World No 4 Paula Badosa admits that realizing she had “haters” was something very hard to fathom.
Badosa, 24, enjoyed a breakout year on the WTA Tour last season, when she won her maiden WTA 1000 title in Indian Wells and broke into the top-10 for the first time in her career.
This year, Badosa climbed up all the way to No 2 in the world.
Badosa, who is now considered among the best players in the game, is kind of still adjusting to her new reality.
“I’m dealing with so many new things this year. One of the things that I’m dealing with is that, of course, I love them and I have a lot of fans, but for the first time I feel as well that I have haters. That was very tough for me to understand because I couldn’t understand why people can hate me without knowing me, you know? It’s still tough for me to see people that, no matter what you do, they’re still going to judge you and criticize you, and they’re going to hate you. I’m still dealing with that and it’s something that’s tough to handle,” Badosa said during her conversation with the WTA titled “The Real Me.”
Badosa: I used to read negative messages
When Badosa became a major star and started receiving much more attention, negative messages and comments also increased.
At first, Badosa used to read negative and hateful messages, which was of course negatively impacting her.
That’s when Badosa realized that keeping out of social media would help her.
“Of course I was looking at the messages, but it’s the worst decision you can do, because, of course, people will have their opinions. When you lose, it won’t be good and you read things you don’t like and will hurt you. I don’t know about other players, but I was reading them because I really cared what people think. That’s one of the things I’m changing because I cannot care about what everyone says as I cannot control that. The things that I do and that worked was that I had to delete social media a few months ago. I couldn’t really sleep because I thought maybe what people were saying was true. So that was the first step I made,” Badosa explained.