Eric Butorac gives TEDx Talk about dreaming small

Eric Butorac, a freshly erstwhile member of the elite ATP doubles ranks and now a USTA operative, recently delivered a TEDx talk at Binghamton University in the state of New York.

"Focus on the things that you control," Butorac says his former college coach, Steve Wilkinson, told him upon joining the team at Gustavus Adolphus College. "Things like giving full effort and being a good sport." Wilkinson also coached Butorac's father, Tim.) Butorac "bought into the philosophy" that his coach at the Minnesota-based school had dispensed.

A self-labeled realist, Butorac took to monitoring the performance and health of his head, heart and lungs. Having previously gotten a girlfriend and joined a fraternity, he admittedly learning all the bars' drink specials in town and then let down his team's seniors with a final-match performance that cost them an important championship. That was it. Butorac went out considerably less and committed himself to becoming the best player he could.

After graduating from college, Butorac thought he would join the day-job work force as an educator. Instead, he took an Australian friend's prodding to heart and began traveling France with him to play money tournaments in small towns, obtaining dozens of euros (or not) at each stop. "It was never about making it," Butorac says today. "I was setting simple goals, things like learning to slide on the European red clay, trying to learn 10 new French words each day, trying to find a small-town supermarket that might be open on Sundays – not possible."

Times were tough. Butorac states in his TEDx talk that he lost two first-round matches at separate tournaments – in one day, in separate parts of the country – in France. At another point, he slept on a locker-room bench for a solid week. "I regularly ate plain pasta with ketchup because that's what I could afford," Butorac remembers. He asked himself on the daily, What are you doing with your life?

This classic grind did not wear on him entirely, though. Eighteen months after starting, he got his first ATP ranking points, in England. He won 230 British pounds. (Score!) He landed at No. 1,461 among those world ranks.

So much for becoming a high-school social studies teacher. This guy had become the sole NCAA Division 3 men's tennis player with a professional world ranking, and reportedly one one of just three from that league to turn pro at all.

A winner of 18 ATP doubles titles and a 2014 Australian Open finalist in men's doubles, Butorac will tell you today that he succeeded because he didn't set outlandish goals. He set realistic if aggressive goals and quite literally hit his marks. "Parents, friends, had been telling [his peers] since a young age that they were going to do great things in the sport – so they were failing." Conversely, for Butorac, "The emails, the congratulatory emails, were flowing in by the ... tens."

The native Minnesotan, now 35, fully immersed himself in the sport at this point. He tracked his percentages on shots he practiced in drills via notepad. He celebrated and honed in on the minutiae, and he went on to play on Wimbledon's grass as of four years later.

"That was the point when all of the outsiders felt I had made it," he says today.

Butorac ended up joining the ATP Players Council, where he served for eight years, even taking over the role of president from a fellow named Roger Federer after serving alongside him as the council's VP. "Now not only was this never my dream when I started this," Butorac offers, "but it would have been ridiculous to think that the greatest player in the history of our sport would feel comfortable passing the torch to a low-ranked doubles player."

Now the Director of Professional Tennis Operations and Player Relations at the USTA – a role well fitted to his years of negotiation experience on the ATP council – Butorac "no longer returns 130-mile-per-hour serves." His battles these days: mastering Microsoft Excel, email etiquette and, frankly, performing this first TED talk.

Ever metric-minded, Butorac happily delivers this call to action for all who would listen: "When you think about something that you want to achieve, how far out is that goal? Is it something that you can actually control? Could you achieve it tomorrow? ... Go ahead and try to dream small – because you just might win big."

Follow Jon on Twitter @jonscott9.