COURTING GREATNESS
Ottawa tennis star will have spotlight at French Open
Only four Canadians have reached the pinnacle of tennis in the modern era.
They have achieved success at the highest level, winning one or more of the sport’s four “Grand Slam” tournaments: Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the French Open or the Australian Open.
The first was Montreal’s Sébastien Lareau, a U.S. Open men’s doubles winner with American Alex O’Brien in 1999. Toronto’s Daniel Nestor became a national hero with a dozen titles between 2002 and 2014: eight in men’s doubles, four in mixed. Vancouver’s Vasek Pospisil joined the elite group in the summer of 2014, when he and Jack Sock of the U.S. took Wimbledon men’s doubles.
Today, the spotlight belongs to Ottawa’s Gabriela Dabrowski.
She won the mixed doubles title at the French Open last year and then again at the Australian Open in January. In doing so, she has become Canada’s only female Grand Slam winner.
While it might seem as though Dabrowski has burst into stardom overnight, in truth, that burst took nearly two decades. Now 26, Dabrowski has been a tour pro since 2011 and has been working to perfect her craft since well before that. It has been a largely solitary journey from outdoor tennis surfaces at Gloucester’s Russell Boyd Park to stadium courts at Melbourne Park, Stade Roland Garros, Wimbledon and Flushing Meadows. Dabrowski has taken her own, unique path.
“I feel like it has been a long time just because I’ve been playing since I was seven, so it almost feels kind of like I’ve been working since I was seven, but the years, I find, are going by really quickly,” says Dabrowski, who will partner with Croatia’s Mate Pavic, with whom she won the Australian titles, at the French Open, which begins anew this weekend.
“It probably would have been nice to have broken through in doubles a couple of years ago, but you don’t know these things, right? You don’t know when you are going to reach some goals that you wanted to reach. You don’t know exactly when they’re going to happen. There are things that happen along the way that might slow you down, whether they be something in your personal life, anything that’s going on physically. Sometimes you can have success really early on and not be able to repeat that again for a few years even.”
Dabrowski enjoyed some early success in singles. She won the prestigious Les Petits As junior event in France in 2006, then three years later captured an Orange Bowl title in Florida. As a pro, she earned titles on lower International Tennis Federation circuits at Nashville in 2014 and Toronto in 2016.
However, her singles ranking at the highest level — the Women’s Tennis Association Tour — has never been better than 164 in late 2014. As of this past week, it was 526.
In contrast, her doubles ranking has been on an almost unbroken rise since 2007, when, still a junior, she was No. 572. She reached No. 7 in late March, although she has since dipped back to No. 11.
Singles play, Dabrowski says, is “not something that I’m really focusing on right now, and it’s so hard to manage to play both singles and doubles where my rankings are at.
In fact, her doubles success puts her in a unique position.
“With my doubles ranking, I can play all of the Grand Slams, all of the premier mandatory events, all the nice, big tournaments where you are rewarded with the way that you’re treated and financially, if you do well, as well. For the singles, it’s hard for me to get into those tournaments unless I get in last minute, kind of by accident. I’m not technically supposed to be getting into those. Generally the cut is around 100 or 120 or 150.
“It would be extremely challenging to try to balance playing the ITF circuit to build up my singles ranking and also focus on performing well and trying to go deep into tournaments in doubles. It’s almost an impossible task.
“If you’re playing the same tournaments in singles and doubles, you can do it, you can manage because you’re in the same event in one week. You don’t need to play extra tournaments in a year to try to bump up your singles ranking. You can manage the length of your season.”
The last time Dabrowski tried something extra to burnish her singles ranking, in 2016, she played some ITF tournaments between the conclusion of the WTA doubles season in October and the end of November, but that meant she had only a one-week break before starting preparations for the 2017 season.
“And that’s kind of psychotic. Tennis, it’s great that you can play tournaments all year round, but it’s also very difficult when you don’t have a proper off-season and amount of time for preseason, to get the amount of rest that you need and the recovery that you need mentally and physically to be able to then start the next year fresh,” she says.
“But I haven’t given up on singles. It’s just really hard to fit it into my schedule right now.”
Another, longer-term goal is to qualify for a second Olympic Games. The direct route to Tokyo would come from a Top 10 doubles ranking as of June 8, 2020, meaning not just an automatic Olympic berth, but also the right to select any other Canadian inside the top 300 as partner. Another 22 duos would qualify based on the two players’ combined rankings.
That was how Dabrowski and Montreal’s Eugenie Bouchard earned entry into the 2016 Rio Games, where they lost to a Czech duo in the second round, and it will also be how the 16 mixed doubles teams are selected for 2020.
The only Canadian woman with a better doubles ranking ever was Jill Hetherington, No. 6 in early 1989. Now Jill Hultquist and living in Seattle, she follows Dabrowski’s progress via online videos and Tennis Canada’s Facebook news feed.
It has always been hard for a Canadian to reach the top of the tennis world, she says. Plus, playing doubles isn’t what it used to be.
“When I played,” Hultquist says, “I was a great serve-and-volleyer and just needed to be really proficient around the net, which I think I was, and I had really good reflexes.
“Nowadays, Gabriela has to be playing from the baseline and she has to have really good hands at net. My groundstrokes were pretty good, but not great, and Gabriela has to have oomph, so I think it’s more difficult.”
Tony Milo, an Ottawa tennis coach who worked with a young Dabrowski, says his former student is also quite capable of handling the pace that comes with mixed doubles, including returning serve from both women and men.
Milo was the one who convinced parents Yurek and Wanda Dabrowski their little girl needed to train in Florida.
One reason was so Dabrowski could train outdoors year-round. Another was that, according to Milo, the level of competition was “as high as it gets. It’s equivalent to guys coming here to play hockey.
“At a certain point, it was hard to find (local) players for her to compete against and to train with.”
Dabrowski’s southern tennis experience progressed from a month or so at ages 12 and 13 to roughly two months at 14 and five months at 15-16. After checking out other facilities, she settled in at Saddlebrook in Tampa.
There, she saw a parade of tour pros in training, including Justine Henin, Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, Ekaterina Makarova, Victoria Azarenka and Dominika Cibulkova early in their respective careers.
She not only occasionally hit balls with some of them, but also watched them train, heard what coaches told them and was inspired.
Funds eventually got tight, so, in late 2009, Dabrowski accepted an offer to train at Tennis Canada’s Montreal facility. Success ensued, including the Orange Bowl championship, and she was ranked fifth in the world as a junior, but an injury led to a forced break in early 2010.
She returned that summer and resumed working with a German coach she shared with another
player, but things kind of fell apart. Dabrowski came to dislike the coach’s energy, vibe and on-court advice. According to her, a request to Tennis Canada for another option was denied.
So, when she turned pro in 2011, Team Dabrowski comprised only Gabriela and her father, Yurek, with some additional assistance from longtime doubles specialist Rennae Stubbs and others at Saddlebrook, where she has continued to train.
It hasn’t always been easy to be part of the Tennis Canada team, but the passage of time has been accompanied by what she describes as an enhanced ability to see things with clarity, less clouded by emotion.
“They said no to anything I asked for. I asked for preferably a female coach with a lot of international experience, or a former player. They said no. Then I saw other girls getting that a year or two, three years later,” Dabrowski says. “I wish I had had more support and you never know what would have happened. Would I have done better in singles? I don’t know. Would I be playing singles and doubles right now? There’s no way to know. All I know is I kind of had to go my own way and try to survive, basically.
“I love representing Canada. That’s all that matters at the end of the day.”
Tennis Canada seems happy to have Dabrowski on side, too.
Fed Cup team coach Sylvain Bruneau says she’s skilled enough to hold her own in singles, but doubles is where she’s most valuable. That was evident in a World Group II “tie” against Ukraine at Montreal in April.
Injuries to others forced Bruneau to sub Dabrowski in for the fourth and final singles “rubber” or match against Kateryna Bondarenko. Dabrowski stunned the 78th ranked Ukrainian 6-3 in the opening set before losing the final two sets 6-2 and 6-1. That evened the tie at two points for each country, leaving the overall result and a continued berth in World Group II in 2019 resting on the closing doubles.
Following a short break, Dabrowski and Bondarenko returned the hard court with 17-year-old Bianca Andreescu of Niagara Falls and Olga Savchuk as their respective partners. The Canadians prevailed 6-3, 4-6, 6-3.
By the time that match ended, Dabrowski and Bondarenko had been on court for six sets over approximately 4 1/2 hours.
“It’s all or nothing. Obviously it’s a huge pressure match,” Bruneau says. “But Gabriela has played a lot of finals to Grand Slams and other (tournament) matches. I feel, over the last year or two years, she has grown a lot and she handles those situations. When there’s a lot at stake, she handles them very well.
“If it comes to two-all, I’m really happy to have her on the court for us and very confident in her abilities.”
Something that has changed little is Dabrowski’s standard of living. Her WTA Tour career earnings are nearly $1.5 million U.S., but that’s over more than seven years. While an equal share of top prize for mixed doubles in Melbourne was $87,500 Aus., that was just one-quarter of the compensation for each winner in women’s and men’s doubles and slightly more than two per cent of take-home pay for singles champs Roger Federer and Caroline Wozniacki. Last year’s French Open title netted Dabrowski about $80,000 US, compared to about $303,000 for men’s and women’s doubles winners and $2.36 million for singles champs Rafael Nadal and Jelena Ostapenko.
On the upside, it still beats pounding away on the lower levels of pro tennis, where ranking points outrank currency.
“It’s not like I’m all of a sudden a millionaire or anything. It hasn’t changed my life in that aspect,” Dabrowski says.
“People might recognize my name more, my face a little bit more, but, again, doubles kind of flies under the radar. On tour, we already know each other because we see each other every week. So, from a player perspective, I don’t think anything has changed. From a media standpoint, I maybe just get more messages of, like, ‘Congratulations,’ but nothing else has changed, I’d say. I’m entering the same tournaments, I’m training the same.”
Soon, though, her hometown will take a big step toward recognizing its very first Grand Slam tennis champion by naming after Dabrowski the Russell Boyd Park outdoor courts where she first played and learned to love the game.
The tribute was initially suggested after Dabrowski and Bopanna won the French Open. However, while acknowledging the offer, Dabrowski also requested that the city first give the cracked court surfaces some TLC. Then she boosted her argument by winning Australian Open mixed doubles with Pavic in January.
The normal public-consultation process for naming civic assets ensued. The City of Ottawa Community and Protective Services committee accepted a report recommending it last week, and city councillors gave it their stamp of approval on Wednesday.
Coun. Diane Deans, who represents the Gloucester-Southgate ward in which the Dabrowskis reside and also chairs the community and protective services committee, was the one who proposed honouring her.
“There’s an imbalance on how many civic assets that bear names of women that have made outstanding accomplishments,” Deans says. “And Gabriela has certainly made an outstanding accomplishment.”
Deans has been working on finalizing details for funding to resurface the courts and anticipates the project will be completed by August, around the time Dabrowski will next be available to attend an official ceremony.