NEW YORK—Summer has been a season of loss for Alexander Zverev.
The ATP Finals champion lost his confidence, split with coach Ivan Lendl and saw his once vaunted serve go MIA for stretches.
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The former world No. 3 arrives at his least successful Grand Slam, the US Open, with one main mission: find his game.
"First of all, I need to get my game back," Zverev told the media in his pre-tournament presser. "My game hasn't been where I wanted to be in the last few months. This is the most important thing. You have to play great tennis to do well at a Grand Slam. First of all, get my game back, and then we can talk about the mental stuff after."
The Roland Garros quarterfinalist suffered opening-round exits at Wimbledon and Cincinnati and has yet to reach the US Open fourth round.
The sixth-ranked German has posted four wins in four Flushing Meadows appearances. Zverev, who resides in second-ranked Rafael Nadal's quarter, opens against Radu Albot and would face either Ivo Karlovic or Frances Tiafoe in the second round.
While there was speculation Zverev might hire another high-profile coach— he revealed before the 2018 US Open he had considered hiring Boris Becker at one point—the former world No. 3 said he has the coaching voice he trusts the most—his father Alexander—in his corner.
"There is nobody I trust more than my father, so I have that voice," Zverev said. "I have that person around me. So it's not like I'm alone right now."
Enduring growing pains on court before thousands of fans has been a learning experience for the 22-year-old German.
"As I said in the summer, there is a lot of things that I had to do that I didn't do in the last few years, so obviously those kind of things were a new learning process," Zverev said. "I'm still a young guy, still only 22 years old. There are still a lot of things that I needed to learn. Not only on the tennis court but in life in general.
"Those things I think every young person has to go through. The only difference between me and other young people is that I have to play in front of 20,000 people sometimes. You know, that's a little bit extra on you. So, yeah, that's why maybe the results haven't been as great as I wanted them to be."
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