“How did I get here?” To Princeton from Tibet, a tennis player's remarkable journey

PRINCETON, NJ — His name is Fnu Nidunjianzan. But that is not it. Because Fnu isn't technically a name; it's an acronym. Fnu stands for First Name Unknown, and this is how Tibetans, who don't follow the traditional first name/last name structure, identify themselves to fill out tedious documents like U.S. visas.

Nidunjianzan grew up playing tennis in Tibet. Or not exactly. Because there are no tennis courts in Tibet. This is partly due to the height. Tennis balls often deflate or explode on impact, which makes playing tennis a bit tricky.

Fnu is called Top. Not because of topspin, although that would be badass. No, that's because his older sister, Fnu Youjia, was in love with a South Korean rapper, Choi Seung-hyun, who went by the name of T.O.P.

Fnu became Top and he remains Top.

Maybe one day his name will become a household name. Or maybe not. Tennis is a difficult business; only a small sample size of its athletes achieve enough to become part of the vernacular. But what Nidunjianzan has already done is extraordinary. In the 50 years since the ATP Tour started its singles ranking system, no player from Tibet had earned a single ranking point. Nidunjianzan has twenty and is ranked 869th in the world.

Sitting in a media studio built into one of the many underground floors of Princeton's Jadwin Gymnasium, 19-year-old Nidunjianzan reflects on his journey, which is just beginning. “I sometimes wonder: how did I get here?”

Nidunjianzan's father, Nimazhaxi, is a former track and field athlete, coach and tourism director. He and his wife Gasheng believe sports provide an important outlet for their children, which doesn't sound very revolutionary in this country. It's bizarre in Tibet. It wasn't until 2022 that a Tibetan-born athlete took part in the Olympic Games. This partly stems from a long and complicated political history in which Tibet has sought independence from China for decades, but also from a mentality that values ​​white-collar jobs over sports.

But Nimazhaxi saw sports as a mechanism to develop his son into a more well-rounded person, allowing him to explore the concept of competition that rarely has a place in Tibet, and perhaps spread his wings beyond the relatively closed confines of the country. He didn't force him into any particular sport. Nidunjianzan visited mainland China. He tried ping pong, swimming, badminton and eventually very rudimentary tennis. Father and son were self-selected: ping-pong and badminton are virtually miracle sports in mainland China, and basketball was not exactly suitable for the vertically challenged Nidunkianzian. That left tennis.

Except for one small downside: Tennis didn't really exist in Tibet. When Nidunjianzan started hitting the ball, people would stop and stare curiously, not knowing what exactly he was doing. Nimazhaxi took it upon himself to create a rudimentary playing field for his son to play on. He also appointed himself his son's coach. “He tried to teach me, but he was a track coach,” Nidunjianzan said. “He told me how tennis translates to javelin throwing, like throwing a javelin is like swinging a tennis racket. Um, not really.” Between that and the balls regularly going pffffzzzzt on impact, Nimazhaxi quickly realized that tennis and Tibet weren't going to work.

When most people think of Tibet, they think of Mount Everest, located in the Himalayan region between Tibet and Nepal, on the western border of the country. Nidunjianzan grew up in the capital Lhasa, on the other side of the country, neighboring China. It was there that Nidunjianzan and his mother moved – to Chengdu, some 2,000 kilometers from home. Tennis was and still is a growing sport in China. Li Na became the first Chinese athlete to win a Grand Slam title when she won the French Open in 2011. But it was light years ahead of Tibet and gave 6-year-old Nidunjianzan, who played at the Chengdu City Club, a chance to practice with players as young as 17.

Luckily, Timmy Allin arrived in Chengdu around the same time Nidunjianzan moved there. Born and raised in Texas, Allin played tennis at the University of Utah. He was a three-time All Mountain West athlete and received a fifth-year academic scholarship to study Chinese at any university in China. He chose Chengdu and during his studies he also coached tennis. He met Nidunjianzan in 2011 when the family was looking for Western coaches to improve his game.

Allin has long been struck by the particular focus on children in China. “Your path is as good as chosen,” he says. “Sometimes you go to school and you play a lot of tennis.” However, according to Allin, this has not necessarily led to great tennis players.

The sport requires technique and skill, but also thrives on creativity and the ability to adapt quickly. China's fundamentals-based approach prevented that side of the game from flourishing. “What I've discovered is that the children who stay in China tend to be more one-dimensional,” says Allin. “They could hit a wall and play on the baseline for hours, but it was almost robotic.”

Allin encouraged Nidunjianzan, who he thought had real talent, to broaden his horizons and invited him to his home in Dallas. “A kind of summer tennis camp,” laughs Allin. He helped Nidunjianzan and his mother with the paperwork to obtain a tourist visa – Nidunjianzan's mother mistakenly told a US customs agent she planned to stay for three hours when she meant three months – and arranged a place for them to stay and introduced them with American food. Metro was a great success.

Nidunjianzan was fascinated by the different ethnicities and cultures in America and that, combined with the tennis lessons, prompted him and his family to look for a more permanent home in the US. They ended up at the IMG Academy, which, before it became an all-sports behemoth, was founded by Nick Bolletieri as a tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida. Nidunjianzan arrived as an 8-year-old and was given an exception to register before the usual admission. age 10.

Young Top Nidunjianzan meets tennis great Pete Sampras. (Courtesy of Princeton Athletics)

Nidunjianzan and his mother moved to an apartment right next to the court. In the morning he would wake up to the sound of tennis balls ricocheting around the court, and often to the sight of a professional – Maria Sharapova, Sebastian Korda, Denis Shapovalov – practicing. For a kid growing up in a country without even a tennis court, it felt like some kind of tennis paradise.

Most days, Nidunjianzan practiced for two hours with other athletes, then spent another hour receiving private coaching from Pat Harrison, who managed the pro division. In between, he worked with teachers to improve his English and took classes. Gasheng, his mother, did not speak English. A few times a month, Nidunjianzan's sister flew to Florida — she was studying in Boston at the time — to help with grocery shopping and other mundane chores, but much of the daily navigation was left to Nidunjianzan.

The couple would not return to Tibet for months, which meant months for his father's Nidunjianzan and her husband's Gasheng. Strangely enough, the sacrifice contributed to Nidunjianzan's success as a tennis player. There is no place to hide on a tennis court, no teammate to blame, or a coach to offer a bailout. “Some people crack, some stay the same and some have the ability to rise under pressure,” says Harrison. “Top has always had the ability to deal with pressure situations.”

Yet Nidunjianzan also carried that pressure with him. Although his parents never forced him to do anything, there is an implicit expectation in splitting a family in half and traveling around the world to play tennis. At some point, Nidunjianzan felt it. The wins weren't coming at the speed he had become accustomed to, and he knew he needed a reset. “I had to stop and think. There is more to life than just tennis, and I can't fit everything into it,” he says.

Choosing one of the country's top academic institutions may seem counterintuitive to ease the pressure. For Nidunjianzan, it made perfect sense to go to Princeton. Well, at least once he decided he was going to go to college.

At IMG there are essentially two tracks: turn pro or go to college. For years, Nidunjianzan was ranked number one, with plans to become a touring teen prodigy. But only the rarefied few really escape their teenage years and end up in the tennis stratosphere. Nidunjianzan and his family thought long and hard about the decision. Although he had not lived at home for years, his unique pursuit of tennis involved more sacrifice, without any promise of any reward.

College tennis players can compete in professional tournaments, but also have the luxury of working out the ropes of their game if it is not yet their full-time job. For Nidunjianzan, that comes down to tapping into the strengths in his game: creating a more reliable serve and improving his transition game. “You get the opportunity to work on your education, fill in the gaps in your game and take a year or two to gain even more experience,” Harrison says. “The tour can be quite lonely. It's all year round, with no real break. That is incredibly difficult.”

Nidunjianzan admits it took some convincing. Like any athlete, reaching the professional ranks is the ultimate goal, and a detour initially felt like a step backwards.

That has not been the case. In addition to amassing an 18-10 record and earning first-team All-Ivy recognition playing No. 1 singles (and taking on the inherent pressure that comes with that position), Nidunjianzan won last year his first professional singles title. In Huntsville, Alabama, unseeded Nidunjianzan blew past three seeded opponents, including one-time NCAA singles champion Thai-Son Kwiatkowski, to win the title. He then earned a spot in the quarterfinals of a tournament in Germany and rounds of 16 appearances in events in Italy and Spain.

Nidunjianzan missed much of the fall due to a wrist injury — though that gave him the opportunity to go home to Tibet for the first time in four years — and hopes to build on what he accomplished a year ago this spring. Top collegiate players earn wildcards into the ATP events, and for Nidunjianzan that would be the perfect transition from where he is now to where he wants to go. “Chinese tennis, I don't think it's even close to where it could be,” he says. “That is my dream: to be the player who makes it possible.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletics; photos: courtesy of Princeton)