By Richard Pagliaro | @TennisNow | Thursday, August 8, 2024
Photo credit: TennisTV Screen Shot
A painful below-the-belt shot didn't slow Grigor Dimitrov's roll in Montreal.
Watch Dimitrov suffer the low blow ball to the groin, every male player's worst nightmare, in the early stages of his Montreal match vs. Rinky Hijikata.
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Dimitrov tried to deflect a Hijikata return after a fault, but missed the ball and suffered the body blow to the most sensitive spot.
Hear fans in the crowd erupt in a sympathetic groan feeling Dimitrov's pain as the battered Bulgarian bites down on his shirt and slowly moves to the back wall trying to walk it off before dropping to his knees in agony like a boxer felled by a below-the-belt punch.
Showing remarkable resilience, Dimitrov not only continued playing after the ball-busting shot, he actually won the last 11 games in a row to close a 6-1, 6-0 triumph over the Aussie qualifier.
Afterward, Dimitrov summed up the experience as positively painful to the third degree.
"It hurts. It hurts. It hurts," Dimitrov told Tennis Channel's Prakash Amritraj afterward. "I was just trying to stop the ball and then it was kind of windy so just in the last second it moved and I didn’t move.
"For three or four games it was no fun."
The seventh-seeded Dimitrov will face either 2023 US Open semifinalist Ben Shelton or Aussie Alexei Popyrin for a quarterfinal spot.