Masarova ponders if it ever stops raining in Auckland
The 2023 ASB Classic kicked off the best year yet for Spain’s Rebeka Masarova. As she came through qualifying to lose to Coco Gauff in the final last time. Ahead of the 2024 tournament, the 24-year-old spoke about the Auckland weather, her views on the Netflix series Break Point, and revealed she can speak a ridiculous amount of languages.
You had an incredible run at the ASB Classic last time, what is your favourite memory from it?
I have great memories from here. I played my first WTA 250 final here and I came through qualifying. So I’m happy to be back here. I remember every match I played, because every match had its difficulties. In the first round of the main draw, I played against Sloane Stephens. When I saw that draw, I thought “oh no”, because I drew myself, I did the draw with the supervisor. I had practised with her a couple of times before, so it was a good win for me. The next matches were really good as well, I was playing pretty good in every match and in the quarterfinal against Carolina Muchova (now ranked No 8 in the world), it was a really good match and high quality (winning 7-6 7-6).
Given your experience in Auckland with the weather last time and the fact that it’s raining as we’re doing this interview, do you have the opinion that it’s always terrible here?
Yes! For us, it looks like that, but I’m sure it’s not always like this. Somehow it always seems to be like this during this week.
You had a fantastic junior career, winning the French Open and getting to the final of the Australian Open. Why do you think it took until 2023 for you to make your breakthrough on the WTA Tour?
Everyone has their own timing for when they mature, or have things going on in their lives. It doesn’t happen the same for everyone and I think that’s fine. There’s not a specific time when you have to reach a certain level. For me, I had some things happen between my junior career and now, where I wasn’t able to compete as much. Since 2021 I’ve been competing more regularly, which has helped me.
If there was one rule about tennis you could change, what would it be?
I love how the sport is and wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t be as interesting if you changed the scoring or something, it would feel like a different sport.
What’s your least favourite surface to play on?
Clay maybe. I still like it, but I’d probably say clay.
You were born in Switzerland, play for Spain and your dad is Slovakian. How many languages can you speak?
I can speak five or six. I speak Spanish, English, German. I also speak Swiss German which is not an official language. I speak Catalan as well, Slovak and a bit of French. I grew up speaking German, Spanish, Slovak and Swiss German, so I didn’t have to learn those. English I learnt at school, but most of it came from travelling and having friends that speak English. For Catalan, I moved to Spain when I was nine years old and learnt it in school.
Did you watch the Netflix documentary series Break Point and if so, what did you think of it?
I liked it, it was interesting. It only focussed on a couple of players and the very top players. It just showed the later rounds of big events and when people who don’t know anything about tennis watch the show, they probably thought tennis is always like this. But most of tennis isn’t that, it’s early rounds or smaller tournaments. They didn’t show the ITF US$15,000 tournaments you have to play in random places to get to that level. But I guess the focus of the series was something else.