What a moment for British sport. After winning his maiden Masters 1000 title in Indian Wells on Sunday, 23-year-old Jack Draper has emerged as tennis’s fastest-rising star.
This is as seminal an achievement as Andy Murray’s own first Masters title in Cincinnati in 2008, which prefigured Murray’s maiden appearance in a grand-slam final only five weeks later.
So it is ironic – and still slightly chilling for British fans – to remember that Draper came close to jacking the whole sport in during Covid.
One suspects that, at that stage, Draper knew he could make a living on the tour. But would he be the sort of fringe player who bounced from one tournament to the next, picking up wins here or there without contending seriously?
That wasn’t going to be enough for a man with a lot of alternative life choices at his disposal.
The son of former Lawn Tennis Association chief executive Roger Draper, Jack could have emulated his brother Ben by working in sports management, or gone to an American university or … well, anything, really.
No. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it properly. And here begins the story of a ruthless campaign of self-improvement. The road leads all the way to Sunday’s 6-2, 6-2 demolition of a befuddled Holger Rune.
The body
Next week will be the fourth anniversary of Draper’s debut on the ATP Tour. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning. Facing Kazakh veteran Mikhail Kukushkin, he collapsed on the court in Miami with heat exhaustion, and had to be helped off: the first of eight retirements to date.
Contrast that moment, and that oft-mentioned trend, with the comments we heard from defending Indian Wells champion Carlos Alcaraz on Saturday evening. Asked why he had played such ragged tennis in the semi-final, Alcaraz replied: “Today I was more worried about [Draper’s] level, his game, than myself … because he’s really tough, he’s really solid, and it’s going to be a really physical match.”
Coming from Alcaraz, a man with an unmatched 12-1 career record in five-set duels, that is a serious compliment. And it stems from a heap of unseen work with a series of different fitness trainers: Ian Prangley, Dejan Vojnovic, Steve “Speedo” Kotze, and most recently Andy Murray’s former associate Matt Little.
Not all of it has worked. As a former Olympic sprinter, Vojnovic’s methods failed to gel with the very different movement patterns of tennis. But you can see the appetite and aspiration. As Draper said last week: “I want to be someone who’s really strong … That was an area I felt other players would look at me and think, ‘Oh, he can get tired.’”
The transformation was unmistakable in Indian Wells. Draper moved with such relentless speed that even someone with the attacking arsenal of Taylor Fritz – the world No 4 and 2022 champion here – was unable to get the ball past him.
Crucially, Draper is now strong enough in the legs to slide into every defensive shot. Pioneered on hard courts by Novak Djokovic, this method is not as elegant as Roger Federer’s catlike movement, but it’s more efficient. You set your legs in a wide “V”, slide into the shot, and then push off the outside leg without needing to take an extra step.
At 6ft 4in and approaching 14 stone, Draper is much burlier than most tennis players, and this has surely contributed to his chequered injury record. Increasingly, he is responding by limiting his schedule – as we saw with his decision not to play Dubai in the week before Indian Wells – so that he can peak for the big events.
The game
Draper was not always a giant among his peers. During his junior career, “he was always one of the smallest guys,” according to development coach Justin Sherring, “but he was so locked in”.
Noted for being a little pest on the court, the teenage Draper had bags of mongrel and desire but no real weapons. Still, his resolve to win was boosted by his status as the son of the LTA’s big cheese. As he told Telegraph Sport in 2020: “I would often go to junior tournaments and have 15 boys on the balcony I had never seen before willing me on to lose, making noises before I serve.”
Admittedly, the young Draper was fortunate in his tennis-centric family. Mother Nicky was Britain’s best junior in her day, while his beloved grandmother Brenda – who now sadly suffers from Alzheimer’s disease – used to coach him as a boy. On top of that, his status as a perceived golden child helped him develop a bloody-minded, “I’m not missing” mentality.
The problem arrived when he became a professional, because consistency is no match for raw power. And as Draper explained last week, “When I played Alcaraz here a couple years ago, I felt like I couldn’t hit the skin off a rice pudding.”
The evolution of Draper’s game in those two years has been partly technical. He went on to speak about how “I’ve worked on that feeling of being balanced a lot on the forehand and not lifting off [which means flattening out the strike instead of relying on the extra safety margin of heavy top-spin].”
But we are also talking about a psychological readiness to go for big winners, even at the cost of a higher error rate. This explains why Draper recruited former world No 6 Wayne Ferreira as a consultant last year, to work alongside his regular coach James Trotman.
Together, Draper and Ferreira focused on playing more punchy, aggressive, Mike Tyson-esque tennis. And yet, unpicking 15 years of defensive programming was never going to be an instant fix. Stranded between old and new incarnations, Draper suffered a disastrous loss to world No 176 Jesper de Jong at last May’s French Open.
He had reached a second fork in the road: a sliding-doors moment to rank alongside the Covid-era self-doubt. Coming away from the French Open in low spirits, he could easily have lost momentum. But instead he worked with Trotman to rediscover his original service motion – which Ferreira had tweaked – and to refine the balance between attack and defence.
This second rebuild worked so well that, when asked to identify his favourite memory from 2024, Draper picked it ahead of either his maiden ATP title in Stuttgart or his run to the semi-final of September’s US Open.
“I was all over the place,” Draper told Telegraph Sport in December. “I was thinking, ‘I need to get my s--- together’. But the best part of this year was after Paris. It was that feeling of being not in the best place with my tennis, but having a great mindset, and then changing that to being a better player, understanding myself more, and building my confidence from there.”
The mentality
Since his defining loss to De Jong, Draper has only suffered one tour defeat against a player ranked outside the world’s top 30. Frustratingly, it came at Wimbledon, where he was ambushed in straight sets by compatriot and regular training partner Cameron Norrie. Regularly holding his hands out towards Trotman in despair, Draper looked overcome by the expectations of his home crowd.
Here was another lesson in the never-ending university of tennis. And another lesson that Draper was determined to learn from. He has always looked beyond the obvious in his recruitment, once even hiring a baseball pitching coach to improve his lefty serve. (Right-handed in everything but tennis, he found the throwing motion unnatural.) He showed similar open-mindedness in December, turning to a breathing coach in the search for more equanimity and poise.
“I had a lot of problems with my sinuses when I was younger,” Draper explained during January’s Australian Open, “so I breathe a lot through my mouth. When you are anxious or you have to recover quickly, it’s not efficient, so I’ve been trying to breathe through my nose more. Sometimes you don’t realise how uptight your body is. Especially me, because I’ve always been someone who likes to try hard. If you’re tense the whole time, you’re not going to last too long.”
If Draper has at times been guilty of entering a nervous funk, this tendency surfaced only once in Indian Wells. That was during the semi-final, when Alcaraz spent the first set spraying the ball in all directions like a rogue firehose, but sharpened up enough to take a 2-0 lead in the second. Draper promptly suffered his own four-game mini-meltdown, which he only halted via a stern self-talk in front of the bathroom mirror.
Asked on Sunday evening about his internal struggles, Draper explained that “there are many matches when you are nervous and when you feel like things are getting the better of you, and you’re breathing shallow. You lose your legs a little bit. You feel like jelly. You don’t have much energy. I hadn’t experienced that for a while, but I experienced it a little bit yesterday against Carlos, and I think it was really important for me to go through that third set and come back against him.
“I’ve been trying to find a lot of one per centers over time,” Draper added. “To figure out my breathing issues, to figure out my physical issues, and I’m just working hard in all those areas. The more experiences I get, the better I’ll become each time I step on the court in a big occasion.”
The reality
During my first interview with Draper, which dates back to the 2020 Covid lockdown, he laughed sardonically while telling me that his teenage self had imagined tennis as a paradise. “At a younger age I was thinking about winning Wimbledon and all the main tournaments and getting with loads of girls and whatever.”
Since becoming an established player, Draper’s experience has been very different. He might look like a glamorous figure, with his high cheekbones and jet-setting lifestyle, and it’s true that he has been featured on the cover of Vogue. But when Draper spoke to the BBC’s Russell Fuller last week about the reality of his life, he stressed the repetitive nature of competitive sport.
“Being away from home, waking up early on a daily basis – it’s like Groundhog Day,” he said. “Putting in hours and hours on the court, in the gym, in the ice bath at the end of the day when I don’t want to.
“It’s like a normal job. Some days you really enjoy it and other times you don’t want to get out of bed. But you do it anyway and do it to the best of your ability. Because you know it is going to pay off on the big stage.”
While I was chatting to one of Draper’s former team members last week, he reminded me that “Jack has always felt conflicted by the demands of tennis.” Hence that wobble in the early days of his professional career. But the rewards are flowing in with a vengeance, and that will surely outweigh the various inconveniences.
After Sunday’s win, Draper spoke of “a lot of pride, a lot of passion. It just feels like a really wholesome moment that I can share with my family, my team, and all the people who have helped me. It’s really a special feeling.”
In the aftermath of that one-sided final, word is finally leaking out about Draper’s potential. Day by day, he looks increasingly ready to succeed Murray as a regular grand-slam contender.
While the former doubles world No1 Rennae Stubbs tipped Draper as a future Wimbledon champion on Monday morning, the Princess of Wales – who happens to be the All England Club’s patron – posted a more measured message on social media. “Congratulations, Jack. A fantastic performance. Well Done. C”
Draper has earned such acclaim the hard way. And as long as that hulking body holds together, he can look forward to more Sundays in the sun.
