New in 2024
a monthly column written by the brilliant Hannah Wilks, who has looked after our Twitter feed at Grand Slam tournaments since 2021. Here’s the first. It made Catherine cry. She described it as ‘breathtaking'. Enjoy.
We need to talk about Grigor
A week is a long time in tennis. Or at least a week is a long time in thinking about some tennis writing that you’re definitely going to do any minute. When I was contemplating this column, I thought it was going to be about comebacks: I was going to write about Rafael Nadal and Naomi Osaka, artfully weave in my own comeback to writing about tennis and end up with something about the joys and anxieties of returning to what used to be familiar ground. But what actually stands out to me from the first week of the new season isn’t a story about comebacks, but a story about someone who’s never really been away.
Grigor Dimitrov has always seemed to me like a character Billy Crudup would play in a movie; implausibly good-looking, possessed of seemingly inexhaustible charm (this is a man who did some version of breaking up with Serena Williams for Maria Sharapova, and somehow ended up better friends with everyone involved) and fatally lacking some essential salt, steel or substance. He won the Brisbane International at the weekend, his first title since winning the ATP Finals in 2017 and arguably claimed in the teeth of a stronger field (beating Andy Murray and Holger Rune is tougher than beating David Goffin twice, I don’t make the rules). Watching the final, I thought three things: That he was playing brilliantly; that it was perfect this win came against Rune, against whom he had failed to meaningfully turn up in the significant moments at Wimbledon last year; and about the last time he won Brisbane, when he would go on to reach the semi-finals in Melbourne, pushing Nadal to five sets and nearly disrupting the Fedal final.
For every tennis player, there’s a definitive match; not necessarily and in fact generally not the most consequential for their careers, but the one where you as a fan formed an unshakeable impression of them which can be modified but never erased. For me, the ur-Dimitrov match has always been that five-set thriller against Nadal in the 2017 semi-finals – which is why it was interesting to discover, doing a little research for this piece, that my memories of it were faulty. I remembered Dimitrov holding match points late in the fifth set, and squandering one if not both with poor shot selection. But that’s not actually what happened. Dimitrov had two break points at 3-4 in the fifth, not match points. And he didn’t do anything wrong on either of those points. Nadal simply produced four unplayably brilliant points from 15-40 down, held serve and went on to win the final set 6-4.
Why had I remembered it, not as Nadal being too good, but as Dimitrov wasting chances? Because what I actually remembered were quotes from Dimitrov in the days after the match saying that he could not stop thinking about how he had played those points, calling then-coach Dani Vallverdu in the middle of the night to say how he should have gone down the line, not cross-court, with his forehand... It wasn’t the points themselves I remembered, but the story Dimitrov told about the points – a story about what he could have done, what he should have done, what might have been.
This is, after all, the story we have all been telling about Dimitrov for years. I mean, he had seven wins against top-10 players in 2023 and won more matches after the US Open than anybody apart from Jannik Sinner, but the only thing I really remembered about his season was his lip-bitingly devastated face during the flat defeat to Rune at Wimbledon. Searching for the quotes I mentioned, I flicked through Google page after page of Dimitrov headlines: “Grigor Dimitrov is the New Roger Federer”; “Grigor Dimitrov is the future”; “Grigor Dimitrov Just Can’t Seem to Break Through”; “Now or never for Grigor Dimitrov”. Do yourself a favour and don’t search “Grigor Dimitrov underachiever” unless you want to experience an intense, day-ruining melancholy. Even now, there’s an overwhelming temptation to frame his strong 2023 and title-drought-ending start to 2024 in these same terms: Is Grigor Dimitrov finally going to…? Is Grigor looking dangerous?
The problem with potential is you can never prove you didn’t have it. Tentatively embracing the thought that you did the best you could while dealing with struggles likely known only to you doesn’t untether other people from their fixed ideas about what you could have done, should have done, might have been. We cling to these narratives, not because we’re horrible people, but because we all want to believe in putting it all together before it’s too late. We all want to suddenly stop getting in our own way and do all those things we know we could do if we could just transcend the basic realities of our personality, like the way I solemnly vowed on December 31st that I would get out of bed on the first alarm every morning in 2024 despite having done that maybe twice during the preceding forty years.
Over the past decade, it’s felt especially necessary to delude ourselves this way coming into the Australian Open, when you have to trawl the men’s draw sheet like Catherine combing the undergrowth for quokkas to try to find plausible alternatives to Novak Djokovic winning the title once more. Perhaps the coming of Carlos Alcaraz, and of Jannik Sinner and the rest, has alleviated that pressure slightly; dimmed the spotlight enough to let Grigor Dimitrov breathe a little.
It’s hard to tell from Dimitrov’s quotes, reliably an impenetrable soup of geniality, how he really feels about having spent so much of his career straitjacketed by expectation, but I did find a line from him back in 2017 that I liked: “Little by little, yeah, drop by drop, here I am.” No giant leaps, no explosive breakthroughs, just showing up and finding out what you can do, oozing into 2024 like an Eastern Brown slaloming underneath a courtside hoarding and, ultimately, not being too hard on yourself when you wake up half an hour late with your head underneath your pillow; this is energy we can all aspire to channel in the still-new year. And don’t forget: You never know…
