Anas Jaber trained on hotel courts during her childhood, then with boys, before breaking barriers by reaching the final of the American Flushing Meadows Championship, the last of the four grand slams, without being able to crown it, which would have made her the first African and Arab player to win a major tennis title.
One achievement following another: the first Arab player in the quarter-finals of a major tournament in Australia 2020, the first Arab to win a professional tournament in Birmingham 2021, the first Arab among the top ten in the world rankings to reach the runner-up, and the first to win the title of one of the thousand tournaments in Madrid last May, before Her achievements in Wimbledon last July, when she lost the final, then Flushing Meadows, despite losing to the world’s first Polish imam Iga Swientek in the final.
South Africans Irene Bauder-Peacock (France 1927), Rene Schurmann (Australia 1959) and Sarah Reynolds (Wimbledon 1960) are the only Africans to reach the Grand Slam final, in the amateur era that became professional in 1968.
Currently ranked fifth in the world, Jaber, who will climb to second place in the new ranking Monday thanks to her result in the American Championship, quickly climbed to the top within two years, and remains proud of Tunisia, her homeland and her country of origin, “where she trained between three and sixteen or seventeen.”
In its initiative, during the month of July 2021, it sold its strikers at a public auction to purchase medical equipment and help hospitals in its country, which witnessed a “tsunami” wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and contributed to the restoration and rehabilitation of schools and institutes in marginalized governorates in northwestern Tunisia.
She’s known for being daring and tough at play and don’t hesitate to stop and ask a fan to keep quiet so you can focus.
The sports supplies company “Loto” designed its own T-shirt that read “Yalla Habibi”, which Jaber camp wore during the final match in New York, indicating that the player “is an inspiration to others.”
She is cheerful and always seeks to comment in her own way, as she has the audacity to ask to listen to Tunisian rhythms and songs following every match she won during the Berlin tournament, which she won this year’s title. The official responsible for the activation in the stadium interacted with her, and specially broadcast for her a clip from a song by the Tunisian rap artist “Balti”.
She is very active on social networking sites and publishes videos and photos of part of her private family life with her husband, the physiotherapist, Karim Kammoun, as well as her celebration of her victories following each session.
Inspirational mother
Anas, or “the Minister of Happiness” as Tunisians call her, was born in the coastal city of Kasr Hilal, on August 28, 1994, in a family consisting of two young men and two girls, the youngest of them.
About the great role her mother Samira played in launching her career, she says, “My mother was my inspiration. She is a big tennis lover and took me to a tennis club when I was three. She played the game with her friends and I commented.”
“I used to spend all day happily at the tennis club, to the point that I forgot to eat,” she continued.
“One day I will make you drink coffee at Roland Garros,” she told her mother.
Anas started in the coastal governorate of Sousse in the east of the country, in stadiums on the king of hotels in the tourist area, then moved to the “Sousse Hammam Club” stadium in the same governorate. “I started in a small club in my town in Monastir, then we moved to Hammam Sousse. I played there in hotels There are no tennis clubs.
Jaber, who started her first steps in the tennis promotion center at school with her coach at the time, Nabil Malika, added, “After participating in local courses and achieving good results, I participated in my first international tournament in Paris when I was ten years old. At the age of thirteen I went to Tunis to train and study in same time.”
Her coach Malika, who accompanied her for ten years, discovered a unique talent with the character of “trying to be distinguished” over the rest of her companions, girls and boys as well.
handball and soccer
Malika, who accompanied her until she turned thirteen, explains, “She had great control over the ball, so that other coaches tried to attract her to handball, and Anas really thought seriously regarding changing her specialty, but stuck to her staying in tennis.”
“I remember we used to call her Roger Federer,” following the Swiss tennis legend, Omar Al-Obeidi told AFP, in front of a tennis court bearing her name in her honor at Hammam Sousse Club, where the champion grabbed the racket for the first time.
He continued, “I faced her during training, I threw a falling ball, I tried to catch it, but I fell and broke my hand.” Since that date, “She called me khubaizah (in Tunisian dialect, it means the defeated)”.
I moved to the Sports Institute in El-Menzah (a government that includes elite athletes) to start a new career in a “specialized sports school for gifted children. This helped me to train more and develop.”
Gaber’s first international success was in the Women’s Championship in Roland Garros when she won the title, where “I crowned in 2011 Roland Garros for female juniors at the age of sixteen, but I struggled a lot to move from the women’s category to the professional tournaments.”
A lover of football and the Tunisian club Etoile du Sahel and Real Madrid of Spain, her former French coach Bertrand Perret said regarding her in 2020, “If she might replace tennis exercises with football, she would be the happiest.”
watching industry
She began attracting attention during the Australian Open in 2020 (78 globally), and she was the first Arab player to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Grand Slam tournament.
In June 2021, she won the Birmingham tournament, becoming the first Maghreb player to achieve this feat.
This season, she presented distinguished levels, winning the title of the 1,000th Madrid Tournament on dirt courts and reaching the final of the 1,000th edition of Rome as well, where she lost to the world’s first Švientek, and she also raised the Berlin Cup (500) on grass courts, where she achieved a great achievement by reaching the Wimbledon final and lost to the Kazakh Elena Rybakina.
She revealed during her participation in Wimbledon that winning there was not her dream, “I will not lie to you, winning Wimbledon was not my childhood dream. My dream has always been to win the French Open.”
She is 1.67 m tall and rests on her right hand. She has been married since 2015 to the former fencing player and current physical trainer, Karim Kammoun, and is coached by the former player Issam Jalali.
Anas is known to have a special style of play in the way she deals with her rivals during the match and is looking for beautiful performances, “She hates playing in one format, always looking to create the spectacle by diversifying the play with strikes that surprise the opponent, especially through fallen balls,” according to Malika, who confirms She’s “really the queen of the drop shot a long time ago”.
Anas has not changed much, “fun and quickly adapts even with those you don’t know” as before, “provocative and argues regarding all topics with great competition.” But on the other hand, she “fights and plays to the last moment and is difficult to handle, so that she continues to play while she is injured,” according to Al-Obaidi.
