Holger Rune, tennis prince of Denmark, has learned his lines. Is he ready to perform?

PARIS, France – There was a moment late Thursday night in Paris.

Near midnight, cold and breezy, fans bundled and packed into Court 14, near the western edge of Roland Garros, taking in the latest downturn in the saga of 21-year-old Holger Rune, a prince of Danish tennis.

The rain-delayed day/night match had been a microcosm of his brief career: a flashy spurt at the beginning, so much promise, so much bravado, and then confusion and turmoil. A two-set lead dissolved into a 5-0 deficit in a fifth-set tiebreak against very young (22) and very green Flavio Cobolli of Italy. Cobolli had just chased down two easy overheads that Rune had hit like a man who had lost his nerve, stealing a point he had no business winning.

Rune, world No 4 in the summer of 2023, and now No 13, was about to sublimate into the night and fall farther from the narrative that launched his stardom-in-waiting: Being a rival of his junior tennis friend, one Carlos Alcaraz for the next decade. 

He did nothing of the sort.

Cobolli hit a first serve into the ad-court with enough heat to throw an already disoriented Rune off balance, but for the first time in the tiebreak, his action received its equal and opposite, and a good deal more. Rune hit a slapshot winner so fast that it appeared not to bounce before crashing into the tarp, and he was away, digging out shots in the corners, switching from defense to offense with an extra twist of the hips.

In his mind, he was thinking of one of his childhood heroes, Roger Federer, and a famous match at the Australian Open in 2020 against the nominative determinism journeyman Tennys Sandgren, when the latter earned seven match points, but Federer stayed calm and aggressive to prevail, just as Rune prevailed 6-4, 6-3, 3-6, 3-6, 7-6(7) over nearly four hours.

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“I don’t know how it appeared, it just did,” Rune said a little while later. “Roger is always very relaxed when he’s playing. I told myself, ‘OK, let’s try to relax’. Then I started to hit my shots better. More freedom, got back on track.”

Maybe, just maybe, down the line, this match will serve as another kind of microcosm for the rest of his career, a turmoil-laden downward spiral, and then relaxation, aggression and success in the face of going off the edge, when it all appears to have dissolved into air and noise.

Holger Rune is not for everyone.

Always bold and confident, even in his first big stage matches three years ago, he is not shy about stating his intention (not his dream) of winning the biggest titles in the sport. Older players occasionally scold him for on-court taunts, stalling tactics, and even occasional head-hunting on short balls. He often follows his losses with explanations that sometimes can come off as excuses. Illness, bad strings, badly strung strings, stuff like that.

But characters such as Rune have long provided an essential balance to the sport: the brash, bad boy who cracks the gentlemanly sheen tennis likes to wrap itself in, whose tennis life doesn’t have the benefit of early solidity or a smooth glide path up to ultimate success — though he’s never too far from it.

The Danish tyro tends to ruffle feathers (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

“Holger is a winner,” his once and current coach Patrick Mouratoglou said during a recent interview. “He’s always been a winner.”

Tennis needs winners. It also needs villains. Rune intends to be both.

Mouratoglou should know. He recruited Rune to his academy in France when he was 13 years old and has overseen his development to lesser and greater extents ever since, along with Rune’s mother, Aneke, who is undoubtedly the C.E.O. of Team Rune.  

In 2022, he became co-head coach along with Rune’s longtime trainer Lars Christensen. Mouratoglou left the squad in spring 2023, but then Rune brought him back a few months later.

Then they parted ways after the U.S. Open, and Rune brought on Boris Becker, a six-time Grand Slam champion with plenty of experience dealing with the perils of young talent, riches and fame.

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That lasted a few months, but didn’t take.

Becker said that he couldn’t devote enough time to the player. So then he brought in Severin Luthi, a Swiss tennis coach who formerly worked with Stan Wawrinka and the Swiss tennis idol that came to mind in the depths against Cobolli.

That lasted about a month.

In February, Mouratoglou returned.

Rune has searched for stability in his coaching setup (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

The chaos of Rune’s box did not have a positive effect on his tennis game. He won three titles in 2022, but just one last year and has yet to win one this year. He’s been dropping matches to opponents he should handle, players only hardcore tennis fans know much about — Sebastian Baez in Rome, Jan-Lennard Struff in Munich, Arthur Cazaux in Melbourne. All of them strong, none of them tipped like the young Dane to be a conqueror of the sport.

Mouratoglou says there are three main obstacles Rune has to overcome.

The first is making sure that he has a consistent voice in his head helping him. He’s had four different ones the past year.

“It was eight months going right, left, up, down, and in a way he kind of a bit lost in what he was supposed to do,” Mouratoglou said.

“He was very confused and, when you’re confused you start to doubt and it’s not the same story.”

Second, Rune has to commit to playing differently than he did as a junior. He was the European under-14 junior champion and won the French Open boys title at 16. He did it playing a style that resembled a young Novak Djokovic, the human backboard who could chase every ball down. Rune liked to win, and that was a winning formula.

The Dane does not find it easy to separate his gifts from his head (David Pretty/Getty Images)

“Two-hundred shots in a row without missing to be able to win the point,” Mouratoglou said.

But that’s not who he and Mouratoglou think he should be now. He has a bounding serve, especially given his size. His forehand isn’t as consistent as it needs to be, but it’s got fire that can’t be taught. He has the timing to take the ball early and is good at that net. 

Stay close to the baseline, Mouratoglou keeps telling him. Don’t drift back.

Third, and maybe most importantly, he needs to learn how to control his emotions, or if he can’t do that, channel that anger in a positive direction so that he knows how to use it to make himself play better the way does. He’s got a long way to go in that department, but that’s not exactly atypical in tennis. The ability to reverse mental adversity as soon as it strikes is frequently the last line of the soliloquy, that takes talent and turns it into essence, something harder to break. Federer and Djokovic weren’t born icemen; they melted as much as Rune early in their careers, if not more. They had to learn their lines.

The spotlight has not always suited Rune (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Mouratoglou likes to compare emotional management in tennis to the beast in the movie Alien. It starts small, and at first it’s harmless, but if you let it grow, eventually you can’t control it anymore. It’s controlling you. You start talking to yourself about missed shots; the more you talk the more you miss; the more you talk, the more you’re feeding the beast. 

“The beast grows and at some point, the beast is the boss and then you’re done,” he said. “Live with the beast, but you don’t feed it.

“He has to feel those moments when it starts to transform into something that will play against him.”

Rune’s match with Cobolli played out like a lab experiment that Mouratoglou had designed to prove his analogy.

He built his two-set lead playing on his front foot, then let Cobolli start taking the initiative and sagged back. By the time he was slogging through the fifth set, desperately fighting off break points, he was playing eight and 10 feet behind the baseline, shuffling backwards after the first shot of so many points.

“I let him control too much,” he said. 

He jabbered with the chair umpire about close line calls and her nudging him to pick up the pace and stop trying to buy extra time with impromptu racket changes and visits to his chair. He fed the beast. It was controlling him.

Then, the vision of Federer’s calm. Relax, he thought. He and Mouratoglou have been working on breathing exercises to control his heart rate and his stress. He started to go on the offensive and fight, pumping his fist as a 0-5 deficit turning into a 9-7 lead and a series of deep balls that pushed Cobolli back and made him miss one last time. 

He and Mouratoglou know it’s too early to declare victory. They still have to tame the doubts that have built up the past eight months, that can cloud the truth that his tennis is better than it was then.

“What is important is to be on the right way,” Mouratoglou said. “Keep improving those things that we’ve talked about and it’s gonna click at some point.”

Getting it to click has been a rough road for Rune, especially losing in his second match in Rome after being up a set and leading in the second. But the extra time let him and Mouratoglou map out the big concepts behind his tennis. They’ve figured out who he needs to be as a player, how to best use his speed, his power, and his 6ft, 2in physique, which is right in that Goldilocks zone of Federer, Rafael Nadal, Djokovic and Alcaraz. Now he has to train his brain not to throw away his gifts.

“I think we used the time right, so now is just to perform and put everything together,” Rune said. “I think my game is good.”

It’s the thought that counts.

(Top photo: Mateo Villalba/Getty Images)