Taylor playing first Slam since 2015: 'It really means so much'

After nearly six years, American Nick Taylor is back in a Grand Slam at this year’s Australian Open.

An 11-time major champion in Quad wheelchair doubles, world No. 16 Taylor was awarded a wild card to this year’s event at Melbourne Park, the Grand Slam first to feature a Quad field of eight players. The entry was reallocated to him after Canada’s Rob Shaw, first out of the direct acceptances and ranked world No. 9, withdrew from the event in later December as a result of COVID-19 travel concerns. 

While some luck helped him get there, Taylor also credits his conscious decision to be on-site as an alternate in the controlled environment in New York last summer with helping light his competitive fire to play on the game’s biggest stages again. The 41-year-old last played a major at the 2015 US Open, but accompanied longtime doubles partner David Wagner in September as a practice partner.

“Going to New York and being there but not playing, it was a weird feeling. It was great to be there and it was such a cool experience for the tennis fan in me, that I was sitting there watching two Top 5 guys in the world play with 10 other people in the stadium,” Taylor told usta.com from his Melbourne hotel ahead of the Australian Open. 

“But at the same time, it was hard inside because the competitor in me wanted to be playing so badly, especially when we got to the Quad doubles final. The singles, it’s more of a struggle against those top guys for me, but the doubles… David and I have never lost together. We’ve played the final seven times and won seven times. They played the final in Armstrong, and I was fortunate enough to sit in the corner, close to the court at about 15 feet away.

“Sitting there but not playing, it motivated me a lot to try to do whatever I could to get back to that, but I never in a billion years thought that the next Grand Slam for me was going to be Australia.”

“Going into 2021, I’m on the ITF players’ council, so I had an idea of a skeleton of a schedule, and I was looking at it wondering where I was going to go,” Taylor continued. “I’d first hoped that there were going to be some tournaments in the first three months of the year in the U.S., but then those unfortunately got canceled. So that put a big dampener on things for me, like, ‘What am I going to do?’ 

“Now, I’ve always entered Grand Slams, Masters and things like that despite my ranking, just in the event that something happens where people don’t go. I knew it was a slim to none chance that I was going to get in, but once I entered, I found out a couple of days after Christmas, near New Year’s, that Rob Shaw was going to have to pull out. He’s a good friend and he sent me a text letting me know. I just sat on pins and needles from then on thinking about what Tennis Australia might do. I was going, ‘Maybe they’ll pick me,’ and I got an email about 48 hours later asking me to come. 

“I was ecstatic, obviously, and that joy remained, but it was a crazy five days just trying to get everything done in terms of immigration paperwork, visas, COVID-19 tests, making sure I got to the chartered flights and all that.”

Having not played a tournament in the aftermath of the pandemic hiatus last year, Taylor instead spent much of his time off practicing with fellow American Casey Ratzlaff at Wichita State University. Taylor is the director operations for the men’s team and works closely with assistant coach Justin DeSanto, who is Ratzlaff’s personal coach. 

“In Wichita, we only went into a period where things were truly shut down for about two or three weeks, but even then, public courts were open,” Taylor said. “We did take a break for a period of time where numbers got a little higher, but we pretty much played at a public park every day. We made the joke that we had ‘Nick’s Rolling Tennis Center’ in the back of my minivan because we had everything under the sun. We grabbed it all when the Wichita State complex was shut down and we knew we wouldn’t be able to get to it. You name it — baskets of balls, medicine balls, yoga mats, bands, cones, racquets — we had it. It was pretty funny. The back of my van was stuffed with tennis stuff for about three months. 

“I do my best to find a positive in everything, and one thing it did was this: we were practicing in probably the biggest public park in Wichita. A lot of people walk there, jog there and take their families there. Even during COVID, people were doing that, wearing masks and social distancing, everything they were supposed to do, but what that did was open up the idea of wheelchair tennis to a lot of people. A lot of people who would never see us practice, saw us, so I think that was pretty cool.”

With Ratzlaff earning a wild card to compete in his first US Open last summer, the first Grand Slam to take place after the pandemic ultimately proved to be integral to Taylor’s season in many ways — despite him not being in the draw.

“I wanted to be there with David but also, by going, that got me inside the bubble. If someone else tested positive or something, then I’d have the chance to be an on-site alternate. It was a slim chance, but I thought it was worth that chance since I hadn’t played anything since March. I hit every day as Wagner’s practice partner even though I didn’t play,” he said. 

“But probably the biggest reason I was happy to be in New York was that it meant so much for me to be there for Casey’s first Grand Slam. I started with Casey at the very first event he played in wheelchair tennis, an event that our organization, Wichita Adaptive Sports, put on. I tell the story a lot, how I convinced his mom that this was the best thing for him to do and everything. To watch him play and then see him take a set against [world No. 4] Joachim Gerard, and have a chance to win that match, that was huge."

With the Australian Open marking the end of a five-week swing of three tournaments on the wheelchair circuit, Taylor hopes that the extra competitive opportunity will help him towards his overall goal for 2021: the Tokyo Paralympics. 

Due to the last-minute nature of his entry, Taylor is partnered with Japan’s Koji Sugeno in Melbourne, but the three-time Paralympic gold medalist’s ultimate aim is for he and Wagner to have an opportunity for a final run at the top of the medal stand.

“To say Tokyo is on my radar would be a massive understatement. It is my radar. Tokyo has been the only target since the day we lost the gold medal match in Rio in 2016. That memory is stuck in my head, so my entire goal is to get to Tokyo and win that gold medal,” he said. 

“Tokyo is also my last chance because of some rule changes, not necessarily through the sport of wheelchair tennis, but the International Paralympic Committee. They have made a rule that I won’t be able to play anymore in the Paralympics. I can continue to play regular tour tournaments, including Grand Slams, but I’m not getting any younger. I’ve been fortunate enough to accomplish a lot in this sport, but I’m such a competitive person. I really hope they’re able to pull it off, and not just for me. There are so many people that this could be their last chance, but for others, it could be their first chance or their only chance. Everything has been focused around what I need to do to get back to that Paralympics for my last chance.”

That road begins this week in Melbourne, where he’s drawn Niels Vink of the Netherlands in singles and he and Sugeno will face Wagner and Great Britain’s Andy Lapthorne in doubles.

“If it still would’ve have been four players, there’s no way I would’ve gotten in. No. 1 through No. 4 are here, so even if No. 4 couldn’t have gone, they wouldn’t have come down to me for the wild card at that point,” Taylor concluded.

“I came so close to not even entering, but I said to myself, ‘It takes 45 seconds to fill out the entry form, why not do it and see what happens?’… I’ve been playing this sport for a long time, and it really means so much to get to play in a Grand Slam again.”