Draper has not played a competitive singles match since his surprise Wimbledon second-round exit in early July.<\/p>\n
He pulled out of the Canadian Open and Cincinnati Open – both key ATP tournaments leading up to the US Open – in order to fully recover from the arm issue.<\/p>\n
After starting to feel a problem during the clay-court swing, he said it got “progressively worse” over the grass-court season which culminates at the All England Club.<\/p>\n
However, he was loathe to blame the injury for his defeat by veteran opponent Marin Cilic.<\/p>\n
“I felt like my arm was shutting down a little bit when I was hitting forehands and on the serve,” said Draper.<\/p>\n
“It got progressively a bit worse. Then on the grass it got quite painful. I didn’t know what I was dealing with.<\/p>\n
“After the grass, I got it checked out. It is one of those where if you keep playing with it, it could become very, very serious.<\/p>\n
“Saying that, it was not so bad because I could do a lot of other things as well physically. It wasn’t like I had to stop completely.”<\/p>\n
Draper returned to the match court this week when he played alongside American star Jessica Pegula in the new-look mixed doubles at Flushing Meadows.<\/p>\n
While it did not look like Draper went full throttle on his serve as the pair reached the quarter-finals, he said it was “perfect” preparation.<\/p>\n
“In tennis, having a month and a half out is quite a long time,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I definitely feel a lot sharper having played that as opposed to maybe having a training week.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Draper has not played a competitive singles match since his surprise Wimbledon second-round exit in early July. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":{"0":"post-92136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92136","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=92136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}