For top players, realisation that they may never win a slam is a brutal, but useful, reality check
Leading juniors dream of winning Grand Slam titles but as most of them find out, it is far from easy
Andrey Rublev (Zuma/Panoramic)
The transition from junior to senior in the tennis world is far from easy. Ask a top junior what their goals are and the chances are they will say: “I want to win many Grand Slams” or “I want to be No 1”.
They’re not being arrogant, they’re all genuine in their thoughts, boosted by the fact that for the most part, they are winning matches, winning titles. When they join the seniors, though, things get tougher and at some stage, for most of them, there will be a realisation that actually, achieving their goals might not be quite so easy.
It’s a realisation that can be tough to take.
Take Andrey Rublev, the Russian firmly established in the top 10 for several years now but who has reached nine Grand Slam quarter-finals and lost the lot.
His time may come, but he has already had that reality check. “I started to have a fear that this might not happen already, like five or six years ago,” Rublev said in an interview. “I started to really feel that fear. And because of this, I started to stress.”
De Minaur: It’s easy not to see the perspective
Alex de Minaur is Australia’s biggest hope for the title at the Australian Open since the days of Lleyton Hewitt, his mentor. Like many others, the 24-year-old burst onto the scene at a young age but has had to temper his expectations. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe he can win a slam, but he appreciates how difficult it is.
“Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back, because it’s very easy to kind of not really see the perspective, right,” he said in an interview at Melbourne Park. “As a junior, as a kid growing up, you think that basically you’re going to win 40 Grand Slams, and you’re going to be world No 1, because you don’t realise how many other good people that there are around the world.
“So once you first come on Tour, you get that first hard knock of reality where you’re like, OK, this this might be a little bit more difficult than I thought it would be.”
De Minaur became the first Australian man since Hewitt to be ranked in the top 10 when he beat Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev at the United Cup earlier this month. Fulfilling one goal, rather than focusing on those junior ideals, is the best way to go, he said.
“Just to keep out and keep improving, keep my head down and to be able to say that I’m one of the top 10 best players in the world, it’s a pretty good feeling,” he said.
Dimitrov: I’m grateful for the “aha!” moments
Grigor Dimitrov won the junior Wimbledon title in 2008 and was immediately held up as a man who would go on to win multiple Grand Slam titles in his career. It hasn’t quite happened yet – he’s reached three Grand Slam semi-finals and who knows, his form of late means he may yet go deep here – but Dimitrov says his reality check came early.
“It happened very fast for me,” he said, at Melbourne Park on Tuesday. “My first professional match was against (Tomas) Berdych, and my second professional match was against Rafa (Nadal). “Berdych I think was No 8 in the world, and I beat him in three sets. I lost three sets to Rafa the following day, and he just came off from winning Australian Open. So that was a reality check at its best.”
Interestingly, Dimitrov is happy that it came early in his career. “Honestly, if I would have beaten him that day, I think it would have done me a big disservice,” he said. “The following week I had to play Gilles Simon. I was 5-3 up in the third and 30-15. I lost that match.
“If you think about it, I had so many of those moments, aha moments, that are right there, and the reality struck very quick for me, for which I think I’m more grateful, because I’ve grown, like, immensely, not only as a player.”
Andy Murray once said that it was only when he accepted that he may never win a slam that he felt freed up mentally. Not long after, he won the Olympics, the US Open and then Wimbledon, twice.
Rublev said he has not given up hope of winning a slam, but focuses instead on the process, rather than the results alone.
“I said to myself, OK, I will believe in myself and that I will do everything and I will work as hard as I can to try to have a chance of trying to win it and then we’ll see what’s going to happen,” he said. “For the moment, I’m just with this belief that I will do everything for this and I will give all myself to have a chance. And then we’ll see if it’s going to happen or not.”
