Lleyton Hewitt was known as a player that squeezed every ounce he could from his tennis and athletic talents through sheer grit and determination.
There is no doubt he has taken that same attitude to his coaching career, always doing everything in his power to help his charge win.
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It seems that includes the odd attempt at skirting the rules, at least until he gets busted.
Over the last 18 months, the men’s ATP Tour joined the women’s WTA in trialling off-court coaching during matches, allowing coaches to get messages to their players with some restrictions.
A practice that had long been frowned upon and could result in penalties – perhaps most notoriously in Serena Williams’ infamous loss to Naomi Osaka in the 2018 US Open final – is now allowed, even though many were dead against the change.
One of the restrictions is that the coaching can’t interrupt play, distract the opponent or take place when the player being coached is at the opposite end of the court.
Enter, Lleyton Hewitt.
As Alex de Minaur was trailing 4-0 in the fifth set of his clash with Andrey Rublev on Sunday night, Hewitt was desperately trying to get a message to the Aussie to try to run the tiring and cramping Russian around the court.
The problem was, Hewitt happened to glance at the big screen at Rod Laver Arena and saw himself, forcing him to immediately stop the hand-signalling as the Demon was at the opposite end.
It was an incident spotted by host broadcaster Channel 9 and discussed on Monday morning.
“Lleyton is onto it pretty early, he says ‘OK there’s an opportunity here’,” host Tony Jones says of the coaching idea.
“And then Lleyton sees himself on screen and he just tries to conceal the hand movements.
“But clearly he’s telling him to move him around.”
Doubles great Todd Woodbridge, now part of the commentary team for Channel 9, was right across the rule about coaching from your side of the court.
He felt if Hewitt had been able to get the message across, the outcome of the match may have been different.
“So the rules have changed, you’re now allowed to coach,” Woodbridge said.
“You can do it from your same end, you can’t go across the court in front of the opponent.
“He was down the other end to De Minaur and he’s trying to say ‘did you see it, did you see it’.
“And he couldn’t quite get the message across. He only had to get the ball going corner to corner and get Rublev moving.
“But that’s what was amazing with Rublev, he’d go bang on the serve, crank a winner or get the point where he could just stand in the centre and that’s hard to do.
“He just kept his composure. If De Minaur gets 4-1, he probably wins that set, but he managed to go through.
“So extraordinary tension right at the end even though that set was 6-0.”
It seems De Minaur was across the tactic, however, he just wasn’t able to execute the way he would’ve wanted.
“I felt great,” the Demon said after the defeat. “I thought we were going to go into the fifth set and I was going to be able to expose him physically.
“I played a couple of average points in the first game, and he played two really good points, and all of a sudden I’m behind the eight ball and I was playing catch-up.”
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