He’s quite the character.
The natural reaction to Rafa Nadal exiting Wimbledon early once again is to speculate on his decline, but that would be doing a woeful disservice to the man who beat him yesterday.
From the very first game, Dustin Brown was serving monsters and casually hitting ridiculous drop shots as if he was on the practice court, not playing one of the greatest players the game has ever seen in front of a worldwide audience.
With a style of tennis like his and with some of the best dreadlocks ever seen in sport, Brown is always going to catch the eye and here are some more titbits of information about a man we hope to see plenty more of over the next week or so.
1. He was born in Germany, but spent a lot of his life in Jamaica
Michael Stich is the type of name you expect to have a German tennis player to have; Dustin Brown isn’t. You don’t expect many German tennis players to have dreadlocks either.
Though Brown was born in and spent his formative years in Germany, his Dad, (bad bad) Leroy Brown is Jamaican and the family moved there when Dustin was 11.
Dustin says his move to Jamaica was hugely benificial for his tennis career, even though the facilities were a world away from what he was used to in Germany.
He told The Guardian: “Things were just so different. Coming from Germany, having a Game Boy, cable TV and stuff and going to Jamaica and having to realise, ‘Shit, there are other things in the world that are important.’
“I’m very thankful that happened. Maybe without going there I wouldn’t be where I am right now. It was good for me to see another side of life, to realise that it wasn’t all Germany.”
2. He has a massive tattoo of his Dad on his torso
When Brown removed his shirt during a break in play against Nadal and when he lifted it up after winning, he revealed a huge tattoo of a dreadlocked man on his torso.
Given the fact that the man had dreadlocks and given Brown’s Jamaican connections, it was suggested that it was a tattoo of Bob Marley.
Anyone who genuinely thought that the tattoo bore any resemblance to Bob must have been smoking something that Bob himself was pretty fond of, because it looks nothing like him at all.
https://twitter.com/ESPNTennis/status/616662399836360704
The tattoo, in fact, is of his Dad Leroy.
“I have the portrait of my dad at home in my bedroom, also. I don’t get to see him that often. Normally in the off-season,” Brown told Wimbledon.com.
“It’s been a very long road for me and my whole family. That’s one of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time and I had the opportunity to do that with a great tattoo artist in Cologne in Germany last year.”
3. He spent years travelling the tournament circuit while living in a camper van
Plenty of people dream of buying themselves a camper van and going touring for a while, but few would have envied Brown’s nomadic existence sometime between 2004 and 2009.
In an effort to save on costs, his parents brought him a fully equipped VW camper van in which Brown drove to tournaments throughout Europe, using it to cook for himself in the evenings and sleep in at night.
During that time, he strung rackets for other players and allowed them to use the other beds in the camper van to earn himself a few quid on the side and he didn’t get rid of the camper van until he started to make more of a name for himself in 2009.
“At the start it was awkward, people didn’t know who I was, everyone was like, ‘Who’s this guy with the camper?'” Brown told The Guardian.
“But after a while, meeting people, playing better, playing doubles, stringing rackets for the guys, you get to know everyone. Call it hustling, grinding, whatever you want… we were all just trying to get on to the big tour.”
4. He is capable of executing some truly outrageous shots
Brown was ranked 102nd in the world before defeating Nadal yesterday and his highest ever ranking was 78th last summer.
Consistency, as you might guess, is a problem, but when he’s on, he’s on.
Brown had beaten Nadal in their only ever meeting before yesterday and fans who had never seen him before will have wondered “who the hell is this guy playing all of these outrageous shots?”
Those who had seen him before will know that he had it in his locker; look at this amazing effort from 2013 as proof…
5. He hasn’t cut his hair in 19 years
We knew dreadlocks take an awful lot of time and effort, but nearly two decades since he’s had a haircut?
You would imagine that having hair as long and as thick as Brown’s, especially the way he wears it, would be prohibitive for playing tennis, or any sport for that matter, but he’s well used to it, having not cut his hair since he was 11, way back in August 1996.
If nothing else, think of the amount of money he’s saved on trips to the barbers since then.
He doesn’t really strike us as a short, back and sides man in fairness.
