The real Jack Draper: on love, Andy Murray and when he’ll win Wimbledon
The 24-year-old reflects on growing up as the next big British hope and his desperation to come back from an injury nightmare under the guidance of his great hero
Tom Kershaw, Tennis Correspondent
Saturday June 20 2026, 2.00pm BST, The Sunday Times
Jack Draper seeks out a quiet corner in the Crooked Billet, a popular pub a few steps off Wimbledon Common, with his hood up to avoid any unwanted attention. Once the coast is clear and he has ordered a portion of fish and chips, the pain of the past year begins to spill out without the need for a pint.
“There are a lot of times when you feel incredibly isolated,” he says. “When you have a big injury, all these questions start to come to mind — ‘Why has this happened? What could I have done differently?’ It’s also the uncertainty of how long it’s going to take when you’ve built back up and you feel really resilient in your body and thwen all of a sudden your arm starts aching during the night and you can’t sleep and that’s four, five months.
“These things take a toll on your mind, and the dark moments come from the fact you are desperate to keep on progressing and fulfil your potential. When you can’t do that, it’s just incredibly frustrating and sad.”
A year ago, Draper entered Wimbledon as the world No4 and was anointed not just as the heir to Sir Andy Murray but a legitimate threat to the duopoly of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. A US Open semi-finalist in 2024, he signed a multimillion-pound sponsorship deal with the Californian clothing brand Vuori and became a heartthrob to a legion of fans with only a passing interest in tennis.
But then a complex bone injury in his left arm kept him off court for the best part of eight months. Just four tournaments into his comeback in February, Draper aggravated a tendon in his right knee and was ruled out of last month’s French Open. His ranking now sits at No113, or as he sarcastically refers to his situation: “It’s dropped to being a postcode.”
Draper had to somehow break the cycle of depressed days and tearful nights. He had always known he wanted Murray to be his coach. He can still remember peering over the glass balcony at the LTA in southwest London as a child, trying to catch a glimpse of the glowering Scotsman in training.
By 2023, the year before he retired, Murray had become such a close mentor to Draper that he gave his heir apparent a lift home from a Davis Cup tie in Manchester all the way to Surrey. The following morning, Murray posted a video on social media of Draper chugging a can of beer in the passenger seat while belting out the chorus to the Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) with the caption, “Kids these days” and an eye-roll emoji. And so, at a meeting in early May, Draper laid out his hopes and dreams of winning grand-slam titles and his commitment to the sport that had driven him to breaking point.
“It’s always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to work with Andy, obviously because of our relationship, but also he’s got a massive tennis brain and he made it pretty clear after he stopped that he wanted to get into coaching,” Draper says.
“I was in awe of him [as a child]. I watched him win Wimbledon, watched him win the Olympics, so many moments that will stay with me for ever and were just crazy inspiring. I got his advice and opinions on my game when I was coming up playing and he was always very honest with me.
“Then, after Covid, he had his hip injury, we spent a lot of time together, and I got to know him on a personal level. I’m kind of at a point where I’m having to restart again, and to have him come in and help me during this moment means a lot. And it’s not only going to help develop my game, it will give me a lift as well, as someone who’s a big part of the reason why I wanted to become a tennis player.”
The partnership will finally be unveiled at Eastbourne this week — the pair’s only warm-up event before Wimbledon. Murray made it clear to Draper that he does not want to travel full-time on tour again, with the arrangement set to cover the grass-court season, but his experience on and off the court will be an enormous boost.
“He’s a bit calmer than I am, which is weird when you think about it,” Draper says. “He’s quite analytical, quite technical. Our personalities are maybe a bit different. For instance, after his career, he’s chosen to play golf. I just couldn’t do it. I’d be out there for nine holes and my brain would be on other things. He’s always been very good at focusing on the task. But I don’t think the way we see tennis is different.”
Murray also knows better than anyone how to handle the pressure of being the big British hope at Wimbledon. The three-times grand-slam champion first captured the attention of the nation as an 18-year-old when he reached the third round in 2005. Draper took a set off Novak Djokovic as a teenage Wimbledon debutant in 2021, but he is yet to make it past the second round in three more attempts. Last year, he was among the favourites after defeating Alcaraz en route to winning Indian Wells — the so-called fifth grand-slam — but crashed out in the second round against Marin Cilic, who was then the world No83.
“I think it’s a weird dynamic for any top-level athlete. You can’t live with [the pressure] and you can’t live without it,” says Draper, who is now the British No3. “I suppose the interesting experience last year was that every single question was about it. But I’ll be very truthful. Last year I was in a great position and now I’m not.
“People will judge Andy coming in based on my result at Wimbledon, but I don’t know if I’ll do amazingly. I want to do well this year, but my goal is to win Wimbledon next year — so when I get that question, I’ll say, ‘Well, I guess I’m like the fourth [best] British player now.’ ”
‘For four or five years I had no friends’
Draper was in many respects destined to become a top tennis player. He first picked up a racket aged three and hit balls against the wall at Sutton Tennis & Squash Club, while his mother, Nicky, a former junior champion, coached the older children. His brother, Ben, played college tennis at the University of California, Berkeley, and his father, Roger, was the chief executive of the LTA up until 2013.
Were his parents pushy? “I’d just say strong-willed,” Draper says. “My dad played rugby and definitely had a determination to win in his DNA. Having an older brother, you want to impress, you don’t want to lose. My mum was incredibly into my tennis, but she was really on it with my school work and just made sure she instilled disciplined values in me.
“It’s weird. You can’t have pushy parents and be a successful athlete without having something inside you. My attitude has always been that no matter if I’m winning, I want to be in the trenches.”
That Draper’s father held one of the most powerful positions in British tennis was a double-edged sword. The parents of junior rivals claimed he was benefiting from nepotism, and gripes occasionally filtered down on to the court. At tournaments in Glasgow and Sunderland, a group of about 15 boys gathered on the balcony and willed Draper to lose, making noises before he served.
“I was incredibly fortunate, but equally my dad left the LTA when I was 12. You can’t buy a British tennis player. You can’t buy someone who wants to give everything,” Draper says. “When I was younger, travelling a lot with the other boys, it was tough because they really liked [Roger], but they probably heard their parents talking at home, who were probably a bit jealous and stuff, and they’d bring that on the tour. I would get a lot of stick, but I’d give it back.”
Draper’s determination to succeed could occasionally cross the line. “I wore my heart on my sleeve. I threw my racket over the fence. I swore a lot,” he says. “I once had a LTA coach sit me down and say, ‘You’re the worst-behaved person [on court] I’ve ever witnessed’, but I was incredibly passionate. It came from a place of really caring.”
That vein of anger stemmed from off the court, too. Draper’s parents separated when he was 14 and he did not speak to his father for “a little while” — the pair have since reconciled. Ben, who is now his agent at IMG Tennis, left for university at around the same time, and Draper’s maternal grandmother, Brenda, to whom he was particularly close, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s.
“It’s difficult for people when they see these young players and they’ve got a bad attitude, and they’re quick to judge, but they don’t know what’s going on in their life,” Draper says. “That personal stuff creates massive emotional struggle.
“My nana started having a really bad form of dementia and I was helping my grandad manage her, my mum as well, and you have to come to terms with the fact that the person you loved, who you could talk to about anything, is no longer there. With my dad, time heals things, but there was definitely a long period of time when I was extremely isolated.”
The singular nature of competitive tennis meant Draper often had few people to lean on after transitioning to home schooling that same year. “There was a good four or five years when I was doing my GCSEs and getting tutored and travelling to competitions where I would say I had no friends,” he says. “Of course I had tennis friends, but they were also rivals at that age.”
Draper’s injuries over the past year have left him in a deep hole, but it is not the first time he’s had to claw himself out of one. He first announced himself as a future star when he reached the Wimbledon boys’ final in 2018, but quickly became disillusioned with tennis after joining the professional ranks.
“As a junior, everything’s great. You’re going to the grand-slams, the locker rooms are beautiful, but that’s very short-lived when you go to the [bottom-rung] Futures [circuit]. You’re in the shit and you’re having to get yourself out. Terrible hotels, terrible courts, in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I think a lot of tennis players go through this. The dream they had turns out not to be the reality.”
Draper steadily climbed the rankings and broke into the top 100 for the first time in June 2022, but the following February he abruptly hit another wall. “I’d battled all that way and felt like I’d gone through so much, I was completely mentally burnt out,” Draper says.
“I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know why I was doing it. I think all those years, going up the levels, I achieved good things but I was so unstable. I took a pause in 2023 and pretty much decided to stop tennis, which is mad because I was No40 in the world.
“It didn’t mean anything to me, nothing meant anything. I had a bit of time off and I started to look at myself and be like, ‘What can I actually do? I’m not just a tennis player. Who is Jack Draper? What can I change about myself?’ ”
‘I’ve been in love . . . but it got a little bit too much’
Draper is refreshingly frank, authentic, and unfailingly polite — aside from when he leans across the table to hoover up the leftover chips. “I’m a big believer that the best athletes don’t pretend to be someone else,” he says.
It would be easy to become lost in the trappings of fame — he has earned more than £6.6million in prize money but he still drives to training in a second-hand 2013 Volkswagen Polo. “I’ve been around many athletes who have a Ferrari on their home screen [of their phone]. I can truthfully say I’ve never played for money,” he says.
On Instagram, he has a carefully curated image of modelling shoots and more than 500,000 followers but Draper rarely uses social media at all. “I’ve seen it in changing rooms everywhere, as soon as people win a match they’re looking for that dopamine [hit] of people saying how great they are,” he says.
If Draper loses, his comments are littered with abusive messages, usually from problem gamblers. “I’ve known from a young age that if I want to be great at something, there’s going to be a lot of people hating me,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me at all, but I’ve got pretty hard skin with that.”
He is occasionally stopped for selfies, but for the most part he can live the life of a 24-year-old untroubled. “I think in this country you have to do something bigger at Wimbledon, and I haven’t yet. I can go on the Tube, I can go into London. A few people will give me looks, but I’m not looking for it. I wear a lot of hats,” he says.
There is a fascination on social media about Draper’s dating life, but that is on pause too. “I’ve had a couple of people I’ve been in love with and it just didn’t quite work out because the timing and the situation just didn’t intertwine,” he says. “That’s what I’m talking about being a professional tennis player. Your life’s so crazy.
“You’re trying to be the best athlete you can be and you have to be selfish with that, but also have a life. It got to the point where it was just a little bit too much. But that definitely taught me a lesson because it hurts. I think there are probably athletes out there who need the comfort of being with someone, but I know I’ve got my life ahead of me and I haven’t got to that place yet.”
Few people outside of the tennis bubble can relate to its “brutal nature”. When he was considering quitting altogether in 2023, he confided in Paul Jubb, a fellow player and one of his closest friends, and suggested they move in together into a three-bedroom flat in Putney, along with Ben, where they remained until the Draper brothers moved into a house near Wimbledon earlier this year.
“At that point everything changed because I started taking accountability for my life. I stopped relying on my mum to wash my clothes, to cook, and I developed much more confidence in myself,” Draper says.
It also provided him with some much-needed perspective. Jubb, who is two years older than Draper, was raised by his grandmother on a council estate in Hull after being orphaned aged eight.
“Paul is someone who is incredibly driven, but it could get to 10pm and we’d watched a movie and we’d go for a pint in the tiny tavern near where we lived and just sit there and talk rubbish about life, about girls, but we’d often have conversations about tennis,” he says. “We used to say, ‘If I don’t make it into the top 100, I’ve failed,’ ”
“But I’ve been fortunate to have great parents. My brother has helped me so much. I could do great in a grand-slam, be top of the game, but who’s to say his success is any different after what he’s been through. Whatever Paul achieves, in my eyes, it is as good as any success that I’ll ever have.”
In the summer of 2023, a 20-year-old Alcaraz’s victory over Djokovic in an epic five-set Wimbledon final provided the spark Draper needed.
“I was watching my ranking drop outside the top 100 and Carlos won. I was obviously happy for him because he’s a great guy, but I was so angry,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here? Get out of your head. There’s an opportunity waiting for you’. It really put the fire in my belly to kick on.”
Draper had been on an extraordinary trajectory when his arm started aching and became a far more serious hurdle than he ever imagined. The future is still somewhat uncertain, with his body not ready in time for Queen’s last week and there is no guarantee it will hold up over back-to-back matches at Eastbourne, but it will not be for a lack of stubbornly returning to the well.
The night before our chat Draper was watching a documentary about the former Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy.
“It had me and my brother in tears,” he says. “It’s not about winning the Premier League ten times with Pep [Guardiola] with a ridiculous-money team. The guy’s gone from a non-League player, climbed eight leagues, and won it with Leicester [in 2016]. Yeah, he only won one title, but that journey for me is more success than winning the Prem four or five times.
“I sometimes think about that with my journey. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. Not that many, but I don’t know what’s going to happen in years to come. If I was healthy the whole time, I might have won a lot more. But if I come back and I lift big titles again, it will mean way more to me.”
JANNIK SINNER as cinematic shots from movie Project Hail Mary (2026). Original cinematic shots are taken from director, Christopher Miller, by Industrial Light & Magic team for Project Hail Mary. Jannik Sinner's original photos are by VCG, Jean Catuffe, and Clive Brunskill via GettyImages.
“I’ll give him my support when I see him, I’ll tell him how amazing he did, how proud I am, and how he’s going to win that title many more times I’m sure.”
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