Culture
Jack Draper’s tennis: How embracing variety took him to Indian Wells title
When reflecting on his favourite moment of 2024 in December, Jack Draper didn’t pick reaching the U.S. Open semifinal, winning his first and second ATP Tour titles, or beating Carlos Alcaraz.
He picked the aftermath of his most disappointing defeat of the year, a loss to qualifier Jesper de Jong at the French Open in May.
“When I came home from Paris, I was all over the place thinking: ‘I need to get my s— together, what am I doing? I’m not fulfilling my potential. I’m not the player I want to be,’” he told a small group of reporters in a pub in west London just before Christmas.
“When I look back over this year, that’s something that actually brings me the most satisfaction. The most joy is working out certain situations and then turning into a different player.”
Draper, 23, was ranked No. 40 and having an identity crisis about his game. He had brought on former world No. 6 Wayne Ferreira to support his main coach James Trotman, and Ferreira wanted Draper to use his bulky 6ft 4in (193cm) frame more. But after a disappointing clay-court season, Draper decided instead to lean on his other talents: soft hands, athleticism, and a heavy forehand that he could blast through the court or kick up above an opponent’s shoulders.
“Wayne wanted me to try to be braver,” he said.
“I suppose I needed that, but at the same time, I needed to understand that that’s not the player I am as well. One of my main attributes as a player is my ability to move well for my size, and be able to get that one more ball back in court.
“That’s how I won matches when I was younger, when I was small.”
Draper and Ferreira split after the grass-court season, and while Draper took some of Ferreira’s advice to heart by not being so “one-paced,” he has embraced the natural variety he possesses and stormed up the tennis ranks ever since.
Last Sunday, Draper won the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. It is his first ATP Masters 1,000 title — the rung just below the Grand Slams — and it moved him into the ATP top 10 for the first time. The slow, grippy hard courts in the Californian desert reward players who can mix up their shots; witness Alcaraz, who Draper stunned in the semifinals despite being on the ropes in the third set. The 21-year-old Spaniard is perhaps the most dexterous player in the world and a two-time Indian Wells champion.
During the Indian Wells final against Holger Rune, Draper demonstrated his mental strategy, centering his vision on his thumb at changes of ends. Because he is so open about discussing the mental side of the game — including on-court anxiety — and his misfortune with injuries, the texture of his tennis and its specifics sometimes get overlooked. In the California Desert, it was in full bloom.
Draper’s flashing forehand was just one component of his success at Indian Wells. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Draper’s forehand is his most devastating ground stroke, but his backhand is his most reliable. Like another tennis southpaw, Rafael Nadal, Draper is a natural right-hander who plays left-handed, so he finds natural stability on the two-handed backhand.
“I think that really helps me, because my forehand has been improving all the time,” he said in a news conference after beating Alcaraz on Saturday. “My forehand is naturally the shot where I’m not as comfortable. It’s always been my backhand which I can hit with my eyes closed.”
Draper’s solidity on the backhand side is discomfiting for his opponents. Against most lefties, the go-to play for a right-hander is to try and get into a cross-court rally in which they hit their forehand to their opponent’s backhand, which is typically the weaker shot.
“I really have no problem against any player with their forehand into my backhand,” Draper continued. “Usually that’s something where players struggle, but with myself, that’s a big strength.”
According to data from TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations (TDI), we can see that over the last year, opponents won 42.8 percent of points when hitting cross-court forehands against Draper, compared to the tour average of 45 percent. Last week at Indian Wells, this figure for Draper’s opponents was even lower, down at 41.7 percent — a significant drop below the average for one of the most important and regularly deployed shots in tennis.
By contrast, Draper’s forehand was even more devastating than usual, particularly against Rune in a one-sided final. When hitting it from the middle of the court, with the choice to go to his opponent’s forehand or backhand, Draper destroyed Rune’s forehand, winning 100 percent of points behind that play.
Draper has worked with Trotman on his movement to stabilize the forehand, acknowledging that he used to struggle when anyone went after it — as he did to Rune Sunday.
“Any pace into it was a problem,” he told a small group of reporters on a video call.
“I remember when I played Carlos Alcaraz here a couple of years ago, I felt like I couldn’t hit the skin off a rice pudding. So I just feel like I’ve come a long way with that.
“I think a lot of it has to do with my positioning, with my body. I’ve worked on that feeling of being balanced a lot on the forehand and not lifting off. I still lift off some forehands, but I feel like most of the time my commitment is to go through the ball and to feel like I’m hurting off that shot instead of it just being a kind of average, spinny ball.”
In that match against Alcaraz, he lost 6-2, 2-0 by retirement. Things looked very different in their semifinal.
Despite Draper’s evolution as a player, there is still no weapon in his game bigger than his serve. That too developed relatively late, since Draper was only 5 feet 6 inches until a handy growth spurt in his mid-teens.
Speaking after his devastating serving display against Rune, Draper said: “My rhythm and my placement has been really, really good. And it’s obviously a huge, huge part of my game. If I can get that right, that sets me up well for the rest of my tennis.”
At Indian Wells, Draper improved his second-serve points won from 52 percent over the last year to 54 percent. He also used his accuracy to account for the slower courts’ effect on his speed, winning 78 percent of points behind serves to the T on the deuce side, and 83 percent on the ad; 40 and 39 percent of those serves went unreturned, respectively.
The serving display gave him the platform to play with more of the variety he has been striving for, mixing up his pace and coming to the net at various points. Against Ben Shelton in last week’s quarterfinals, Draper somehow manoeuvred his body to hit a volley that was flying towards his chest, fell down, and got back up to win the point.
Against Rune, Draper showcased some outstanding defense to go alongside his devastating attack, winning 43 percent of points when defending, per the TDI “steal score” metric. Draper’s average in the past 52 weeks is 35 percent. It was his rich mix of attacking and defending options, rather than a brute force approach, that took him to the title.
Draper is one of many ATP players who are facing up to how Alcaraz and world No. 1 Jannik Sinner have reconfigured tennis, but he appears better placed to embrace that change than some of his peers in the rankings. 1990s-born players, including world No. 2 Alexander Zverev, No. 4 Taylor Fritz and No. 6 Casper Ruud have openly said that they feel ill-positioned to adjust to the huge hitting and court coverage. Draper has studied them both carefully and gotten to know them well, too; Sinner is a friend and former doubles partner, while Draper was planning on spending the most recent off-season with Alcaraz in Spain before a hip injury intervened.
Draper is ranked No. 3 by his 2025 results, and has won 13 of his 15 matches this year, including 10 of the last 11. He heads to Miami as one of the tournament favorites, and then has very few points to defend during the clay-court swing. But the biggest challenge is the Grand Slams — the biggest tournaments in the world which bring the elongated five-set format in which Draper has struggled more in the past. His recent form, however, is making him believe he is on his way.
“I can compete consistently against top players in the world. I feel like I belong completely,” he said.
(Top photo: Andy Abeyta / The Desert Sun via Imagn Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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