Matteo Berrettini recounts his drama: “Darkness without end.”
Matteo Berrettini recounts his drama: “Darkness without end.”
Matteo Berrettini in an interview with Corriere della Sera opened his heart, recounting the difficult months he went through after his injury and his rebirth at Wimbledon.
The Roman tennis player after an injury-riddled 2022 ran into the same problems in the first part of 2023-a nightmare that caused him to plummet in the rankings. “I experienced too many mental and physical tears. There were times when my head and body were not aligned, I was asking too much of one or the other. Clinically it was an internal oblique tear. I think I was asking too much of my body. If the head deludes itself into thinking it’s fine and the body is sick, you pay the price I paid.”
Berrettini talked about the darkness that swallowed him in those moments, “And the darkness seems to have no end, it seems to swallow you up because instead of standing still and resting, you dig yourself into an abyss. Those were bad moments that I didn’t like. But they were instrumental in making me rediscover the reasons for the joy of doing what I started as a child and has occupied my whole life. I looked back to the origins to find myself again. The darkness gave me the space to do that.”
Haters on social media hurt him: “I realized that my mood changed in relation to the tone of a hundred people who wrote their legitimate, but often unfair, comments that came directly into my hands. I realized that my mood had a duty to depend on more than that. It seemed unfair to me that, for something pertaining to my physique, I had to swallow so much nastiness. That everyone who had cheered would disappear or suddenly turn into judges or haters. After all, I was blocked by my aching body and tried to fight back with all my might. I paid the highest price. Here, this elementary solidarity was missing for me. It hurt me not to find this sensitivity.”
Berrettini confessed that he thought about giving up everything: “In 2020 I had a complicated year and I remember having the thought, which helped me sleep, of taking my passport, saying nothing to a soul and running away where no one could find me. I happened to think about it, in the dark days. I thought but why do I have to suffer all this pressure, the guilt for my wounded body…. Life is one, it has no replication. But then time, comparison with others made me realize that I am happy only if I go down the field and breathe that atmosphere. And I am unhappy if I don’t: it is a magnificent condemnation….”
