Nadal’s next opponent in Rome: from a name inspired by a football legend to his charity work in Africa
Rafael Nadal He already has a confirmed opponent for his debut in the tournament. Rome Masters 1000. Manacori, former number 1 in the ATP world rankings and now ranked 305th, will face a tennis player who has never cracked the top 100 but is the best racket in his country: Zizou Bergs.
Originally from Lommel (Belgium), The current number 108 in the ranking is named after one of the legends of world football: Zinedine Zidane.. The French star, who played professionally from 1989 to 2006 and became a world champion with the French national team in 1998, is named Zizou.
The big question, however, is how did their parents decide to give them this curious nickname as a name? The answer comes from his father Cohen, who said that as a teenager he played in a team with friends in which everyone had the name of a famous player such as Pele, Maradona, Platini or Zidane himself.
When the time came for the birth, Cohen and his wife (Anne-Mi) thought they were going to be parents to a baby girl. Without the boy’s name, Zidane’s nickname appeared: -What about Zizou?
Besides this curiosity, Bergs He is also involved in charitable work on the African continent. When, at age 15, he made a demonstration trip to Burundidecided to help them from my small place. “We don’t always realize it, but you have a lot, and sometimes you feel like you don’t have enough. You grow up in a very good culture, in a very good country, and you think that everything is quite normal, that you have all these clothes, shoes, rackets that you can string whenever you want, and there is delicious food on the table every day. . It’s not accepted there, it really opened my eyes. They played with my things, even if they were five sizes too big for me, they still played with them. “It really touched me,” he told the ATP in an interview.
At the tennis level, Belgian Zizou has achieved over the past year and a half great performance at the Challenger Circuit. From January 2023 to May 2024, he became champion in Tallahassee (twice), Drummondville and Yokkaichi. He also made his debut in the main draw of the Australian Open. playing in two out of four majors throughout his career (in 2022 he did it at Wimbledon).
As an ATP player, he only won five matches. The first of these was against Albert Ramos-Vinolas (Antwerp, 2020), then against Oscar Otte (Gstaad, 2021), later against Laszlo Djere (Gstaad, 2023), Yuri Rodionov (Gstaad, 2023) and Patrick Kipson (Houston, 2024) . Can he surprise in Rome and defeat Rafael Nadal?