🎾 Karen Khachanov vs Brandon Nakashima
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What happened to Kyle Edmund It has happened to many players. Talented tennis player, who does not stop growing, who breaks it in a Grand Slam, who joins the elite, who multiplies his expectations, both he and people outside, until an injury comes and the light goes out. The next step is the only one that can vary depending on the protagonist. Some never shine again, while others return to the main stages, but never at the same level. In the case of the British, it is still to be decided which side he belongs to.
“The days where I couldn’t play tennis were hard, I woke up every morning and asked myself: why am I getting up? Literally, the plan I had from first thing in the day was to do some rehab,” Kyle admits in an interview for ATPwhere he explains in great detail what a person who does not see the light at the end of the tunnel thinks. At 29 years old, those semifinals of the Australian Open or the pride of seeing his name on the No. 14 step in the world are far away. Today the reality is that he is still out of the top 300, only with three operations on his left knee.
“It has been a very difficult battle, sometimes emotional, too long without playing a tournament,” emphasizes the one from Johannesburg. “What happens is that You start to lose your purpose a little bit, you start wondering what to do and all that kind of stuff.. There are some moments when you are completely depressed, you even get emotional. The luck is that you have your family and your coaches with you, they are always around you to help you release that frustration, to listen to you when you need to remember that the situation is shit,” says the current #334 in the classification, someone who arrived to be in the top20 for eight months.
Everything was going well for the Briton at that time, until at the end of the 2020 season he had no choice but to undergo surgery to resolve the pain in his left knee. In March 2021 it would have to happen again, even a third time in May 2022. Bad luck? Taking into account that in 2023 he also had to stop due to a left wrist injury, it is evident that Edmund has not been the luckiest with physical issues. There was no lack of adversity on his path in these last four years, but neither was the drive to get up every day to fight them.
“I never lacked motivation, which is positive. There were times when I didn’t feel like there was any progress. Now it’s different, even if it’s a little progress, at least you feel like you’re moving somewhere, but in the past there were stages where absolutely nothing was happening, that was hard to deal with. However, I knew that by doing nothing, I was not going to improve, so I decided to move forward no matter what,” acknowledges the champion of two individual titles, Antwerp 2018 and New York 2020.
TENNIS OR TENNIS, THERE WAS NO OTHER OPTION
And so time has passed, four seasons in which no one talks about Kyle Edmund, whom many dressed as the clear successor to Andy Murray, a suit currently occupied by Jack Draper (we cross our fingers that he has a little more luck) . With all the scars along the way, it will not be easy to see him in the world top 15 again, not to mention seeing him again in a Grand Slam semifinals, but his story goes beyond the numbers. The case of the British speaks about the value of never throwing in the towel, of pursuing a dream, of giving every last drop of sweat until the body can’t take it anymore. Until the mind says enough.
“In my head I was always very stubborn, that stubbornness has helped me in other things, it is a good trait to be stubborn with rehabilitation, I was always willing to do everything possible to return“, he values after so many years of sacrifice. “I dreamed of seeing that day arrive when I could be on the court again. Eventually, when you’ve been away for so long, you realize why you’re fighting. Of course there were moments where I thought about quitting and doing something else, but as soon as I kept thinking about it… I quickly showed myself that what I wanted was to keep trying.”
