It was recently announced that a WTA tournament will be staged this October in Monastir, Tunisia, and I couldn’t be happier.
It’s a lot of pressure but it’s a good kind of pressure, the kind that helps you perform well in front of your home crowd. It’s great to see that we are evolving and are staging bigger tournaments in Tunisia. I’m glad the Tunisian tennis federation and my country have taken this big step. It’s also nice to see more and more tournaments staged in Africa, in general. Hopefully it’s going to be a great one. I cannot wait to invite every player to come and play and hopefully they will have a great first impression of Tunisia.
The tournament will take place in the same town that is home to the very first club I ever practiced at. It’s going to be in a hotel and they’re building a big center court with several outside courts. I do my preseason training block there every year and it’s a great place. Hopefully I’ll have a home court advantage. The crowd will be there to support me for sure.
It’s also great they are giving more importance to women’s sport. I think in Tunisia specifically, when a Tunisian woman or a man does something good, the people automatically get interested in that sport. So since they have me in tennis, they’re following tennis more and more. I know some Tunisians who have told me they previously followed Nadal and Federer and now don’t even know what the guys are doing, so now they’re just following me and following women’s tennis. This is a great thing. Hopefully people will discover more and more about women’s tennis because there really are some amazing players on the WTA tour.
I saw what Andrea Petkovic said about the WTA being a very competitive environment but that it also felt like a sisterhood. I think before it was tougher to feel the sisterhood part. Some players tend to forget they are human beings. But now I feel like that has changed. With time, I have come to feel very close to a lot of players.
I am someone who loves to put the human being before the player, so it’s nice to talk to my peers on tour about so many things. I even offer them help from time to time. I don’t see it as: “Okay, if I’m going to help you, you’re going to beat me later.” Or anything like that. It is a family to me, the WTA, and I think there is more and more humanity on tour right now, which is really great. And I hope we can continue evolving in that way, because I feel as women, we should stick together.
It’s the opposite of what some outsiders think it is; like we’re fighting in the locker room or something. No way! We are actually nice to each other and are very supportive of each other. Sometimes a player would come to me and say: “You deserve to be on a big court, why did they schedule you on that court? You deserve better.” Which is really unbelievable to come from another player, but it’s true. We care about each other.
New York has been fun so far and I’m happy to have gotten through my first two matches at the US Open. I got to meet lots of people including Seal, the British singer. It’s the second time that I have met him; the first time was in Indian Wells.
I saw him the other day in the players’ area and he was like: “Nice to see you again.” I know he’s a huge tennis fan and he said: “I was supporting you at Wimbledon, my heart was with you.” It’s nice to have that kind of support, and you could see he is very passionate about my game; he calls it the “sneaky game,” because he knows I hit a lot of drop shots and slices. He said I was representing all of Africa, that I’m being a great example and he loves it every time I send that powerful message. It’s very nice of him really.
It’s important to me to use my platform to speak about things I believe in. But I also have to be very careful because some people can misunderstand my views. I think if you decide to stand up for what you believe in, you have to accept that there will be a lot of people that can criticize you for that, which is very powerful to understand at that stage. I love what Coco Gauff is doing, I love what so many players are doing with their platform. Definitely I want to get more involved and speak up about so many things and help my country more.
On the court, one of my goals is to become world No. 1. It’s a process and it will take time. The process has already started though and I feel if everything goes well, hopefully by next year I can really achieve that goal. Still, for me, the ranking is not as important as my game. I need to improve my game to really deserve that spot, to really handle the pressure of being No. 1 and keep going. I feel like Iga Swiatek is doing a great job at handling that top position and she deserves to be there, for now (laughs). She pushes me to do better, I definitely push her to do better, and all of us are trying to inspire each other and hopefully the entire top 10 field will be even stronger than before.
- Tunisia’s world No. 5 Ons Jabeur was talking to Reem Abulleil in New York ahead of her third round clash with American Shelby Rogers scheduled for Friday
