Gabriela Sabatini was the protagonist of a new interview Augustine Creevy. The former rugby player completely changed his role as an athlete and migrated his knowledge towards journalism.
Knowing the behind-the-scenes of high-performance sports, Creevy investigated, in depth, the life and work of Sabatini, who stood out from a very young age in tennis and He retired at 26an age where, in general, athletes begin to find maturity to endure in the environments where they develop.
In an extensive interview, the winner of 27 titles on the WTA circuit He gave an in-depth review of his first steps in tennis and how he shaped his introverted personality to transcend the sport.
In the introduction of the note, Creevy asked Sabatini about the impact he generated throughout his career on fans, who have a positive image of him.
“It is a process, one will go through many stages. When you are competing you get like in a bubble and you don’t realize what you cause. Once I stopped playing I realized everything it had meant,” she highlighted, with the simplicity that characterizes her.
In turn, He stated that he was “excited” when some people remind him that they stayed late or gathered with their family to watch their games.
The former tennis player’s shyness was her Achilles heel during her first years of life. Without interacting with his classmates at school, Sabatini faced a transformation to leave this behavior behind, but without losing its essence.
“She was shy and introverted and at school it was very difficult for me to speak, stand up, I didn’t like tension or being the center of attention. In that sense, tennis helped me a lot to be able to express myself and speak more,” he said.
Immediately afterwards, he expressed a particularity about how his way of relating conditioned his progress in tennis: “For example If I played the tournaments I had to speak if I reached the final, then I lost in the semifinals because I didn’t want to face that situation.. “If I won I had to say something and I didn’t want to know anything.”
Faced with this situation, Sabatini turned to professionals who could alleviate this defect that was detrimental to his professional progress: “I worked with sports psychologists who helped me with a lot of things. On the court I was very grumpy, I threw the racket saying bad words. There was something beyond”.
While he resolved his way of acting and relating to his schoolmates, Sabatini rose considerably on the national tennis level. To everyone’s surprise – including the protagonist of this story – the former tennis player It began to appear in the sports newspapers and that consequently led to it being recognized by the entire school environment..
“My mother came to pick me up from school to take me to training or to tournaments. I didn’t say anything that I played tennis, the only ones who knew were the teachers. At one point I started to appear in the newspaper and I didn’t want to know anything about them asking me”, he launched, laughing, under the watchful eye of Creevy who moderated the interview.
Another important moment in his youth was when he returned from Europe after playing in a tournament and his image began to appear regularly in the media, completely changing his life. “When I return to Argentina I see a world of people and when I ask my dad what’s happening he tells me it’s because of me. There were television cameras, my neighbors and friends were there, I wanted to die.”
“I retired because I couldn’t think of it anymore”Sabatini summarized about the end of his career at a young age. “Physically I was in great shape, but I was already processing it,” he argued about a culminating moment in his life, where he left aside the demands of sport.
“The issue of retirement began in 1994 when I began to work with a sports psychologist to see what was happening to me. At one point in my career You get into a rut and say ‘I don’t want to be here.’‘. It happened to me when I was 17, but then I got hooked again. And at 26 the same thing happened to me. That was when I pushed myself to the maximum, but I realized that it was the end“, held.
Like several colleagues who decided to lower the blinds, Sabatini clarified that the harmful environment surrounding tennis led her to abandon the excessive demands of high-performance sport: “It is not the sport itself, but everything around it that leads you to know how to handle fame, contact with the press, the demands, the expectations and you don’t realize it and it starts to burn your head.”.
Some time later, without being in the professional orbit, the athlete reconnected with her origins in an exhibition. “I went back to playing when I grew up and I enjoyed the game again, I was like that girl who played at 13. Then this becomes a job, the pressures and demands appear, you get into it until at one point I couldn’t continue. It got to a point where I hated tennis and I didn’t want that to happen. I respected what I felt“, hill.
