There’s more to Gallatin’s Tennys Sandgren, rising tennis star, than a fitting name – Tennessean
He’s famous, this guy.
No, really.
Just a week before, he’d been on televisions worldwide, delighting a packed stadium, within one shot of upsetting the great Roger Federer to reach the semifinals of the Australian Open, tennis’ first 2020 grand slam.
But you’d never know it as Tennys Sandgren sat in a coffee shop near Vanderbilt’s campus, sipping a latte. One of the world’s best tennis players, completely unrecognized in his own city and comforted by that fact.
“I love being in Nashville. I love being in Middle Tennessee. It’s home for me,” Sandgren said. “It’s nice to go to a place that’s kind of outside of the tennis world. … Outside of tennis tournaments, I’m hardly ever recognized in the U.S.”
Born and raised in Gallatin, Sandgren still lives there when he’s not traveling the globe, which is often the case in non-pandemic conditions.
With the ATP Tour, like the rest of the sporting world right now, sidelined by the COVID-19 crisis, Sandgren’s ranking sits at No. 55.
A 28-year-old who was at the University of Tennessee about a decade ago, Sandgren is a solid, workmanlike player with a career that has reflected it. He has paid his dues in pro tennis, climbing the ladder through years of lower-tier tournaments, hungry competitors, small crowds and smaller paydays.
One might call him a journeyman if not for the oversized reputation.
Or a nagging sense that there could be much more out there for him on the court.
He’s again sniffing the big-time, a budding international sports star, but nothing as you’d expect. Sandgren, instead, has an easy-going, everyman quality. He has “stuck to his roots,” in the words of Chris Woodruff, current Vols men’s tennis coach who was an assistant when Sandgren played in Knoxville.
“He’s not doing it for the glamour or the glitz or notoriety,” Woodruff said. “This is just kind of who he is.”
And to begin to get to know Tennys Sandgren is to realize you didn’t know him at all.
“It’s almost like getting used to being misunderstood,” he said. “… At this point, I feel like most reasonable people are pretty chill. There are still some people that really don’t like me at all, but I feel like there would be absolutely nothing I could do to change those peoples’ minds.”
A name for the game
Inside a singular pursuit like tennis, Sandgren can’t help but stand out.
Some of that is notoriety. Some of that is his unique name: “Tennys.” Pronounced just like the sport.
“He was not going to be a baseball player, that’s for sure,” Federer told John McEnroe with a laugh during an on-court interview at the Australian Open.
“I never played baseball. He called that one right,” Sandgren said. “Yeah, it’s a family sport. Everyone in my family played (tennis), my parents and my older brother. I loved to play, and I enjoyed the one-on-one aspect of it. I didn’t really like team sports that much.”
He was named after his great-grandfather. His parents had moved from South Africa to Tennessee, and Tennys was coached by his mother, Lia Sandgren. As a kid, he and his older brother Davey – who also played at UT – would load up in a van and go all over the place.
“To make it work on a tight budget, with the travel, going to tournaments and national events, it was a challenge,” Sandgren said. “To have done it from here (in Tennessee) – which is not known for its tennis prowess – is cool. I do take pride in that.”
Sandgren didn’t attend traditional high school – focusing fully on tennis, which is common for top players – and spent only two years at UT before turning pro, though he was on the 2010 team that reached the NCAA final.
He didn’t crack the world’s top 100 until late 2017, closing a long period during which Sandgren battled injuries (like a hip surgery in 2014) and toiled and worried about wasting his 20s. He eventually concluded he was better at this than he could be at anything else, so he kept swinging.
“As the wins kind of come,” he said, “your perspective kind of changes and what you think you can do increases. When I was making the first run at Australia in 2018, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m playing with these guys.’ ”
Wins, fame and controversy
The 2018 Australian Open should have been a wonderful memory for Sandgren, but it’s not. That was when he burst onto the stage, coming from relative obscurity to reach the quarterfinals of a major tournament, beating a pair of top-10 opponents in Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem.
The five-set win over Thiem in the Round of 16 was “the biggest win of my career,” Sandgren said.
“I was feeling over the moon about that result, but at the same time just dealing with a lot of stress and anxiety outside of that.”
Sandgren’s sudden success on the court created unprecedented attention off it, and his run in Australia rapidly became controversial for reasons outside of tennis. He ended up deleting Twitter posts after journalists questioned some of the political views expressed in his social-media activity, including his retweeting of an alt-right personality.
A stigma has been created. At the time, Sandgren rebuffed the perception, reading a statement to media at a press conference and saying, “With a handful of follows and some likes on Twitter, my fate has been sealed in your minds.”
“It was frustrating,” he said, looking back at the ordeal. “None of the conversations that I was able to have in those interviews or press conferences was over anything of substance. It was all just broad questions, people making up their minds already rather than having a conversation about stuff, which I’ve always done with people, regardless of something as asinine as political orientation. … I’m not a fan of labeling people and assuming that their beliefs go down some sort of a line. Most people have a very mixed bag of beliefs. To assume otherwise, I just think it’s wrong.”
Sandgren remains a prolific – and entertaining – personality on Twitter, though he admits that he learned to be more careful in such a platform.
It can be too easy, he said, for things to be assumed or taken in the worst possible way.
“When you meet someone face to face, what are the chances that you take their worst possible intention, just in a face-to-face reaction? You don’t,” he said. “… When it comes just between a screen, you lose that. It’s easier to say things that you wouldn’t say otherwise. That goes both ways. I’m not just putting that on other people. I put that on myself, too.”
Changing of the guard
Men’s tennis remains a headline-grabber in plenty of other countries. It has generally ceased to be in the United States. No American man has won a grand slam singles title since Andy Roddick way back in 2003.
“Unfortunately, tennis doesn’t get our best athletes. It just doesn’t,” Sandgren said. “I mean, imagine if LeBron James played tennis. It’d be silly.”
Sandgren’s No. 55 ranking has him fifth among American men, though his latest run to the Australian Open quarterfinals suggested he had perhaps recaptured something that might be sustainable – if he can stay healthy.
Big if there. Untimely injuries have gotten in the way previously.
Just in the past few years – the most successful of Sandren’s career – he’s dealt with a stress reaction in his arm that caused “miserable pain” and sidelined him after the 2018 success in Australia. There was a fractured toe. Knee pain that accompanied him back from Australia this time barely merited a mention.
“I would love to see where I could get to if I do stay healthy for the whole time,” Sandgren said.
The five-set loss to Federer – he never won that match point despite seven tries at it – was tough to take and encouraging at the same time.
The book on Sandgren: He’s a good athlete. He moves well for his 6-foot-2 size and has good instincts, things you can’t teach. Plus, he’s in great shape – and he needs to be. He’s known for counter-punching, running down a lot of balls, making his opponent keep hitting one more shot.
There’s upside in that. Such a strategy can frustrate the game’s best players, but it’s a tough way to make a living. It can be punishing physically and might have something to do with all those injuries.
With the urging of his new coach – former touring pro Michael Russell joined up with him last year – Sandgren has tried to be more offensive and more aggressive at times.
“He’s in the prime of his career,” Russell said. “He’s in a good situation with a good opportunity to really push the envelope these next two years.”
Sandgren tossed out “top 10” or “top 15” as goals for this year, at least before the coronavirus put a halt to matches.
Ambitious, sure, but not far-fetched. He is emerging as a promising candidate about the same time that aging royals like Federer and Rafael Nadal are nearing retirement.
It’s an interesting time for tennis. And perhaps for Tennys, as well.
“His game was always good enough. But his mind has gotten stronger,” Woodruff said. “… I think when there’s a changing of the guard, if you will, he’s going to be in those 20 or 30 guys you’ll see make a difference in our sport.”
Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.
Published 11:00 PM EDT Mar 29, 2020
