"I told her you are a champion because of you. And you’ve had help along the way, but I’ve seen you win 25 tournaments and in 23 of those there was a match you could have lost and won anyway.
"I told her you can quit tennis now and be fine, or keep playing and you can be ranked No. 15 and try to be happy with that, or you can suck it up, stop looking at people for answers and take some responsibility for yourself.”
The coach has to commit to learning about the player, and the player has to learn to trust her instructor.
“That why I laugh at players who change coaches all the time, because it take a while to get to know somebody,” Joyce said. "We as men have a enough trouble figuring out women in general, let alone when they are playing a sport like tennis.”
While he’s impressed by younger generation players such Azarenka and Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova, he is not by former No. 1 Wozniacki, the 21-year-old has not won a big tournament in more than year.
“She's the one I’m most disappointed in,” Joyce said “I tell you what’s killing her—everyone talks about her needing to be more aggressive, but it’s not that, it’s she has to get more weight on her ball like she had a couple of years ago. She can’t break an egg with her forehand.
"Her forehand is a joke. It’s not penetrating at all. It’s like the Andy Roddick syndrome. She used to use a Babolat racket and then switched to Yonex, which is not very powerful. There’s nothing on her ball and that’s going to hurt her against Maria, Kvitova, or even a Marion Bartoli.”
“Roddick is a good example of that,” he said.
“He spent so much effort trying to beat Roger Federer that he became a worse player in general. Wozniacki might be confused, whether she should be aggressive or not.”
Wozniacki might have made a critical error at the start of this year. Finally, after months of vacillating, she and her father and coach Piotr brought in a new coach, the experienced Ricardo Sanchez. But then fired him after just two months on the job. Sanchez was not allowed to develop trust between the three, which Joyce sees as a mistake.
“Look at Maria and Hogstedt,” he said. “ She played bad for four months, then had decent results and still wasn’t playing that well, but maybe now she is playing better because it takes time.
"But if Caroline’s dad is the coach it might be [a] problem because you can’t go in there and really help her if her dad has the final word on everything. That’s going to be an issue.
"That’s one thing about Yuri [Sharapov] that people don’t realize is that Maria always had good coaches. Yuri liked to hear he was the coach in public, but he was letting me work with her all the time.
"You see Wozniacki’s dad running down on the court. Yuri never ran down on the court, Sometimes you would see him yelling down at Maria, but half the time he was telling her what I had told him to say.”
And what would Joyce tell Wozniacki if she asked?
The same thing he told Sharapova.
"Take more responsibility for herself because at the end of the day, no coach is going to matter when it’s 5-5 in the third set. That’s on you.”
