Success brings scrutiny of political views
MELBOURNE, Australia — Thirteen times Tennys Sandgren tried to qualify for a Grand Slam tournament. Thirteen times he failed.
“Losing in qualies is awful,” said Sandgren, 26, who played in last year’s French Open and U.S. Open as a wild card. “It’s one of the worst experiences I’ve had professionally, and I’ve had it a lot of times.”
He had his best experience professionally this week, reaching the Australian Open quarterfinals with a five-set victory over fifth-seeded Dominic Thiem on Monday.
His run ended Wednesday with a 6-4, 7-6 (5), 6-3 loss to Hyeon Chung, an unseeded 21-year-old from South Korea, who reached the semifinals of a major tournament for the first time.
But Sandgren’s unexpected performance has had some unwanted repercussions. His social media activity has come under scrutiny here as his profile has risen.
On Monday night, after his victory over Thiem, Sandgren was asked about online exchanges he has had with right-wing activists.
“Who you follow on Twitter, I feel, doesn’t matter even a little bit,” Sandgren said Monday. “What information you see doesn’t dictate what you think or believe. I think it’s crazy to think that. I think it’s crazy to assume that.”
Yet by Tuesday morning, all of Sandgren’s tweets since June 2016 had been deleted. Several hours later, only a single retweet was left on his feed — a long tennis article from 2013 that features him prominently.
In a television interview with ESPN on Tuesday, Sandgren said he deleted his tweets not because it’s “something that I’m really necessarily embarrassed about,” but because he thought that “creating a version of a cleaner start is not a bad call.”
He added: “People can screenshot, save and distribute everything they would like to. I know that, and that’s fine. It is what it is. It’s just something that I thought wouldn’t be a bad way to kind of move forward.”
Before his social media posts disappeared, dozens of other Twitter users and publications had preserved them.
On Jan. 14, Sandgren retweeted a video on Twitter posted by Nicholas Fuentes, a young alt-right commentator and a former host of a podcast called “America First.” (Fuentes retweeted support for Sandgren on Monday.) And in November 2016, shortly after the presidential election, Sandgren seemed to support debunked online reports of children being kidnapped, molested and trafficked in a Washington pizzeria as part of a sex-abuse ring connected to Hillary Clinton.
“It’s sickening and the collective evidence is too much to ignore,” Sandgren posted in a Twitter conversation on the topic that was labeled Pizzagate by proponents and critics alike.
At Monday night’s post-match news conference, Sandgren’s coach, Jim Madrigal, tried to shut down the inquiry about Sandgren’s political views by saying, “This is the Australian Open.” But Sandgren chose to answer and said he did not support the socalled alt-right movement.
“I don’t,” he said. “I find some of the content interesting.”
At the time, he did not elaborate on what he found interesting. In his ESPN interview Tuesday, he clarified that he did not think alt-right content was interesting, “just some individuals’ specific content.”
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday night, Sandgren shook his head when asked if he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy.
Sandgren has described himself as politically conservative, and the people he follows on Twitter include some notable politicians and pundits of the far right, including Sebastian Gorka, Ann Coulter, Mike Cernovich, Tomi Lahren and Alex Jones. (He also follows many of his fellow players, actors such as Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, his favorite band Metallica, and a variety of news organizations.) Sandgren said that following accounts or linking to information on Twitter did not indicate his approval.
In his interview with The Times, Sandgren said he believed it was important in the current polarized political landscape of the United States to be open to hearing differing viewpoints.
Asked if he was concerned that he might be associated with alt-right views, Sandgren said: “Honestly, it does concern me a little bit. Because it doesn’t represent my viewpoints.”
He also recognized that his sudden tennis success would put him under greater public scrutiny.
“I’ve been in obscurity and I get to do my own thing, which is cool, without really any kind of microscope, and it’s something I think about as far as how would I be viewed,” Sandgren said Monday night, hours before messages began disappearing from his Twitter feed. “But I don’t think that should censor me to the point where I would censor myself from all things just to be a white rice of a personality so that everybody thinks I’m amazing. If everybody thinks you’re amazing, you probably are doing something wrong.”