At Indian Wells, the 27-year-old bowed out in the first round to Yosuke Watanuki on a Wednesday afternoon. With time to spare, his coach Artem Suprunov suggested taking a road trip to Las Vegas ahead of the Phoenix Challenger. With his pupil posting two wins and eight losses to start his season, Suprunov kept it real, as Bublik tells it.
“He’s like, ‘Man, if you play like this, we’re just going to be out of tennis’, of the conversation by Wimbledon because that’s where my points are. After Wimbledon I made, like, 50 points,” he recalled.
Bublik agreed to the change of pace, spending three days in the Sin City and turning up for his opener in Phoenix a few hours beforehand with the mindset he was “useless” and simply needed to “let it be.”
The approach did the trick.
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s go to Vegas.’ We enjoy. We change the racquet. We did many things. I said, Okay, if it goes, it goes. If not, thank you very much, tennis, and it worked,” he said.
