Dustin Brown made a splash this year. At least, for a guy who primarily played Challengers in Jamaica and Germany and has been ranked 400 or worse for at least 5 years of his carrer.
He won a round in Queen’s Club, then reached the quarters of Newport. With his flowing dreadlocks, he is reminiscent of Yannick Noah during his peak years. Brown lists himself as a man from Jamaica, but the fact is, he’s half-German, spent much of his early years in Germany, and then around the age of 10, he moved to Jamaica. Brown doesn’t speak with the stereotypical Jamaican accent sounding a little American, a little British.
In a way, Brown is much like James Blake who is the son of an English woman and an African-American man, or Yannick Noah, the son of a Cameroon soccer player and a French woman. Such is the international nature of tennis.
Ranked 118 in the world, aged 25, and towering at 6’5″, Brown might never reach the vaunted heights of the sport, but who knows. Players like Blake or Soderling have matured a bit later in life. And even if he doesn’t reach the heights of the sport, he’ll at least say that he had a pretty good life. Fans often have disdain for players that never reach the top 50, that toil on the tour for years. They wonder “why play if you can never be the best”, never realizing their lives are so far from being the best that the 100th or even 500th ranked man in the world is far in excess of where they will ever be in their lives.
The world of tennis is cruel. You can only be truly wealthy if you are a top singles or doubles player. Most jobs let you be the 100,000th best in the world and still make a good living, the kind that lets you feed, clothe, and house yourself. But even players like Dustin Brown can say they saw the world and played a sport they loved.
