If Alex de Minaur keeps improving at his current rate, then he will soon become a household name. The next step, though, will be learning to pronounce it.
In De Minaur, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Denis Shapovalov, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Karen Khachanov and others, the young generation of men’s tennis looks strong.
And yet, although tennis is one of the most global sports, their names are proving somewhat problematic, for commentators and fans alike.
De Minaur, the young Australian who recently won his first ATP title in Sydney before a rampaging Rafael Nadal ended his AO2019 run, is already used to hearing his name mispronounced, both at home in Australia and all around the world.
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“To be honest, I’ve heard it that many different ways, at this stage I’m considering changing my name to Demon,” De Minaur said recently. “It’s alright, it doesn’t really bother me. I’ve heard everything; “De min-our”, “Deminooer”, just about everything except the proper way to say it. It’s “Dur Minnor”.
The same goes for Tsitsipas, the world number 15 and the first Greek man ever to be ranked in the top 100. “My name has been pronounced in so many ways,” said Tsitsipas, who says it should be Sits-i-Pass, with a short “a”. “One of the (strangest) I had was “Thith-i-path”, I don’t know if he had a lisp. There was also “Sits-eye-parss”.
Struggling with player names is not exactly a new phenomenon. When Andre Agassi shot to fame in the late 1980s, he was widely called “a-Gassy”, (a as in apple), rather than “Agger-sea”.
World No. 1 Novak Djokovic is often called JOE-Ker-vitch instead of Jock-ervitch and Russian Maria Sharapova, whose name is pronounced Sha-RA-puh-vuh, was called Sharra-POE-ver so many times that eventually she just accepted it.
Canadian left-hander Denis Shapovalov explained early in his career how his name should be pronounced. “It’s just “Chapeau” and “Valov”, the Canadian told reporters in Toronto in 2016. “If you put the two together it’s much easier, but when they see it on paper, a lot of referees just panic. Once I was called Sharapova.”
To try to help commentators, fans and anyone who needs it, the ATP Tour has a nifty feature on its website, www.atpworldtour.com, where the players themselves can be heard giving the correct pronunciation of their names.
So we know that Karen Khachanov, the world No 11, should be Ka-WREN Ha-CHA-noff and Canadian teenager Felix Auger-Aliassime should be Fay-LEEKS oh-zhAY Alee-a-SEEM.
Likewise, it should be Ma-RIN CHI-litch, not Si-litch, Bornar Choritch and Fabio Fon-yeeni, not Foneeni, and certainly not Fog-neeni, as he is often called.
But even the ATP Tour’s gadget was problematic at first, when David Goffin initially pronounced his name as David Goffin (as in coffin), instead of Daveed GoFAN, because “everybody calls me that”. Goffin soon corrected it.
The WTA has yet to produce something similar, however, and many player names are still badly mangled. Czech player Barbora Strycova is another to have heard her name pronounced in numerous ways throughout her career.
“The worst is Stritch-koh-ver,” she said. “Strike-over, that’s normal, I call myself Strike-over (it happens so often). Then Striss-over.
“They never say it the way my name is, but I don’t mind it. Well, I mind it when the referee asks me, how do I pronounce your name…they really should maybe look it up and say it the right way. It is ‘Stritzzuva’.”
And some names would sound strange if they were pronounced absolutely correctly, like Roger Federer. In Swiss-German, he would be called Rojjair Fay-derrer, but he will always be known worldwide as Rodger Fed-er-rer.