Berasategui, Alberto

Alberto Berasategui began to play tennis at the age of seven. A young native of Basque Bilbao studied in the USA with the famous coach Harry Hopman , and no one heard about him in Spain until at the age of 14 he unexpectedly won the Manuel Alonso Prize, defeating Alex Corretha in the final ^[1] . In 1991, he won the individual European Junior Tennis Championships and helped the Spanish youth team win two European team tournaments ^[2] . In the same year, Berasategui began his professional career. In March 1992, he reached the semifinals of the APR tournament in Casablanca ; taking the 280th place in the ranking , he defeated two rivals from the first hundred before losing to the 45th racket of the world Guillermo Peres-Roldanu . Then Berasategui reached the finals of the Challenger tournament in Italy and by the end of the season he climbed to 118th position in the hierarchy of the strongest tennis players in the world.

In February 1993, Berasategui won his first Challenger on clay courts of the Argentine Mar del Plata . In July, at a tournament in Stuttgart , for the first time in his career, he defeated an opponent from the top ten in the ranking - another representative of Spain, the fifth racket of the world Sergi Brugere , and from August to November he reached the final of the ATP Tour tournaments four times, winning one of them. During these months he rose in the ranking from 83rd to 36th place. Success continued the following year: starting the clay season was not very successful, Berasategui already won his second title in the third tournament after it started, defeating Stefan Edberg and Jim Courier in the ranking, who respectively occupied the third and fourth places, and unexpectedly made it in early summer to the final of the French Open after defeating the fifth racket of the world Goran Ivanishevich . In the final, he lost in four sets to Bruger. After that, Berasategui reached the 14th place in the ranking, and in July, having won the tournament in Stuttgart, he entered the top ten for the first time. By the end of the year, he won five more ATP tour tournaments and one Challenger on the ground, rising to eighth place in the ranking and securing his participation in the ATP World Championship and Grand Slam Cup - annual tennis tournaments that showed the best results during the season. On the carpet, however, he was unable to confront the other strongest players, losing twice to Michael Chang and once to Bruger and Andre Agassi .

1994 was the best year in Berasategui's career. 20 weeks after the start of the new season, he dropped out of the top ten and for the remainder of the season played in only two finals, having won one title. 1996 turned out to be better than the previous one, bringing Berasategui three victories in three finals of the ATR unpaved tournaments and two more in the “challengers”, so he managed to return to the Top-20 of the world ranking and finish the season in 19th place. After a two-year break, he also once again managed to get the better of an opponent from the top ten (ninth racket of the world, Richard Kraichek ) and for the first time in his career to get to the semi-finals not on the ground, but on the hard surface (in Scottsdale, USA).

After five years of playing in professional tournaments, Berasategui suffered injuries, and his right-handed kick, on which his entire game was built (see. Style of play ), lost stability. In 1997, he still managed to win the national championship of Spain ^[2] , but success in international tournaments began to decline, and he only occasionally managed to once again show his best game. From 1997 to 1999, Berasategui, who began to divide attention between singles and doubles, played a total of nine times in the finals of ATP tournaments (five times in singles and four in pairs) and won three more titles (respectively two and one) . Although he was not able to repeat his success at the French Open, he accounted for reaching the finals of the prestigious Barcelona tournament in 1998 and the semifinals of the Italian Open in 1997, both times after defeating Evgeny Kafelnikov , a top-ten player at that time. At the Australian Open 1998, Berasategui showed his second result in Grand Slam tournaments by beating the second racket of the world, court master Patrick Rafter on his way to the quarterfinals. He played his last final at the APR tournament in October 1999 in Palermo, and completed his performances at the age of 27, in the spring of 2001, referring to the fact that he can no longer move as fast as before, his right shot lost his strength, and his Arancha’s wife is expecting a baby ^[1] . This happened a few months after the first and last career appearance at the Wimbledon tournament ^[3] .

The peculiar playing style of Berasategui was suitable mainly for “slow” clay courts. He held the racket, twisting the brush so hard that this grip could not be called western, and for fun it was called "Hawaiian." This allowed him to send heavily twisted balls, playing with an open racket, but created inconvenience when playing closed: Berasategui did not have enough time to intercept the hilt, and in the end he played on the left as unusual as on the right - the same side of the racket ^[3] . The bizarre grip also almost deprived him of the opportunity to play on the net, which did not allow him to stay among the best players in the world for a long time. The quick coverings of his weaknesses were especially noticeable, and their culmination came precisely during the years of his highest take-off, when in 1995 he lost both his Davis Cup meetings on hard courts to much less eminent rivals from the Mexican national team ^[1] .

Despite the oddities of style, Berasategui was helped out by the highest speed of moving around the court ^[1] , as well as the fact that he was an extremely stubborn and tactically inventive opponent, forcing his opponents to “lay out” balls for him to hit with an open racket. It was possible to defeat him not by tactics, but by brute force, “knocking” him off the court, which was mainly succeeded by Sergi Bruger, Andre Agassi and another great master of playing on the ground - Thomas Muster ^[3] .

Singles (0 + 1)

Defeat (1)

Singles (14 + 9)

Doubles (1 + 3)

• Profile on ATP website

• Profile on ITF website
• Profile on the Davis Cup website