Jannik Sinner, unbelievable stuff: it happened in front of everyone.
It’s not every day that an “informal” tournament, unrelated to the Atp calendar, puts this much money up for grabs. In Saudi Arabia, however, it happened. There was as much as $6 million on the pot for the winner and $1.5 million for all the other participants, and it’s a complete given – there should be no need to point this out – that such a lavish haul was a pretty good incentive for the champions who took part.
Jannik Sinner, however, was quite clear on this point. The world number 1 has won a lot of money, this season, so he wanted to emphasize immediately that the prize money did not affect his decision to leave for Riyadh in any way. “It’s a nice prize of course,” he had said on the subject, ”but I went there because the six best players in the world were there. I don’t play for money, it’s as simple as that. I could measure myself against opponents like them and it was a good event for me. When I win it means I played the right way and I can improve for the future. Money is not the most important thing, I live well without it. They are just an extra, they count much less than health and family.”
A praiseworthy thought, his, which, however, has not been well digested, at least so it seems, by his fellow circuit riders. One among them, who in the past few hours, a few days after the South Tyrolean’s statements, wanted to throw a dig at him. As well as to mock, in some way, the sentences that Jannik said with his heart in his hand.
Sinner in the crosshairs: he said it in front of everyone
That was Alexander Bublik, whose reference, during an interview with Tennis Channel, was not so veiled. And the fact that he brought up Sinner like that, out of nowhere, while talking about his situation, would seem symptomatic of the fact that he does not live so well with the rise of the blue champion.
When asked for his thoughts on the past season, his personal successes, and whether his bank account has benefited, Bublik gave an extremely allusive response, “As Sinner said, money is not everything….” A decontextualized jab at the world number 1 and his post Six Kings Slam speech, clearly.
Speech that Alexander apparently did not quite understand. It would not explain, otherwise, why he decided to mock Sinner’s words and use them in a distorted way to mock him on the air.
