Holger Rune burned through the coach. He brought in Boris Becker and Severin Luthi for 2023, but now those coaches are gone. Rooney saw his form improve towards the end of 2023 with the help of Becker, but has not won a title since claiming the trophy at the Munich Open last April. It was just a 250-person event.
Rune has competed in three games this year. He reached the final at the Brisbane International, which opened in 2024, but lost to Grigor Dimitrov. The Dane was eliminated in the second round of the Australian Open. Rooney reached the semi-finals of the Montpellier Open, but withdrew due to an arm injury 3-6 1-4. Or maybe he just knew he was going to fail and quit.
Something clearly happened to Rune. In the second season of the Netflix documentary Breakpoint, he comes across as a bit like a spoiled brat. His mother seemed to control his career and everything he did. Maybe the docuseries just showed him to be different than who he really was, but at least an overbearing mother and Ruane’s over-the-top attitude toward tennis could explain his constant changes in coaching.
Tennis commentator Mark Page recently said on Tennis Channel that it was strange that Rooney had lost so much coaching, and that it was strange that Page found out that Becker and Luci left Rooney for the same reason. Both said they didn’t have the time to devote to the Rune project. Or as Page puts it, “If you’ve ever been in a situation like this, when you go in to coach a player, the first thing you have to do is how much time you have to give, so I don’t know if everybody is It’s trying to cover up the other root cause, which is feeling.”
In completely different news, French player Richard Gasquet recently compared Novak Djokovic to the NBA’s Michael Jordan. That argument makes sense, right? Djokovic and Jordan are arguably the two best players of all time in their respective sports. But Nick Kyrgios dismissed comparisons to Gasquet and added another.
In Eurosport’s Instagram post, they quoted Kyrgios as saying: “No. (Djokovic) is LeBron (James). LeBron is still doing it at 40. Jordan stopped earlier, And not as dominant.”
I know Kyrgios is a die-hard NBA fan and he also knows a lot about basketball, but his level is not as good as Jordan and James. Of course, both were great, but Jordan came out of retirement a second time and played for the Washington Wizards at age 38 and 39. In terms of dominance, maybe Kyrgios means player production. In terms of leadership, Jordan won an NBA championship in six of the seven years he played between the ages of 27 and 34. This is dominance.