British tennis welcomed a new superstar in 2024: an exciting left-hander who reached the semi-finals of the US Open, collected more than £2 million in prize money, and ejected reigning Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz from Queen’s.
Not that you would know it from chatting with him. “I still drive a second-hand Polo,” says Jack Draper. “I’m not materialistic. I don’t find who I am or what I do very impressive.”
Having first interviewed Draper in the summer of 2020 – when he was still a likeable 18-year-old bumping around third-tier Futures events – I can confirm that his ego remains unaffected by a surge up the rankings. He continues to display humility, which many of his peers can learn from.
Other things certainly have changed, however, and mostly for the better. As a player and as a man, Draper has matured enormously since he won his first Tour-level match (against current world No 1 Jannik Sinner, as it happens) on those same lush lawns of Queen’s Club.
Some of this stems from the “good values” – in Draper’s words – that were instilled by his tennis-loving family, especially mother Nicky. But there have also been some harsh lessons along the way.
Professionally, his rise has been regularly undercut by a series of significant injuries, affecting a variety of body parts including his hip, shoulder and stomach. Personally – and more harrowingly – he has had to cope with the incremental loss of Brenda, his beloved grandmother and first tennis coach, to the subtle thief that is Alzheimer’s disease.
“You watch that person you love not know who you are and not know what’s going on,” Draper explained, during an end-of-year briefing in a pub near Hammersmith Bridge that he held earlier this month.
“There’s many stages to Alzheimer’s. At first, you’re not thinking properly, and you lose your memory. Then the worst stage is when you’re physically capable, but you’re angry. There’s many different stages that I’ve watched her go through, like not wanting to get in the shower. And then it’s like, ‘How do you get this strong woman into the shower every day?’ It’s impossible. And so carers like my grandad, he’s an absolute hero to keep on doing what he’s doing, just putting one foot in front of the other.”
Shortly after our conversation, Draper led a ‘Memory Walk’ along the Thames in aid of the Alzheimer’s Society, which was attended by LTA chief executive Scott Lloyd and a wide array of coaches, reporters and family members.
On reaching the conclusion of the walk – another pub, this time near the start of the Boat Race course on the south side of Putney Bridge – Draper gave a deeply impassioned speech about his grandparents, and especially his grandfather Chris’s work as a carer, that brought many people in the room to tears.
‘I don’t think of what I do as exceptional’
Here is a man whose perspective extends beyond the tennis court – another rarity on the professional tour. “If I go out or if I meet other people, I’m never talking about my tennis,” Draper explained afterwards. “I don’t think of what I do as exceptional because I’m around it the whole time.”
In fact, he has been “around” the game – as he puts it – since birth. Father Roger was the chief executive of the Lawn Tennis Association, while Nicky was Great Britain’s leading junior in her day. Uncle Jon Entract and brother Ben also played at a high level.
So what marked Jack out from his relatives, as the one family member who made it to the tour? Being 6ft 4in tall and left-handed – like 2001 Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic – was a good start. And then there was the extra dose of mongrel that came from being the younger brother in an ultra-competitive family: the same formula that worked for his role model Andy Murray.
Admittedly, it took a while for Draper to come to terms with the lonely life of a tennis pro. In my first interview with him – which we did over Zoom in the early days of the pandemic – he complained about “travelling to not so many nice places” and wondered aloud whether he had made the right choice There had also been a footballing opportunity, during the 18 months he spent as a member of the Chelsea youth squad as an 11- and 12-year-old.
It was only as Draper began to gain momentum, and the remote backwaters transformed themselves into major international destinations, that he warmed to the idea of hitting fuzzy yellow balls for a living. As he matured, he also realised that playing for his own self-aggrandisement was not going to supply sufficient motivation. The discovery of a wider cause – he is now an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society, a role that he describes as “incredibly important to me” – helped him focus more intently.
“When I was a bit younger, I used to love just [doing] a bit of training, and then come back and eat crisps all day and watch TV,” said Draper, during that briefing by the foot of Hammersmith Bridge. “But now that I feel like I’ve got a goal and a purpose bigger than myself, I want to be busy the whole time. I want to be progressing. That’s all I think about really. So when I have days off, when I have times where I’m injured or I can’t play, or I can’t get in the gym, I do find it incredibly difficult.
“I’ve started to understand now why Andy [Murray] struggled to leave the sport. [As tennis players] we’re chasing something the whole time, we’re busy with that dopamine hit of winning and playing and travelling. It’s not real life. So when you go back to not having a lot of stuff on, it’s kind of like, ‘I’ve got another six hours till the end of the day. What am I going to do? Watch some TV?’
“It’s obviously a shock that he [Murray] is going to be with Djokovic [as a coach for at least the start of the new season]. But I can understand that he probably wants that buzz again. I’m definitely wired a little bit that way, as well. I suppose the sport wires you to be that way.”
Frustratingly, Draper is in the middle of one of his fallow periods at the moment. He incurred a new hip issue in training, forcing him to cancel both a training week with Alcaraz in Spain and his planned participation in January’s United Cup. It is only the latest item in a fat medical file. Like his friend and contemporary Emma Raducanu (who nipped across from training in nearby Roehampton to hear his moving speech about his grandparents) Draper is undeniably prone to picking up inconvenient niggles.
Indeed, Draper has now concluded that the gastric issues which saw him throw up repeatedly during his highest-profile match of the year – September’s US Open semi-final against Sinner – were the result of hammering away too hard at the anti-inflammatories. He had been scarfing down the ibuprofen throughout the tournament, on account of an irritating ankle complaint.
At the time, he ascribed his bout of vomiting to emotional tautness, plus the stifling conditions of late-summer New York. But then he had what he calls “a lightbulb moment” when he went straight on to an indoor stadium in Manchester to play in the Davis Cup. After he experienced a similar bout of nausea – despite the absence of heat, humidity or any comparably urgent stakes – “I thought, ‘Could this be something that’s messing up my stomach?’”
In light of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s status as the biggest venue in the sport, one might have expected Draper’s deep run in New York to be his favourite memory of the season, even though he also collected his first ATP title (in Stuttgart in June) as well as a second in Vienna in October. But when asked to pick, he went for something less obvious: the technical and emotional rebuild that followed his disastrous loss to world No 176 Jesper de Jong at May’s French Open.
A little context might be helpful here. Draper superfans will remember that he entered the clay-court season with a so-called “supercoach” at his side: former world No6 Wayne Ferreira, who wanted him to beef up his attacking game and introduce elements of Ivanisevic’s cobra-strike serve.
But it’s never easy to change your game during the season. All the tweaking left Draper looking so confused during the De Jong defeat that you wanted to hang a “Warning: coaches at work” sign around his neck. He left Paris in low spirits – which is when the reassuring presence of his regular mentor James Trotman came to the fore.
“I was all over the place,” Draper recalled. “I was thinking, like, ‘I need to get my s— together. What am I doing? I’m not fulfilling my potential. I’m not the player I want to be.’ So when I look back over this year, that’s something that actually brings me the most satisfaction, the most joy: working out certain situations and then turning into a different player because of the shift in mindset. During those two weeks, [which began with training on the grass of Wimbledon and progressed into the triumph in Stuttgart] I really changed.”
Did the Ivanisevic comparison prove unhelpful? “Yeah, it didn’t work for me. I think a lot of coaches – I’m not saying Wayne, but a lot of people – they see players, and they think, ‘Oh, that technique’s wrong.’ Then you look on the TV and you’ve got players like [Daniil] Medvedev, and you’ve got my forehand, or you’ve got all these funky techniques, but that’s them, that’s the way they play, that’s their style. So I think, yeah, good lesson for me that I just stick with my own style and my own technique and just learn to be more consistent and make it better.”
While Draper ceased collaborating with Ferreira after the grass-court season, the very process of investigating his own game – and dialling up the aggression a notch – still proved beneficial in the long run. A sharp self-analyst, he was able to apply the best elements of the collaboration without getting lost in the details.
“Wayne wanted me to try and be braver, play first-strike tennis sort of thing. And I suppose I needed that, but at the same time, I needed to understand that that’s not the player I am as well. I’m not a John Isner [the 6ft 10in American who probably had the best serve in tennis history]. One of my main attributes as a player is my ability to move well for my size, to get that one more ball back on court, because that’s how I won matches when I was younger, when I was small.
“I had to see for myself that it wasn’t going to be something that was radical and a big change. It was just maybe five or 10 per cent, coming up the court a bit more, or stepping in on a few more returns, or serve-and-volleying a few more times, and just trying to create more of a presence around my game and not be so one-paced. I had to change, but I didn’t have to change a massive amount. I just had to sort of understand when to push and when not.”
The fact that Draper’s stellar 2024 coincided with Andy Murray’s final season has led to plenty of “baton-passing” comments, not least in this newspaper, since Murray stepped down in June. British tennis is certainly fortunate to have an heir apparent on hand, just as it was when Murray started flirting with the world’s top ten a matter of months before Tim Henman’s retirement. When you consider the relative slightness of this country’s tennis culture – at least when compared with giants like Spain, Italy or the USA – we should be grateful to have had at least one man (and it is usually only one) contending for big titles since the mid-1990s.
When asked about the inevitable comparisons with Murray, Draper sounded flattered, but said he tries not to think about it. In general, he is keen to stay in his own lane, despite taking inspiration from his idol’s extraordinary work ethic.
“I think what works for me is to come in every day and try and understand what I need to do better in order to hopefully compete at the biggest tournaments, in the later rounds, and with these top players – mentally, emotionally, physically, everything.
“I’m a big character. I think my personality is ready to do that. I’m not going to go into my shell. But I’m not sitting every day in my living room thinking ‘I’m going to be the No1 Brit, what’s that going to mean?’
“I’m focused on how I’m going to be better. And if that’s in Australia, if that’s midway through the year, if that’s at Wimbledon, then whatever. But the main thing is I’m improving all the time. And, yeah, I hope that I can be one of the top players in the world.”
For more information on the Alzheimer’s Society, visit www.alzheimers.org.uk
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