Taylor Fritz: Inside the American’s rise & competitive spirit | ATP Tour

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Taylor Fritz: Inside the American’s rise & competitive spirit

Exclusive insight from physio Wolfgang Oswald

September 06, 2024

Taylor Fritz broke new ground on Tuesday when he defeated Alexander Zverev for the second consecutive major to reach the semi-finals of the US Open. The American had made four previous Grand Slam quarter-finals, but never advanced to the last four. That changed with a splendid performance against the two-time Nitto ATP Finals champion.

But according to Wolfgang Oswald, Fritz’s longtime physiotherapist, the 26-year-old is not satisfied just to move one step further.

“Before, maybe there was a sense of relief. ‘I made the second week, I made a quarter-final’,” Oswald said. “He actually said it in a car the other day. He was like, ‘I’m not celebrating, because it’s not over. I’m not happy’.”

Fritz is fully focused on continuing his biggest run yet and trying to become the first American man to win a major singles title since Andy Roddick 21 years ago at Flushing Meadows.

ATPTour.com spoke to Oswald, who knows Fritz as well as anyone, to gain insight into the 2022 Nitto ATP Finals competitor’s growth and mindset. The Australian first noticed Fritz when he played Tommy Paul in the 2015 Roland Garros boys’ singles final, won by Paul. He then continued to follow the American as he progressed to the ATP Challenger Tour, including a final-set tie-break Fritz played against Dustin Brown.

At the time, Oswald was a tennis fan working out of Arizona. He got into tennis because Brett Waltz, the current physiotherapist for Frances Tiafoe, Fritz’s US Open semi-final opponent, thought it would be good to get a physio with a tennis background like Oswald on Tour.

One day, the Aussie received a call asking if he could be in Chengdu by Wednesday. Despite a fully booked schedule, Oswald manouevred things around and made the trip to work with Fritz later that week.

“I’d never met Taylor. I’d never met David Nainkin, his coach [at the time]… I rocked up at breakfast, and I met Taylor, and we went straight to the tournament, and he was in qualifying, and he qualified. He made the quarter-finals and that’s how it started,” Oswald said. “I’d never even talked to him on the phone. I just rocked up in Chengdu, China. It was supposed to be a three-week trip.”

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It turned into a five-week trip as Fritz was pushing to qualify for the Next Gen ATP Finals presented by PIF. Oswald even competed in an ATP Challenger Tour event in Vietnam during the trip.

“Taylor’s pretty reserved if he doesn’t know you. So I remember he was on his phone. He said, ‘Hi’. I talked with his coach quite a bit in the car ride over, because his coach and I had a lot of mutual friends. The tennis world is very small,” Oswald said. “There wasn’t a lot of communication, I would say, because Taylor’s pretty reserved and pretty quiet. But I remember he had his routine, I had a routine and we grew together.”

After a whirlwind start to the trip due to how quickly it came about, the player-physio duo familiarised themselves with each other better at an ATP Challenger Tour event in Ningbo, where Oswald needed to take on a few more roles for the week. They naturally spent more time together.

“We went out to the malls and did some shopping, went out to dinner,” Oswald said. “And then we started communicating a lot more, and then we gelled pretty good.”

It did not take long for Oswald to learn about Fritz’s competitive spirit.

“Pretty much the first match I was with him, qualifying in Chengdu, which is me not knowing him that way, because I didn’t get that from watching him on TV, necessarily,” Oswald said. “[I saw] how laid back he is, and then flip the switch and fight tooth and nail to the end and [how he] tries to figure out how to win… Pretty much right from the get-go, you can see he was a competitor.”

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^{Photo: Sarah Stier/Getty Images}
According to the physiotherapist, Fritz’s competitive nature came out in many settings, including the arcades and batting cages in Tokyo their second week together. It was not just on the tennis court.

“Video games, ultra competitive. We’re playing cards, ultra competitive. Chess, ultra competitive. Any type of social game, ultra competitive,” Oswald said. “If we’re doing drills on the court, [even] if there’s nothing riding on it. ‘Hey you’ve got to do assault bike sprints or push ups’, then he’ll be ultra competitive. So he’s very competitive at almost anything that he does.

“I’ve seen him get pretty heated early on. Actually, he was really into FIFA. Now he plays other games, but he was video gaming FIFA, and I remember he beat a professional FIFA player that we thought was professional based on his user name. I remember he was ultra competitive, maybe even breaking a couple of controllers on his video game console, because he was that competitive, truly heated when he would lose.”

But Fritz is not constantly in that mode. In fact, he is more reserved than many of his colleagues off the court.

“He’s quiet and reserved and he’s very mellow other than [when he is on] the court. His heart rate doesn’t even go up one beat per minute if we’re late for a flight. He is so cool, calm and collected,” Oswald said. “And then in a match, if you watch him play, he fights tooth and nail to the end. But I think being calm most of the time helps the mental energy when you have to turn it on. You can turn it on. If you’re always amped up, and then have to amp up more for a match, sometimes that can be very mentally fatiguing.”

That mentality has helped Fritz climb as high as No. 5 in the PIF ATP Rankings and check off various stepping stones in his journey. The World No. 12 has won at least one title at the ATP 250s, ATP 500s and the ATP Masters 1000s.

“Having been quarters of Slams and being close to a semi several times in five sets, this is the next stepping stone. Now he’s been in that situation, he knows how to handle it,” Oswald said. “One of the themes the last couple of days has not been, ‘Hey, we’re happy we’re in the semis, let’s celebrate’. The job’s not done, let’s go for the whole thing.”

Oswald has watched his charge grow in several ways over the past seven years, from physical improvements to maturity and more. And now, Fritz has used that to move to within a match of becoming the first male American singles finalist at a major since Roddick at Wimbledon in 2009. Only longtime friend Tiafoe stands in his way.

“Frances and him have pushed each other. His training volume went up when Frances hit 30 something in the world the first time, and then Fritz overtook him, and then Frances got better,” Oswald said. “They’ve continually pushed each other. Even though they’re good buddies, neither one wants to lose the other guy, I can tell you that.”