ABU DHABI: When Borna Coric was just 17 years old and ranked 124 in the world, he shocked third-ranked Rafael Nadal during their first-ever meeting in Basel, in 2014.
At 18, the Croatian broke into the top-40 rankings for the first time and by 22 he hit a career-high No. 12. Now 26 years old, Coric, who was considered a teenage phenomenon, is brutally honest when assessing his own career progression.
“When I was No. 33 in the world — probably at my best at the time I was 18, 19 — I wasn’t able to deal with it,” Coric told Arab News ahead of his Mubadala World Tennis Championship debut on Friday.
“I just got way too… I thought, it’s going to be much, much easier. I thought, okay now I’m top-30 and next year I’m going to be top-15, next year I’m going to be top-five, and the year after that I’m going to be No. 1 or top-three. And I stopped working hard. I got very complacent.
“I didn’t actually improve my tennis and I felt those three or four years, between 2015 and 2019, I was just there on the same level, pretty much. If you watch my game when I was 18 and when I was 22, it was pretty much the same. And then if you watch my game, I feel at least when I was 24 and now, it’s a big, big difference.”
Coric is a last-minute replacement for Frances Tiafoe in Abu Dhabi this weekend, where he will take on Andrey Rublev in his opening match on Friday. The winner of that clash will face Carlos Alcaraz, who at the age of 19 is already a Grand Slam champion and the reigning world No. 1.
“What he’s doing is absolutely unbelievable,” Coric said of Alcaraz. “It’s very good for him that he has such a good team around him. They know what they need to do to keep him on the same level, being No. 1, or just being at the top.
“He’s an unbelievable player, an unbelievable talent and I know he’s a very, very good guy, I know him very well.
“I have absolutely no doubt that he’s going to stay there. If you’re asking about me, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it at that age for sure.”
Now older, wiser, and looking to put behind him a shoulder injury that sidelined him for a year, Coric explained what triggered his desire to change his approach to tennis and figure out a way to develop his game to its full potential.
“Probably just seeing that I was stuck at pretty much the same place for three years,” he said. “I just realized I need to change something, I need to focus more on the game, I need to study the game more.
“I was always working hard but I just felt that in those three years, which are very, very important in my opinion because there you can improve a lot and you don’t need to worry much about everything else, I just didn’t improve.
“I would just play the tennis to play it, I would just train to train, but I wasn’t training on my weaknesses, I was not thinking why I lost. My mentality was not so focused on the tennis.
“Nowadays I always try to see why I played badly. I try to understand, if I was slow that day, why I was slow. If I was tired, I try to understand why I was tired and then, obviously, I try to implement that in my training sessions. I just think there is way more thought given to my training and my tennis than when I was younger.”
After undergoing shoulder surgery and spending 12 months on the sidelines, Coric returned to action at Indian Wells in March but suffered a string of early, three-set defeats that resulted in him dropping as low as 278 in the world rankings.
He began to find his game again after the French Open, clinching a Challenger title on clay in June. Two months later, the Zagreb native stunned the field at the Masters 1000 event in Cincinnati, defeating three top-10 players — Nadal, Felix Auger-Aliassime and Stefanos Tsitsipas — en route to claiming the biggest title of his career.
It was a remarkable run, which helped Coric return to the world’s top 30 and contributed to him being named the 2022 Comeback Player of the Year.
Reflecting on his first few weeks back on tour earlier this season, when the results were not going his way, Coric said: “It was not very easy for sure. I lost a couple of matches that were very, very tight.
“Having the ranking I had back then, I saw I was spending all of my protected rankings and not making much of the points. Obviously you can get a little bit panicky and it adds extra pressure.
“But at the same time I knew I needed to keep working hard. I think the good part was also that I didn’t think much about my tennis because my shoulder was still not 100 percent, so I had pains and niggles and it would be up and down. So when I was losing, I was probably more focused on recovery and my shoulder. That’s why I didn’t think much about tennis.
“I probably started to think more about tennis after the French Open, when I started to play Challengers. Then I was able to focus more on the tennis and not think so much about my shoulder.”
Coric said he has two main goals for 2023: To stay healthy for the whole season and to “attack the top 10 again.” He added that he now has a better understanding of what it takes to be a top-10 player compared with five years ago and will not be disappointed if he is unable to join that elite ranking bracket. The most important thing, he explained, is that he knows he gave it his best shot.
“If I finish top-15 and if I give my best in the whole season, which I will, I’ll still sleep well at night,” he said.
The world No. 26 was training in Dubai with his coach, Mate Delic, and fitness trainer and physiotherapist Yiani Louizos when he got the call to replace Tiafoe in the Abu Dhabi exhibition tournament.
Further testament to his work ethic is the fact that Coric opted not to go to Qatar to watch Croatia face Argentina in the World Cup semi-finals, instead opting to maintain his strict training regimen.
“I was thinking whether to go there or not but then I knew I probably wouldn’t be doing this interview if I’m there,” he said. “I would have probably been very tired from the game and from the night so I decided to stay healthy and to be professional.
“Croatia has had an absolutely amazing run; I was enjoying watching the games. We watched every game here, from Dubai. There isn’t much I can say other than they did an unbelievable job and hopefully we can win the (third-place) medal now, it’s going to be tough but that’s what we’re hoping for.”
