Ilya Ivashka remembers his first martial arts class vividly. His friend, Andrei Kozlovsky, gave him a stern warning.
“He told me, ‘Man, don’t go there because they are going to break all your body’,” Ivashka recalled from when he was a child. “I was so scared. I said, ‘Okay, I’m not going there.’ I went to the first class. I was crying, they took me out and because of him I said I will never do it.”
The next sport Ivashka tried was tennis, because his father always played with a friend. Fast-forward two decades and Ivashka is competing in the US Open, where he is into the fourth round for the first time.
In the stands throughout the tournament has been Kozlovsky, who now is a professional dancer living in New York. It is safe to say his advice to Ivashka worked out. The 28-year-old is living his dream on one of the biggest stages in sports.
Ivashka’s 21-year-old brother, Aleksei, grew up playing many sports. “My brother tried all sports that exist in the world,” Ivashka said. “By 10, he changed [to] 25 different sports. But for me, [it was] not like this.”
It was all tennis all the time for Ivashka. Before he was a teen, he had already travelled outside Belarus to compete. One memory sticks out from when he was 12 years old.
Ivashka remembers playing a prestigious junior tournament in Bradenton, Florida. Training at the same facility was Andy Murray, who at the time was on the verge of cracking the Top 10 of the Pepperstone ATP Rankings.
“To see him playing and just to get a photo was the best moment of the trip,” Ivashka said, before reflecting on their first practice together, which came earlier this year in Rotterdam. “When I got the chance to practise with him, it was a very nice moment. I found this photo on Facebook that I have. I don’t use the Facebook, but I went there and I had this photo from I think 2006.
“He was super nice. He’s a very, very nice guy. Even when we were practising, I didn’t know him and probably he didn’t know me as well… I talked with him and I showed him the picture from when I was young and he was super, super nice to me. We spoke and he’s a really nice guy.
“It was funny because he was looking [at the picture] like, ‘What’s happening with my hair? What’s happening on my head?’”
In his late teens, Ivashka’s parents wanted him to consider going to college in the United States. But at the age of 19, he secured his first Pepperstone ATP Ranking…
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