My coach Grant (Doyle) is great friends with Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish, and while we were in Los Angeles, Mardy wanted some hits. Ben (Mitchell) and I jumped at the opportunity and were able to train at Dr Phil\u2019s house, because Mardy knows Dr Phil well.<\/p>\n
It was great. It\u2019s always a good experience hitting with quality professionals to witness their work ethic on the practice court and see how they hit the ball, and also to have a laugh. The court and house were absolutely incredible. The house was basically in the middle of Beverly Hills, up on its own private mountain. The house was a mansion and the green clay court was surrounded by trees, almost overhanging a cliff at the back.<\/p>\n
While I was in LA I also got to meet Andy Roddick, which was really cool. I have looked up to him all my career and I really listened to some of the informative words he had to say.<\/p>\n
Things were really busy in LA \u2013 through Ben\u2019s LA-based management company, we were able to get some private suite tickets to watch an NBA game. It was the first time I had been to a game like this and it was intriguing to witness the intensity and determination, especially that the Lakers were showing considering they are on the brink of missing the NBA playoffs.<\/p>\n
After LA I headed to Oklahoma for an ITF Futures event on hardcourts. Unfortunately I lost my first round match, which wasn\u2019t great, but there is always next week \u2013 I plan to head to Little Rock, Arkansas for another ITF Futures event on hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hear from Luke about his recent travels in USA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5915,"featured_media":5569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5915"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}