By Chris Oddo | Thursday, March 20, 2014
Bernard Tomic suffered the quickest defeat in ATP history on Thursday in Miami, but he got some support from his camp in the aftermath.
Photo Source: Corleve
While Lleyton Hewitt did Australia proud by notching his 600th career ATP victory on Thursday at the Sony Open in Miami, Bernard Tomic was drawing the ire of fans both at home and abroad after suffering a 6-0, 6-1 thrashing at the hands of Jarkko Nieminen that proved to be the shortest loss in ATP history (see a video of match point below).
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Naturally Tomic, who has built a reputation for tanking and wavering concentration (and other more sordid affairs, just google him if you don't know), took some heat for his new record. Here's a small sample of the myriad tweets that called out Tomic for his latest head scratcher:
But one of the members of Tomic's current team, sports performance specialist Allistair McCaw (who has worked with numerous players, including Svetlana Kuznetsova, Xavier Malisse and Monica Puig), came to Tomic's defense on Facebook. “It seems certain people thrive on other's misfortunes,” wrote McCaw, who has been helping Tomic rehab from a double hip surgery for the last five weeks along with Lleyton Hewitt's physio, Ivan Gutierrez.
“At the Australian open this year, he got hammered by media saying he was faking and tanked, only to have double hip surgery 4 days later,” McCaw continued. “I didn't see any media saying 'sorry Bernie, we were wrong.'”
McCaw says that Tomic was out there only five weeks into his rehabilitation because the ATP fines and awards zero points to players for missing tournaments. “Bernard's choice was simple,” McCaw writes. “Get on and off the court ASAP. Maybe it's a message to the system and what value it has in the end.”
The full text of McCaw's Facebook post can be found here.
It still remains unclear why Tomic couldn't resist playing Miami if he was nowhere close to being fit. Would a drop in the rankings really be worse than what happened today? Nevertheless, it's good to see someone coming out in defense of Tomic. Kudos to McCaw for having Bernie's back.
This isn't the first time that Tomic has had trouble in Miami. In 2012, he made news when he asked the umpire to remove his father from his box during a match with David Ferrer.
In 2013, Tomic was booed by fans after losing 20 of the final 24 points to Andy Murray.
McCaw certainly has good points regarding today's incident, but Tomic's lack of mental fortitude during times when he was healthy have led people to believe that today's incident was just another episode of mental frailty for the immensely talented 21-year-old.