Few players wear their heart on their sleeve as much as Ons Jabeur. The Tunisian, whose sublime skills and smile have lit up the women’s Tour over the past decade, reached the Wimbledon final in 2022 and 2023 and earned herself the nickname Minister of Happiness.
But somewhere along the way, Jabeur lost the joy. Keen to start a family, she had told herself that if she won Wimbledon in 2023, that would be the perfect time to take a break. It didn’t happen – she lost to Marketa Vondrousova – and so continued playing. But injuries, illness and the scenes of human suffering in Gaza made her struggle over the past year.
“What’s happening in the world, I think it affected me more than I had expected,” Jabeur says on the eve of the Australian Open, which begins on Sunday. “I try to stay away from the media, because every time I open a video it is horrible. I try to help as much as I can but the tough part is I know I cannot really help as much as I want to. The loss at Wimbledon affected me also. A lot of things together, with the injuries and playing, all that baggage, didn’t help the performance. I tried to remind myself why I started playing tennis. The tennis court should be my happy place. And if it’s not the case that something is probably wrong.
“Everybody calls me the Minister of Happiness, sees me happy all the time, but obviously I’m not happy all the time. There are some moments there, anger, sadness. You can see on the court, I get angry a lot. It’s a mix of a lot of things. But I try to highlight that happiness is the best emotion that anybody could feel. It’s very important to remind myself of such a beautiful emotion.”
Jabeur was one of the few players to speak out about the scenes in Gaza and she continues to work to improve things in her role as ambassador for the World Food Programme. While she thinks tennis could have done more to help, she knows the politics of the situation make it difficult.
“For me, the important thing to speak out is to try to find peace somehow, to raise my voice, to use my platform, but also to help the kids, the families, they’re suffering every day,” she says. “As a WFP ambassador, we’re trying to get a simple thing that we have every day here, food. They don’t have that. And now it is the winter there so actually, babies are freezing to death because of that, which for me, it’s inhuman. How can we live in the world like this? What is happening in the world for me, it doesn’t even make sense. It just is really, really horrible.
“Kids are dying everywhere, either in Ukraine or in Gaza or in other countries. It is very sad. I stand by justice. I stand by peace. That’s the most important thing. If they stop firing and selling guns or whatever, this will be over. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”
Separating what is happening in the world from her job as a tennis player has not been easy, a task made more difficult by knee trouble and then a shoulder injury that forced her off the Tour after last year’s US Open. Some bad choices, in hindsight, also affected her as she fell from No 6 at the start of 2024 to No 40 as the Australian Open begins.
If she could have done something different, she would have taken better care of her body, she said, admitting she had played through injury and sickness. “As a competitive athlete, you always want to play, even knowing I was not 100%. But I will learn from these mistakes, definitely. What kills me the most is the injustice that we’re having in this world. I’m working on that. I’m trying to separate things, even though it is very difficult. What’s the point in playing tennis if innocent people are dying?”
This is Jabeur’s 14th year on the WTA Tour. It took her many years to really find her feet but she has reached three grand slam finals and has been ranked as high as No 2. Gifted with a deft touch, she can bamboozle any opponent when healthy and she is still aiming high, trying to win that elusive slam title. “That’s definitely the ultimate goal,” she says.
“But I think the most important thing, I want to get back to my game. I just want to win the grand slam with the game that I know. You see a lot of girls playing at an amazing level right now. I want to have that level and I don’t want to just play one or two matches at that level, I want it to remain high.”
It may take Jabeur time to find top form, after injury, but she is confident it will happen. Having a family remains a life goal, too, and the coming 12 months are pivotal. “It is definitely a crucial year for me to take a lot of decisions,” she says. “But I just want to take it step by step. I feel like if I think a lot about my family, it puts a lot of pressure on me and I don’t need more pressure, for sure.
”It’s a question of acceptance, if I am satisfied with the career I’m having right now or not, and what is it going to take for me to do more? Do I have the energy to do more? There’s a lot of question marks in there, but I am taking it day by day, and maybe I’ll have my answers during the season.”
