Will Lleyton Hewitt actually send Alex de Minaur against Dominic Thiem to the field today at 11:00 (live on DAZN and in our live ticker)? Nothing could be won against Dennis Novak for the 19-year-old. On the court, at any rate, he acts with an incomprehensible agility that earned him a mystical nickname.
According to Duden, a demon is an inherent uncanny power. The Australian press in particular attributes this to their new tennis shooting star Alex de Minaur.
According to Sydney Herald, Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic first gave this name to their compatriot during a Davis Cup week in which De Minaur was involved as a hitting partner. Supposedly to abbreviate his name more or less elegantly.
“I like the idea much more that it comes from the fact that I always give myself out completely on the court,” says De Minaur himself.
With a height of 1.80 metres, the Sydney man is one of the smaller players on the tour, but he makes up for his alleged weaknesses in serve with a smart baseline game.
“It helps me a little,” says De Minaur. “In the long run at least. I learned early on to win matches with different strategies and a lot of variability.” Above all, however, he relied on his excellent footwork, which makes him one of the fastest players ever.
Since the end of last season, the teenager has had an additional mentor in his team alongside his coach Adolfo Gutierrez. Lleyton Hewitt, Australian Davis Cup captain and once the youngest number one in the world, helped him out of his box for the first time in the preparation tournaments for the Australian Open.
Hewitt is a valuable addition to his team, as “Rusty” himself once pursued a very similar style of play. The cooperation between Hewitt and De Minaur was initiated by the Australian Tennis Federation. A few years ago, however, it was not yet clear whether he would even serve the country in which he was born.
His father Anibal, an Uruguayan, once ran a restaurant in Sydney where he was to meet Alex’s mother Esther, a Spanish. The De Minaur family moved to Spain when Alex was five years old and also pursued some business there.
Alex went to school in Spain, studied perfect Spanish and French, only to move back to Sydney after eight years. However, since the restaurant there was abandoned, the De Minaur family now lives in Alicante, where Anibal operates a number of car washes.
So it came that little Alex, who has a Spanish passport, also played at youth tournaments under the flag of the nation on the Iberian peninsula. “But I always wanted to play for Australia. I was also never seen as a Spanish player,” says De Minaur, who is not a classic baseline player, but often seeks his way to the net. “I was too aggressive, too overloaded. I’ve always enjoyed playing my own way.”
This style of play brought him from 208th place at the beginning of the year to his current career high of 38th place in the current season, reaching a final on the ATP tour in Sydney for the first time in his career and ending in the final against Alexander Zverev in the 500s tournament in Washington.
A place at the ATP NextGen Finals should be certain for him, and he also achieved his first tournament victory on the Nottingham turf on the Challenger Tour. He surprised again at the Rogers Cup in August, but that was because he refused a wild card for the Masters to give his body a break. An extremely mature decision that helped him to enter the third round of the US Open a few weeks later.
With the successes of the last weeks and months, De Minaur, a passionate golfer, is also a dangerous weapon for the Davis Cup playoff in Graz. Above all, his mental strength is also reflected in the statistics. In the under-pressure ranking of the ATP, De Minaur ranks 19th, well ahead of Dominic Thiem (38th).
De Minaur wins above-average tiebreaks and is also hard to beat in decisive sets. Somewhere a sign of some ungraspable, uncanny power.
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