After a win on Davis Cup duty for Great Britain in Norway in early February – in what was his first match since August – Draper was advised not to play in Rotterdam the following week.<\/p>\n
But when he did return to the tour in Dubai, wearing a black compression sleeve on his arm, he beat Quentin Halys before falling in three sets to Arthur Rinderknech.<\/p>\n
“I was very happy with the week in Dubai,” Draper told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t so much about my level, it was how I was going to respond to the matches, to the practice. That was kind of the final hurdle, really.<\/p>\n
“I was proud of just getting out there and competing hard and doing what I love once again. <\/p>\n
“Potentially it was probably a good thing that I wasn’t playing match after match after match.”<\/p>\n
Draper beat back-to-back top-five players in Taylor Fritz and Alcaraz on his way to last year’s Indian Wells final, before overcoming Holger Rune to lift a first Masters 1000 trophy.<\/p>\n
One of the perks of winning at Indian Wells is that you get to select the menu for the following year’s Champions Lunch.<\/p>\n
Draper chose steak and chips, which appeared on the menu as grass fed filet mignon with parmigiano truffle fries and a green peppercorn sauce.<\/p>\n
The women’s champion Mirra Andreeva opted for cheese pancakes with vanilla-honey mascarpone for dessert – and she wasn’t the one having regrets.<\/p>\n
“I’m not feeling too great about that choice now,” Draper said before the food was served.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got to practise in about an hour. When I said that I was probably very deep in a training block, and having a very strict diet.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a win on Davis Cup duty for Great Britain in Norway in early February – in what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-518476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}