{"id":817,"date":"2008-03-17T22:39:53","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T06:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=817"},"modified":"2008-03-17T22:39:53","modified_gmt":"2008-03-18T06:39:53","slug":"817","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/817\/","title":{"rendered":"The Young Mr. Young"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Young 18 years old and he’s made it into the top 100, but he\u2019s still a young player.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the first indication that Donald Young<\/strong> is still young. Like most teenagers, late is the same as being on time and when he did wander into the media interview room after his straight set loss to Rafael Nadal<\/strong> today, his parents accompanied him.<\/p>\n

Like most youngsters, he\u2019s very anxious to prove himself. After a miserable first set in which he held service once, he stayed with Nadal till the middle of the second set then he dropped his serve again. In the next game he had Nadal down 0-30 on his serve then proceeded to make two straight errors by going for too much and lost his advantage. I asked him if he overhit because he felt pressure to break back:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about feeling the pressure, probably I just wanted to win the game so bad.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how it is when you\u2019re young: you try to do too much to show the world that you can play with the big boys. It almost cost Young his career because he struggled through 11 straight ATP losses when he should have been playing Futures and Challenger events.<\/p>\n

The low point was a 6-0, 6-0, loss to Carlos Berlocq<\/strong> in Miami two years ago. It probably sunk even lower when Berlocq lost to James Blake<\/strong> by the same score in the next round. Young was horrified at the loss:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never lost 0-0 in my life, and then I lost 0-0 in one of the biggest tournaments I played. That wasn\u2019t confidence boosting at all. Actually shut it down pretty bad\u2026 It just looked really bad, so it hurt my feelings a lot.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Young went down 0-4 to Nadal in the first set today, I wondered if that 0-0 match seeped into his mind. Was his mind freaking out something like this: \u201cOh no, here we go again, another 0-0 match, can\u2019t do that, can\u2019t have that, it just cannot happen again\u2026\u201d How long does it take before a low point like that stops seeping into your mind under duress and the steady confidence of a more recent triumph takes its place?<\/p>\n

The answer is linearly related to the number of matches you win: the more matches you win, the faster you forget such things. The more you lose, the longer you remember the low points. Young won two matches here and they were his first two Masters Series wins so he\u2019s on his way but it\u2019s a slow and steady process. After he failed to serve out the second set to win the match against Lopez, he had to apply a bit of mental management to prepare himself for the third set:<\/p>\n

,,,I took a bathroom break and tried to refocus and think about the things I did do well because usually I would get really upset and just pretty much not be there mentally at all for the third set, and I didn\u2019t want that to happen.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s puzzling when you hear that from someone who was the number one junior in the world and won junior slams but he\u2019s still a kid on the ATP tour and that\u2019s how it is for everyone when they start playing with the big boys.<\/p>\n

I want to say one more thing before I leave you today. Young suffered those 11 straight losses because tournaments kept giving him wild cards. People tend to blame Young’s parents for letting him take those wild cards when he probably wasn’t prepared to play on the ATP tour, but his management company didn’t help either.<\/p>\n

At the time, he was managed by the huge management company IMG. IMG represents many players including Roger Federer<\/b> and Rafael Nadal<\/b>. IMG also owns the Bollettieri Tennis Academy and part of the Evert Tennis Academy. And it owns a number of tournaments including that tournament in Miami I mentioned above.<\/p>\n

I spent a long time today talking with Norman Canter<\/b>, the co-owner of Renaissance Tennis Management<\/a>, a much smaller management company whose clients include Jonathan Erlich<\/b>, Andy Ram<\/b>, and Benjamin Becker<\/b>. In his view, collusion between management companies, tournaments, the USTA and the ATP leads to a very corrupt system which harms tennis and particularly tennis players, including players like Donald Young.<\/p>\n

I’ll talk much more about that tomorrow. Nighty night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Young 18 years old and he’s made it into the top 100, but he\u2019s still a young player. Here\u2019s the first indication that Donald Young is still young. Like most teenagers, late is the same as being on time and when he did wander into the media interview room after his straight set loss […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}