World No.762 Max Purcell has stunned even himself to win the ATP Challenger title in Gimcheon, Korea at the weekend.<\/p>\n
The 18-year-old overcame injured compatriot Andrew Whittington in the final, a victory which will see him leap almost 400 places in the ATP rankings.<\/p>\n
He had earlier won two matches to\u00a0qualify for the main draw\u00a0before winning his next five, including an opening-round upset of No.4 seed Luke Saville.<\/p>\n
It is\u00a0the\u00a0first professional title of\u00a0Purcell\u2019s\u00a0career at any level.<\/p>\n
The Sydneysider becomes the second lowest-ranked player to win a Challenger title since the year 2000; the lowest was Czech Petr Luxa back in 2002.<\/p>\n
Another Aussie teen, Blake Mott, won his first Challenger title earlier this season in Launceston as the world No.721.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a little surprised,\u201d Purcell told atpworldtour.com<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting this coming in, but I\u2019ve played much better than in the Futures events before this.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great here in Gimcheon. The facilities and service are all well managed and it\u2019s far better than at other tournaments I\u2019ve played.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just trying to get better little by little each day. I\u2019m trying to be more professional in taking care of my body and stretching before matches, and then also playing with more confidence on the court.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" World No.762 Max Purcell has stunned even himself to win the ATP Challenger title in Gimcheon, Korea at the weekend. The 18-year-old overcame injured compatriot Andrew Whittington in the final, a victory which will see him leap almost 400 places in the ATP rankings. He had earlier won two matches to\u00a0qualify for the main draw\u00a0before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5788,"featured_media":11968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}