Matija Pecotic is living his Hollywood Moment.

The 33-year-old is the Director of Capital Markets for a real estate investment company who signed in as an alternate for qualifying at the Delray Beach Open. The lefty not only received a spot, but reached his first ATP Tour main draw. On Tuesday evening, he upset former Top 10 star Jack Sock to reach the second round.

Not bad for someone who worked his office job on Monday after qualifying.

But to fully understand Pecotic’s road to this point takes revisiting his roots. The Croatian was born in 1989 and in 1993, his family was still in Belgrade, which was entrenched in war. Matija’s father, orthopedic surgeon Goran, received a call from a friend who had just travelled to Malta. Recruitment was underway for an orthopedic surgeon.

“If he got there within a few days he might have had a shot to get the position. So he flew there by himself and found a base [and] rented a house. It’s not easy,” Pecotic told ATPTour.com. “People say there’s so much pressure playing this match. But if you really think about what he did, he was 40 years old, [had] two kids, hyperinflation [was] going on in the country. All your life’s possessions became worthless and you had to move to a country where you didn’t speak the local language and figure it out.

“Talk about pressure. That’s real pressure.”

The Pecotic Family followed Goran to Malta, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. The country is not a tennis hotbed to say the least. In fact, Matija took to European team handball as he grew up and other hobbies he had, including spearfishing.

Pecotic never cracked the Top 1,000 in the ITF Junior Rankings. But he decided to mail DVDs of his game to college coaches in the United States. One of the coaches who replied was Glenn Michibata, then the head coach at Princeton University.

“Instead of throwing it in the trash, he said, ‘This kid is just different. And I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to entertain a conversation with him,’” Pecotic said. “If it were not for Glenn, I wouldn’t have gotten to the U.S.”

Billy Pate, who became the Princeton head coach Pecotic’s senior year, laughed thinking about how the lefty ended up at the Ivy League school.

“I get an email now and you have a guy who’s ranked around 1,000, you usually don’t recruit them necessarily unless they only played one or two ITF events and that’s why. So it wasn’t like he had this high ranking going for him,” Pate said. “He told me he went to a high school in Malta where there was a castle type of school with a moat around it and a goat in the front yard.”

Watch Pecotic Complete His ATP Main Draw Debut Win:

Pecotic became a star at Princeton, where he was a three-time Ivy League Player of the Year and climbed as high as No. 2 in the college tennis rankings. He took particular pride in his performance against fellow Ivy League student-athletes, tallying 22 consecutive wins against them.

“Sometimes it got personal in these Ivy League matches because you were playing for your school, you’d wait for these matches all year long. You kind of know who you’re going to play more or less, so I just had to visualise all these opponents and just visualise taking them down one by one,” Pecotic said. “I would print out their pictures on large A4 paper and post them up on my wall in my dorm. I would just put a big red ‘X’ through each one when I got through with them and I did that 22 times in a row.”

According to Pate, Pecotic developed an intimidation factor by the end of his college career.

“He’s got a little bit of the Nadal-like game and he’s got a little bit of a Nadal-type fierceness, where [he has] the big physical energy moving around,” Pate said. “He has a lot of routines he does and also values the fitness and the gym aspect of it and the grind, so I think he’s got a lot of those elements.”

After finishing school aged 24, Pecotic wasted little time climbing the Pepperstone ATP Rankings. He began his professional career in 2014 and ascended to a career-high World No. 206 in 2015. But before the 2016 Australian Open, he underwent stomach surgery and contracted a serious staph infection that kept him bedridden for eight months.

During that time, he sat for the GMAT Exam and applied to business school. Pecotic then attended Harvard Business School and between his final exams and graduation in May 2019, he won an ITF Futures event in Cancun.

“All of a sudden he was like, ‘I’ve got another degree, but I just won a Futures and I’ve got some points, let me go see what I can do with this again, I’m back,’” Pate recalled.

The lefty returned to the Top 400 by the end of the year, but the Covid-19 pandemic hindered his efforts. Later that year at the Sofia Open he signed in as an alternate for qualifying, much like he did in Delray Beach. He was set to play former Top 10 star Gilles Simon on centre court, but withdrew due to illness just before the match, taking away that chance.

With various travel restrictions in place and other pandemic-related roadblocks, Pecotic began to turn his attention to the business world. Today he is the Director of Capital Markets for Wexford Real Estate Investors, an affiliate of the $4 billion investment firm Wexford Capital.

Despite working normal 9-6 hours, he tries to play tennis as often as he can. He often hits with his boss, who is in his 70s. Last Sunday, Pecotic coincidentally ran into Citi Open Chairman Mark Ein.

“He said, ‘Do you want to hit this week? So we played on Monday and then Wednesday’,” Ein said. “After he won his first [qualifying] match against Stefan [Kozlov] he said, ‘You were the only person I hit with this week.’ And it was on clay!”

If Pecotic did not receive an alternate spot in the Delray Beach qualifying draw, they were going to hit for a third time on Saturday. Instead the Croatian faced Kozlov, then eliminated two-time Australian Open quarter-finalist Tennys Sandgren in the final round of qualifying with the support of former World No. 12 Dominik Hrbaty, a longtime friend of Pecotic’s boss.

What has stood out most during his dream run is Pecotic’s passion for the sport.

“The fact that he asked me if I wanted to play with him shows me how much he loves the sport. He wants every opportunity to play,” Ein said. “So I think that was evidence of how much he loves it that as soon as he saw me he just said he wanted to get a chance to literally get out of work and get a hit. We were scheduling the hit around his meetings.”

Ein later added: “[His story] is so fantastic. This is really a Cinderella story unlike very many.”

After working at the office Monday, Pecotic was getting ready for his match Tuesday evening when a friend and mentor, Gordon Uehling, told him a story about 16-year-old David Filer IV from South Bend, Indiana.

“There’s a famous story about him in the juniors where he won a match where he was down 6-0, 5-0, 40/0 and he clawed back and found a way to win. Unfortunately he was diagnosed with a serious form of brain cancer and he fought it off, just the way he fought when he was down 6-0, 5-0, 40/0,” Pecotic said. “Just a couple weeks ago I think it came back and they delivered some really tough news to him and he doesn’t have a lot of time to live. That just put things into perspective.”

(Learn More About Filer IV In The South Bend Tribune)

^{Photo Credit: Andrew Patron}
So when Pecotic lost the first four games of his match against Sock, he was thinking about Filer IV.

“I thought of this kid, who is fighting and enjoying every day that he has on the planet and what he would give to be out on the court there,” said Pecotic, who rallied against Sock to win in three sets. “I just said, ‘Keep digging, keep your head down, keep your emotions in check and don’t give up.’ If I can dedicate this win to someone, I’d like to dedicate it to him.”

This is Pecotic’s Hollywood moment, one he worked towards his whole life. But the humble 33-year-old, who is in the office Tuesday ahead of his second-round match against Marcos Giron, is using the opportunity to thank all those around him who have helped put him in this position.

“Were it not for my first backer out of Princeton, I wouldn’t have even been able to play professionally. Were it not for these incredible guys in Boston that I met in business school who convinced me that I should dream and give tennis another shot, I wouldn’t be here,” Pecotic said. “I feel so privileged and there are just so many people that should be part of this victory. This is a lot more than just a win for me.”

Jannik Sinner was tested on Wednesday at the ABN AMRO Open, but last week’s Montpellier champion battled on to set a second-round showdown with top seed Stefanos Tsitsipas.

The Italian overcame a second-set hiccup to defeat Benjamin Bonzi 6-2, 3-6, 6-1 after two hours and four minutes in Rotterdam.

“For sure it’s tough when you come quite late to the other tournament, so I’m very happy about my performance today,” Sinner said. “It was not easy for me. We made a lot of unforced errors today. But still I tried to stay focussed [on] my game.”

Sinner saved two of the three break points he faced and won 46 per cent of his return points to improve to 9-2 on the season. He will next try to double his win total against Tsitsipas (1-5).

“I started off very well and I finished quite well, so I’m happy,” Sinner said. “Let’s see what’s going to happen in the next round.”

Also moving on was fourth seed Holger Rune, who ousted qualifier Constant Lestienne 6-4, 6-4. The Danish star broke the Frenchman’s serve four times to reach the second round.

“It was tricky. It’s a lot about finding the rhythm here in the beginning of the tournament and first match you have to really be on your toes, especially I played a qualifier today who already has two matches in his bag,” Rune said. “It made it more difficult, but I’m happy how I handled every situation today.”

Already through to the quarter-finals is former World No. 3 Stan Wawrinka, who defeated another former Top 10 star Richard Gasquet 6-3, 6-3.

The Swiss has long enjoyed success in the Netherlands, having won the tournament in 2015 and advanced to the final in 2019. Wawrinka will play the winner of Sinner and Tsitsipas in the last eight.

Dominic Thiem got off the mark for the 2023 ATP Tour season with a quality win on Tuesday night at the Argentina Open. The former World No. 3 defeated seventh seed Alex Molcan 7-6(4), 6-3 in Buenos Aires, breaking through in his fifth match of the year.

“It was a good match,” said Thiem, who won the Buenos Aires title in 2016 and 2018. “I like it a lot here in Buenos Aires. Already the last days in practice I was feeling well.

“I won my first match of the season against a very good opponent. I stayed focussed throughout the whole match, as well in the difficult moments. So I’m happy and I’m trying to focus fully on the second round now.”

Thiem and Molcan traded breaks from 5-5 in the opening set, with Thiem racing to a 5/1 lead in the tie-break after failing to serve out the set. The 29-year-old Austrian did not face a break point in set two as he improved to 12-1 in Buenos Aires with the victory.

Next up for Thiem is Peruvian qualifier Juan Pablo Varillas, a 6-2, 7-5 winner against Joao Sousa earlier on Tuesday. Third seed Lorenzo Musetti is a potential third-round opponent at the ATP 250.

Matija Pecotic became one of the stories of the young season on the ATP Tour by qualifying for his tour-level debut at the age of 33. But the Croatian, who holds a full-time job in finance, was not content just to make the main draw at the Delray Beach Open.

On Tuesday, Pecotic extended his dream run in Florida with a 4-6, 6-2, 6-2 win against former Top 10 player Jack Sock. After falling behind 0-4 in the opening set and fighting off a break point early in the second, the Princeton and Harvard graduate dominated the second half of the match. He won the final four games of sets two and three, and did not face a break point beyond the third game of the second set. 

“I certainly didn’t expect to win, but certainly didn’t come into the match thinking that I’m definitely going to lose,” said Pecotic, who represented Croatia at the inaugural United Cup last month. “You’ve got to be realistic. This is a former Top 10 guy with an incredible amount of tennis experience, with a huge serve. He came out serving 134 [mph] on the first serve. It would be arrogant to think that I’m going to come out and expect to win.

“But I certainly figured if I could sink my teeth into the match and work on the two or three patterns that I prepared before, that I’m going to have a chance. And then let’s see… if I was going to fall under pressure or not be able to serve it out at some point. But I didn’t and I got the win.”

Pecotic hit 10 aces and 30 winners in the two-hour, 10-minute match, saving six of eight break points. He attacked the net 31 times, winning 21 of those points.

The 33-year-old won just three games in the opening round of a Cleveland ATP Tour Challenger event two weeks ago, but now finds himself in the last 16 at the ATP 250 level. He will next face Marcos Giron, who defeated eighth seed Ben Shelton 6-4, 6-4 to close the evening’s play in Delray Beach. Pecotic has already beaten three Americans this week, beginning with Stefan Kozlov and Tennys Sandgren in qualifying.

“I had to leave work early today,” joked Pecotic, whose boss was in his player box. “I had to send an email to the whole team. [My boss] let me off. I’m going to have to ask for another day off tomorrow.”

Also advancing on Tuesday in Delray Beach were Americans J.J. Wolf and Mackenzie McDonald. The ninth-seeded Wolf defeated Ilya Ivashka 7-5, 6-3, while McDonald downed Taro Daniel 6-2, 6-2. Adrian Mannarino joined them in the last 16 with a 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 win against Daniel Altmaier.

Carlos Alcaraz has missed four months due to injury. In doing so, the Spaniard also lost his place atop the Pepperstone ATP Rankings.

Starting this week in Buenos Aires at the Argentina Open, the 19-year-old sensation is determined to climb back towards the top of men’s tennis’ mountain.

“It has been a long time [I spent] at No. 1,” said Alcaraz, who held top spot for 20 weeks. “Now it’s a goal for me to recover No. 1 and try to do my best in these tournaments to be back on that number. I’m looking for that.”

The teen knows the road to accomplishing that feat will not be an easy one to travel. The current World No. 1 is Novak Djokovic, the 22-time Grand Slam champion and 38-time ATP Masters 1000 titlist, who has been at the top of the sport longer than any other man in history.

Alcaraz looks forward to embracing the challenge of chasing the Serbian, for whom he has great respect.

“He has no weaknesses. Every shot, it’s amazing,” Alcaraz said. “His physical condition is amazing, his mental condition is amazing. He’s like a god and I admire him over the years staying at the same level, staying at the top. It’s really, really difficult and I admire that.”

Djokovic (7,070) holds an 840-point advantage over Alcaraz (6,230) in the Pepperstone ATP Live Rankings. But for now, the Spanish teen is focussed on making his return to action in Argentina.

“I’m feeling great. I’m getting used to these conditions, to play with the best players, so at the moment I’m feeling well,” Alcaraz said. “It’s tough to play my first tournament after a long time for me, after four months. So it’s going to be really, really tough to win the tournament or be close to winning. My hope is to feel that I am okay with the injury, with my body and try to play well.”

Alcaraz will face an immediate test against Serbian Laslo Djere, who defeated Italian Fabio Fognini 6-4, 6-4 in the first round. Djere has excelled on clay, winning an ATP 500 title on the surface four years ago in Rio de Janeiro. It will be the pair’s first ATP Head2Head clash.

More than anything, Alcaraz is thrilled to be back in action.

“I’m really excited to play here in Buenos Aires. I had four months with no competition, with no matches, just training and recovering my injury,” Alcaraz said. “I’m so excited to play again, to be in the competition again. I’m looking forward to doing it.”

A day after Stan Wawrinka edged Alexander Bublik in an entertaining ABN AMRO Open first-round singles clash, the pair combined to cause an upset in the doubles draw at the indoor ATP 500 event.

Bublik and Wawrinka defeated second seeds Nikola Mektic and Mate Pavic 3-6, 7-6(3), 10-7 in Rotterdam. Although the Kazakh-Swiss pair did not carve out a break point in the 78-minute encounter, they took ultimately unassailable early leads in both the second-set tie-break and the Match Tie-break to notch a notable victory against the Croatian stars.

Next up for Bublik and Wawrinka in Rotterdam are Belgian qualifiers Sander Gille and Joran Vliegen. In the same half of the draw, Ivan Dodig and Austin Krajicek also needed a Match Tie-break to see off Fabrice Martin and Andrey Rublev. The Croatian-American pair, which qualified for the 2022 Nitto ATP Finals in their first year as a team, prevailed 3-6, 6-4, 10-4 to reach the quarter-finals.

Also on Tuesday, Rohan Bopanna and Matthew Ebden downed Australian Open finalists Hugo Nys and Jan Zielinski 7-6(6), 4-6, 10-5, while Grigor Dimitrov and four-time Rotterdam doubles winner Nicolas Mahut beat Andreas Mies and John Peers 6-3, 6-3.

Bolleli/Fognini Breeze Through In Buenos Aires
At the Argentina Open, Simone Bolleli and Fabio Fognini delivered a dominant display to defeat Sadio Doumbia and Fabien Reboul 6-1, 6-3 and avenge their first-round defeat to the French pair at January’s Australian Open.

The third-seeded Bolelli and Fognini, who lifted the Buenos Aires title in 2013, converted five of 12 break points in their 69-minute victory against last week’s Cordoba finalists. The Italian duo will next take on home favourites Sebastian Baez and Facundo Bagnis in the quarter-finals.

The other doubles action at the clay-court ATP 250 in the Argentine capital Tuesday saw Cordoba semi-finalists Andrey Golubev and Aleksandr Nedovyesov defeat Alexander Erler and Lucas Miedler 6-4, 6-4.

Verdugo/Reyes-Varela Pull Away In Delray
Hans Hach Verdugo and Miguel Angel Reyes-Varela edged Diego Hidalgo and Hunter Reese 3-6, 7-5, 10-6 to advance to the quarter-finals at the Delray Beach Open. Despite converting just two of 13 break point opportunities in the one-hour, 43-minute first-round clash, Mexican duo Verdugo and Reyes-Varela maintained their composure and were never behind in the Match Tie-break.

Their next opponents at the hard-court ATP 250 in southern Florida will be third seeds Nathaniel Lammons and Jackson Withrow or Nuno Borges and Andre Goransson.

In his first competitive action since the Australian Open, Daniil Medvedev battled back from a set down to defeat Alejandro Davidovich Fokina on Tuesday night at the ABN AMRO Open. The sixth seed earned a 4-6, 6-2, 6-2 victory, turning the match around by winning nine of 10 games after falling behind 0-1 in the second set.

“I just managed to play a little bit better,” Medvedev said of the turnaround. “I don’t want to say that I played much better, but a little bit better, managed to use the crucial opportunities a little bit better and I feel like he was missing a bit more than in the first set.

“All together, I feel like I changed just a few millimetres of tactics, if we can say like this,” he added, later explaining that he varied his position on return, including moving closer to the baseline on second serves. “All of this happened to work, so I’m really happy about it.”

Medvedev converted on eight of 16 break chances, with Davidovich Fokina breaking six times from 11 opportunities in a topsy-turvy match. Four straight breaks closed the opening set, with Davidovich Fokina claiming his sixth set point in a marathon Medvedev service game to edge in front.

After finding his best tennis in the second set, hitting 14 winners to just three unforced errors, Medvedev stayed steady in the deciding set in the face of his opponent’s aggressive tactics. While Davidovich Fokina earned two breaks with his big ground game, unforced errors prevented him from holding serve in the set as Medvedev locked in on return.

“That’s my game,” Medvedev said of his steady play. “When I miss, that’s not very good. I don’t know what else to say. I’ve had some matches where I struggled when I missed.”

Medvedev improved to 6-2 on the season, with runs to the Australian Open third round and the Adelaide International 1 semi-finals in his first two events. He will next face Botic van de Zandschulp or Quentin Halys, with third seed Felix Auger-Aliassime a potential quarter-final opponent.

In danger of a second early exit in as many weeks in his home nation, Francisco Cerundolo used a late surge to escape an opening-round challenge from qualifier Yannick Hanfmann on Tuesday at the Argentina Open. The fifth seed won the final four games in a 6-2, 4-6, 7-5 victory, denying his opponent’s attempt to serve out the match at 5-4 in the final set.

After retiring with a leg injury last week in the Cordoba quarter-finals, Cerundolo started well at the ATP 250, cruising through the first set and opening up a 3-0 lead in the second without a break point faced. But Germany’s Hanfmann flipped the match on its head, winning nine of 11 games to claim the second set and build a 3-1 lead in the third.

With the backing of the home crowd, Cerundolo re-established himself in the match and began to step up his aggression in the late stages. He missed out on three break chances as Hanfmann held for 5-3, but that would be the last game the German won on the day as Cerundolo closed out the match with consecutive breaks.

The 24-year-old will next face Jaume Munar, who beat Argentine wild card Guido Pella 6-4, 7-5 on Monday night.

While Cerundolo avoided Hanfmann’s upset bid, eighth seed Albert Ramos-Vinolas could not do the same against fellow Spaniard Roberto Carballes Baena, who knocked him out with a 7-5, 6-4 victory.

Two Argentines also advanced in Tuesday’s early action. Camilo Ugo Carabelli defeated Daniel Elahi Galan 7-6(7), 6-3 and Tomas Etcheverry outlasted Hugo Dellien 3-6, 6-2, 6-2.

Stefanos Tsitsipas shook off some early struggles to make an ultimately confident start to his 2023 ABN AMRO Open campaign on Tuesday, when the top-seeded Greek defeated Emil Ruusuvuori 7-5, 6-1 in Rotterdam.

Tsitsipas was greeted with an early barrage of clean hitting from the World No. 52 Ruusuvuori at the indoor ATP 500 event. The Greek trailed 3-5 in the opening set but, as he has done so often already in the 2023 season, he dialled in behind his serve and forehand to grind his way back into the match. Tsitsipas won 10 of the next 11 games to accelerate away from the Finn for a one-hour, 33-minute victory.

“My footwork got better over time,” said Tsitsipas post-match. “I think I wasn’t very well adjusted in those first few games, and it took a little bit of time to find the right footwork, [get used to] the speed of the court, [acclimatise] to the new conditions.

“I had an opportunity in the last game [when Ruusuvuori led 5-3] to come back. I revived from that, I regenerated some awesome tennis and I recaptured that first set, which was crucial. I think from that point onwards it was flawless tennis. I was able to produce some really good shots.”

Ruusuvuori won just four games in his only previous ATP Head2Head meeting with Tsitsipas in Stockholm last October. The Finn appeared keen to emphasise early that there would be no repeat in Rotterdam as he hit his flat groundstrokes with aggression from the start and that strategy, along with some uncharacteristically wayward Tsitsipas serving, earned the Finn the first break of the match in the fifth game.

Despite a slow start by his standards, however, Tsitsipas did not panic. He began to find rhythm behind his forehand and ground out four games in a row from 3-5 to steal the set when he had spent much of it under pressure.

Once in front, Tsitsipas was clinical in making his advantage count. Looking increasingly comfortable from the baseline as the match wore on, he broke the Finn’s serve twice more in the second set to race to victory having converted four of his eight break points.

“The process that you get to repeat these things over and over again, it gives you tremendous understanding of how things actually work,” said Tsitsipas. “When you’re younger, you try your best but of course lack experience. I think being able to get in these moments more and more often on the Tour helps you understand, makes you wiser when you’re trying to deal with all these problems.”

Tsitsipas now holds a 13-1 record for the season, with his only defeat coming against Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open championship match. The 24-year-old’s next test in Rotterdam, where he reached the final in 2022, will be a second-round clash against Jannik Sinner or Benjamin Bonzi.