Matteo Berrettini in shock: “Death threats against my family”

After his victory over Stan Wawrinka in the first round of the U.S. Open, Matteo Berrettini revealed during a press conference what had happened at the most recent French Open in Paris: “I think we need to protect the players and do everything possible to create a safe environment for everyone, because, if I’m not mistaken, at Indian Wells an Italian female tennis player received some messages, and my brother is here: at Roland Garros, he received messages on his phone containing threats against my family and things like that.”

“I think we should create a stronger structure—I don’t know, a stronger committee—to protect the players,” as reported by Ubitennis. “Do I always get these messages? Yes. I won a match, and they were writing things like: ‘Matteo is so bad that if you don’t tell him to lose,’ or something like that, ‘we’ll kill your family’ or ‘we’ll do this.’ They were threatening us.”

“Obviously, my brother reported everything to the ATP, and we reported everything as well. They have our phone numbers and everything else. But we’re thirty years old—we’re adults—yet when I think about the girls and the younger players, receiving this kind of message can be scary. We’re tennis players, so it’s important to protect ourselves.”

The match against Wawrinka wasn’t an easy one. The 41-year-old Swiss player, who won the same tournament in 2016, received a last-minute wild card and was able to hold his own against Berrettini in the first two sets, taking both sets to a tiebreak. It wasn’t until the third set that the Italian pulled away, closing it out with a decisive 6-0. At the end of the match, the crowd at Flushing Meadows gave Wawrinka a standing ovation, accompanied by a video highlighting the most significant moments of his career: the Swiss player has already announced his retirement at the end of the season, and the match against Berrettini was his last Grand Slam match.