines of how Misbun played.
Everyone thought Morten was finished this time, but he cleaned him up.
I learnt from Morten about how to win matches. He liked talking badminton.

The No.1 requirement is the will to win. You go the extra mile... they've gone through a lot of pain, sacrifices. Prakash could have stayed in India. But he went to Denmark.