Stosur’s tip for Tomic
‘Change it up, it’s not working’
GOLD Coast tennis star Sam Stosur is urging fellow pro Bernard Tomic to take a sabbatical if he needs to.
Stosur, yesterday on the Coast where she has spent most of her summer tennis season build-up, said if Tomic was not into it and wants a long break then “just do it”.
“Don’t keep doing what you are doing because it’s not really working,” she said.
“If you are in a funk and it’s not right, get away, go do what you need to.
“If you find that desire again for it, then make a really good go of it.
“If you don’t have it, it’s very hard to continue in anything – whether a tennis player, a football player, an accountant. If you don’t have that desire, it’s very hard to push on every single day.”
Stosur, who won 2011’s US Open and has been fourth in the world, said Tomic had a unique style of play and was “really exciting to watch”.
“He has proven when he wants to do it he can match it with some of the best and get those great results.”
Stosur admitted three or four seasons ago she struggled with the sport too.
“You think ‘Do I want to keep going, keep doing it?’. You have a few losses that are a bit hard to handle and everything seems so hard. That may have lingered on for a while but at the end of the day I always knew I loved what I did,” she said.
In a raw TV interview earlier this year, after admitting boredom on court at his favoured Wimbledon, Tomic said he liked tennis but saw it as a job he felt “trapped” by.
Ranked 142, the 25-yearold – who has earned $7 million in prizemoney – has entered Brisbane International qualifying later this month.
Tournament director Cam Pearson confirmed Tomic was in qualifying: “It’d be great to see him playing his top tennis – at his best he is a top 20 player.”