Expectations and pressures can derail a player’s career. If he is also one of the most successful juniors in recent decades, originally from one of the countries with the greatest tennis tradition in the world… it may be too heavy a burden. But it’s never too late to redirect your career: tell Liam Broady.
Liam Broady He is living the best moment of his sporting career. It takes place at 29 years, an age at which a decade ago many would have placed him with an important list of titles. The Briton’s career has not been the most conventional, and the ceiling that was assumed for him after a career as a sparkling junior (Wimbledon finalist and former world number two) began to adjust to a complicated reality. Common name in the concrete jungle that is the circuit ATPthe reflections that Broady makes in conversation with ATP bring us closer to a story with many edges, many interior reflections and that elevate a player with a very well put together head.
2023 is the best year of his sporting career, the season in which he has finally achieved the long-awaited top-100. The reason his peak has come now, closer to what should be the twilight of his career? No one better than him to explain it. “The change comes from the feeling that I was a bit of a disappointment compared to my career as a junior. I felt like I was throwing away my talent.. I didn’t want to continue living with the feeling that I’m rubbish at tennis, knowing that I can do something to change it. Now I go to bed every day knowing that I am giving my best to this sport. I’m doing everything I can to meet my goals: if I don’t reach them, at least I can say that. I am a great believer in karma“I believe that if you do the right things, good things will happen to you, whether during your career or after it.”
What happens on the track is just an extension of the huge change in attitude and approach that Liam has carried out this season. The Brit admits that his mentality deprived him of great results in the past, and acknowledges that he has found maturity ten years later. But we could point to a key moment in his career, a turning point that takes place in early 2020. Broady loses to Ilya Ivashka in the first round of qualifying. Open the Australia…and just win three games after a performance that left him in shock. That’s when a call with his coach became the seed of a total transformation on a mental level.
“My first reaction to that game was go get drunk already having a good time in Melbourne, but I thought that’s what I’d been doing for three or four years, that it wasn’t going to make things better, it would make them worse. I had a call with my coach and I told him immediately: ‘I don’t want to talk about the game, I don’t want to talk about how I played. I just want to tell you that let’s make a promise: I’m going to commit 100% to tennis for the next twelve months and see how it goes. If things don’t go well, maybe I’ll leave him, but if things go well, we’ll talk again.’ I thought it was my job, that you only have one career, and from there everything has grown. I wish I could have made that change when I was 18, I would have had seven or eight years ahead of me to learn what I have learned in three or four, but sometimes things don’t work out that way. “I am very proud of what I have achieved.”
WIMBLEDON, THE PLACE TO CREATE MAGIC MOMENTS
The All England Tennis Club has always been the scene of the best moments of Broady’s career, a kind of reward for doing things well: last year he reached the third round after beating Diego Schwartzmanand this season he signed one of the great surprises of the tournament and celebrated a victory against all a top-5 like Casper Ruud. “Those games are magical moments: at the end of the day, you never know if you will have a chance to play them again. It is one of my great motivations, to have more and more moments like those, because the players who are top-50 or top- 20 play them constantly. That’s where I want to be.”
2023-09-27 18:32:38
#story #Liam #Broady #gem #maturity
