Paul Baccanello

Paul Baccanello (born 12 June 1979, Adelaide, Australia) is an Australian professional tennis player. He has sustained various injuries during his career, which have hampered his results.

Baccanello managed to qualify for the main draw at Wimbledon in 2003. He defeated former top 100 player Ivo Heuberger in the first round, before falling in a tight four set match to Croatian Ivo Karlović in the second round. As a result, he earned a career best prize-money of over $23,000 and rose 37 places in the ATP rankings. In arguably his best performance to date, he did manage to reach the semi-finals of the Challenger event at Segovia in 2003, where he played Rafael Nadal. In a close match, Paul took Rafael to a tie-break in the first set, before Nadal took control in the second set, winning 7-6 6-4. His career high singles ranking of 129 was achieved on 3 November 2003, after other strong performances on the Challenger circuit. His current singles ranking is 439.

Paul currently has a 2–8 ATP record and has earned a total of $261,855 prize money in his career, but the costs involved with being a struggling tennis player far outweigh this, believed to have cost in the realm of $400,000.

...
Wikipedia