Yahoo Sports Jack Draper’s plan to win over Australian fans? Get a ‘local’ haircut
Great Britain’s feisty young prospect Jack Draper is going into the Australian Open with an equally spiky haircut – the mullet/Mohican crossover beloved of Australian rugby players – which he hopes will garner extra support from the locals.
Draper – who will play the USA’s Marcos Giron on Tuesday – has little prospect of appearing on any Wimbledon promotional material until the sides of his head grow back. On the upside, though, his shorn temples should cool him down in Melbourne’s steamy temperatures.
“I went to Adelaide with it,” said Draper, who lost in the final of that 250-point warm-up event. “I was saying to Trots [his coach James Trotman], ‘Everyone’s going to be looking at me.’ And then it turns out everyone in the city had the same haircut.
“I might get a few more fans here because of it. I like to be different and express myself. I think that’s part of tennis, right? Expressing your game on the court. And I think I’m a bit different in that aspect. Some people might say it’s atrocious. But I’d say it’s bold, isn’t it?”
At 22, Draper can afford to mess around with his image, because most floating sports fans wouldn’t recognise him anyway. He has been competing at a high level now for a couple of years, with an impressive 40 per cent winning ratio against top-20 opponents. And yet, despite taking a set off Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2021, he is still looking for that one big moment of connection with the British public.
After a strong finish to 2022, Draper’s progress was interrupted when he missed the entirety of last summer’s grass-court season with a torn shoulder tendon. That is him in a nutshell: a compelling talent, hindered by setbacks at all the wrong moments. It is as if his career had an in-built limiting device, like the ones sometimes installed in super-fast cars.
But there are many insiders – including the Russian star Andrey Rublev – who think Draper is on the verge of something big. The physical side finally seems to be coming together, for one thing. An off-season of hard graft with Steve “Speedo” Kotze – an experienced fitness trainer who previously worked with Andy Murray among others – has trimmed three kilos off his imposing 6ft 4in frame. In Adelaide, he scored the longest win of his career – a 3hr 39min struggle with Miomir Kecmanovic – and then roared back the following day to beat top seed Tommy Paul.
“We [Draper and Kotze] have been doing a lot of on-court conditioning, a lot of stuff on the bike, just stuff that’s maximal,” said Draper, whose ranking of No 55 clearly undervalues him. “I’m really pushing my boundaries. Maybe in years past I was a bit softer, maybe, and I didn’t want to fully do the work. Whereas I’ve had enough experiences where there’s no hiding from it and I’ve really embraced what I’m trying to do. That kind of determination and real effort is going a long way for me right now.”
Draper has now reached the final of his two most recent ATP tournaments – Sofia in November and Adelaide last week – while he also overcame the likes of Casper Ruud and Holger Rune to win the UTS Finals off-season exhibition event. With luck, Draper will soon be chopping chunks off his ranking in the same way that the Turkish barbers savaged his hair.
