Stefanos Tsitsipas chases tennis’s big three, with Greece (and YouTube) on his side

But when the 2020 ATP Finals get underway Sunday, the O2 will be without fans, as has been the case nearly everywhere since tennis emerged from quarantine in mid-August. And Tsitsipas (pronounced “TSE-tse-pahs”), the defending champion, will still be seeking that second signature title.

The global pandemic has taken a toll on tennis, upending the calendar and exiling paying spectators. It has also tested players’ ability to stay in form and improve without steady competition.

Asked to describe his regimen during the five-month hiatus, Tsitsipas said: “Lots of ice cream. Lots of meditation. And lots of training.”

The result has been mixed: Some highs, a few lows and a stretch in which he felt his game had plateaued. With a 28-12 record (.700) and one tournament title (Marseille) heading into the ATP Finals, which pits the world’s top eight singles players in a round-robin format, Tsitsipas is likely to finish 2020 ranked where he began, No. 6 in the world.

His season’s highlight was reaching his second career Grand Slam semifinal, in October’s French Open, in which he battled back from a two-sets-to-none deficit against world No. 1 Djokovic. But he faded in the fifth set, hampered by a leg injury, while Djokovic, a 17-time Grand Slam champion, elevated his play.

Afterward, Tsitsipas acknowledged the Serbian’s mastery and the gap between them.

“He has reached almost perfection, Novak, in his game style, the way he plays, which is unbelievable to see, honestly,” Tsitsipas said. “That inspires me a lot to go out and work and try to reach that perfectionism, that ability to have everything on the court.”

So far, Tsitsipas’s pursuit of perfection has made compelling entertainment.

At 6-4 and 196 pounds, he is quick and nimble on court, his shoulder-length hair a mop of kinetic energy as he charges the net and races sideline to sideline. He boasts a blistering forehand, an elegant one-handed backhand and an enviable array of shots and tactics. And he competes with a thespian’s repertoire of emotions, at times to his detriment.

Tsitsipas is equally engaging off-court, an avid reader and aspiring filmmaker with a philosophical bent. On Twitter, @Steftsitsi is more apt to quote artists or share personal musings than tennis minutiae.

“The most dangerous job you can have in your 20s is a comfortable one,” he tweeted amid the pro tour’s lull this summer. In September, a few days after squandering six match points in a five-set loss to Borna Coric at the U.S. Open, he tweeted: “The biggest victory will be achieved by someone with the greatest imagination and creativity.”

While vacationing in Athens after his French Open defeat, he sought advice about achievning a championship-caliber mindset and training regimen from Giannis Antetokounmpo, the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, and later tweeted a short video of an exchange between the two Greek sporting stars.

Greece has gone tennis-mad since Tsitsipas broke into the top-20 in 2018, according to journalist Vicky Georgatou, who has covered him since he was a young teen. Parents have enrolled their children in lessons. Greece’s public television station started airing his matches. “Greece [was] all about basketball and football,” Georgatou explained. “[Now] everyone in Greece is learning the game because of him.”

Although he now lives in Monte Carlo and trains in France, Tsitsipas is rarely happier than when strapping on a backpack, grabbing his video-camera and setting out to chronicle all he sees and learns between tournaments. And he’s bringing fans along for the ride, cobbling footage into the 10- to 15-minute posts on his YouTube channel and inviting his 170.000 subscribers to “sail with me on this epic adventure to happiness.”

Installments include a three-day trek to Iceland, where he howled about the frigid air as he swam in an outdoor pool, explored a cave and visited a tomato farm, peppering all he met with questions about Icelandic tradition.

He posted another from travels in Oman. And he waxed philosophical in his dispatch from the Caribbean archipelago of Anegada.

“They say the pages of your passport is the best book,” Tsitsipas said into his camera as goats roamed in the background. “A wish that I have for me is to keep traveling until the last day of my existence. I want to live my life at its fullest.”

Tsitsipas is the proud product of two cultures, reared by a Greek father who’s also a tennis instructor, and a Russian mother who is a former pro player and coach. Together, they taught the eldest son to look beyond the granular details that translate to incremental gains on a tennis court and to take in the world with the widest possible aperture.

This started when, at age 9, he declared that tennis, more than swimming or soccer, was his true passion. His mom, Julia Apostoli Salnikova, became his first coach. As a young athlete in the former Soviet Union, she was denied many fundamental freedoms, she explained in an interview, so she instilled in her children a love of travel, books and new experiences, taking pains to schedule Stefanos’s tournaments in cities with sights they’d enjoy exploring.

“It was very important to me to raise him with a wider knowledge, so he could see different things,” said Apostoli Salnikova, who studied broadcast journalism in Moscow after her pro career. “We didn’t spend time in the tennis clubs; we tried to figure out the food, the culture of each place. And when he was speaking to me in Greek, I was answering only in Russian, which made him learn Russian very well.”

At each step of his progression, explained his father Apostolos Tsitsipas, who is now his son’s coach, he and his wife gauged their son’s happiness, convinced that happiness is the foundation of success.

The result is an elite tennis player with a worldview that’s broader than that of many touring pros, whose orbit typically consists of practice, training, matches, recovery and little else.

Martina Navratilova, who won 18 Grand Slam singles titles (and 41 doubles) over a three-decade pro career, believes that will work to Tsitsipas’s benefit.

“It’s great that he is interested in other things because that allows you to escape the tennis,” Navratilova said in a telephone interview. “You only need to be committed to tennis when you’re on the court or when you’re in the gym or when you’re talking about the match. You need to do other stuff that feeds your soul away from tennis.”

As for Tsitsipas’s game, Navratilova applauds his variety of shots, his slice, the timing of his strokes and his sense for when to move forward. She views the competitive gap between him and the sport’s “Big Three” of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic as “not that big,” but it showed in the French Open semifinal against Djokovic, which she covered as a Tennis Channel analyst.

The essential difference, Navratilova said, is that Tsitsipas misses too often on crucial points — something Djokovic, Nadal and Federer rarely do. But she views this as an understandable, “nice problem,” at least in Tsitsipas’s case, because it’s the result of having so many options at his disposal rather than too few.

“He has got all the shots; it’s a question of figuring out when to use which shot,” Navratilova said. “It takes a while for it to be just really by instinct when you have a great all-around game — especially one that requires touch. It takes a bit longer before it becomes second nature. Those players flourish a little bit later.”

Meantime, in pursuit of perfection, Tsitsipas continues working on his mental game and ways to progress when the results aren’t coming.

“I guess a loss is a very good lesson where life puts a stop at what you’re doing,” he said after his five-sets defeat in the French Open semifinal. “You can reflect on that. You can grow. You can get better. You can take that loss and turn it around, use it as a life lesson to move forward, to become a stronger person.”

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