After only two days on Australia’s Survivor-like reality TV show called I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Outta Here!, 25-year-old tennis player Bernard Tomic, Australian’s non-Kyrgios bad boy who’s best known for tanking matches and acting like a jerk, quit the show saying it made him depressed and that he wanted to return to tennis.
Tomic, who hasn’t made it past the third round of any tournament in a year and who didn’t even qualify for the Australian Open this year, spent all of 2017 sliding in the rankings to his current world No. 168. He went on a talk show today to address his decision to leave the reality show and his desire to return to tennis:
“I only became depressed when I got in. I actually thought the whole year that I sort of didn’t play tennis and mucked around I think that’s one of the reasons my ranking fell; don’t get me wrong I was in the same position about a couple of years back, I was 150 in the world and managed to be a top 16/17 player year after that so I’m going to turn this around. It’s my goal to prove everyone wrong and I’ve done it all throughout my career and I’m excited for the challenge.”
“Only then when I got into the jungle I realised that maybe the jungle will make all this whole last year disappear and I can just enjoy it with these people here, but it just gave me a bit of depression and maybe said ‘you know what I started only a couple of months back doing the right things; I’m playing well, I’ve got to get back in there, this is not for me right now’.”
But he denied that he was mentally fragile before entering the show:
“No, no, no I was not too in a mentally [fragile] state to do this, I mean I got to the top 16/17 of the world’s best tennis players in one of the biggest sports in the world and you can’t do that if you’re not mentally strong.”
He also vaguely accused Tennis Australian of being corrupt but said he would still want to represent Australia in the Davis Cup again.
“I’m not happy with that whole sort of situation there with Tennis Australia until that sort of clears and until a few of the problems come out – we’ve seen it with the FIFA federation and stuff how they were corrupt – and I know it’s in there and I am yet to address all the issues there, but maybe in the coming future I can speak about it.
“...I hope they can do it because we have such a great nation in Australia of playing tennis throughout the last decade but we have a few wrong people in that organisation and I hope that can change and I hope the best players can start playing Davis Cup again.”
No one knows exactly what’s up with Tomic, who turned pro when he was just 14, has the potentially most domineering sports dad in all of sports, and has admitted to feeling depressed, but this appears to be the most motivated he’s been about tennis in months.