This was published 11 months ago
Thanks, Lleyton: Why the number of Aussie men in the top 100 has soared
There are more Australian men among the world’s top 100 tennis players today than at any time since 1998. Most are not household names but they credit someone who is – and the culture he’s built – for their understated rise up the ranks.
Lleyton Hewitt cheers on his team at a 2023 Davis Cup quarter-final match in November.Credit: Giampiero Sposito/Getty Images
Lleyton Hewitt shrugs the tension from his shoulders and tugs at the bottom of his wattle-yellow shirt, momentarily taking his eyes off the young Finnish player coiled at the service line. His feet are evenly balanced and planted wide, readying him to lunge left or right, his body tilted forward in anticipation. When the first serve catches the tape and plops wide of the line, he shrugs again and gives his shirt another little tug. A lifetime of tennis has taught him every match point is a precious thing, to waste one a grievous sin. He wipes a trickle of sweat from his forehead and lets the air cool the damp on his fingers. Then he stares fixedly. Waiting.
When the final forehand misses and the match is won, Hewitt leaps off his chair and pumps both fists in the air. Australia’s Davis Cup captain hasn’t picked up a racquet, much less hit a ball, but he has ridden every point alongside his charge Alexei Popyrin, who is grinning wide-eyed as he bounces towards his captain and teammates, knowing for the first time what it is to play and win for Australia in the Davis Cup.
Unless you are a dedicated tennis watcher, you will probably have forgotten, if indeed you ever knew, that Popyrin’s win against Finland’s Otto Virtanen in Malaga, a port city in southern Spain, in November put Australia into a Davis Cup final for a second successive year. Or that, for a second year in a row, Australia lost the final. It may even be news to you, as the world’s best players gather in Melbourne for the start of this year’s Australian Open, that the Davis Cup, a storied sporting competition which predates Australia’s federation, is still a thing.
Congratulating Alexei Popyrin after his win against Finland’s Otto Virtanen, a victory that put Australia into the Davis Cup final for the second successive year.Credit: Getty Images
The International Tennis Federation, having entrusted the long-term future of its international teams competition to Gerard Pique, a cashed-up, retired Spanish footballer, belatedly recognised the folly of this arrangement. But not before the experiment tarnished the sport’s famous silver punch bowl in the eyes of many players, fans and sponsors. The ITF’s partnership with Pique’s Kosmos Group ended in 2023 and remains subject to legal dispute. Yet, for all the problems with the present, truncated format of the Davis Cup – and Hewitt will happily provide a long list – Australia’s performance in Malaga hinted at a very good story unfolding in men’s tennis in this country.
Consider the evidence. At the end of last year, eight Australian men’s players were ranked inside the world’s top 100. That’s one more than Spain or Russia, two more than Italy or Argentina, and twice the number of the UK. The only countries that began 2024 with more players in the top 100 were the US and France.
To find a time when Australia had so many players ranked in the world’s top 100, you need to go as far back as 1998, when Pat Rafter and Mark Philippoussis served and volleyed their way through a US Open final and a fraggle-haired teenager from Adelaide named Lleyton Hewitt won his hometown tournament and finished the year at No.100.
Some of today’s names might not mean a lot to you. Alex de Minaur is an outright star and Thanasi Kokkinakis is well known, but if you can pick out Alexei Popyrin, Max Purcell, Jordan Thompson, Aleksandar Vukic and Christopher O’Connell from a line-up of other professional players, you’re either a ball kid or spending way too much time on Kayo.
Rinky Hijikata is the youngest of the lot, at 22 years of age. He cracked the top 100 for the first time in September after a break-out year that began with winning the Australian Open doubles title with Jason Kubler, who, at 30, has overcome three serious knee injuries to keep chasing his endless summer. Kubler was ranked inside the top 100 as late as November and finished the year just outside.
The thing to keep in mind as you’re reading this is how hard it is for any player – let alone eight from the same country – to make it to the top 100 of the ATP tour. Statistics compiled by Tennis Australia show that, of about 8000 professional tennis players born in the two decades between 1980 and 2000, only 4.7 per cent have achieved a top 100 ranking at any point in their career. The stats also show it is an increasingly more difficult club to break into, as tennis becomes more global in its appeal.
Rinky Hijikata and Jason Kubler of Australia with the men’s doubles trophy at last year’s Australian Open.Credit: Getty Images
Wally Masur, a constant in Australian tennis for the past 40 years as a player, television commentator, Davis Cup coach and captain, high-performance director and, most recently, coaching mentor, says reaching the top 100 is an important staging post for anyone trying to make a living from tennis. It is also a critical measure of the health of a tennis nation. Once you’re ranked inside the top 100, you gain automatic entry into the four major tournaments of the year, you start making some money and move into contention to be selected for the Olympics, Davis Cup or the Billie Jean King Cup, the equivalent women’s event. Put simply: if you’re in the top 100, you’re in the game.
“It gets you into the slams and it puts you in the frame to have a meaningful career,” Masur says. “We’ve had times in Australian tennis when we’ve had grand slam winners and that has hidden the fact we lack a bit of depth in the top 100. It is a massive benchmark in world tennis.”
The other big change in men’s tennis in Australia is more subjective. When Bernard Tomic emerged as a gifted but tempestuous teenager with lucrative management and sponsorship contracts already in place, followed by Nick Kyrgios with his immense capacity for shot-making and distaste for the hard work required to sustain a successful career in such a punishing sport, the fortunes of Australian men’s tennis rose and fell according to the mood swings of these idiosyncratic talents.
For many years, Tennis Australia was torn between conflicting urges to indulge these mercurial, marketable players and to stop them carrying on like prats. Today, with Tomic tanked and Kyrgios’s future prospects unclear after a year missed through injury, there is a different character about the top ranks of Australian men’s tennis.
‘You have eight guys inside the top 100 and seven of those aren’t as talented as [Kyrgios or Tomic]. They … have gotten there by grinding on tour.’
Sam Groth, former pro player turned politician
Our highest-ranked player, Alex de Minaur, is a fastidious professional, known for his ravenous work ethic. The group of players he heads are a blue-collar crew who, for differing reasons, have taken long and sometimes circuitous roads to get to where they are. They know what tennis looks like off-Broadway – long weeks spent playing in lower-tier competitions for a fistful of dollars and ranking points – and are desperate to stay in the show. They see in de Minaur and Hewitt – a player who was renowned for pushing his body and talents beyond their natural limits – what is required. Where Kyrgios, in the words of John Millman, could win tour matches playing with a wooden racquet, the current Aussie mob know they have to “soak everything out of their game” to be competitive.
Sam Groth, a former Australian professional tennis player who was elected to the Victorian parliament in 2022, says the shift in attitude is clear. “You have eight guys inside the top 100 and seven of those aren’t as talented as Nick or Bernie. They are workhorse guys who have gotten there by grinding on tour and doing all the right things.”
Millman, a popular, retiring tennis pro, believes since Hewitt’s appointment as Davis Cup captain in 2016, he has played a seminal role in changing the culture of Australian tennis. Hewitt is a complex personality but has always had a strong sense of what matters in tennis. According to Millman, two things are non-negotiable with Hewitt. “Lleyton built a career by getting the most out of his game,” he says. “He only wants to work with people who are going to go out there and demonstrate some of the same qualities we saw from him on court: those fighting attributes and that leave-it-all-out-there approach. The other necessity with Lleyton is that if you get called up to play for your country, you play for your country.”
It is no coincidence that, where Tomic fell out with successive Davis Cup captains and Kyrgios has played intermittently and sometimes prioritised other events, every Australian player currently ranked inside the top 100 unconditionally makes themselves available for Davis Cup duties. De Minaur, the 109th player to represent Australia in the Davis Cup, has the number tattooed on his chest.
The turning point can be traced to an unlikely location: a grass court under sweltering skies in Darwin nearly nine years ago, when Australia was drawn to play the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in the Davis Cup. Millman, who served as the team’s orange boy [a role given to up-and-coming players who practise with the Davis Cup team] for that tie, explains that Pat Rafter, Australia’s Davis Cup captain for four years and later, Tennis Australia’s head of performance, had decided to introduce a “no dickheads policy” in team selection. This followed an ugly, public feud between Tomic and Rafter which began when Tomic, nursing the disappointment of a loss at Wimbledon, rounded on Tennis Australia and its most popular office holder for a perceived lack of support.
Rafter’s retort – that tennis is about opportunity, not entitlement – effectively put a line under Tomic’s Davis Cup career. Years later, Rafter explained the philosophy behind his “no dickheads” approach. “I wanted to bring back some really strong, ethical morals we used to live by,” he said. The upshot in Darwin was that Tomic was left out of the team and 20-year-old Kyrgios was benched after sulking through his opening match. The tie was eventually rescued by Hewitt and his friend and regular doubles partner: Groth.
Hewitt was named Davis Cup captain the following year and maintained the “no dickheads” policy. In 2019, after Tomic rounded on Hewitt following a first-round exit from that year’s Australian Open, Hewitt declared that as long as he had a say in the matter, Tomic would not be invited to wear Australian team colours again.
“We’re trying to set cultural standards for the Davis Cup and representing Australia,” Hewitt said at the time. Hewitt’s stance was publicly backed by Tennis Australia’s then chief tennis officer, Matt Dwyer. “We had a burning platform,” says Dwyer, who now runs the Australian operations for Wilson, a global sporting goods company synonymous with tennis. “We’d seen the demise of Bernie. We’d had all the behavioural stuff with Nick. There was a willingness and appetite to change.”
Tennis Australia commissioned a review of its professional tennis programs and Dwyer, a commercial and marketing executive who’d come to tennis after working with Australian and English cricket, conducted interviews with every player ranked in the top 250 and former players like Rafter and Darren Cahill to gain a better understanding of what players wanted from Tennis Australia and what Australia wanted from its tennis players. One of the findings of the review was that although tennis is an individual sport, many of Australia’s top players crave and thrive in a team environment. The challenge for Australian tennis was how to build a Team Australia culture beyond the few weeks of the year when the men’s players come together to play the Davis Cup.
Dwyer says it started with Hewitt spending an enormous amount of time on tour to become a regular touchstone for Australian players. “Technically, his job description was for about 16 weeks of the year, but he would be out there whenever he could. He lived it. He was madly passionate about it.”
At the same time, Hewitt has kept familiar faces in Australia’s Davis Cup set-up – and brought in people he trusted from his time as a player. Jaymon Crabb, one of Hewitt’s personal coaches, came on board as Davis Cup assistant coach and Peter Luczak, the coach of Hewitt’s teenage son Cruz, also joined the support team. The familiar figure of Tony Roche, an enduring Davis Cup servant who also coached Hewitt for a time, was on the sidelines in Malaga, in his green and gold tracksuit, at the age of 78. “We should have stadiums named after Tony Roche,” says Millman.
Groth adds that Hewitt’s influence on today’s generation of players has been no less profound. “You have a group of guys who, growing up, saw how he went about things,” Groth says. “On the men’s side, for a long, long time, it was only Lleyton. Every time we’d go out to practise, Lleyton drove a culture of what is acceptable and what is not. He has kept driving that as the Davis Cup captain but it is [also] a broader attitude. The guys on tour all know they have to be there for each other. Generally what happens in Australian tennis is that when one or two come through, a group follows. When Aussies have done well, it has always come in waves.
Hewitt celebrates Alex de Minaur’s Davis Cup semi-final match win in November.Credit: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
“In the group we have now, there are probably a few who were unlikely to end up as high as they have, but once they see one do it they have that belief that they can do it, too. When Aussies see each other doing well, it gives them the confidence to say: ‘Why can’t I?’ ”
This is certainly the case with Rinky Hijikata, a son of Japanese immigrants who grew up in Sydney playing tennis and swimming in the surf. He says there’s a group dynamic at play that explains, in part, what we are seeing in Australian men’s tennis. Hijikata trained at the same Sydney tennis academy as de Minaur, Purcell, Thompson, Vukic and O’Connell.
“I feel like having a group of us who are all pushing each other to do better has helped massively throughout the past few years,” he says. “I can’t speak on behalf of everyone but I know that when I see a few of the other Aussies get a big result or a big win, it gives me the belief that I can go out there and do the same. It is a kind of snowball effect. One person gets a good result and all the others think, ‘there is no reason I can’t do that’. They will then go out and put up a better result and it just keeps building. At the front of it you’ve got a guy like Demon [de Minaur] who is the ultimate professional and a ridiculously hard-working and humble and supportive guy. When you have someone like that leading the pack and everyone aspiring to get to where he is, it makes for a really good dynamic.”
Hijikata started touring as a full-time tennis professional midway through 2021, when the pandemic was still raging. He had just finished two years at the University of North Carolina, in the uber-social college town of Chapel Hill, and soon found himself living in a shared Airbnb in Portugal, playing a series of small tournaments. He didn’t speak the language and, even if he did, didn’t have anyone to talk to. Most nights he ate on his own. “Those weeks are really tough, especially if you are not putting results on the board,” he says.
Now, at most tournaments he plays, there are other Australian players with whom to share a practice court or a game of cards. The larger tournaments usually start with an Aussie dinner, arranged via a WhatsApp chat group, where all the touring players come together for a shared meal. These might sound like small things but Ben Robertson, Tennis Australia’s national wellbeing manager, says a little support means a lot to players on a seemingly endless tour.
“Tennis is an individual sport but you need a team to perform at your best,” says Robertson, who came to tennis after working in cricket and football. “You hit the ball one on one, we get that, but off court there is a team of support people who are there to help you in any way they can. Tennis is a hard sport and it can be an isolating sport. The quicker you get a crew or a team or a group of people around you, where you enjoy their company, you are going to be in a better place. Then you can take things on.” Robertson talks of a critical mass in Australian men’s tennis. Wally Masur has long spoken about Aussie players hunting in packs.
Being an Australian on the ATP or WTA tour usually means travelling for about 40 weeks of the year. Where European and North American players can sometimes return home between tournaments and find time for little breaks from the tour, Australian players can go for months without sleeping in their own bed. It is murder on family life and can be an isolating, and at times a miserable experience for young players, even if they’re winning on court. This is where the pack comes in.
“The other Aussies become your family,” Groth says. “They become your support network. While you might want to destroy each other when you draw one another to play, you need those guys week-in, week-out because you are not going to make it through mentally if you don’t have that support.”
It is 48 years since an Australian won the Australian Open men’s championship. As things stand, Mark Edmondson’s place in tennis history appears secure over the next two weeks. Yet, in so many other ways, Australian men’s tennis is in rude health. If an Australian bloke was to win the lot at Melbourne Park, the first thing they’d do is thank their team.
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