Move over ‘Big Four’ – meet the next generation ready to make their mark

From a ‘Greek god’ to America’s golden boy, five rising stars tell their stories to Simon Briggs

STEFANOS TSITSIPAS ‘I was seconds from drowning’

It was when Stefanos Tsitsipas turned around and saw that he was 25 metres from the beach that he started to fear for his life.

Then only 16, Tsitsipas was meant to be enjoying a day off amid a gruelling sequence of Futures matches in Heraklion. But a gentle dip in the Mediterranean Sea turned into a near-death experience when he became caught in a rip-tide.

Only the timely intervention of his father, Apostolos – who swam out and guided him to a nearby rock – saved him from drowning.

“The waves were covering us every two or three seconds,” recalls Tsitsipas. “I felt I was a few seconds from dying.”

Three years on, he still blanches when the subject is raised. Yet Tsitsipas – who is now the secondyoungest man in the top 50 – believes that his brush with mortality on a Cretan beach taught him a valuable lesson. Since that moment he has gained a deep understanding of Boris Becker’s famous aphorism: “I lost a tennis match. Nobody died.”

As Tsitsipas tells The Daily

Telegraph: “It actually did change my attitude to the sport. When you deal with these kind of situations, where you fight for your life and you manage to survive somehow, your brain works differently. You appreciate life more.

“I became definitely more disciplined than before, and on the court after this, I was looser and more relaxed. What I faced before that was five or six times tougher.”

Standing 6ft 4in, with long golden locks and arresting amber eyes, Tsitsipas looks like a classical statue made flesh. In tennis terms, he is the closest thing Greece has to a god, having recently become the first man from his country to reach an ATP final since Nicholas Kalogeropoulos in 1973.

With no local role models to follow during his formative years, Tsitsipas idolised players such as Pete Sampras and Mark Philippoussis, who are both part of the wider cultural diaspora.

He also cites Melbourne – which is home to a large Greek population – as his favourite travel destination.

Yet Tsitsipas acknowledges that his country’s image has hardly been boosted by a decade of financial bail-outs.

“People call us lazy,” he says with a smile. “But I searched on Wikipedia recently, to see ‘Most working hours by nation’, and Greece was third in the world after South Korea and Mexico. I was surprised. Maybe other countries have a better plan, but I would really like to know how it works.”

Like his two most visible contemporaries – Alexander Zverev and Denis Shapovalov – Tsitsipas has a Russian connection through his mother, Julia, who was born in Moscow and reached the world’s top 200.

As with the Zverevs – who share an agent, Patricio Apey, with the Tsitsipas family – tennis runs through the whole brood. Seventeen-year-old Petros plays on the Greek Davis Cup team, while Paolo, 13, and sister Elisavet, 10, are just starting out on their own journeys.

“It’s tough for Petros because he has no support,” says Tsitsipas, whose father – again, like Zverev’s father, Alexander Snr – is also his coach. “My mum is at home taking care of the other kids. There might be a change in the whole thing. We were thinking that Petros can travel with us, be a hitting partner, then play tournaments around the places I am playing.”

To counterbalance the constant focus on forehands and backhands, Tsitsipas tries to disconnect once training is over, particularly through photography.

“I bought my camera in Australia this year,” says Tsitsipas. “I did tons of research to find the best one: tutorials, teaching videos, stuff like that. I like street photography, landscapes, portraits. I am trying to master Photoshop at the moment, to make visual effects. I feel free doing it, I feel like it comes straight from the spirit.”

Creative and charismatic, this is a man with crossover potential.

Even his game, which features a lissom single-handed backhand, is easy on the eye. During a careerbest run to the Barcelona final in April, he beat three top-20 players, including French Open runner-up Dominic Thiem.

It is strange to think that, had things turned out differently in Heraklion that day, tennis fans would never have known what they were missing.

As it is, Tsitsipas is making the most of his lucky escape.

TAYLOR FRITZ ‘I’m the esport locker-room king’

Like every other tennis player, Taylor Fritz wants to win Wimbledon. But Fritz also harbours a more unusual ambition – to double up as the first professional athlete who makes money from esport.

The son of former world No10 Kathy May, Fritz has always been precocious. He was 16 when he reached the semi-finals of junior Wimbledon, and 18 when he finished as a runner-up at the ATP event at Memphis.

But all that counts as the day job. During our interview, Fritz’s eyes suddenly came alive when he was asked about the dedicated gaming room in his San Diego home.

“My go-to partner for Fortnite [the popular survival shoot-’em-up] is Kozlov,” says Fritz, in reference to the American No 28 Stefan Kozlov. “I’ve gotten games with Nick Kyrgios – he is pretty solid. [Jack] Sock’s just starting out. He is not that good right now. I need to find more people to play with but I have to say I think I am the best [in the locker-room].”

Along with Fortnite, Fritz’s other favourite game is Fifa. “I was close to a professional level in Fifa last year,” he says.

This helps to explain why he keeps a signed Cristiano Ronaldo shirt above his gaming chair. He loves football and bridles at the idea that he might use the American term “soccer”.

As he explains: “I just call it football because I am a true fan. I watch every game that I can. I played a bit as a teenager, but I wasn’t that good.

“If I had to pick another sport where I had a shot at being a pro, it would probably be baseball. I was a pretty good pitcher. Throwing a baseball is very similar to serving, the same motion.”

As a 16-year-old, Fritz started dating fellow US junior Raquel Pedraza. They married two years ago, becoming the golden couple of American tennis. Now they have a son, Jordan, who is coming up to the 18-month mark and will be attending an overseas tournament for the first time this week. “I think it’s going to be great,” says Fritz, “because I always play my best when my family is with me.”

Do his peers ever remark on the fact that he is a family man already? “I don’t think so. I feel like a lot of the time, they forget.” Perhaps because they are so busy blowing each other up on the Playstation?

To finish, I ask him about Ninja, the esport icon who earns $500,000 per month from Fortnite. “It’s funny,” Fritz replies, “because before I came here, I was just explaining to someone how he is probably one of the most famous people in the world just now. But I’d still rather meet Ronaldo.”

FRANCES TIAFOE ‘I do small talk with Federer. Incredible!’

Frances Tiafoe has one of tennis’s most distinctive voices. It is so low-pitched that it sounds almost subterranean, and he rumbles away in a deep drawl that could come out of a William Faulkner novel. When we meet, he uses that voice to describe his upbringing in the small town of College Park, Maryland.

His father, Constant – who came over from Sierra Leone in 1993 to avoid the civil war – happened to be the head of maintenance at the local tennis centre.

“I felt at home from day one,” says Tiafoe. “Ever since my dad first took me there as a kid, me and my twin brother used to hit balls against the wall. After that, I learned from watching. It was definitely a different experience from most.”

Tiafoe’s game, too, is instantly recognisable. His forehand has a waggly backswing that makes it look as though he is about to swat a fly. But his soft, creative hands make him a hard opponent to read.

While Tiafoe won his maiden ATP title at Delray Beach in February, he cites last year’s Laver Cup – where he was the chief instigator of the Rest of the World’s joyful cheerleading routines – as his favourite event to date.

“I have known [Alexander] Zverev since we were 10,” says Tiafoe, “so when we were celebrating he was looking over and we were like, ‘You’re European, you can’t be over here, bro.’”

And what about the biggest European stars?

“Rafa [Nadal] kind of intimidates me. He seems very serious all the time, so I let him do his own thing. Roger [Federer] is pretty easy going. He was asking what we were doing for the rest of the year and just having a bunch of small talk. It was unbelievable.”

BORNA CORIC ‘Britain? No, I was always Croatia’

Can British tennis claim a slice of the credit for Borna Coric, the muscular Croatian who recently broke Roger Federer’s 20-match winning streak on grass? We can certainly try, since Coric spent two teenage years training at the David Lloyd Club in Northwood, north London.

Still only 21, Coric has already packed more into his short career than many achieve in a lifetime. His upward trajectory stalled last year, as he clocked up 15 firstround losses, but a new coaching deal with the respected Riccardo Piatti has put him back on track

Coric says that his resilience and work ethic were built during his time at JTC, the London academy run by Tim Henman’s former coach, David Felgate. He arrived, unaccompanied, aged 15.

“I learned a lot about myself,” Coric says. “I needed to start to cook for myself and pay for the food, which I never did before. My dad was coming sometimes, but mostly I was alone.”

The Lawn Tennis Association, in a repeat of its flirtation with the young Novak Djokovic a decade earlier, put out feelers to see if Coric might be interested in switching nationality. But like most Balkans he is fiercely proud of his homeland. “I was always going to play for Croatia,” he says.

Even so, he still keeps in touch with some of his British friends from that period. “Josh Page was with me. He was in the top five British juniors. We were chatting just the other day, because we are going to go together for a vacation.”

KAREN KHACHANOV ‘Our Russian group is very close’

If last year’s ATP Nextgen Finals in Milan are to be seen as a guide, tennis fans should be looking out for a Russian resurgence – or should that be revolution? – in the coming months.

Three of the eight men in Milan played under the Russian flag – and they were a close-knit group. “With Andrey Rublev, with Daniil Medvedev, we are really close friends,” said Karen Khachanov, who comes into Wimbledon as the highest-ranked Russian because of Rublev’s back injury. “Andrey and Daniil were at my wedding. If we play against each other, of course we are not going to go for a dinner, but outside of the court, and especially during the training weeks, we spend some time together. We were always playing together, Under-12s, Under-16s and now the ATP. Especially with Andrey, we were practising at the same club from 12 years old when I was in Moscow.”

Standing 6ft 6in and serving at upwards of 130mph, Khachanov plays first-strike tennis in the manner of his idol, Marat Safin.

Last year was his first appearance in the Wimbledon main draw, and he came through two lengthy matches before falling to Rafael Nadal in the third round.

With his huge shoulders, Khachanov looks like he could be packing down in the middle of a rugby scrum or barring the way into a high-end nightclub. But he has a sharp mind too. The son of a businessman and a neurologist, he can often be found playing chess with Rublev in the players’ lounge.