There’s a fabulous, untold yarn about Jack Draper that tells us a little about his backhand and far more about his mind. It is also why the sharer of this tale uses ‘savage’ as a term of endearment.
To get there, we must go back 13 years, to when Draper was 10 and his coach at the time felt a tweak was necessary.
‘I’m laughing just thinking about it,’ says the chap at the other end of the phone line, and that would be Justin Sherring, a renowned figure in British tennis who oversaw Draper’s development between the ages of five and 15. Their bond remains tight.
This pair travelled the world together, won together and drafted a life-changing email together. But before most of that, there was the backhand and a plan Sherring brewed at his base in Weybridge, Surrey. It was nothing major, just a couple of adjustments, and Sherring wanted a visual example to show to the prodigy in his care.
That was a pretty sound idea, except for one aspect. Sherring picks up the tale: ‘I chose a video of Jurgen Melzer, a top-10 player. Like Jack, he was a lefty and had a great backhand, exactly what we wanted to copy. I stick the video in front of Jack and I say, ‘Look at the extension of the arms’, but Jack has got this look on his face.’
Something of a conversation would follow.
Jack Draper warms up at Wimbledon this week as he prepares to lead the Brit charge at SW19
A 13-year-old Draper was already showing the competitive spirit which would serve him well
The 23-year-old’s good looks have attracted companies such as Burberry for whom he did a fashion shoot this spring alongside top model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Draper: ‘Who is this?’
Sherring: ‘It’s Jurgen Melzer, mate, top 10.’
Draper: ‘Why have you brought me Jurgen Melzer?’
Sherring: ‘It’s the detail, Jack. Right arm.’
Draper: ‘Yeah, I get that. But why aren’t you showing me Rafael Nadal?’
That stumped Sherring and Draper’s mother Nicky, a former British junior champion who was with them. The grown-ups did not quite know what to say.
Sherring creases up as he walks through the recollection. ‘I think I’ve said to him, “I’m sorry to have offended you with a top-10 player. What was I thinking?”.
‘The next day I bring him in a video of Nadal, the best lefty of all time, and Jack is just giggling at me and goes, “That’s more like it, Justin”.
Even at a young age, Draper wasn’t afraid to challenge his coach Justin Sherring (right)
The left-hander wanted to examine 22-time Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal’s technique
Jack jumps for joy after a brilliant victory over Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz at Queen’s last year
‘This kid, I love him. He’s the nicest guy in the world and also a savage. He always knew what he wanted.’
From the boy of 10 to the man of 23, and for all the many difficulties in between, that aspect of his personality wavered but never changed.
Nor did the goal he wants above anything else — to win the championship that happens to come next.
Wimbledon. It’s the big one. And Draper, who faces a tricky first-round clash against Argentine Sebastian Baez on Tuesday, is a big boy now.
He is the fourth seed, which makes him the highest-ranked Brit since Andy Murray in 2017 and roughly 100 spots north of where he was towards the end of 2023.
‘Extremely impressive,’ says Leon Smith, captain of the British Davis Cup team since 2010 and the head of the men’s game at the Lawn Tennis Association.
‘I was looking at this the other day. We watched it closely in real-time, but you see it on paper and do a double-take because in the final quarter of 2023, Jack was playing Challenger-level events. Astonishing, really.’
Indeed. His rise has encompassed a semi-final at the US Open last autumn, almost £6million in prize money, three ATP Tour titles and three other finals. There have also been two wins from four matches against Carlos Alcaraz and, more recently, his 6ft 4in frame was presented on the pages of Vogue and Tatler.
Draper’s grandfather Chris (right, with wife Brenda) watched him at the French Open this year
Draper is the fourth seed which makes him the highest-ranked Brit since Andy Murray in 2017
Draper is building a great rivalry with world No 2 Alcaraz whom he has already beaten twice
The latter described his jawline as ‘sharper than a Stanley knife’, but we should talk first about daggers, because Draper’s story is a complicated one.
As Smith, Sherring or anyone else in tennis will point out, Draper was a child star; he was the top-ranked 14-year-old in Europe and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon in 2018.
But the falls between then and now are well documented and so were his eight injury retirements since 2021, bottoming out with the shoulder problems that cost him six months in 2023 and an appearance at Wimbledon.
A persistent abdominal issue was more subtly destructive and as recently as January, Draper spoke about his hip as a ‘ticking time bomb’.
It has been a slog, or to borrow his reflection of those bad times, which was delivered last week during his run to the semi-finals at Queen’s: ‘I looked like a Ferrari, but I was a bit of a Toyota.’
‘There have been hugely frustrating times for him,’ says Smith. ‘We saw it with Andy, too, of course. They have spent a lot of time together — they’re close — and Andy will have spoken about the frustration with him for sure.
‘You have these moments where everything is coming together and then you’re off court again. That’s much harder than most realise with all the rehab and difficult thoughts.
‘The robustness needed to ride that out is key, but Jack has that. He is ferociously ambitious and has a huge fire in him.
Draper is good friends with Jannik Sinner, whom he defended after the Italian’s doping ban
The British star appears to have put his injury worries behind him and is reaping the benefits
Draper is making a splash on and off court and faces another test of character at Wimbledon
‘I could see that in how he came into this season. I remember at the end of last year, I was at the National Tennis Centre and went on the balcony overlooking Court Six, where Jack was doing an endurance session. It stuck with me — he was on his back, dripping sweat, absolutely empty from how much he was putting in. There were a lot of those sessions. We’re seeing now what can happen when he has a run of staying healthy.’
The great unknown is how long it will last. But since retiring against Alcaraz in the fourth round of the Australian Open in January, having endured three five-set wins to get there, Draper has not folded once.
If the highlight of that liberation was his win at Indian Wells in March, when he beat Alcaraz along the way, then broader proof of Smith’s final point exists in the detail of those rankings.
The speed with which Draper has traversed a difficult portion has been extraordinary — his step from 30th to the top five was completed in just 44 weeks. Only Alcaraz of the current elite skipped through faster.
Jannik Sinner, the world No 1, needed two-and-a-half years to cover that stretch and for Alexander Zverev, the world No 3, it was 15 months. Murray required two years and Roger Federer waited three months longer than Murray.
All of which is to say, the metric weighs nothing compared to winning slams and yet signifies the rarity of what Draper has been able to do in a Ferrari.
But Wimbledon. It’s the heavy one. And Draper hasn’t been such a big boy there — he has not gone beyond the second round in three attempts and the expectations to be the next Murray can crush you lower than an 8mm blade of grass.
If Draper is to get what he wants at SW19, he faces another test of character.
The world No 4 insists his growing fame is water off a duck’s back and will not affect his game
Draper faces a tricky first-round clash against Argentina’s Sebastian Baez on Tuesday
Under the watchful eye of coach James Trotman (left), Draper has climbed the rankings quickly
To understand the character of an adult, it can be useful to revisit the child. And no one has better memories of Jack the lad than Sherring.
James Trotman, one of the best in the business, has been Draper’s coach since 2021 and prior to him it was Ryan Jones from 2018. But Sherring was first on the scene and he has a few thoughts on the meaning of talent.
‘Talent is over-rated,’ he says. ‘Jack has tremendous talent and always did. Aged 10, I put him in with our Under 18s at Weybridge, some of the top guys in Surrey, and by week three they didn’t want to play him. That was talent.
‘But his character, that’s the difference. Jack is a fighter and you’ve seen that with what he has come through lately. As a kid, we saw it every day.
‘There’s a monster inside him on the court and that goes back to when he was little — he wanted to smash players.
‘Funny thing, he’s also the loveliest, softest, cuddliest guy you’ll meet. I was with him a few days ago at Queen’s. He’s family to me. But on the court, he’s a savage.’ It is a depiction thatt allies with Smith’s assessment of a ‘guy who is utterly charming to everyone’ and a ‘brutal competitor’.
Smith spoke of conversations with Draper away from tennis focusing mainly on their mutual ownership of Australian labradoodles, families and Netflix recommendations — true crime is the preferred genre of a guy who once had a fall-back plan of being a detective.
But on the court he most relishes imposing his will on an opponent, watching the fight leave them.
Draper holds the spoils after securing the biggest title of his career, the Indian Wells Masters
He may be gentle and kind off the court but he has plenty of fire when he has racquet in hand
Draper, pictured in an ice bath, has worked hard to make sure he is in top shape physically
It all rings a bell with Sherring. ‘He loved to dominate a player,’ he says. ‘I was out at Indian Wells when he won a few months ago — he had that same feel about him, but now with this big physique. I saw elite players falling apart in front of him. If you speak to players I work with, I’m always on about the ‘fight’ of tennis. Jack was huge on it.’
Sherring details how Draper, until recent years, carried a picture of two boxers squaring off as his WhatsApp profile picture. Back at Weybridge, he also used walk-on music from loud speakers during practice — appropriately for a gifted child, Draper favoured The Prodigy and Firestarter was the tune. These days, he evidently goes for Eminem.
‘He always wanted to get the blood pumping,’ Sherring says. ‘The music would create a sense of event and greatness and we wouldn’t shy away from that when we spoke — it was always about big goals and he wasn’t afraid of having them.’
Sherring used to monitor the extent of that appetite when Draper was in Chelsea FC’s academy around the ages of 11 and 12.
‘I remember going to watch him once and he pings this free-kick into the top corner,’ he says. ‘I was a bit like, ‘Damn, he’s really good — that could be a worry’.
‘After that I started asking him this question, because he’s a Manchester United fan, about which he would prefer — a penalty to win the Champions League for United or serving to win Wimbledon. The answer was always Wimbledon and it was my acid test to check we were still on track.’
For all the success of those early days, there were challenges.
One was Draper’s height. As towering and muscular as he is today, he was relatively small until a growth spurt in his mid-teens added a foot to his height. The initial disadvantage has shaped into a benefit — he became a savvy counter-puncher through necessity and when he shot up, the service and forehand weapons made for a versatile package.
Draper was a Man United fan and a promising youth footballer but tennis was his first love
His father Roger was chief executive of the LTA but that was often a mixed blessing for Jack
The other difficulty involved the innuendo of others. Given Draper’s father, Roger, was chief executive of the Lawn Tennis Association, whispers of favouritism to an establishment kid were common.
‘There was definitely a ridiculous perception that he was entitled,’ Sherring says. ‘There were people who would say things and I’d get quite cross.
‘I actually believed it was more of a hindrance, his dad’s position, because of the pressure and unnecessary noise Jack had to put up with from others.
‘As I told a few people, if they doubted him, they should come and see exactly how much he wanted to be a champion. No one wanted it more.’ With that comes a gem of a story dating back to when Draper was 14 and had just lost a match in Sweden against Timofey Skatov from Kazakhstan. Draper was still hot when he and Sherring got on the flight home.
Sherring: ‘Jack was grumbling a bit, saying, “Nah, this isn’t going to work”. Eventually I ask, ‘What do you mean?’.
‘He goes, ‘This guy who just beat me, he’s in the Russian academy, playing against adults. I’m playing with kids. Ridiculous. Got to leave school’.’
School for the previous two years had been Reed’s in Cobham, a prestigious place, and Tim Henman is among their alumni. Sherring knew all this and was also aware of two significant obstacles to his student’s plan — his mother and father. The best Sherring could suggest was an email to layout a detailed plan.
‘The next bit I will never forget,’ he says. ‘Jack gets out his laptop and it went like this: “Hi mum and dad, Jack here. Yeah, this is not going to work. I’m playing kids and the best are playing against much better players every day and I need to go full-time. Lots of love, Jack”.
‘I’m looking at this and say, “Mate, we need a bit more” and so he started writing again. Tell you what, though, a couple of months later he got what he wanted.’
Draper lets his temper get the better of him as he smashes his racquet at May’s Italian Open
The British No 1 claimed his first senior ATP title on grass at the Stuttgart Open last summer
Mark Petchey remembers the first time he met Draper. It was when he was doing a coaching stint with Murray in 2021 and needed a hitting partner. Draper, ranked outside the top 300 but already reasonably close to Murray, happened to be on an adjacent court.
‘He came over and straight away was putting Andy under pressure,’ says Petchey, who now works with Draper’s close friend Emma Raducanu.
‘He wasn’t fazed in the slightest and it’s kind of like how he is handling his career now.
‘He’s in a very abnormal situation, No 4 in the world, been through a lot, and he is just treating it all like the most normal thing in the world.’
Wimbledon will presumably ratchet that tension up a notch. So will his increasing proximity to Sinner and Alcaraz, who are threatening to dominate an era and exist on a far higher plane to their pursuers, Draper included.
‘It’s funny when you look at his situation now compared to Andy,’ added Smith. ‘Andy had Roger, Rafa and Novak Djokovic in the way of winning slams. It drove him so hard to new standards.
‘Now you have Jack looking at Sinner and Alcaraz and he knows he’s capable because he has the weapons. It’s a big challenge, but it’s one he has worked very hard for and one he wants.’
It is a tough ask, even for a savage who has long made a habit of getting his way in the end.
Mark Petchey (right), who now works with Draper’s close friend Emma Raducanu (left), remembers the first time he met the star
DRAPER BY NUMBERS
107 Wins from 166 singles matches on the ATP Tour in his career.
3 Singles titles, including one ATP Masters 1000 title — in March at Indian Wells, where he beat Holger Rune in the final.
4 Current world ranking, the highest of his career so far.
2 Draper’s Wimbledon record is surprisingly poor, his best efforts coming in 2022 and 2024 when he was beaten in the second round.
£5.9m Prize money won since turning professional in 2018.
