Alexander Bublik’s tennis and the strange normality of elite sport: ‘Everybody is like robots’

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — At the end of a match in Miami four years ago, Jannik Sinner and Alexander Bublik met at the net and had a short conversation. Sinner, 19 at the time, had just won a tight quarterfinal 7-6(5) 6-4, but he was astonished by the performance of his opponent. In just the fourth game, Bublik had edged forward to return a serve from halfway between the baseline and the service line, chipping a forehand at Sinner’s feet and then flicking away a half-volley drop shot at the net.

“You’re not human,” a laughing Sinner said.

“What do you mean?” Bublik replied. “You’re not a human, man. You’re 15 years old, playing like this.”

The exchange — and match — encapsulated why Bublik, who will face the now-world No. 1 Sinner again in a French Open quarterfinal on Wednesday, is one of the most fascinating players on the ATP Tour.

Bublik, 27, is a proud nonconformist, a richly talented maverick from Kazakhstan who, on his day, can beat anyone, but who insists he will not sacrifice his health and his work-life balance to maximise his talents. Whether it’s hitting shots with the handle of his racket in a final, smashing rackets, trying to throw a bottle up and getting it to land during a change-of-ends, chatting to spectators mid-match or serving a whole game of aces, Bublik is magnetic. He’s also the king of the underarm serve, hitting six in a single game on more than one occasion.

He has been ranked as high as No. 17, but is currently No. 62 after losing motivation last year when he cracked the top 20 for the first time in May. He said a few years ago after beating former Roland Garros champion Stan Wawrinka in Monte Carlo, Monaco that: “I hate clay, I hate this surface.” And yet here he is, in his first Grand Slam quarterfinal on his least favourite surface.

After bamboozling world No. 5 Jack Draper to reach the last eight, Bublik spoke about how he doesn’t fit the mould of the modern, hyper-focused tennis player, a subject that he has discussed throughout the tournament.

“Right now, everybody is like robots, and they’re just crazy, crazy performance guys,” he said in a news conference prior to that match.

Sinner embodies that sentiment: someone who works phenomenally hard to maximise his talents. Someone whose biggest vice, according to a recent YouTube video, is driving golf karts quite fast around Melbourne Park or eating a burger after winning a Grand Slam.

“I’m the guy you can see having a nice time down the street in Paris in the evening before the match,” Bublik said. “Not to go crazy, but I’m social. I can skip the practice if I don’t feel like it.

“In my opinion, I’m super normal, and they make me feel different.”

Bublik’s musings pose a fundamental question. Who is normal in elite tennis: a player like Bublik, or a player who sacrifices every part of their life for the sake of reducing the number that comes after their name?

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“I prioritize tennis and the life in equal ways,” Bublik said after beating Draper on Monday.

“So, for me, it’s a 50-50 relationship. If I can’t walk at the age of 40, it’s OK? No, it’s not.

“I prioritize health and my lifestyle, because I have a family and I’m a father (Bublik has a two-year-old son, Wassily), and I have to do the father duties.”

Bublik insists that he does work hard, but not heedlessly. If he wants to miss a practice, he will. His style of tennis makes it easier for him to do that than most, because as with other mercurial players on the tour like Nick Kyrgios, he is blessed with skills that practice can groove but not create.

Like most crafty players, he has incredible hands and an innate understanding of how points work and how to turn them upside down. Unlike most crafty players, he also has a 140mph serve, liquid power on his forehand and backhand and a large wingspan at 6 feet 5 inches tall. He doesn’t have to work as hard as his peers to be a top-50 player.

He is also quite calculated and knows how much he needs to do to stay at that kind of level. It was his dropping to No. 80 in March this year that prompted him to apply himself on the clay, having had a wretched record on it for most of his career. He has interests outside of tennis, like investments in real estate and a curiosity about cryptocurrency. He is a reader.

“He’s very bright and quite worldly,” said a staff member — speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships — who worked with him on the Ultimate Tennis Showdown exhibition circuit.

“I think that can come across as a little cynical but my impression is that actually he’s just experienced and smart enough to understand how things work.”

Bublik’s claims about his work ethic at the French Open have also exposed something fundamental about the expectations fans and players have about normality in elite sport. In any other walk of life, work-life balance is held up as essential. If a friend or family member were doing nothing but pushing themselves relentlessly in their job, at the expense of everything else, people would be expected to check that they were OK.

In sport, it’s the opposite. Utter dedication to a chosen craft is fetishized. The hours spent refining the forehand, or the swing, or the shot. The Olympic rower who woke up at 3 a.m. every day for four years in pursuit of a bronze medal. Doing otherwise is framed as a waste of talent.

Bublik does not deem this normal.

“If you want to sleep, you just sleep,” he said in a news conference at Roland Garros.

“I mean, we are top athletes. Someone made like 100 million, 25 titles, and he still wants to go for more. For me, that’s not normal, in my opinion. But they make me feel like this.

“Nowadays sport makes me feel like this, that I’m different, which I don’t believe so because I think I’m just normal guy that was playing tennis and made it.”

Bublik’s long-time agent and manager Corrado Tschabuschnig, who started working with him at 17, gave a window into his psyche during an interview at Roland Garros on Tuesday.

“If a player arrives late because he has a delay and he sleeps just five hours instead of eight hours, often he feels he cannot perform the next day because mentally he’s completely destroyed,” Tschabuschnig said.

“Alex can sleep one hour and he goes to the court and he says, ‘Let’s see what happens. If I’m tired, I just tank a set and sleep and then I play the third one.’

“He’s less bound to circumstances around him that he cannot control.”

Something striking about Bublik’s run at the French Open has been his speed of play between points. When he is losing, it looks like he wants out, but when he is winning, opponents get sucked into a vortex of aces and drop shots. Tschabuschnig said that Bublik is now serving and playing with such speed because he wants to win, not just because he wants to get off the court quickly.

He has constantly changed his goals, from getting to the top 50 to the top 20, to winning an ATP 500 title, to beating a top-10 player. All of which he’s done — but without compromising on who he is.

“He was not very keen on authority and discipline when we first met and he was not going to be the person who follows instructions,” Tschabuschnig said.

“It was clear that he was going to be one of those players that needed to fall and stand up, that you could not prevent from falling. But you can advise him what to do in case he doesn’t want to fall the second time.”

Bublik has made some concessions as he seeks to rebuild his ranking, playing fewer of his most ludicrous trick shots — the underarm tweener serve, the shots with the racket handle, the dummied smash that turns into a drop shot — but he showed no mercy in scrambling Draper’s brain with his variety.

“I don’t play many matches where I feel like it’s almost out of my control what’s going on, and he made that happen today,” said Draper after the match. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Tschabuschnig said that Bublik’s apparently random approach is actually entirely planned. “He has no other option than to hit winners, to play with risk, to play drop shots and to come to the net … But it doesn’t mean that you do it because you don’t care. You do it, because you think that’s the way to win.

“Because if he practices well for six months, he’s going to face a Medvedev who practised well for 11 years. So what are we going to tell him? Or a Sinner who’s practiced for 15 years.”

In a scintillating return game that decided the fourth set and ultimately the match against the Brit, Bublik broke to love with a backhand winner, a forehand passing shot, a drop shot winner and a service return winner. He also looked at his box and gave them a wink in the third set, when a clearly frazzled Draper hit a double fault.

“He loves to get in his opponent’s head,” Tschabuschnig said. “And when he’s in there, he doesn’t let go. It’s like he’s got a drill in there.”

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Bublik is plenty relatable for someone whose tennis talents are so otherworldly. He likes to wake up at 9 or 10 a.m. and finds early starts hard. During his five-set win against the ultra-professional No. 9 seed Alex de Minaur in the second round, his mind wandered to the logistics of getting home when he was two sets down.

His turning point for his change in attitude this year wasn’t a great training block or match, but a blowout in Las Vegas with his coach.

He can be a difficult customer, too. His racket smashes and propensity to give up in difficult circumstances can put people off, while he can be brusque off the court, giving little truck to questions or topics that he doesn’t view as interesting. When asked by this reporter in a one-on-one interview to talk about his underarm serves, Bublik was unimpressed.

“It shouldn’t be a big deal — it’s just a stupid shot that gives a player an advantage,” he said.

He is also open about his bewilderment at how tennis has changed. During a defeat to rising teenager Jakub Menšík earlier this year, Bublik bemoaned the concentration of talent that is moving down the tennis ladder.

“Remember when tennis was easy, eh?” he said to umpire Mohamed Lahyani.

“Like five years ago, it was super easy to play tennis, huh? Yeah, bunch of random people in the top 50, barely moving.” Pointing to Menšík, he expressed his disbelief at the Czech not being a top-five player. But his peers hold his style and recent exploits in high regard.

Aryna Sabalenka, the women’s world No. 1, said on Tuesday of Bublik’s performance against Draper: “That was crazy. If he would play the way he played against Draper every time he’s out there, I think he would be in the top 10.”

Tommy Paul, the American world No. 12, said in a news conference at Wimbledon last year that Bublik’s huge power on serve, coupled with the fact that he can chuck in an underarm one at any moment, means that when he is serving “you have to keep your eyes on him at all times. You actually cannot take your eyes off of him.”

Bublik’s team believe he has the talent to win a Grand Slam, and could one day win Wimbledon on the grass where his game is best suited. He won his only 500-level title, two levels below the Grand Slams, on grass at the Halle Open in Germany two years ago.

For now though, the focus is absolutely on the clay, a surface Bublik previously detested. He’s loved at Roland Garros, helped by speaking decent French. During an emotional post-match speech after beating Draper, in which Bublik described the win as the best moment of his life, he was given the kind of loud and heartfelt ovation that is generally reserved for home players.

In the interview room, Bublik then insisted that the experience won’t change his approach. “The good thing about this question is you mentioned that you ‘might get,’” he said.

“Will I put my life and health on the line to have a “might”? A maybe? No.”

Against Sinner, a December conversation with Gaël Monfils, another mercurial talent, may feel pertinent.

“I was complaining. I was losing. I was on a losing streak,” Bublik explained Saturday. I said, ‘Gaël, it was so easy. (But now) everyone is playing so good.’

“Gaël said: ‘You wait for your chances. You have your chances, you use it. If you waste it, it’s your problem.’”

Even if Bublik does waste his chance against Sinner, it won’t be the end of his world.

(Top photo: Andy Cheung / Getty Images)