“I was always dreaming about tattoos and I was dreaming about tigers. It happened for one week, two weeks, three weeks and then one day I woke up and said, “Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to get this tiger tattoo.”—Aryna Sabalenka
January, 2022: A tiger blocks Sabalenka’s path. Fear, then more fear. She cannot move. Her nightmare begins: the worst service yips in history. Her fans and supporters crying at first, then laughing wildly, as her serves land everywhere: beyond the baseline, way out wide, bottom of the net. The tiger growls, then roars. Super soft serves, underhand serves.
It’s a few weeks before the 2022 Aussie Open. Sabalenka confronts the fear. There is a technical glitch in her second serve, yes, but the bigger problem is uncontrolled desire. She wanted to win so badly she often lost control when things did not go her way. Tightness, nerves. Wild emotional swings. Panic, even, when she would miss a shot she would have to hit again. She needed to learn breath, calmness. She needed to learn one of the great secrets of tennis: short-term memory loss to avoid the resulting scar tissue. She needed to tame the tiger within while allowing the tiger to be the tiger it is. As Sabalenka put it: “I’m the tiger. I don’t need to be afraid of something, I just need to go for it.”
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