There’s a tennis player you probably don’t pay much attention to, though perhaps you should.
Not because he narrowly escaped being the victim in a massive upset on day one of the Australian Open, surviving a fifth-set tiebreaker when all appeared lost. He’s not the next big thing. At 26, he’s too old for that. His game is hardly the most sublime. Terrific forehand, though. Despite his rabid desperation, he may never win a Grand Slam title.
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And yet, you still ought to pay attention to Andrey Rublev because, chances are, he’s you.
Do you know how blessed and fortunate you are but still ache for just a little bit more?
Do you lose your temper at inconvenient moments, times when every ounce of brain power is telling you not to lose your temper?
Have you ever shunned guaranteed money because you wanted to pursue your passion?
Ever put friendship and principle above silence and a safer path?
If so, then Rublev, warts and all, a Russian at a time when Russians are considered an enemy for much of the world, might just be your guy.
He’s the world No 5 and coming off the best season of his career. After a one-week vacation to see his family in Moscow, some of whom he had not seen in nearly two years, he returned to the practice court and started this season as well as he could have hoped, winning the season-opening Hong Kong Open, then survived five nervy sets against the dangerous Thiago Seyboth Wild of Brazil without losing his mind. For Rublev, that may be the biggest victory of all.
Tennis, with all that time between points and games to dwell, alone, on a recent mishap and the mishaps that have piled up over the years, may be the greatest mental test in sport. Right now, Rublev is the ultimate manifestation of the sport’s torturous dynamic. He would prefer not to be. He wants to win, badly, but he wants to tackle the demon that lives inside his skull, the one that transforms a player his close friend, Daniil Medvedev, has described as “the kindest player” in the game, a sensitive, soft-spoken and self-deprecating soul Medvedev asked to be the godfather to his daughter, into a madman.
He knows that’s not who he is, which makes it even worse.
“At least if I was like that, then I would be more OK about it,” Rublev said recently.
Galo Blanco, Rublev’s agent who was his coach for a time, said Rublev is making slow and steady progress, working with a new coach with a background in psychology.
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“He’s a little kid in his head,” Blanco said. “He needs to keep working.”
Rublev and his coaches practise breathing exercises, energy control, and understanding when he is most prone to an eruption. The more tired he is, the higher the likelihood of an explosion. (Sound like anyone you know?)
Sometimes the toolbox works better than others. At the ATP Tour Finals in November, Rublev was hanging with Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish wunderkind, until a sloppy game late in the first set. Within minutes, he was slamming his racket into his leg, over and over and over. His kneecap became a bloody mess.
He knows how bad it all looks. He hates that kids who might look up to him see him acting in a way he never wants to act. That makes it worse.
“You get mad with yourself, then you get mad because you got mad with yourself,” he said. “It’s like a snowball that starts to be bigger and bigger, getting upset with yourself, because you know, you’re not supposed to. You’re trying not to do it, and then first you get mad with yourself because you did some stupid mistake or something, and you show emotions, and then you get mad with yourself because like, everyone told me 1,000 times. I know that I shouldn’t act like this. And then it’s like, again, the same mistake. How you can do the same mistakes 1,000 times?”
Been there? Done that?
Those who don’t follow tennis outside of the Grand Slams, or in those moments when the sport or a player does something that breaks into the public consciousness, may be familiar with Rublev for another reason. He is the Russian who, in those foreboding days in February 2022, scrawled “No War Please” on the glass in front of a camera lens as his country’s troops massed on the border of Ukraine. It was not the sort of message that President Vladimir Putin wanted one of his country’s most famous stars to espouse.
Russian tennis player Andrey Rublev writes “No war please” on the camera following his advancement to the final in Dubai. pic.twitter.com/GQe8d01rTd
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) February 25, 2022
Later that year, Rublev was so dismayed about players from Russia and Belarus being barred from playing Wimbledon in 2022 that he offered to donate any money he might have earned from the tournament to relief efforts in Ukraine. He appeared in a video filmed in Barcelona with Daria Kasatkina, another Russian player, as she criticized the war and expressed empathy for the citizens of Ukraine. In the same video, Kasatkina came out as a lesbian and spoke of the difficulty of being gay in a country where homosexual behavior or its promotion can be prosecuted.
Rublev provided support and at one point, said he agreed with everything Kasatkina said. It was a risky move. Most of Rublev’s family still lives in Moscow. He has barely been back since the war began, visiting quietly with relatives for a week at the end of this season.
Having made his sentiments clear and not wanting to put his family in danger, he has tried to avoid speaking about the war since then.
“He is a tennis player, not politician,” Blanco said. “When you ask him what is his wish, he says he wants peace in the world.”
On a personal level, Rublev has always wanted something else off the court as well — his own clothing line. He had a clothing contract with Nike, but as its expiration date approached, he told Blanco something that no agent ever wants to hear.
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Rublev said there was no deal with another clothing manufacturer that he would sign, regardless of how many millions of dollars it might guarantee. Neither he nor Blanco knew much about manufacturing or marketing a clothing line. But now they are figuring out how to sell the “Rublo” gear he is wearing in Australia. The practice shirt has a design that, fittingly, looks an awful lot like the graph of a spiking heartbeat under stress.
Like most players (and people), Rublev doesn’t explode or feel all that stressed when he is winning or feeling fresh. And his anger is almost always directed entirely at himself, not umpires or line judges. He’s generally calmer in best-of-three sets matches than in best-of-five, which is why, despite a few screams here and there, his relative serenity on Sunday, even when he was down 4-1 in the final-set tiebreaker, was such a victory and not an accident.
Last year, he and Blanco brought in Marcos Borderias, the well-regarded trainer, to improve his fitness and endurance to ward off physical and mental exhaustion. Borderias works alongside Fernando Vicente, a former top-30 player from Spain who has served as Rublev’s lead coach for several years. Alberto Martin, another former pro who comes with a degree in psychology, works with him occasionally, as a kind of ‘super-coach’, like Toni Nadal does for Felix Auger-Aliassime.
Solving the technical part of the Rublev puzzle has its complications. He is one of the best players in the game at winning points when he is on the attack, his so-called conversion rate. He won 70.6 per cent of those points last season, fourth on the men’s tour, behind only Novak Djokovic, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Roman Safiullin, and well ahead of the average of 66 per cent.
But he and his coaches know he has to get better at winning points when he ends up on defense. He needs to figure out how to shift from defense to offense with a rip of his racket, or work his way toward those moments with slices and deep, looping groundstrokes that can buy time. They would all like him to drink a little less Coca-Cola, which is one of his few vices.
He is trying to learn how to finish more points at the net, before a player like Alcaraz can pin him deep behind the baseline. He has dedicated long hours of practice to this. Doing it during matches has been another story. He’s come this far largely by whaling away from the back of the court. Doing something different with money and rankings points and trophies on the line doesn’t come naturally.
“You feel more tight, you feel more nervous and you don’t want to do something that you are not confident in,” he said.
No one has ever questioned his desire or his love for the game and the life it allows him to lead. Gary Swain, a longtime agent who works closely with John McEnroe, worked for a time with Rublev and said his yearning for victories, and the torture he experienced from the losses, rivalled only McEnroe’s among players he knew.
Rublev has had long-running debates with his team over his schedule. He loves nothing more than going from tournament to tournament, relishing the travel, drawing energy from visiting one world capital after another. He has friends with diplomas from top universities, who can’t find jobs, or have to settle for a job doing something other than what they have trained for and for little pay.
“Having the job that I love to do,” he said, “and having, like, everything, what I was dreaming for is just…” He doesn’t bother finishing the sentence. He doesn’t have to.
He has won nearly $22million in prize money, and millions more in endorsement deals and appearance fees, but it goes beyond that. His coaches often urge him to compete less, to rest and practise more. He says he gets twitchy and starts to feel stale when he takes off weeks during the season.
He was points away from an extended early season break on Sunday. Down 4-1 in the deciding tiebreaker, with Seyboth Wild seemingly cruising, he figured this was not his day and nearly gave up. But he didn’t.
And more importantly, he didn’t crack up.
(Top photo: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
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