By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Wednesday July 12, 2023
Chris Eubanks dazzled Wimbledon for ten days, bursting onto the sports’ grandest stage and going from a relative unknown to a name on the tip of every tennis fans’ tongue.
It was beautiful to watch the hard-hitting American, who entered the main draw at SW19 with a 2-8 lifetime record at the majors, play with such conviction on his Wimbledon debut. Every once of power and precision in his game seemed to crystallize as he mowed down his competition, riding the high of notching his maiden ATP title in Mallorca and parlaying his confidence into viral wins over No.12-seeded Cameron Norrie and No.5-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas.
He was the last American man standing at Wimbledon, but his run came to an end in five sets on Wednesday at the hands of Daniil Medvedev, who served lights out down the stretch to finally tame the 27-year-old Eubanks.
Now that it’s over, how does the former Georgia Tech Yellowjacket feel about his future in the men’s game?
Sanguine, in a word.
“I’ve played some of the best players in the world,” he said. “I’ve seen how my game stacks up against them, how I can disrupt them, how I can frustrate them. I think it just gives me added confidence in my ability that I know I can compete with some of the best players in the world, whereas maybe I didn’t fully know or believe that before.”
Eubanks, who is up to No.31 in the ATP live rankings, is taking the positives, and there are plenty of them.
Over the course of his nine-match winning streak and career-best Grand Slam performance he has proven that he can hang with the ATP’s best. Now all he has to do is prove that he has staying power.
“I think this week, these two or three weeks have been filled with positives,” he said. “I didn’t win today. I’m disappointed about it. It’s unfortunate for me. But I think I showed a lot of positive signs that I can take moving forward, so I’m okay with that.
“I think it’s going to encourage me to continue to enjoy the process that I’ve been doing, especially over the past year I would say. Just continue to train harder. It’s super cliché, but it’s like I want to continue to feel this feeling.”
Eubanks should be seeded at the US Open with that ranking, and he’ll enter Masters 1000 draws for a while without having to fuss over playing qualifying. It’s been a great few weeks for Eubanks, and best of all, he is intent on making sure that his upward trend continues.
“I think that if I can continue to have the joy that I had on court for these past three weeks, continue to work as hard as I've been doing over the past year, 12 months, I think good things are going to happen and it's kind of going to take care of itself,” he said, adding: “I'm probably having the most fun I've ever had in playing tennis. I'm going to continue to try to ride this momentum out. We're going to see where it takes me.”