NEW YORK – Jack Draper is calmer after he went through a ‘little storm’ in the North American summer: ‘I played three very tough matches in Cincinnati, and then in the match with Rune I wasn’t there. I wasn’t just physically tired, mentally I was drained from the night before.’
What happened the night before? The most trending event in the build-up to the US Open until Jannik Sinner’s doping case broke out: the controversial match point that saw him win against Felix Auger Aliassime in the last 16 of the Masters 1000 in Ohio.
The Briton went up to the net, and the Canadian’s response hit his racket, then the ball hit the ground and then went to the other side of the court. With no video review in tennis, the umpire’s decision had already been made and Aliassime’s complaints (very polite, by the way) had no effect.
“It took me a couple of days to recover mentally and emotionally,” Draper confessed to the media after his triumphant debut in New York.
‘All of a sudden you get criticism from people when you don’t play well, they tell you you’re terrible at tennis, or that kind of stuff online. But when you get comments about you cheating, lying and all that kind of stuff, it’s tough and it definitely gets into your mind,’ the British number one added.
Hundreds of messages flooded his Instagram account.
‘I guess you can’t stop it. You can turn off the comments. If you lose a match these days, just go to my latest Instagram picture, you’ll probably see about 100 messages with emojis of clowns and snakes and all this kind of stuff. It happens to all of us, especially girls, I think it happens to girls worse than us,’ he said.
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL MATCH POINT EVER!!!
WHAT JUST HAPPENED…? 😱#CincyTennis pic.twitter.com/cxU4H2A4Af
— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) August 17, 2024
Were there colleagues angry about what happened in Cincinnati? Did they take the salute away from him in the locker room? Nothing like that, Draper says.
“No. I’m good friends with a lot of tennis players. I think a lot of the players know what it feels like to have a ball come at your feet ridiculously fast…. It was an illegal shot, yes, but it’s very easy to see it on a slow-motion replay. There are a lot of players who say, ‘I would have done this, I would have done that’. …. I just didn’t know what happened, so I did what I had to do.
“I don’t think any of the players in the dressing room necessarily have any feelings about it. They’re all worried about their lives and nobody cares. It seems like a big deal on Twitter,’ added Draper, who was left with positives after the incident. He said that having such an experience will make him more in control of his emotions in the future, and will not affect him on the court.
He made a successful debut at the US Open on Tuesday: “It felt good”.
In the last couple of days he managed to feel fresh and managed to fix his mind on the competition. This Thursday he will face Argentine Facundo Diaz Acosta for a place in the third round in Queens.
