Grigor Dimitrov returns to Wimbledon after heartache, for one more journey into the flow state

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — As mid-match tennis injuries go, Grigor Dimitrov’s torn pectoral muscle, a year ago on Centre Court at Wimbledon, was about as heartbreaking as they get.

One moment, Dimitrov was playing the match of his life against Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1. He was up two sets to love, and flowing as players only do a handful of times during their careers.

Dimitrov seemed destined to get over the line that evening and pull off one of the great upset wins of his career, as he sliced Sinner into submission for the better part of two hours.

And then he was crumbling to the grass, clutching his chest like someone had fired a bullet at him, as he pelted a serve into the deuce court to level the third set at 2-2. Within seconds, Sinner was at his side, comforting his friend and Monte Carlo neighbor.

Six days later, Dimitrov watched Sinner lift the trophy as the men’s singles champion.

“I was sad,” Dimitrov said in his pre-tournament news conference. “I knew that it could have been one of my best chances. I knew it. But in the end this is what happened.”

What happened next goes a long way toward explaining where Dimitrov finds himself now, back at Wimbledon as a wild card. He’s 35. He’s never made a Grand Slam final. Last year really might have been his last best chance, but he’s also had a good run. He’s collected more than $31 million in prize money and millions more in endorsements and perks.

It’s just that every tennis player with gifts like he had as a teenager believes that destiny has something more for them. OK, no one could seriously live up to “Baby Fed”, a nickname that Dimitrov came to hate, but one Grand Slam title didn’t seem so far away.

Then it was, and eventually it wasn’t clear how much Dimitrov minded that, given everything else that the job and the life had given him.

His friends occupy the high places in tennis. Novak Djokovic refers to him as his “Bulgarian brother.” He and Serena Williams are, Williams said, besties.

“I always call Grigor my bestie, which he’s definitely my guy bestie,” Williams said in a news conference this week. “He gets my crazy. I get his crazy. Believe me, he’s way crazier than I am.”

Dimitrov fell out of the top 10 in 2018, and didn’t come particularly close to it again until 2024.

He was 33 by then, and he started working with Jamie Delgado, who had previously worked with Andy Murray and has a reputation for not working with people who don’t want to work. He said he wasn’t in it for the trophies, or even to try to match the Jannik Sinners and Carlos Alcarazs of the world. It was to see how much he could get out of himself.

Could he be better than he had been? Could he be better at 34 than he had been at 33? And then, for a couple hours, he was so much better than Jannik Sinner, truly in the flow.

“It’s a great feeling,” he said during a roundtable at Wimbledon. “It is wonderful. That’s why I say there is only very few moments in one’s career, at least for myself, and even from the players in the past that I’ve talked to, where you feel in a total togetherness, like a wholeness on the court. You get into that flow state and you’re just having fun. You’re not thinking about anything else.”

And then he was sitting on the grass, feeling pain unlike anything he had ever felt.

He cried for two hours in the locker room. But then he left the grounds and headed to the hospital and decided to start his rehab.

Big mistake.

He didn’t process what had happened. It wasn’t like stubbing his toe. It was big. It cut to the core of who he was, and put his identity at stake. As an adult, he’d only been Dimitrov, the tennis star, at least to the outside world.

He tried to put all that in a storage unit, and it didn’t work. When he returned to the court months after his surgery, he’d toss the ball in the air and have a flashback. No matter what doctors told him, he worried that if he hit the ball too hard his muscle would tear again.

“I was not afraid to ask for help,” he said. “I had to find a different way to manage it.”

He searched for reasons why it happened, and why it had happened at that moment. Ultimately, he landed in the only place he could — there was no reason.

But now, here he is again. He has won four of his six matches on grass the past month. That slice backhand and that serve are skidding and pelting again, and there are moments when he can dream of feeling like he did that night a year ago against Sinner, when everything felt like nothing.

There were some flashbacks when he walked through the gates. He was nervous in the car driving over to the club just to practice. It was three days before his opening match.

The nerves, he said, tell him he still loves the game. Dane Sweeny, the qualifier from Australia he beat in the first round, probably wishes he loved it a little less.

Tennis feels a little lighter now. It’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t go well.

“We’re putting so much importance between those seven lines,” he said. “You need to find that, I think, that balance.”

Dimitrov will try to focus on the game and the ball, and maybe one day, something bright will light a path to that flow state once more, and he will be better than he has ever been.

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