Tennis: At the Australian Open, Shang Juncheng leads wave of talent from China

China's Shang Juncheng hits a return against Germany's Oscar Otte during their match at the Australian Open on Monday. PHOTO: AFP

MELBOURNE – Shang Juncheng could have chosen his father’s sport of football or his mother’s sport of table tennis. His father, Shang Yi, was a leading Chinese midfielder, good enough to play for the national team. His mother, Wu Na, was a world champion in doubles.

Instead, their son became a tennis player, leaving home in Beijing at age 11 to train at an academy in Florida.

On Monday in Melbourne, it looked as if he had made a wise choice. Shang, a 17-year-old qualifier and the youngest player in the men’s draw, showed rare skill and maturity as he made his Grand Slam tournament debut and became the first Chinese man to win an Australian Open singles match in the Open era.

He did it with a gritty, often-pretty victory, 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (2-7), 7-5 on opening day over Oscar Otte, an unseeded 29-year-old German with a booming serve and a full beard. Shang, who will face American Frances Tiafoe in the second round on Wednesday, did it on Court 13 with hundreds of fans packed into the grandstand and shouting encouragement in Mandarin and English.

“I felt like I was playing at home,” he said.

Shang, nicknamed Jerry, speaks both languages fluently after spending so much of his youth in the United States. Although he was interested in football in his early years, he said his mother suggested tennis because she believed there were fewer injuries. Shang first played on an indoor hard court in Beijing and said he liked it from the start.

“For me, the main goal was to become a professional tennis player, even when I was six or seven years old,” he said in an interview. “We started practising in Beijing. That’s where I started on an indoor hard court, and my dad used to play soccer in Spain, so he really liked the system and the way the Spanish athletes work.”

But instead of basing themselves in Spain, the family chose for Shang to train at the Emilio Sanchez Academy operated by the former Spanish ATP player in Naples, Florida.

Shang later moved to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, a long-time hub of the game, and he is managed by IMG, an agency that represents several other Chinese players, including Li Na, who is retired.

Li became the first Chinese Grand Slam singles champion, winning the 2011 French and the 2014 Australian titles. The Chinese men have long lagged, and progress has been slow. At the 2013 Australian Open, Wu Di became the first Chinese man to play in a major tournament in the Open era, which began in 1968. It took nearly a decade for a Chinese man to win a singles match in a Grand Slam.

But Shang, once the world’s top-ranked junior, is the youngest member of a promising new wave that includes Wu Yibing, 23, and Zhang Zhizhen, 26.

All three were in the main draw this year in Melbourne. It is the first time three Chinese men have played singles in one Grand Slam in the Open era.

On Monday, while Shang was breaking through on Court 13, Wu was on adjacent Court 14, playing grinding rallies with Corentin Moutet of France before losing in five sets.

Wu, who also trains at the IMG Academy, reached the third round of last year’s US Open, where Zhang lost in the first round. Now, Shang, a dynamic left-hander who looks like the most promising talent of the group, has joined them at this level.

“Now we have three players in the top 200, and I’m happy that I’m one of them,” he said. “The other two are like older brothers to me and have been on the tour a lot longer than me. We do practise a lot, and we do speak about how the game is right now and how we can push forward to a higher ranking. “For me, each step is a learning step right now. I’m in a young stage of my career, only my second year playing professional tennis. So, for me, it’s just watching how they do things, like we’ve also watched Li Na and how she did things.”

Shang said his parents nicknamed him Jerry when he was very young after the mouse in the Tom And Jerry cartoons.

“Tom was the one always getting in trouble and Jerry was the smart one, so they thought it was better to choose Jerry,” he said.

He plays tennis cleverly, changing gears and speed often to avoid giving opponents a consistent rhythm. But his top gear is impressive, particularly when he is dictating terms with his quick-strike forehand. Against Otte, he showed a deft volleying touch, as well as plenty of composure: avoiding the temptation to rush between points and gathering himself. He finished off the victory with a bold, leaping backhand winner.

“He’s a complete player,” said his new coach, Dante Bottini. “He can read the court and the game very well, so that’s what surprised me the most when I started working with him. He knows a lot about the game for someone at his age.”

Bottini coached Japanese star Kei Nishikori and worked more recently with Chilean Nicolas Jarry and Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov, both of whom sometimes practised with Shang at the IMG Academy.

He began coaching Shang in the pre-season after being recruited by Li Xi, Shang’s primary agent, a former Chinese player who was on the women’s team at the University of Virginia and was sitting courtside on Monday next to Shang’s father.

Shang has had no shortage of coaches in his short career, including Marcelo Rios, a former No. 1 from Chile who worked with him for a brief period in 2022. Although Shang won his first Challenger title in Lexington, Kentucky, during their collaboration, they soon split.

“It was sad it didn’t work out in the end, but he did bring things to my game,” he said.

Once ranked No. 1 on the ATP Tour, Rios, like Shang, is a left-hander, but Shang said his biggest source of inspiration has been another left-handed No. 1: Rafael Nadal.

Shang first saw him play in person at the men’s ATP event in Beijing. While he has not returned to China since he was 14 because of the pandemic, he is eager to play there again once the country, which is reopening, allows international tournaments such as the Beijing event or the Masters 1000 in Shanghai to resume.

“It would be great to play at home in China,” he said.

For now, considering the supportive atmosphere on Monday, he will have to settle for playing at home in Australia. But he should face a bigger challenge in Tiafoe, a 2022 US Open semi-finalist who is seeded No. 16 in Melbourne.

Bottini said: “He has a lot of potential, as we can all see, but we need to go little by little. I think he has a big career ahead of him.”
NYTIMES

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