Simona Halep made a quick-as-can-be exit, overpowered by Kaia Kanepi to become the first No. 1-seeded woman to lose an opening match at the US Open.
Get the US Open 2018 tennis tournament’s dates, TV schedule, news coverage, live scores and results on ESPN.
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Tsitsipas slowly rolled to his side and rose, leaving a dark stain on the court. He went his chair, beads of perspiration still dripping from the blonde highlights in his long, curly chestnut colored hair. Many in the crowd seemed transfixed, as if they were watching one of Jason’s argonaut emerging from an Aegean shipwreck.
Such scene are likely to be repeated with greater and greater frequency, on larger and larger stages, in the coming months and years. Tsitsipas, just 20, has an explosive game that, in the span of eight months, has catapulted him from a ranking of No. 91 to No. 15. He’s also eye-catching, a pencil-thin mustache leaving him poised perfectly between rakish and boyish. Tsitsipas has been a sensation everywhere he’s appeared — not least because his Greek heritage tends to bring out fans who know how to liven up a tennis match.
Tsitsipas also has philosophical inclinations, much like the earnest college sophomore his talent will forbid him ever being. They show up in his musings on Twitter. His passion for social media is proactive. Tsitsipas has his own YouTube channel mostly dedicated to his series of travel Vlogs. All in all, he’s a well-rounded youth with his antennae out in various directions. Should Tsitsipas’ career continue to skyrocket, that could become a problem: Great players tend to become consumed by the sport.
“There are positives and negatives to all this success,” Tsitsipas told ESPN.com, sitting in an empty office in the bowels of Arthur Ashe stadium an hour after his win over Robredo. “How to say this. . . not all is shiny and beautiful? When you win you need to work harder than before. You need to keep consistency. Keep wins going. It’s a bigger responsibility. I expect myself to perform better in the next couple of months, so I am going to try to handle this (success) as mature as possible.”
Stefanos Tsitsipas’ style and game are ready for the spotlight. Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports
Tsitsipas’s father, Apostolos, is Greek. His mother, Julia Apostoli-Salnikova, is Russian. They met when Julia was playing a WTA event in Athens, where Apostolos was a line judge. As a teenager, Salnikova had been ranked as high as No. 1 in Russia, which she represented in Fed Cup (she had a win over Virginia Wade). Stefanos is the oldest of four tennis-playing siblings (both parents were involved in club-level coaching). When it became clear that Stefanos had world-class talent, Apostolos dropped all else to study coaching at the University of Athens. He became his oldest son’s coach and chaperone.
“My father is one of my heroes,” Tsitsipas said. “To me, he’s a legend. He risked everything since the beginning, when we had absolutely nothing, and started traveling with me.”
Apostolos isn’t the only “legend” in Tsitsipas’ gallery of heroes. In fact, he has quite the palette: Leonidas (the warrior king of the Greek city-state of Sparta), the Dalai Lama, vlogging phenom Casey Neistat (“I’d love to meet him, he lives here in New York,” Tsitsipas said. “But it’s probably impossible. He has 10 million followers.”), Pete Sampras and Roger Federer .
The “risk” paid off when Tsitsipas became the No. 1 junior in the world, and the dividends multiplied quickly. He won his first ATP match in late in 2017, then broke through to the elite level when he achieved the final of Barcelona this spring. Tsitsipas built on that success. He knocked out four top 10 players (including Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev ) to reach the final of Toronto just weeks ago.
Tsitsipas appears to have plenty of room to grow. Stylistically, he’s an all-courter, with seemingly vast stores of energy backed by clean strokes and a Federer-esque appetite for swashbuckling, glittering tennis. “I love coming to the net,” he said. “I believe that being aggressive, taking the ball earlier, can help me beat good players.”
“He’s just a huge talent,” according to ESPN analyst Patrick McEnroe. “He’s multi-dimensional. He can stay back, come in, slice, hit the one-handed slice. There’s a question of how long it will take him to put the package together, but look at the package, add the attitude and court presence, and this is a guy who could take the game by storm.”
Novak Djokovic, beaten by Tsitsipas in Toronto, said: “He’s showing a lot of commitment, a lot of discipline. He’s putting in the hours in the gym and on the court and it’s paying off.”
The “package” McEnroe described may come with an owner’s manual recommending that Tsitsipas back away from some of his avocations and focus, like most of the best players, on his career quest. There will be pressure to change, to become more conventional and exclusively focused.
“I’ve been been thinking about it,” he said. “Image is an important part of my career, But stopping doing my vlog? I don’t think so, not really. I will keep doing it the way I do it because I enjoy it. I love it. Of course people will be watching, but I should keep doing what I do.”
It isn’t just about the vlogging, either. Tsitsipas is plugged in, but also aware of the value of pulling the plug, too.
Tsitsipas said he likes to leave his smartphone behind whenever he can, like when he goes out to dinner in New York during this tournament. He came to the conclusion some time ago that people lose too much time staring at screens, “scrolling all the time.” He believes it would be “awesome” if kids today spent more time doing interesting things instead of staring at their phones. “Nowadays,” he said, “It’s really important to spend time in the real world, not so much in the virtual world. I miss those times of my childhood.”
That childhood was spent in the Greek village of Vouliagmeni, a seaside suburb south of Athens. Tsitsipas said it’s still his favorite place, a hillside enclave with plenty of green, a lovely beach not far below. “The view from my house is just unreal,” he said. “And it’s so peaceful there.”
The tranquility may be hard to come by in future visits home. Tsitsipas made his stunning run to the final in Toronto shortly after the worst of the wild fires that ravaged Greece in late July. His performance in Canada became a welcome distraction from the tragedy.
“After the fires, what I managed in Toronto, everybody suddenly woke up,” Tsitsipas said. “Everybody started watching tennis. They told me, ‘Grandpas in some villages started watching tennis.’ They had no idea about the sport before. People went crazy.”
People going crazy when Tsitsipas plays tennis. Get used to it.
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