Watching Lleyton Hewitt at the US Open this year has been a fascinating exercise. Australia’s Davis Cup captain has been courtside for as many of his players’ matches as has been physically possible, always positive, always supportive. Once a volatile character on the court, especially as a youngster, Hewitt has been a vision of calm, his presence enough, seemingly, to inspire the best out of the next generation of Australian players.
And they really have been inspired. Led by Alex de Minaur, a man cut from the same cloth as Hewitt in terms of game-style, Australia’s men have enjoyed a brilliant US Open. Of the 12 men in the draw, four made it to the third round for the first time since 1997 and three – De Minaur, Jordan Thompson and Alexei Popyin – reached round four, the best effort since 1988. Popyrin’s win over Novak Djokovic in the third round signalled a major personal breakthrough, Thanasi Kokkinakis showed what he can do when he beat Stefanos Tsitsipas in the first round and De Minaur has now made the quarters in each of the past three.
It is still too early to say if any of them will step up to match the exploits of Pat Rafter, who won the title here in 1997 and 1998, or Mark Philippoussis, who lost out to Rafter in the second of those finals and reached the Wimbledon final in 2003. But in De Minaur, who beat Thompson to make the quarter-finals and will be favourite to beat Jack Draper next up, Australia has someone who is a threat in the biggest events and who, by extension, is inspiring and pulling his countrymen along with him.
Whether Nick Kyrgios, the most recent Australian to make a grand slam final, at Wimbledon in 2021, will return to boost the ranks even further remains to be seen after his struggles to regain full fitness after wrist surgery. But even without him, there are now 10 Australian men in the world’s top 100. With De Minaur in the top 10 and Popyrin and Thompson sitting at or near career-high rankings of 23 and 29 respectively, there can be no doubt that things are moving in the right direction.
The progress of Popyrin, in particular, has been little short of spectacular. His victory in Montreal last month, when he beat Tomas Machac, Ben Shelton, Grigor Dimitrov, Hubert Hurkacz, Seb Korda and Andrey Rublev, made him the first Australian since Hewitt, in 2003, to win a Masters 1000 title. Upsetting Djokovic proved to himself that he belongs at the top level and though his defeat by Frances Tiafoe in the fourth round here was a missed opportunity, he has moved up a couple of levels.
“Look, I’m telling everybody now, if you would have told me at the start of the summer I would have been 23 in the world with a Masters title and second week of a slam for the first time, I probably would have taken it considering the position I was in,” he said. “If I hadn’t won a match in Montreal or Cincy, I probably would have dropped to outside 90 in the world. So considering all that, I think it was a very successful summer.”
De Minaur has been taking care of business in typically impressive fashion, his recovery from the hip injury that forced him out at Wimbledon going better than even he anticipated. But the 25-year-old has also kept a close eye on his Davis Cup teammates, players he has grown up with and whom he now inspires through his professionalism. Popyrin, he believes, is a new man.
“He’s always had this big game, right?” De Minaur said. “But for me, the way I’m seeing it is, in his mind, it’s clicked. It’s clicked with his game style, what he wants to do every time he steps on court. And he believes. So much in this game, it’s about belief. I struggled with that belief, to take it to the next level. And I’m just happy to see Popyrin breaking through those barriers. In my eyes, I think once you break through, you never look back. I think we were going to see some really, really great things.”
Davis Cup is in Australia’s DNA, with Hewitt maintaining the push for glory. As De Minaur said earlier this week, reaching the finals in each of the last two years, punching above their weight, showed the strength in depth they possess. Winning it is a definite goal.
“It’s very important,” Popyrin said. “I think the last two years we’ve become finalists, and we really want to win one. It’s top of our priority all year long, so we’ve always made ourselves available. It’s a huge opportunity for us to test ourselves against the best teams in the world, best countries in the world. We’re back-to-back finalists so we’ve got to hold ourselves up and show what we’re made of there.”
