If there’s one word that epitomises Ons Jabeur’s journey from being a standout Grand Slam-winning junior at 16 to becoming a first-time WTA titlist at 26, it would have to be ‘patience’.
Granted, a great deal of hard work, perseverance, self-belief and ambition was involved throughout the Tunisian’s career, but ask any elite athlete and they’ll tell you that patience is often the toughest commodity to acquire in professional sport.
If you win, you want to win more, immediately, especially if you’ve tasted success from a young age. When you get injured, you want to get back on court as soon as possible. When you’re trying to add more to your game, you want to see those improvements reflected right away in your performances.
In a sport like tennis that never stops for nearly 11 months a year, and where every week there is a new tournament, and a new rankings list released; cultivating the patience necessary to survive it all can be a laborious task.
For Jabeur, patience has become her secret weapon.
On Sunday in Birmingham, she lifted her maiden WTA trophy to become the first Arab woman in history to achieve that feat.
Jabeur had lost her previous two WTA finals, in Moscow in 2018 and in Charleston earlier this year.
In Birmingham, she overcame the same player who defeated her in that decider in Russia three years ago – Daria Kasatkina, a relentless fighter with a knack for pulling off comeback victories over Jabeur.
"Playing against Dasha, I know she's going to be that player who gets every ball," Jabeur told The National following her title triumph.
“With another player I could have finished the shot in like three shots, but with her I have to add like five or six shots. And I think that’s what made the difference, is that I was so patient.
“I was like, ‘OK, you want to play 15 shots I’m here, you want to play 20 shots, I’m here’.”
This title run by Jabeur felt like a long time coming and her emotional reaction on court was the culmination of 10 years of searching for ways to realise her full potential; 10 years of getting knocked down and getting up again [yes, like the cliché song]; 10 years of reconciling her much-touted talent with the hard work needed to utilise it to achieve results.
If ever the Arab world needed a coming of age success story for inspiration, then we should look no further than Jabeur. She saw opportunity when others only saw limitations. She refused to let where she came from dictate where she can go. She takes pride in her role as an Arab pioneer, but her goals are far greater than any regional success.
She chose to hire an all-Tunisian team, believing her own country had everything she needed to make it to the next level. She is now No 24 in the world, No 14 in the 2021 Race to Shenzhen and is the joint match-wins leader on tour this season alongside world No 1 Ashleigh Barty.
“The question that everybody asks me is that I’m the only Arab woman, I’m making history, etc … I know that’s something big, but let’s face it, there aren’t that many Arab players and there weren’t many Arab players before me, so it’s totally normal that this is history,” explained Jabeur, who is the highest-ranked Arab woman in tennis history, and the first to make a Grand Slam quarter-final.
“So I’m telling them what I’m trying to do is make a point here and saying that it’s not impossible, you guys can do it.”
A day after winning singles in Birmingham, and making the final in doubles, Jabeur, her coach Issam Jellali, and her husband/fitness coach Karim Kamoun, drove to Eastbourne, where she is defending semi-final points from 2019 (the event was cancelled last year).
The North African had made a strong start to 2020 by reaching the quarter-finals at the Australian Open before the tour stopped a month later due to the pandemic. Jabeur was not discouraged and kept up her form when the circuit restarted five months later. She struggled with bubble fatigue and the revised ranking system did not properly reflect the progress she had made, but she stayed the course.
After checking a new milestone off of her bucket list by winning her first title in Birmingham, she assures she remains as hungry as ever.
“I am someone that builds up small steps. For me, the small step is to win a WTA title, I have bigger steps to win a Grand Slam, I have another big step to be No 1,” she says.
“So I know everything takes time, I know with me, with my game, I have to be patient, I have to be always working hard and wait and never give up with the results.
“I had so many disappointments that happened during my career but the good thing and the thing that I‘m proud of is that I didn’t give up and I didn’t stop believing in myself. I think a human being is always hungry to win more and is never satisfied.
"So you always have to find the way to come up with that speech, to talk to yourself and be more hungry to win.”
There is defiance in Jabeur’s approach to her career, because she learnt the hard way that she had to take matters into her own hands and become the primary decision-maker.
She says she was criticised for hiring a Tunisian coach that didn’t necessarily have experience on tour, and faced lots of scepticism when she started working with her husband. But she stuck to her guns and with time, focused her energy on trusting her own instincts and disregarding the outside noise.
"I tried to go in that direction to prove people wrong, but I think that's the really bad direction to go because I know the work I'm doing with my team and the work they're doing with me is good enough to make me go to the top," she told WTA Insider on Sunday.
Jabeur’s work ethic came into question early on her career – a misconception she believes stemmed from being labelled a “talented player”. She has a unique game that mixes power with delicate touch. She is No 4 on the aces leaderboard this year, but has won many matches by torturing her opponents with deft drop shots.
Being seen as “just gifted” is something Jabeur took years to adjust to and she is finally in a place where she has complete faith in her work process and feels like she has nothing to prove to anyone but herself.
“I'm not born talented. I worked hard to be talented. That's what most people don't understand. They think I just picked up a racquet and then I knew how to make a forehand and backhand, which is not the case. To be talented, I played a lot of sports before. I played handball, football, a lot of things. That's how I developed the touch and everything,” she said.
“So for me, being a ‘talent’ was not helpful during a period of my career. I've been going through a lot of things, but I was patient because I knew that I'm a player who takes my time.
“I'm not a 19-year-old winning a Grand Slam right away or something. I take my time and I'm really more and more patient over the years, which helped me a lot, not to focus on the negative and focus more on the positive.”
Looking ahead to Wimbledon, Jabeur is sticking to the plan, taking things step by step and relying on the main thing that has kept her going this far: Patience.
