Sandgren blasts media on way out for ‘sensationalist coverage’
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA » After losing in the Australian Open quarterfinals on Wednesday, Tennys Sandgren saved his final shot of the tournament for the media.
Sandgren opened his news conference following a 6-4, 7-6 (5), 6-3 loss to Hyeon Chung by reading a prepared statement directed at the media that has scrutinized his Twitter feed during his unexpected run at Melbourne Park.
“With a handful of follows and some likes on Twitter, my fate has been sealed in your minds,” Sandgren said, reading from his mobile phone. “To write an edgy story, to create sensationalist coverage, there are a few lengths you wouldn’t go to to mark me as the man you desperately want me to be.”
Sandgren refused to answer questions about his statement, saying that the focus around him “has gone very far away from the tennis.”
If one thing is clear after the past few days, it certainly has.
Given what he’s accomplished on the courts at Melbourne Park, Sandgren’s story was initially focused on his tennis. The 26-year-old Tennessee native has never come close to experiencing this type of success before. Prior to coming to Melbourne, Sandgren was a mainstay on the second-tier Challenger Tour — the minor leagues of tennis. He had only won two matches at the ATP Tour level — and never played in a Grand Slam.
But in Melbourne, Sandgren came out of nowhere to stun two top-10 players — Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem — en route to being just the second man in the last 20 years to reach the quarterfinals on his Australian Open debut.
What started off as a fairy tale story, though, began to change tenor when Sandgren’s social media activity came to light.
Before he scrubbed his Twitter history on Tuesday, Sandgren’s tweets had included one saying the unfounded “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory linking Democrats to a child-sex ring at a Washington pizzeria was “sickening and the collective evidence is too much to ignore.”
Among his recent retweets was a video by Nicholas Fuentes, former host of a podcast called “America First” who attended last year’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.