The 21 & Under Club: Stefanos Tsitsipas

“My life is like a speeding bullet that just hasn’t hit the target yet,” Stefanos Tsitsipas wrote on Twitter this spring. Accompanying his words was a photo of the 20-year-old Greek staring soulfully into the camera while taking a water break during practice.

The statement and the picture were pure Tsitsipas: sincere, self-dramatizing, restlessly unsatisfied—and expressed on social media. In a word: youthful.

Of all the players who make up tennis’ up-and-coming generation, Tsitsipas most fully embodies and embraces the often-thrilling, sometimes-painful process of growing up, both as a player and a person. More specifically, the Athens native embodies a generation of young male players who are attempting, so far without much success, to fill the very big shoes of Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal.

As with everyone else in his cohort, life these days for Tsitsipas can feel like one long learning experience. Or, to use his words, it can feel like a speeding bullet that finds its target some weeks, but still flies well wide of the mark during others.

In January, Tsitsipas hit the bull’s-eye when he upset Federer in the fourth round of the Australian Open. “Changing of the guard!” headlines around the world screamed. Tsitsipas was praised not just for defeating Federer, but for doing it with an updated version of The Maestro’s game.

In that moment it seemed as if tennis, after two decades of searching, had finally found an heir to Federer’s artfully-appointed throne. Tsitsipas had the same elegantly lethal one-handed backhand; the same powerful, point-ending forehand; and the same instincts for how to deploy his many weapons to maximum effect.

“He could be my son,” the 37-year-old Federer had joked when he faced Tsitsipas in Perth two weeks earlier. Tennis-wise, Federer may have been closer to the truth than he realized.

With his curly blond locks, purposeful strut and joyful celebrations, the 6’4” Tsitsipas also cut a distinctive, appealing figure on court. He manages to come across as Old World and post-millennial all at once.

“This young man is a young player on the way to elite status,” Tennis Channel commentator Paul Annacone said. “It’s exciting to see his flair and variety in his game style. He has the charisma, talent and mindset to be in many more final weekends of majors.”

Fast forward two months, though, and Tsitsipas no longer looked or sounded like the happy-go-lucky new kid on the block. He had traveled and played virtually non-stop from Melbourne to Sofia to Rotterdam to Marseille to Dubai to Indian Wells. The tour grind had taken its toll, and when Tsitsipas reached the California desert, he discovered that his role as the ATP’s Next Big Thing had already been usurped by an even younger player, Felix Auger-Aliassime. After Tsitsipas lost to the 18-year-old Canadian, he sounded less like the future of the game, and more like a kid who is still a little daunted by what it takes to be a top player today.

“When you do something with a lot of intensity and a lot of focus and alot of will, sometimes your mind cannot keep up and you get tired,” Tsitsipas said. “You cannot do the same thing over and over again. And that’s why I admire the players like Djokovic, Federer and Nadal. They seem to be consistent in all they’re doing.”

Asked how he would rejuvenate himself, Tsitsipas could only shrug and say, “I don’t know.”

Fast forward two more months and it was clear that Tsitsipas had found his way again. The shift from hard courts to clay, did him good; as you would expect from a player with such a varied arsenal, his game translates to all surfaces. He showed just how fluent he can be on dirt when he dethroned the King of Clay—for a day, anyway—by beating Nadal in Madrid. But Tsitsipas may have earned his highest praise in defeat: His five-set, five-hour loss to Stan Wawrinka in the fourth round at the French Open was a war for the ages, and the match of the year so far. It was also, for better or worse, another educational experience, this time in the survival-of-the-fittest type of tennis that best-of-five-set matches require.

“I feel exhausted,” said Tsitsipas, who could barely move by the time he reached the interview room at Roland Garros. “I don’t know. Never experienced something like this in my life. Long time since I cried after a match, so emotionally wasn’t easy to handle. I’ll try to learn from it as much as I can.”

For the moment, the Wawrinka match seems to have had a hangover effect. At Queen’s Club last week, Tsitsipas suffered from pain in his shoulder, and another loss to Auger-Aliassime that left him scratching his head.

“He’s the most difficult opponent I’ve ever faced,” Tsitsipas said of the young Canadian. But he vowed he would be properly prepared for Wimbledon. “I just need to think the right way and be ready for best-of-five matches.”

There’s no reason to think that Tsitsipas won’t eventually find the the elusive consistency he’s searching for, and learn to win those five-set wars for the ages. Tennis is deeply inscribed in his DNA. His father, Apostolos, has been his coach since he was 6, and his mother, Julia, was a Top-200 pro—they met at a tournament where she was a player and he was a line judge.

Like many natural talents, Stefanos grew up surrounded by the sport on all sides. He can’t remember a time when the game wasn’t part of his life.

“My first memory is being 3 and hitting balls with my father in the gap between [his] lessons,” Tsitsipas told Greece’s Sport24 last year.

In classic Greek fashion, there’s a mythic quality to Tsitsipas’ rise. He grew up playing a variety of sports, but according to his family, he knew what he wanted to do with his life before he had turned 10. As his father recalled to Greece’s Tennis News last summer, the legend of young Stefanos began after a junior tournament in France, when the 9-year-old “woke up in the middle of the night,” came to his father, and said, “Dad, I have to tell you something: I want to become a tennis player. I like the competition, I like the challenge.” Eight years later, he was the No. 1 junior in the world. This spring, he cracked the ATP Top 10.

Despite his sense of destiny, and his obvious gifts for the game, there were bumps in Tsitsipas’ road to success. The Greek tennis federation had little money to spare for his training. Instead, he had to fall back on his family, who understood how tough it can be for anyone from a small country who has pro-tour aspirations.

“My parents were into tennis so they knew—my mom especially—how the whole thing works, and the sacrifices you have to make,” Tsitsipas told The Telegraph in March. “There are a lot of risks, but we also had a family member who helped us a lot economically—my mom’s twin sister, Alla. She paid some of the bills so that I could travel during this difficult period from the age of 10 to 16. She was a big help, and without her I don’t think it would be possible for me to be here.”

If Tsitsipas is a throwback as a player, he’s very much a member of his own social-media-savvy generation. His success over the last year has been meteoric, but we already know a lot about him. He tweets, he podcasts, he makes videos and vlogs, he takes photographs for an Instagram feed under the name Steve the Hawk. Rather than coming across as superficially self-involved, though, Tsitsipas appears to be the most thoughtful of the game’s many Next Gen talents.

Tennis players, whether out of practicality or incuriosity, have traditionally allowed themselves to see little of the world as it zooms past them while traveling; their focus is on winning matches, not expanding horizons. Tsitsipas is the rare pro who can’t help trying to do both. There’s lots of downtime on tour, and he’d rather spend it creating than being bored.

Like a philosophy-spouting undergrad on a backpack trip around the world, Tsitsipas engages with everything he sees, and tweets the many notions that come into his head on his travels from Perth to Paris. A sampling of maxims from The Tao of Tsitsipas:

It’s not the length of life. It’s the depth of life.

Interested is interesting.

One thing that is impossible is to meet every single person on planet earth.

*How do we stay human in an

addicting technological world?*

I pretty much operate on adrenaline and ignorance.

Living life is awesome!

As a junior, Tsitsipas split his training time between Paris and Athens, and those who knew him then could recognize his precocious interest in the outside world.

“He had a sophistication that you don’t see in a lot of kids,” says Sandra Harwitt, a veteran tennis journalist who interviewed Tsitsipas during his junior days. “He was educated and erudite, and he was actually interested in you. He would ask you questions like, ‘What did you think of To Kill a Mockingbird?’”

“Just from the way he carried himself, you could tell he had something.”

Tsitsipas’ interest in others hasn’t waned; he has been known to sit for hours with reporters, if the conversation is stimulating. But as with his game, Tsitsipas’ communication skills haven’t always come as easily to him as it may appear now. Life on tour has helped him come out of his shell, even though striking up friendships with his on-court rivals still isn’t easy.

“I was shy when I was a kid, but not anymore,” he said in Melbourne. “I learn to find comfort when I’m with people. I think I’m comfortable meeting new people and having a discussion with someone...I would love to have more friends on tour.”

Whether it’s making friends, avoiding burnout, seeing new places or trying to live up to the historic achievements of the Big Three, Tsitsipas has his work cut out for him—so far, it doesn’t seem as if he would want it any other way. Federer himself took longer than most of his peers to forge his varied game into a coherent whole, and to find the consistency Tsitsipas is seeking now.

The place where Federer did it first, and where he has always done it best, is on Centre Court. Tsitsipas, who reached the fourth round at the All England Club last year, also has a game that should be built for grass. Wouldn’t it be fitting if this speeding bullet found its target at Wimbledon this year?

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