Australian Open: the demons fighting every player

Every player at Melbourne Park is fighting a psychological war they would prefer to keep private

Demons imagined and real haunt American player Tennys Sandgren

Grigor Dimitrov mentioned demons and the locker room gasped. Because every player at Melbourne Park is fighting a psychological war they would prefer to keep private. With clenched teeth and curled fists, they’re furiously trying to silence the whispering voice of negativity that threatens to bring them undone.

It’s the sneering, ruinous, mean-spirited messenger who reminds them of their weaknesses at the worst possible moments. Scoreboard pressure makes the demon raise his ugly little head. Fatigue lets him in.

Every player left in the tournament has the physical attributes to win the Australian Open from here, but not all of them can beat the demon. Pick a player, any player, and there’s an issue. The demon knows the mental frailties and the technical chinks. The little bastard knows too much.

Tennys Sandgren has a real demon and a demon we though might exist before the American did his best to knock it on the head before today’s quarter-final against Hyeon Chung. Sandgren’s real demon is the suspicion that he’s already done enough by coming this far. He’d never won a match at a slam before last week. The demon breeds complacency as expertly as fear.

“If I wake up now, I’m going to be real upset,” Sandgren said. “I used to put maybe more emphasis on … are you good enough? Are you not good enough? Now I don’t really care. I’ve been able to keep my emotions under control, which is a big deal because I can be an emotional person.

“That doesn’t go well with tennis. You don’t have energy to waste on emotions.”

The imagined demon with Sandgren was that he was going to turn the Open into some sort of Donald Trump rally — or worse. Make American Tennis Great Again? Sandgren’s increased profile has led to scrutiny of his social media activity. In particular, the retweeting of white ­nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, who was up to his neck in the Charlottes­ville rally. The following of a host of right-wing figures on Twitter. And the argument with former US player James Blake, an African-American, about racism in the US.

“I just don’t know how a country that practices (sic) systemic ­racism elected a black pres, twice,” Sandgren tweeted.

He deleted the tweets this week, but denied wrongdoing. “I’m not concerned about it,” Sandgren said. “Look, who you follow on Twitter, I feel that doesn’t matter. What information you see doesn’t dictate what you think or believe. I think it’s crazy to think that. To say, ‘well, he’s following X person, so he believes all the things that this person believes’, I think it’s ridiculous.

“If you watch a news channel, you wouldn’t then say that person who is watching the news channel thinks everything that news channel puts out. I don’t think any kind of engagement in that way dictates that you then are right in there with that particular person.

“You can ask me about my beliefs on things, that’s cool. But I think to lump in and say, ‘You follow this person, so then wow, who are you?’. Ask me who I am. I’m perfectly fine answering those kinds of questions.”

So, do you actually support the hate-mongering demons of the alt-right? “No, I don’t,” he said. “I find some of the content interesting. But no, I don’t. As a firm Christian, I don’t support things like that. I support Christ and following Him. That’s what I support.”

Let’s stick with on-court demons. Madison Keys plays Angelique Kerber today. Keys’ demon is the memory of her capitulation against Sloane Stephens in the final of last year’s US Open. She was embarrassed 6-3 6-0. She says she wants to make amends. She tells herself to ignore the fact that one of the worst and most anxiety-riddled performances of her life came at the biggest moment.

She was the favourite. She crumbled. The same demon of Flushing Meadows can appear again at Melbourne Park. The demon for Keys is stage fright. “It was really devastating for me,” she says of her US Open defeat.

Dimitrov’s weakness against Britain’s Kyle Edmund yesterday was a second serve that had resembled a scene from Wolf Creek in the first four rounds. He served five double faults in round one, nine in round two, 15 in round three and seven against Nick ­Kyrgios in round four.

No professional player should serve 36 double faults in four matches. Dimitrov’s demon told him the double faults would come on important points.

Bouncing the ball on his second delivery against Edmund, you could see it on his face. Please, not now. As the similarly haunted Novak Djokovic said after his nine double faults and preoccupation with injury in his defeat to Chung: “I just had too much to deal with.”

Dimitrov served a double fault at 4-4, 15-30 and lost the opening set. He looked spooked. Serving at 4-2 in the second set, he yipped three double faults. He conceded the break in the third set with another double. He served seven for the match in a 6-4 3-6 6-3 6-4 loss.

Forty-three double faults was the most by any player in the tournament. He’d been tough enough to stare down the demon in the earlier rounds but Edmund was ruthless enough to make him pay.

“I know it’s a big battle out there but you know, we are humans,” Dimitrov had said on the weekend. “Above all, we have to fight our demons. We all have some.”

Chung powered through upset victories against Alexander Zverev and Djokovic but the player nicknamed The Professor has entered a different psychological realm, that of favouritism. He should beat Sandgren and that throws up its own set of challenges.

The demon will tell him to look too far ahead. That he needs only three more victories to win a major. The demon will tell him, don’t stuff this up. Chung constantly looks at his support crew while pointing at the court. The message is this: I’m staying here.

“I’m just trying to focus every day, every time, every moment,” he said. “I’m just trying to focus on the moment.”

Federer and Rafael Nadal have demons: the fear of injury forcing them into retirement, sooner than they want. Federer plays Tomas Berdych. The Czech’s demon tells him he’ll never win a major. That his best days have come and gone.

Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki have the same demon. It tells them they are failures unless they win a slam. That they don’t deserve to have been world No 1. The problem with the demon is that he sometimes gets it right.