I was looking at Williams and Sharapova during my childhood - Sabalenka
In an interview to The Telegraph, Aryna Sabalenka commented on who were her childhood idols. "I was looking more at Serena [Williams] and Maria [Sharapova] probably, but it wasn’t like I was a big fan of theirs," the world no. 11 confessed ahead of the Australian Open. "My dad told me a story. When I was maybe 12 a friend of his came to me and said: ‘Oh, you’re a future Sharapova.’ I was so angry. I said, ‘I’m a future Sabalenka, not a future Sharapova.’”
Sabalenka often had some controversial behaviours during her career, which was not easy to handle. “At some tournaments, they spoke to me like ‘You need to be more quiet.’ But, well, you don’t really control that", Sabalenka admitted. "I don’t know how it happened actually [that she became a grunter]. Sometimes I can stop screaming at all. Sometimes I scream like a crazy [person]. I am so sorry to the people who don’t really like it.”
The Minsk native also confessed that in some ways she does not feel grateful to her country: "In Belarus, to be honest, there were only a few people who believed in me. They thought I was stupid, that I had no chance to play at this level. And now they’re all nice to me! I don’t really want to speak to them because I know what they were saying about me. I need to be thankful to them because that motivated me to work even harder and to show them, ‘Guys, you’re not right. You need to stop talking about players because you don’t really understand about tennis’.”
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from Tennis World USA http://bit.ly/2Fwv9HQ
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