Alexander "Sascha" Zverev (German pronunciation: [alɛˈksandɐ ˈzaʃa ˈtsfɛʁɛf]; born 20 April 1997) is a German professional tennis player. He has been ranked by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) as high as world No. 2, and was continuously ranked in the top 10 from July 2017 to November 2022. Zverev's career highlights include titles at the 2018 and the 2021 ATP Finals, and a gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He has won 19 ATP Tour titles in singles and two in doubles, and reached his first major final at the 2020 US Open, finishing runner-up to Dominic Thiem. Zverev is the only active player outside of the Big Four with five Masters 1000 titles.Zverev is a former junior world No. 1, and won a junior major singles title at the 2014 Australian Open. He had an early breakthrough on the professional tour as well, becoming one of the youngest Challenger Tour title winners in history at the age of 17. As a teenager, Zverev won two ATP titles and upset then-world No. 3 Roger Federer on grass. At 20 years old, he became the youngest player to debut in the top 20 since Novak Djokovic. At the Laver Cup, Zverev has played an instrumental role in Team Europe's early success in the competition, winning the clinching matches in 2018 and 2019.
Alexander "Sascha" Zverev was born on 20 April 1997 in Hamburg, Germany to Russian parents, Irina Zvereva and Alexander Mikhailovich Zverev. His older brother Mischa, born nearly a decade earlier, is also a professional tennis player. Both of Sascha's parents were professional tennis players for the Soviet Union. His father, ranked as high as No. 175 in the world, became the top-ranked men's player nationally, while his mother was the fourth-highest ranked women's player in the Soviet Union. They both moved from Sochi to the capital to train at the CSKA Moscow military-run tennis club. The Soviet government often restricted their players from competing outside the country, an impediment that limited how high either of Sascha's parents could rise in the world rankings. With the collapse of the Soviet Union imminent, Irina went to Germany to compete at a tournament in 1990, with her husband accompanying as her coach. While in Germany, they were offered jobs as tennis instructors. After initially declining, they accepted an offer to work at the Uhlenhorster Hockey Club in Hamburg the following year and ended up settling in the country.
Zverev started playing tennis at the age of 3. Since Sascha began playing tennis at a very young age, he has said, "One day, when I was I think one year and five months old, I just picked up a little racket, and I was starting to push the ball all over our apartment, and since then, they took me out on the court. I enjoy it still, I enjoyed it back then." When he was five years old, he started to play tennis at least half an hour each day. Sascha was extremely competitive as a child. His brother Mischa said, "He would not understand or accept that he was losing" when the two would play against each other. He would never want to leave the court unless he won the match. Sascha also played hockey and football as a child but decided to focus only on tennis around the age of 12 after an early-round loss at a high-level international junior tournament in Florida.

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