Home NBA ‘It was like meeting a god’: Tennis impressionist Josh Berry on mimicking the GOATs

‘It was like meeting a god’: Tennis impressionist Josh Berry on mimicking the GOATs

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‘It was like meeting a god’: Tennis impressionist Josh Berry on mimicking the GOATs

How many people can say that they have spoken to the ‘Big Four’ of men’s tennis, as well as John McEnroe and Boris Becker, on topics ranging from the greatest male tennis player of all time to Rafael Nadal explaining his decision to dispense with prepositions when speaking English.

That’s the experience of spending an hour on Zoom with comedian Josh Berry. The 28-year-old from Reading has become a familiar face (and voice) to tennis fans worldwide for his impeccably observed and executed impressions of the most famous men’s players. At 16 years old, he thought he would put a video on YouTube and see how it was received. It blew up. Within weeks, he was appearing on ESPN’s Wimbledon coverage and the tournament’s official channels.

Berry’s main focus is on writing and performing comedy that has nothing to do with tennis, but every summer around the UK grass-court season he is in big demand from the tennis world. Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, who faces Carlos Alcaraz in Sunday’s Wimbledon final, are particular fans of his. A couple of weeks ago, he went viral again by interviewing Murray as Murray.

But how do the players take it when he impersonates them? “Andy is an absolute legend and he’s always great with it,” Berry says during an interview with The Athletic via Zoom — it’s a busy Wimbledon for him.

“He’s just like, ‘Oh ok, you’re doing your impression’, and it’s great. He takes it extremely well.”

Murray has also taken an active role in promoting his mimic. Back in 2017, when a 21-year-old Berry had just finished university, Murray suggested the impressionist interview him as Murray for the first time. He then promoted the video on his social media channels and gave Berry’s profile a huge boost just as he was starting out trying to make a living from comedy. “He’s an absolute gem,” Berry says.

After a video of his Big Four impressions went viral when Berry was 16 in 2013 (thanks largely to a Djokovic endorsement on social media), he has been welcomed into the tennis fold. He has got to know Murray especially well, and has always been struck by Djokovic’s friendliness.

Aged 17, Berry was invited to perform at the players’ party in Dubai in 2014. Djokovic interviewed him on stage and his warmth made a big impression. “Djokovic, for all the hatred he gets, he was remarkably friendly and very nice,” Berry says. “He’s always been extremely nice to me. He didn’t have to be that friendly.

“Roger Federer was there and apparently, he enjoyed it as well, which is pretty cool. He’s the one with the biggest aura. It was like meeting a president or a god or something.”

Nadal was a harder nut to crack, and there’s an awkward video of a 17-year-old Berry doing impressions to the seemingly baffled Spaniard.

“I remember being like, ‘Oh so nice to meet you Rafa’. And he was like, ‘No, no, no it is Rafael’. I think he was winding me up, but I don’t know.

“And then I did an impression of that. Then we did a game of guess the impression, which is always a fairly excruciating exercise because if people don’t get it then you’re just standing there awkwardly and it’s awful. I did an impression of Murray. And, I can’t tell still, to this day… I’m not sure whether he was winding me up or genuinely, he didn’t get it, but he’s standing there and he’s confused.

“And then he says to his team: ‘What a disaster on that one. Very bad’. And then he’s like: ‘Andy?’.

“And I’m shaking at this point, this is just so painful for me. And then eventually it got a bit better. And I did Roger and him and he liked those I think.”

While Berry has become famous for impersonating the best tennis players in the world, he didn’t choose Murray, Nadal, Djokovic and Federer as his inspirations as a mere tennis fan. He was a county-level tennis player as a junior, and then represented the University of Oxford, having become obsessed with the sport aged 10 in 2006, just as the Big Four era was beginning to emerge and the Williams sisters and other legends were battling for dominance of the women’s game.

Lean and 6ft 6in (198cm), Berry has the physique of a modern player, and still participates in tiebreak challenges on YouTube, with a winning combination of seriousness and exaggerated despair.

While devouring tennis growing up, he built up a huge database of material to mimic.

“I used to listen to them all the time and by osmosis, started doing impressions of them,” he explains.

“I had so much source material of them that they ended up being fairly accurate. Jon Culshaw (a British actor and impressionist) talks about downloading a voice, and when you have enough information you can start building that impression.”

As a 12-year-old, Berry started saying, “Thank you very much everyone” in a Nadal voice to his mum, and he was away.

It became a routine after tennis practice sessions for Berry to do his impressions to his team-mates, so aged 16, in 2013, he answered some questions in the style of each member of the Big Four and uploaded it onto YouTube. Not much happened straight away but a week later, the video had been watched more than 250,000 times, helped by Djokovic sharing it on his Twitter. Had that first video flopped, Berry, who is not a natural self-promoter, wonders whether he might never have gone down this path.

“I’d probably be doing something boring,” he laughs.


Berry with Judy and Andy Murray at an exhibition tournament at Queen’s Club (Luke Walker/Getty Images for LTA)

Djokovic giving a budding impressionist such a boost is perhaps not such a surprise. He was a gifted mimic when emerging on the tour, and impressions of Maria Sharapova, Andy Roddick and Nadal earned him the nickname ‘Djoker’, as well as some locker-room opprobrium — after which Djokovic quickly canned the routines.

Djokovic is not alone in being able to impersonate his rivals. Many young players enter the sport with similar tics and habits to the players they’ve idolised, thanks to the neurological phenomenon of “mirror neuron” capacity. The same region of mammalian brains is in use whether one performs an activity, watches it being performed, or imagines it. Emulation, which is what mirror neurons are thought to enable, is part of how players learn.

After her win over Maria Sakkari to reach the Wimbledon fourth round last week, Emma Raducanu said: “The last couple matches, I’ve been following Carlos Alcaraz (onto court), and yeah, it’s just good to watch before the match. In certain moments, you try to emulate certain shots.”


The Alcaraz impression isn’t quite in Berry’s repertoire yet (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)

Berry thinks there’s something in this.

“The skill of observation is a remarkably important one for a player, and something I’ve noticed in most tennis players I’ve met is that they are all quite observant,” he says.

“That’s a trait comedians share, a sense of picking things out. When I saw Andy for that interview at Queen’s recently, we played in an exhibition thing afterwards. And he was like, ‘Oh, you’re not wearing grass-court shoes. That’s pretty unorthodox’. And I was surprised that he picked that out because that feels like quite a small detail.

“You’re always looking at your opponent to see whether they’re flagging, how they’re emotionally dealing with stuff. It’s like the process of being a comedian — you’re constantly assessing an audience’s attitude to you, both vocally and visually: ‘OK, do they want me to go further here or pull back?’.”

Observing and listening underpin what Berry does. He possesses a natural gift but he still constantly refines his impressions — listening to short voice notes of the players and then recording ones of himself repeating them. Doing so keeps him fresh, but he also says voices change over time.

Andy Murray is one example.

Berry says that while Djokovic’s English improvement has altered his speech quite significantly, he has noticed the opposite trend with Nadal.

“With Rafa, amusingly, I thought that since the French Open last year, his English had gotten worse,” he says.

“It was like he’d just abandoned prepositions while he was out. So before he was like: ‘Well, it’s very tough on me. I’m trying. It’s going to be a difficult one’.

“Whereas now, he’s like: ‘Well tennis, good. Me? Fantastic’.”

Federer posed a challenge initially because Berry’s voice had fully broken when he started out, and he couldn’t get the depth quite right.

He’s well and truly fixed that now:

Put these all together and it makes for quite the combination — before you add in Nick Kyrgios and McEnroe talking about the greatest-of-all-time debate in tennis.

An impression Berry is currently trying to nail is Wimbledon champion Alcaraz, one of today’s finalists. He isn’t prepared to release it into the wild just yet, because he’s not yet put together enough of the the infinitesimally small details that compose an accurate impression.

In Alcaraz’s case, one of the foibles he’s picked up on is how the Spaniard says the word “to”. The following day at an Alcaraz press conference, I had to stifle laughter every time he used that very commonplace word.

Other voices arrive pretty much perfectly formed in his head, like McEnroe, the first in a roll call of his hits.

“I still find the process quite mysterious,” he says. “It felt like I could do a good John McEnroe straight away. Whereas other people have got better over the years.”

Some of his impressions are incredibly accurate, but the player in question doesn’t have the profile to strike a chord with the wider public. Stan Wawrinka, who Berry points out always sounds like he’s about to cry, is one such example.

Are there any players that he just can’t impersonate? He avoids doing WTA players, because he doesn’t think his fairly deep voice can recreate them accurately. On the men’s side, he’s stumped, until… “Oh!” he says, suddenly remembering a crucial detail.

“Tim Henman. I can’t do Tim Henman.”

He explains that Henman’s voice is “quite nondescript. I’m from Reading, he’s from Oxford. Both posh middle-class males. It’s difficult to distinguish my voice from his”.

Players themselves start to sound like one another and use similar phrases to one another, in the way groups of friends do. The “super tough, super good, super anything” has afflicted tennis for a number of years. Berry points to Henman in commentary, where he echoes his former co-analyst Becker’s habit of saying “very much so”.

Away from tennis, Berry is preparing for his two-week stint at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was at the festival where Berry built on the platform his tennis impressions had given him and did a first proper show in 2018 — every night for a month. It was a “steep learning curve” as he got to grips with the process of writing and performing.

Stand-up is his “bread and butter” he says, and his tennis material now makes up only about 10 or 15 per cent of what he does. His most famous character is probably Rafe Hubris, a Conservative party MP concocted during Covid-19 lockdown.

The 12-year-old doing impressions of Nadal to his mum has come a long way and broadened his horizons. But in a sport that often takes itself too seriously, Berry’s ability to fondly cut it down to size makes him an important and hilarious part of the ecosystem.

(Top photo: Luke Walker/Getty Images for LTA)

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