His Own Man

The lights in the theater below Madison Square Garden were turned a cool blue as Serena Williams, Caroline Wozniacki, Gael Monfils and Stan Wawrinka walked out from behind a curtain for a press conference. It was March 8, World Tennis Day, and they were in the Big Apple to hit, giggle and entertain a crowd of 16,000. This being New York City, though, home of the nation’s most ravenous media beast, they had to answer a few questions before they were allowed to play.

Cameras clicked and reporters pressed forward while the emcee recited each player’s credentials. Wozniacki was described as a two-time No. 1. Williams was called the greatest female athlete in history. Monfils, it was agreed, was the most electrifying player in the game. When Wawrinka’s turn came, he was duly credited with his two major titles, but the emcee had to stop and ask what else he had done.

“You won an Olympic gold medal, right?”

Wawrinka smiled wryly and nodded his head. Yes, as a matter of fact, he had.

With introductions out of the way, the questions began. The majority were directed at Williams and Wozniacki, with a stray query or two for a sleepy-looking Monfils. As the minutes ticked by, and no one seemed to notice him, Wawrinka’s smile grew wider and wryer: He had become the invisible Grand Slam champion in the room. Just when it looked as if he might leave without opening his mouth, Wawrinka was asked how it felt to be in the Garden for the first time.

He leaned forward and grinned.

“Finally, a question, thank you so much!”

Wawrinka said these words in jest, rather than resentment. This 31-year-old farmer’s son from Switzerland is used to playing tennis’ odd man out. In many ways, it has defined his career. Being cast in that role is part of what kept him from fulfilling his vast potential during his 20s, and it’s what has driven him, over the last three years, to make good on that same promise. Even now, despite being a virtual lock for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, Wawrinka doesn’t fit easily into the narrative of his time.

When Wawrinka was young, he was the second fiddle of Swiss tennis, a big-time talent overshadowed by the all-time talent of his countryman Roger Federer. Now that Wawrinka has emerged from those shadows, he has gone from second fiddle to fifth wheel. Whatever he accomplishes, this period in men’s tennis will be remembered as the era of the Big Four: Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray. It’s a circle that has been closed for nearly a decade.

Wawrinka, who didn’t reach his career-high ranking of No. 3 until he was 29, came along a little too late to join the in-crowd. Even the nicknames that he has picked up since his rise began—Stan the Man, the Stanimal—are more playful than reverent. Maybe, in a nation as small as Switzerland, there’s room for only one tennis immortal. And maybe that’s why Wawrinka still, after all his success, has trouble seeing himself as a member of the game’s elite. This is, after all, a player who went 3–40 against Djokovic, Federer and Nadal through the 2013 season, and who had difficulty even winning sets against any of them.

“It’s quite strange when I tell myself that I have a gold medal, Davis Cup and I have two Grand Slams,” Wawrinka admitted last year. “Something quite amazing. Never expect to be that far in my career. Never expect to be that strong.

“I’m not as good as they are—I mean the Big Four ... I can beat them in major tournaments, in a semifinal, in a final. But once again, the Big Four will always be the Big Four.”

While Wawrinka marvels at the uncanny consistency of those tennis demi-gods, he knows that, like most humans, he’s still prone to great days and awful ones. There has always been, and probably always will be, a Good Stan and a Bad Stan. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The fact that Wawrinka enshrined this fatalistic phrase of Samuel Beckett’s in a tattoo on his left forearm tells us something about his mind-set: He knows that, for him, failure is the only road to success.

It’s hardly a surprise that, according to Wawrinka, the match that made him believe that he could beat the world’s best wasn’t a victory, but a defeat, to Djokovic in a classic fourth-rounder at the Australian Open in 2013.

“I had the click inside me that said, ‘OK, I might one day beat him in a Grand Slam,’” Wawrinka told The Telegraph.

Yet when Wawrinka did beat Djokovic in a Slam final, last spring in Paris, it still came as a surprise. A dozen years earlier, he had won the boys’ title at the French Open, but that victory hadn’t convinced him that he could repeat the performance as an adult.

“My dream was to play Roland Garros, not to win it, not to reach the finals,” Wawrinka said. “To me, the players that did that were mutants.”

Two days later, in the Roland Garros final, Wawrinka put on the closest thing to a superhuman performance that the sport would see in 2015. He would rifle—actually, the ball sounded like a cannon-shot coming off of his strings—60 winners and hand Djokovic his only loss at a Grand Slam tournament that season. It was one of those matches where Wawrinka, detonating his exquisitely lethal one-handed backhand from all areas of the court, makes the tennis world’s collective jaw drop, and inspires his fellow players to take to Twitter to vent their jealousy.

“Wow, just wow, I wanna play like that!” Serena Williams tweeted during Stan’s barrage.

“Holy Swiss cow!” chimed in Ivan Ljubicic, possessor of a pretty fair one-hander himself.

He went on: “That was something. #bullets”

Rather than react to his earth-shaking win with a newfound sense of entitlement, Wawrinka kept his old self-deprecating sense of humor intact.

During press conferences, stars like Federer and Nadal are careful to wear baseball caps emblazoned with their personal logos. After the French Open final, Wawrinka came up with his own, cheeky take on the branding concept. He brought along the now-legendary, widely derided harlequin-style shorts that he had worn during the tournament and draped them over the dais in front of him. These were the same shorts that the Roland Garros website said looked like “pajamas [he had found] tucked away in his father’s wardrobe.”

“I enjoy it, the shorts,” Wawrinka said with a smile. “Apparently I’m the only one...It’s quite funny that [they] won the French Open.”

At season’s end, Wawrinka would remind Djokovic, a friend and frequent practice partner, of that fact by presenting him with a key chain featuring a tiny version of his most famous fashion statement.

“I see those shorts in my nightmares,” Djokovic said with a laugh this spring.

“There remains something engagingly spontaneous about his recent success,” tennis journalist Simon Briggs wrote last summer of Wawrinka. Wawrinka’s manager, Lawrence Frankopan, calls him “the people’s champion, someone very approachable; people maybe see themselves in him.”

Wawrinka’s down-to-earth personality came naturally; he grew up, with an older brother and two younger sisters, on his parents’ organic farm outside Lausanne. A family friend, Dimitri Zavialoff, discovered Stan’s talent and began coaching him when he was 8. By 15, he had quit school to pursue tennis full time; by 17, in 2002, he had turned pro.

His tour debut was quickly followed by Federer’s ascension to No. 1. Having a countryman in that position was a double-edged sword for Wawrinka. On the one hand, Federer served as an example of what was possible for this shy young man from the sticks of Switzerland, a nation that had never produced a male player remotely close to Federer’s caliber.

“I always worked hard, but the fact that he has been ahead of me during my whole career helped me a lot,” Wawrinka told the sports journal VAVEL in February. “I’m timid and people did not speak too much about my career, because he was ahead. Being behind the back of the best player ever and being his friend makes you learn.”

On the other hand, friends or not, Federer beat Wawrinka in 13 of their first 14 meetings. How could Wawrinka not have an Oedipal complex—or, in this case, a Fedipal complex? How could he take his place on the world stage if he couldn’t command his tiny home country’s attention?

While Wawrinka now sees the upside of being protected by Federer’s fame, he didn’t always appear to relish his supporting role. At many press conferences, he could only shake his head and laugh as he was asked, yet again, to shed some previously unseen light on his illustrious friend’s life. After reaching the French Open final last year, the first thing a reporter said to Wawrinka was, “You have a chance to equalize Roger Federer in the number of Roland Garros titles.”

“Great, for the first question, to put Roger in it,” Wawrinka replied sarcastically.

As Wawrinka’s stature grew, so did the possibility of a first Davis Cup title for Switzerland. Wawrinka was fully committed to the cause, but he came to be exasperated by Federer’s comparatively cavalier attitude toward the team competition. “I really don’t understand him at all,” Wawrinka said, after learning that Federer would skip Switzerland’s first-round tie against the Czech Republic in 2013.

By the weekend’s end, Wawrinka was in tears after playing for 13 hours—including a seven-hour doubles match—only to see his team come up short. The pill was only made more bitter when the Czechs went on to win the Cup.

In the fall of 2014, tensions between Federer and Wawrinka exploded in plain sight, and in the strangest way imaginable, at the ATP World Tour Finals. During their semifinal, Federer’s wife, Mirka, could be heard calling Wawrinka a “crybaby” from the stands. Rattled, Wawrinka would squander four match points and lose. When Federer withdrew from the final the next day, rumors flew about a heated post-match contretemps between the two men in the arena. By the following Sunday, though, all was forgiven and forgotten, as Federer and Wawrinka teamed up to bury the Davis Cup hatchet and beat the French for Switzerland’s first title.

While Wawrinka is hardly the game’s most flamboyant player, drama has had a way of finding him. Two months before his professional life reached a peak in Paris, his personal life had hit a low. Wawrinka announced that he and his wife, Ilham, were separating, and she issued a lacerating statement about him in return. Wawrinka was linked to teenage Croatian pro Donna Vekic, a link that was made very public, in a very ugly way, that August in Montreal.

During their match, Nick Kyrgios coarsely informed Wawrinka that fellow player Thanasi Kokkinakis had slept with Vekic. After retiring with an injury, an angry Wawrinka tweeted, “So disappointing to see a fellow athlete and colleague be so disrespectful in a way I could never even imagine.”

Kyrgios was fined by the ATP and pilloried in the press, while Wawrinka was gratified to see his fellow players rally around him. At year’s end, the two ended up playing on the same team in the IPTL exhibition league in Asia. While they never had a clear-the-air conversation, the experience was, according to Wawrinka, a lesson in pragmatic coexistence.

“You’re doing your job and that’s it,” Wawrinka told Sport 360. “Nick is a tennis player, I’m a tennis player, we’re going to be around for a while, every tournament or whatever...The thing is, I don’t forget [what he did] for sure.”

“He’s a very interesting player to watch, because you never know what to expect. This week we saw the greatness of Stan, but next week it could be something else.”

This was how Wawrinka’s coach, Magnus Norman, described him after his win over Djokovic. If that seems honest to a fault, it’s hard to blame Norman. He also knows what Stan was like when they started working together in 2013.

Norman deservedly receives a major share of the credit for Wawrinka’s late-career surge. Before their union, Wawrinka had played in 36 majors and failed to reach one semifinal. Since then, he has won two, become a consistent contender at every event and cracked the Top 5 for the first time.

“Everybody told me when I started working with Stan that he was a little bit soft,” Norman said at Roland Garros. “In the two years that we have been together, he has been rock solid in all the big matches.”

The self-effacing Norman, who also turned Robin Soderling’s career around, is called “the tennis whisperer” by colleagues. He has helped Wawrinka rein in his powerful but unruly game by using more spin, aiming farther inside the lines and, when the match is tight, waiting to pull the trigger. According to Wawrinka, a pep talk from Norman helped ease his nerves before the Roland Garros final.

“I started to be really nervous,” Wawrinka said, “and I started to tell myself, ‘What the f--- is happening?’ [We] had a good talk. Magnus is always confident in me.”

What is happening with Wawrinka? His late breakthrough is virtually unprecedented. Rather than let himself be a victim of his star-studded era, he has learned over the years to make the best of it, to take his chances when they come. These days, once Stan gets deep in a draw, his confidence tends to grow. “A few times I told myself, ‘Maybe that’s it, maybe my best ranking is 2008, No. 9 in the world, and I’m born to be Top 20 for 10 years,’” Wawrinka told The Telegraph. “But Magnus helped me a lot.”

Wawrinka makes a point of practicing with the Big Four. He learns from them, but he no longer tries to match their perfection. “I don’t try to put myself as their rival,” he says.

Instead, Wawrinka uses his imperfection to his advantage. With his game, he knows he can beat them on the right day, on his own terms. He knows now that, just because he’s failed once, twice, even 10 times, it doesn’t mean he’ll fail every time. It’s just a matter of, as Beckett put it, ever trying.

In May, Wawrinka will return to Paris to try to successfully defend a Grand Slam title for the first time. Even if he doesn’t succeed, he’s done more than he could reasonably have

expected. And he has, at least in one small way, joined his fellow Swiss in tennis immortality.

“It will be in the Roland Garros museum,” Wawrinka says of his title-winning attire. “You will see my shorts forever.”

Originally published in the May/June issue of TENNIS Magazine.