Stefanos Tsitsipas Picks Up Doubles Tennis and His Kid Brother

This is the place Stefanos is useful. Because of his excessive singles rating (at the moment No. 5), the Tsitsipas brothers can get into big-time tournaments that Petros may not have certified for with a lower-ranked associate. Also, given Stefanos’s star energy, match organizers usually tend to supply them a wild-card entry into the doubles draw.

That stated, for Petros to climb the doubles rankings in a approach he was not capable of in singles, he has to play extra than simply eight or 9 occasions a 12 months with Stefanos, to study the sport and win as a lot attainable. Lately, when his older brother has not been obtainable, he has been taking part in in tournaments on the Challenger tour with Sander Arends, a 31-year-old from the Netherlands who by no means cracked the highest 1,000 in singles however is ranked 98th in doubles. Last 12 months, Petros had a special teammate practically each week. He has climbed to a hundred and fifteenth within the rankings, from under 400 two years in the past.

“It’s like learning to play chess,” Petros stated.

He can discover a straightforward function mannequin throughout the locker room. Jamie Murray spent years making an attempt to be referred to as one thing apart from the brother of Andy Murray, who in 2013 grew to become the primary man from Britain in 77 years to win Wimbledon.

Jamie Murray stated he nonetheless hears individuals say, “That’s Andy Murray’s brother” when he walks across the grounds of a tennis match, one thing he realized to just accept years in the past.

“No point to fighting it,” he stated.

But Murray stated he sensed that folks stopped pondering of him as a sibling of somebody higher at his sport than he was after 2016. All it took was pairing along with his brother to win the Davis Cup and changing into the world’s top-ranked doubles participant — the identical 12 months his brother grew to become the top-ranked singles participant.

Now he sees Petros making an attempt to perform the identical factor, to make his personal approach with individuals taking a look at him largely as simply somebody’s brother.

“It’s not easy,” he stated.