Articles by Steve Tignor

Rewatch, 1990 Hilton Head: Navratilova shows Capriati how to close

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Wimbledon’s cancellation and Roland Garros’s potential postponement have been the big news developments in the tennis world during the coronavirus crisis. And for good reason: It’s hard for many of us to picture our spectating life without the Grand Slams. But those stories also obscure the loss of many smaller, unique, charming single-week events, ones that help knit together the varied, international fabric of the tours.

One of those uniquely charming events is the Volvo Car Open, which would have been underway in Charleston, S.C., as we speak. Founded in 1973 (as the Family Circle Cup), it was held at the Sea Pines Plantation until 2000, before moving to Daniel Island, near Charleston, in 2001. After a month in Indian Wells and Miami, it can be refreshing to take a breath, relish the slower pace and take in the southern hospitality.

As quaint as it may seem, though, this stop in the corner of South Carolina was a big part of the WTA’s rise as a separate, viable entity in the 1970s. Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini: The tour’s best came to Sea Pines, and their matches often served as previews of what was to come at bigger venues. In 1986, Graf beat Evert for the first time there; by the following year, she would be the new French Open champion. In 1990, an even more extreme battle of the generations took place in the Hilton Head final, when 33-year-old Martina Navratilova faced Jennifer Capriati, who had just turned 14, for the first time.

A changing of the guard moment? Not quite. While Capriati played the type of baseline style that would become the norm in this century, Navratilova, with her 6-2, 6-4 win, showed that serve-and-volley tennis wasn’t dead quite yet, even on clay.

Thirty years later, we roll the videotape.

Capriati was a year younger than Coco Gauff when this match was played, but judging by what we see here, she had the more polished game. Early on, we see her hit a confident slice second serve; sprint forward to put away a forehand on the run; and knock off a forehand winner that elicits a racquet clap from Navratilova—the first of many compliments from the ever-complimentary Czech.

Navratilova is the veteran and, in general, the more aggressive player, but it’s Capriati who dictates through the opening games. Martina is content to sit back and assess this new opponent, by taking pace off the ball and forcing Capriati to generate it herself. Then, on break point, Navratilova shifts gears and turns the teenager’s power back on her. She reaches out and sends a hard, counterpunching forehand down the line that Capriati isn’t ready to handle. Fans of today’s game might see a little bit of Angelique Kerber’s running forehand in Navratilova’s.

And then, much like her fellow GOAT Roger Federer when he gets an early break, Navratilova is off to the races. She gives a lesson in pressure tennis to Capriati, who said afterward, “I’m not used to that kind of game.” Even then, a net-rusher was becoming a rarity.

But Navratilova shows us how to make it work, even against a hard-hitting baseliner. She was patient, picked her spots, and moved her serve around. Most of all, Navratilova closed. She put herself on top of the net and dared Capriati to come up with a perfect shot. You can even hear Evert, who had retired the previous fall and was doing commentary with Dick Enberg, say “Uh oh,” when Capriati left a ball short and Navratilova pounced. The teen made her share of brilliant passes, but not enough.

“She has to go for her shots to beat me,” Navratilova said. “I served well when I had to. There were a lot of close games.”

Most of Capriati’s passes, even some very good ones, ended up on Navratilova’s strings. I had forgotten how good Martina’s forehand volley was. She hits several winners with the shot here, first inside-out and then crosscourt, and is amazingly good at creating her own power with such a short stroke. As an awed Evert says in the second set, after a beautifully constructed point by Navratilova, “That’s perfect playing from Martina.”

Navratilova finished with a perfect flourish, a half-volley that, as she put it, “snuggled in.” After a late, incorrect out call from the line judge, Capriati conceded the point, and the match ended with a hug.

“It was the greatest feeling playing Martina,” Capriati said. “She’s a legend.”

Eleven years later, Capriati reunited with Navratilova when the 18-time major singles champion helped present her countrywoman the Laureus World Sports Comeback of the Year Award alongside four-time Olympic champion sprinter Michael Johnson. (Getty Images)

Did she say “legend” or did she say “ledge”? It was around this time that a gum-cracking Capriati used that word to describe Navratilova in a press conference. I seem to remember the media in the room being baffled, until she clarified that it was short for “legend.”

“It was a learning experience,” Navratilova said. “I was really impressed with her pace. She hits hard from anywhere on the court. And I was impressed with her poise. I’ve never seen anyone like that at 14, and I hope I never see anyone else like that.”

Unfortunately, Navratilova would see a 15-year-old Capriati the following summer at Wimbledon. There, in an all-time stunner, the kid knocked off the nine-time champ in the quarterfinals. Was this the changing of the guard moment? It may have been for Navratilova, who would never win another major. For Capriati, it was an early peak, one that it would take her a decade to surpass.

Even though Navratilova would gradually decline, like everyone else, few have surpassed her. This was her 150th career title; she would finish with an all-time record 167—Federer’s not catching that. Wouldn’t you love to see her take her 1990 game—or, even better, her 1983 game—and put it up against the top women today?

What it's like to be college's top team—and have the season just...end

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:20:00 +0000

Over the next three days, we'll look at how the coronavirus crisis has impacted one aspect of tennis in a particularly cruel way: the college game.

On Monday, Steve Tignor looks back on a season at the top for the University of Southern California men's team—before it suddenly stopped. He also speaks with Joel Drucker, in the #MondayRally, about the communal side of college tennis, and if it can be replicated elsewhere in the sport.

On Tuesday, Ed McGrogan writes about Fairfield University's women's team, which made an unlikely run to the NCAA Tournament in 2019. But in covering the mid-major school this March, he got an up-close look at the abrupt sadness that followed.

On Wednesday, Nina Pantic examines the NCAA's ruling that grants spring-sports athletes another year of college eligibility, if they so choose.

Every so often Brett Masi finds himself thinking about what he and his University of Southern California men’s tennis team might be doing right now—if the world suddenly hadn’t been turned upside down.

“We were scheduled to play Baylor last week, and Stanford and Cal this past weekend at home,” Masi says. “Sometimes I’ll catch myself wondering, “Would we be up 1-0 in doubles? Who would be playing singles right now?”

“We were doing so well. Now you feel like you’re missing out on everything.”

Masi’s Trojan team had done well enough to claim the No. 1 spot in the most recent Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) men’s rankings. In February, USC had won the ITA’s National Indoor Title in Madison, Wisc., and were 13-1 in dual matches. The team was led by the No. 1-ranked singles player in the country, Daniel Cukierman, followed by 15th-ranked Mor Bulis, and 24th-ranked Brandon Holt (the youngest son of Tracy Austin).

As talented as the 2020 team was, though, that wasn’t what Masi loved most about them.

“What was awesome and refreshing was close they all were,” he says. “There was a real brotherhood on this team, everyone pumped each other up.”

Life is good at numero 1️⃣!#FightOn ✌️ pic.twitter.com/1UUoDdFCSl
— USC Men's Tennis (@USCMensTennis) March 10, 2020

What more can a brand-new PAC-12 head coach ask for? Masi took over the position last summer when Peter Smith, who had led the men’s team to five national championships and 16 Division I appearances in his 17 seasons at USC, announced his retirement. Masi had been an assistant to Smith for four years, and had spent the last decade as a head coach at the University of San Diego and Texas Tech. But this was both a homecoming and a higher-profile job. USC is a historic powerhouse in men’s tennis, with a record 21 NCAA titles. And with an all-star lineup of players recruited by Smith—including two of this sons, Riley and Colter—hopes were high that the team could make a run at No. 22 this spring.

“There’s nothing like being a Trojan,” Masi says. “In a lot of ways it was tough emotionally to take over for Peter, we had been close. But it was exciting to be back at USC again, back in Southern California, back in the PAC-12. I knew the team was going to be good; not many of these guys had lost more than a couple matches.”

Masi says he began to understand what his team was made of at the National Indoors, when they knocked off TCU, Stanford, Michigan and North Carolina for the title—and fought off a team-wide case of the flu to do it.

“That was nuts,” Masi says. “We were all sick, and pretty much just holding on. Holt was a quarter of a human being, he was dying on the court, but he said, ‘put me out there’ in doubles, and they beat the No. 5 team in the country.”

Unfortunately for Masi and his team, they never had a chance to find out how far their shared sense of purpose could take them. Three weeks ago, in the span of a few hours, the college-tennis season was over, for everyone.

“All of it was thrown at us so quickly,” Masi says.

Pac-12 statement on men's basketball tournament, Pac-12 sport competitions & Pac-12 championship events: pic.twitter.com/HjJvki3LOT
— Pac-12 Conference (@pac12) March 12, 2020

The USC team was packing up to head over to UCLA for their annual away match with their crosstown rivals. At that point, fans had already been banned, “which would have been really weird for that rivalry,” Masi says. A few minutes before they left, Masi got a call from UCLA coach Billy Martin, telling him the match had been cancelled. A minute later, Martin called again to tell him the PAC-12 had been “shut down.” Later that same afternoon, Masi, his head still spinning, was told the whole season had been cancelled. Instead of coming up with a pep talk for UCLA, he had to tell his team their NCAA title dream was over.

“You don’t really have a blueprint for something like that,” Masi says. “I hadn’t even really processed it myself. The team sat there and talked about what each of them meant to each other, how much they’d miss playing together, doing 6:30 A.M. workouts together, grinding in practice together.”

A month later, though, Masi says that everyone understands the gravity of the situation, and that this is about more than anyone winning a dual match or a national championship.

“Everyone seems to be OK,” Masi says, “no one’s deeply depressed. Everyone’s lives have changed so much beyond tennis, and everyone’s problems are so much bigger right now, so you have perspective.”

Still, Masi says he’ll be thinking about what might have been at the PAC-12 Championships, which were scheduled to run through April. And in May, he’ll be thinking about what might have been at the NCAA Championships, which were scheduled to be held in Stillwater, Okla. in the middle of the month.

For now, all Masi can do is wait, though his seniors did get a piece of good news last week when the NCAA ruled that they would be eligible to return in 2021. That’s fine with their coach.

“If could have it, I’d want my whole team back,” Masi says. “We were amped up to win the NCAAs. I’d love to see if we could have done it.”

Sports give us our signs of spring: How will we know it’s here?

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 13:00:00 +0000

So far this spring, only a few, tentative buds have formed on the trees outside my windows in northern New Jersey. Technically, we’re two weeks into spring, but what we mostly see here are bare branches, reaching up for the sky and waving back and forth in the raw April wind. The 50-degree weather tells you that everything will be green and growing soon, but for now it’s hard to tell what season it is.

Or maybe I can’t tell what time of year it is because this season’s traditional signposts have vanished. I’m not talking about what’s outside my window; I’m talking about what’s not on my television set. Where past generations celebrated the harvest in spring, or maybe just the chance to run outside again, many of us now associate this hopeful time with the lineup of sporting events that are beamed into our living rooms in March and April.

It’s not a coincidence that hearing the words “March Madness,” “Opening Day,” and “A Tradition Unlike Any Other”—i.e., CBS’s slogan for The Masters—are music to Americans’ ears. It’s not that these competitions are inherently more exciting than others; the first day of a 162-game baseball season is about as irrelevant as it gets in sports. What’s important is that they herald the end of winter, and embody the transition from indoor to outdoor life, from snow to sun, from wintry landscapes to greener pastures. Each, in its way, is about the future.

Youth is the overriding theme of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. As the nickname March Madness suggests, it’s about the berserk, irrational exuberance of our college years. For older fans, it’s a way to tap back into that enthusiasm for a few weekends, the same way we tap back into it on college-football Saturdays.

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Indolence is the theme of Opening Day. Everything, including your mind, slows down during a baseball game. If you’ve ever switched channels from tennis to baseball, you know it can feel like you’re riding in a car that just slammed on the brakes and went from traveling 70 miles per hour to roughly 20. This can be jarringly boring at first, but once you adjust, time stretches, and you wonder why you were in such a rush before. This is what summer, ideally, is supposed to do for us, to get us off the fast track. “A baseball game,” Michael Chabon wrote, “is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”

The Masters has its less-than-salutary themes, including elitism, sexism, and all-around stodginess. But the sight of the course at Augusta National, with its cornucopia of dogwoods, magnolias, junipers, and jasmines, all of them already blooming in Georgia, is an early sign of growth and rebirth, and a heartening one for those of in colder parts of the country. Color will return to us, too.

And how about tennis fans? We have our own set of events that are music to our ears, and that are synonymous with spring. The first two on the calendar, Indian Wells and Miami, have earned a co-nickname, the Sunshine Double. On their own, each of those tournament’s names calls up its own set of appealing images. “Indian Wells” calls up blue sky and desert sun. “Miami”—or “Key Biscayne”—evokes oranges and palm trees.

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Both of these tournaments are products of tennis’s professional era, and both are quintessentially American. They’re owned by billionaires—Larry Ellison in Indian Wells, Stephen Ross in Miami—each of whom pays the men and women equally, something that’s not true at all dual-gender tournaments. They’re held in giant facilities, and can hold their own with the biggest U.S. sporting events. For me, Indian Wells and Miami are what tennis hoped it could become when it threw itself into the marketplace at the start of the Open era. For a U.S. tennis lover in the dead of winter, there’s nothing sweeter than being able to say, “Just got my tickets for Indian Wells!”

But the tournament that most says spring to a tennis fan is one that is quintessentially European: Monte Carlo. Played at the edge of the sea since 1897, it recalls the game’s aristocratic origins and its fantastic popularity along the Riviera in the 1920s. Whereas Indian Wells and Miami seem like 10-day vacations, Monte Carlo signals a return to business; the race to Roland Garros is on. And no spring is complete without a photo of the Mediterranean, and the blue sky beyond, from the top of the Monte Carlo Country Club.

Except that this year, we won’t see that photo. Like every other tournament from now until July, Monte Carlo has been cancelled. A non-sports fan might say this is an opportunity; to get off the couch and appreciate the season outdoors, to see nature in bloom around you. And it’s true, I’ve become very familiar with the slowly-flowering trees and shrubs of northern New Jersey over the last few weeks.

What’s missing is the community that sports creates, the shared sense of hope and optimism that comes with the season, and which we likely won’t feel again until 2021. How will I know it’s spring next year? When everything—from tennis fans planning their trips to Indian Wells; to college-basketball fans filling out their brackets; to the magnolias blooming at Augusta; to the sunlit grass of a baseball diamond—feels a little irrationally exuberant again.

Shooked: Wimbledon’s cancellation isn’t tragic, but it still hits hard

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 23:19:00 +0000

Sometime in the middle of February, when the coronavirus was beginning to spread outside China, the talk of canceling sporting events began. Big events. Olympic events. Unthinkable events. My mind started to tick forward, week by week, month by month, through the tennis calendar. Every possibility seemed more unreal than the last. No Indian Wells? Could that actually happen? No Miami? Really? What about Monte Carlo and Rome and the clay swing? No Roland Garros? It seemed inconceivable—borderline illegal.

Next, of course, came Wimbledon, and that’s where my mind usually came to a halt. A year without The Championships really did seem impossible. Many of the tennis fans I talked to about it reacted the same way. When I asked if they thought Wimbledon was going to happen this year, they looked surprised and a little distraught, and said something like, “Oh, I hadn’t even thought about that.” Wimbledon, it seemed, was untouchable. It’s cancellation was something that no player or fan wanted to contemplate.

But it turns out even the hallowed lawns of the All England Club weren’t safe from the coronavirus. On Wednesday, tournament officials announced that the 2020 edition has been cancelled. They decided that it couldn’t be postponed because the grass wouldn’t be playable later in the year.

Serena Williams summed up the tennis world’s reaction with a one-word tweet

“Shooked.”

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The announcement wasn’t a surprise, and I haven’t heard anyone claim there was any alternative. SW19 and its environs are on lockdown for the foreseeable future, and every professional sporting schedule is being gradually, reluctantly, painfully pushed backward. There’s a good chance now that tennis won’t return at all in 2020, and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to wonder if 2021 could be in jeopardy, too, at least in the U.S. and Europe. Will people want to gather in huge crowds a year from now, if there’s no vaccine developed for the coronavirus by then?

Wimbledon softened the blow by leaking the news of its likely decision over the weekend. By then, like most people, I had shaken off my earlier disbelief and adjusted to the idea. During this spring without sports, I had started to see them for what we often forget they are: a luxury, a diversion, and ultimately a sign of health. As much as the classic final between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer felt like life and death while it was happening in 2019, the events of 2020 have reminded us that it was anything but. It was a celebration of life and life only—of excellence and mastery and achievement, and we should never forget that. The correct reaction to Wimbledon’s cancellation is to say: We have more important things to worry about now.

Still, even with that proper perspective, and the proper preparation, getting the news on Wednesday was a blow. For players and fans searching for prospects of joy, or even just normalcy, in 2020, seeing the sunlight on the grass inside Centre Court was something to hold out hope for. Even among global athletic events, Wimbledon stands out as a summit, the cherry on top of the sporting cake. It’s played at the height of summer. The players are dressed in white. There’s nothing in sports like the tension of a Wimbledon final, when it feels as if every eye on the planet is trained on two people. To see someone win the title and hoist the trophy is to see someone achieve a childhood dream. As commercial as the event is, it retains a purity.

To lose Wimbledon, in other words, isn’t like losing any other tournament. It’s losing a little bit of perfection, and the best of what tennis can offer. There are much bigger issues to deal with and think about right now, but we can be bummed about this one, too.

Rewatch, 2003 Wimbledon: Federer seals first Slam via serve-and-volley

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 10:34:00 +0000

“Roger Federer’s best chance at a 21st Grand Slam will evaporate if Wimbledon is cancelled,” a headline in the Daily Mail read this past weekend. That’s probably true. By the time the summer of 2021 rolls around, Federer will be a month shy of his 40th birthday. Surely that will be a sign that the end is nigh, right?

As far as orders of importance go these days, the major-title plights of Federer and his fellow legend Serena Williams, who will miss out on perhaps her best chance to tie Margaret Court’s record total of 24 Slams, rank fairly low on the global list. But someday, hopefully, we’ll have a chance to care about frivolous things like GOAT races and major-title totals again. Missing this event would likely hurt Federer and Serena in those races more than anyone else.

With Federer in mind, I thought it would be interesting to return to happier times, at least for a few minutes, and rewatch his first Wimbledon win, and his first Grand Slam win, which came over Mark Philippoussis in the 2003 final. From an historical perspective, the match was also the last time that two men would primarily play serve-and-volley tennis in a Wimbledon final. Starting in 2004, Federer served and stayed back, and he has been a baseliner on grass ever since.

At the time, this final had a note of anti-climax to it. Leading up to Wimbledon that year, the talk surrounding the men’s event had centered around a potential showdown between the No. 4 seed, Federer, and his fellow young gun on the rise, Andy Roddick, who was seeded No. 5. Two weeks earlier, Federer had won the tune-up event in Halle, at the same time that Roddick was winning the tune-up at Queen’s. The dominant grass-courter of the previous decade, Pete Sampras, wasn’t in the draw, and would soon be retired. When the defending champion and top seed, Lleyton Hewitt, lost to Ivo Karlovic in the first round, the road was wide open for a Federer-Roddick semifinal.

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Many of us believed that Roddick was Sampras’s heir apparent. After all, he was American. Could a guy from Switzerland really beat him on Centre Court? The answer, we quickly found out in their semifinal, was an authoritative yes. Federer raised his game to a place where Roddick couldn’t go, and basically kept it there for the rest of his career. I can remember an editor at Tennis Magazine who had gone to Wimbledon that year returning as a raving Federer fanatic. He wasn’t the only one. I’ve heard from a lot of people through the years that Federer’s win over Roddick ignited their love for the Swiss, and reignited their love for the sport.

I can also remember thinking that, because of the display he had put on in the semis, Federer might be set up for a letdown against Philippoussis. Once upon a time, the Australian had also been seen as an heir apparent. He had reached the US Open final in 1998, and the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1998, 1999, and 2000. In 2000, he was up a set on Sampras when he injured himself and was forced to retire. Unseeded due to injuries in 2003, Philippoussis looked ready to finally make good on his bomb serve and his early promise.

Just as he had in the semis, though, Federer waved his magic wand and made his flame-throwing opponent disappear in three fairly routine sets. For years, we had been told that power tennis was the future, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Then, suddenly, over the course of a weekend, Federer did.

Naturally, we didn’t know all of that then. I watched this match at my tennis club in Brooklyn, and few of the other members were particularly riveted by the matchup; Federer wasn’t a known quantity then. In the closing stages, I can remember thinking something like, “Huh, I guess Federer is going to be a Wimbledon champion.” Up until then, I had thought of him as a player who would hang around the Top 10 or Top 5, but I hadn’t contemplated him as a major winner, let alone a 20-major winner. After all, he was already almost 22 in 2003! That was ancient by the standards of the day.

In my defense, even Federer sounded legitimately stunned to be holding the winner’s trophy when it was over. For many, the most memorable part of this day was his stammering, tearful, semi-delirious winner’s speech afterward. Crying, for the most part, wasn’t a thing in sports at that time; now it’s pretty much standard. Federer’s words—about how many times he had pretended he had won Wimbledon as a kid, and how mind-blowing it was to actually be doing it—were relatable, and won him many more fans. Beneath Federer’s cool exterior, we found out, was a deep pool of emotion.

Let’s roll the videotape.

—The clip starts with an interesting shot of the two players waiting to go on court. Federer is relaxed enough to look at the camera and smile as the club’s designated bag carrier drops the players’ bags to the ground. Most players, as they’re about to walk out for their first Wimbledon final, or for any Grand Slam final—or virtually any match—put on a facade of total, stony concentration. Not Federer. Watching him happily chat away during pre-match interviews over the years, I’ve always been amazed at how easily he can shift in and out of game-face mode.

—Here we get to see Federer the serve-and-volleyer. He comes in behind his first serve for most of the match, but not his second. The tactic doesn’t work out so well on the first point, as Philippoussis belts a forehand pass for a winner. Federer’s service motion was a little simpler, a little more still in those days, especially when he’s tossing the ball.

—Do you like Mirka’s shades? She turned 25 a few months before this match. Nervous and hunched down low in the player box, she reminds me of…Awkwafina?

—This was the last hurrah for old-style grass-court tennis at Wimbledon. The tournament had installed new all-rye turf in 2001 that would eventually make it easier for baseliners to succeed there, but these two weren’t ready to make the change. Philippoussis grew during the net-rushing days, and Federer came in at the tail end of it. To them, the only way to win Wimbledon was to go to the net.

In truth, it was the serve alone that mattered most at Wimbledon, and matches were often decided by a couple of shanked returns that somehow landed dropped in for winners. You can see Federer hit a couple of them here—they qualify as highlights. In the old grass-court game, there was a fine line between the tense and the dull. Either way, there was something simple and pure about it.

—Philippousis hits a spectacular forehand that seems like it’s going to go for a winner. That is, until Federer easily gets there and blocks it back into the open court, and eventually closes the point with an inside-in forehand winner and a fist-pump. The mix of offense and defense he used in that point has defined men’s tennis ever since.

—Philippoussis shanks a forehand return to give Federer the first set. Mirka can’t hide her relief, while Federer responds with a narrow-eyed strut to the sideline. From there it’s full flight Fed to start the second set. He caresses an overhead for a winner, and follows it up with a backhand pass from his shoe tops. Soon he’s up two breaks and casually poking over drop volleys that die in the grass. Some things have never changed.

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—The one element of his game that Federer would clearly improve is his forehand. The few rally forehands we see him hit here sit up in the middle of the court, in a way that they won’t in the future. With his move back to the baseline, he would become more reliant on his forehand as a point-changing weapon.

When Philippoussis hits his final backhand return into the net, Federer has Grand Slam title No. 1. He’s won 19 since, and seven at Wimbledon. Let’s hope he gets another shot there before he’s done.

Global facepalm toward U.S. Soccer's Stone Age sexism inspired by WTA

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Which is more significant, a sexist statement of Stone Age proportions, or the worldwide facepalm it inspires?

Last week, U.S. Soccer, in its attempt to defend itself in a $67 million equal-pay lawsuit filed by the U.S. Women’s National Team, made just such a dated declaration. It is “indisputable science,” the federation and its attorneys asserted, that the “overall soccer-playing ability” of the women’s national team is inferior to that of the men’s.

According to U.S. Soccer, the men’s and women’s don’t perform “equal work requiring equal skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions.” For one thing, the women don’t have to contend with the same type of “fan hostility” that the men do when they play on the road—or, apparently, at home.

“Even the hostility of fans at home crowds for the Men’s National Team in some friendlies can be unlike anything the Women’s National Team faces,” lawyers for U.S. Soccer wrote.

Shouldn’t a lack of hostility from home fans count in the women’s favor?

If you’re like me, your jaw dropped a few millimeters with every word you read from U.S. Soccer. To base their case on the idea that, essentially, the men’s team can beat the women’s team sounded so…last century. Never mind that the U.S. women’s team has won the last two World Cups while the men failed to qualify in 2018. Never mind that America’s most high-profile and prominent soccer stars at the moment play for the women’s team.

Fortunately, there seemed to be a lot of people like me. U.S. soccer’s filing was “widely condemned as misogynistic,” according to The New York Times. Five major sponsors—Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Visa, Deloitte—joined in the condemnation. Members of the women’s team played a match in Japan with their jerseys inside-out, to obscure the U.S. soccer logo. Most drastically, Carlos Cordeiro, the president of U.S. Soccer, resigned, saying the documents were “unacceptable and inexcusable.” Most telling to me were the reactions of old-guard pundits like Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, who host the Pardon the Interruption show on ESPN. Neither is known as a feminist, but both were left speechless by U.S. Soccer’s argument. Even for these 60-something males, the time when you could argue that men should be paid more just because they’re men was long past, and didn’t even merit a response.

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If that time really is past, it’s tennis—in particular its women players over the last 50 years—that we can thank. For the first century of the sport’s existence, from 1873 to 1973, the U.S. Soccer attitude was also the norm in tennis. Al Laney, sportswriter for The New York Herald Tribune and one of the most respected tennis journalists of the amateur era (he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1979), wrote extensively and enthusiastically about Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills in his 1968 memoir Covering the Court. But he also wrote this:

“In looking back over a few pleasant decades of attending sports activities on both sides of the Atlantic, there are discovered few games played by women that seem worth recalling in detail….Nearly always it is clashing personalities rather than skill or outstanding performance that make the occasion memorable. Unless something other than actual tennis has intervened to grace the occasion, you will search long through the history of the game to find matches suitable for embalming in the hackneyed superlatives of the sportswriter.”

Another respected tennis writer, former amateur player Gordon Forbes, admitted at the end of his 1978 memoir A Handful of Summers, that he had “used up all my adjectives on the men players.” Forbes sums up the prevailing male attitude toward women players during the amateur era this way:

“The girls were as much a part of this section of tennis history as the men. We watched them, were amused by them, and annoyed when their matches went too long and held up the starts of our own. We laughed at their funny service actions, and the mighty female swings they made at overheads.”

A few paragraphs later, Forbes notes the shift in that attitude that occurred during the 70s:

“Billie Jean and her colleagues soon changed that,” he wrote. “Players such as she, Margaret Court, Maria Bueno, Virginia Wade, or Darlene Hard could bury overheads with the best of them…Billie Jean is the modern American woman through and through and a great tennis player. More than great.”

What happened to make Forbes change his mind about women’s athletic abilities? The Battle of the Sexes, of course, and the rise of the WTA. That same year, 1978, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova would begin their rivalry in earnest with their first classic final, at Wimbledon. Since then, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Lindsay Davenport, Justine Henin, and especially Venus and Serena Williams have built on that athletic legacy. We still watch women’s matches for the clash of personalities, of course, but we watch for their skill and shotmaking, and for the drama and tension that their close matches create—all the reasons we watch men’s tennis, in other words. Last year’s US Open winner, Bianca Andreescu, is just 19, but she's already as tactically savvy and creative as any male player in the game today.

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In A Handful of Summers, Forbes concludes his brief summary of the women’s game this way:

“Thinking back about all the girl players whom I watched, I find that there were only a handful who really perfected the simplest and most complicated of all things in tennis—the classic service swing.”

It’s safe to say Forbes would agree that Serena has perfected it in a way that few players of either gender ever have. As much as anyone else, its Serena’s dominance and commitment over a 20-year span that have made the old sexist notions about women’s tennis being an amusing warm-up act largely a thing of the past.

I say “largely” because, as we can see from the U.S. Soccer controversy, the old tropes about women’s athletic inferiority linger. And while equal pay has been the rule at all of the Grand Slams since 2007, there are still plenty of people in tennis who will never accept the idea. All of which makes me think of something that Billie Jean, quoting another King, said to me a few months ago:

“Coretta Scott King has this great quote—do you know it?—about how struggle is a never-ending process,” BJK said, “and every generation has to fight for its own freedom.”

The fact that sports officials can still issue sexist comments of Stone Age proportions means that fight must go on. The worldwide facepalm it inspired shows that women tennis players haven’t been fighting it in vain.

Maple Leap: How Bianca Andreescu turned a hockey nation tennis-mad

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Early last year, Bianca Andreescu traveled to The Netherlands to play a Fed Cup tie for her native Canada. At the time, she was a tour neophyte who had just cracked the Top 100. But a month earlier she had beaten Venus Williams and Caroline Wozniacki on her way to the final in Auckland, a run that made the tennis world sit up and take notice. This powerful athlete and savvy competitor, everyone agreed, was on her way to bigger things, and higher rankings, very soon.

While the sport’s media recognized Andreescu’s talent, they didn’t know much about her. Who, for instance, was her coach? According to the Fed Cup’s website at the time, it was former pro Nathalie Tauziat, but their partnership had ended a year earlier. Asked about it in a press conference, Andreescu corrected the record.

“Right now, it’s Sylvain Bruneau,” she said, naming the Canadian coach she has worked with for the past year. “I think on Wikipedia it’s correct. They took out Nathalie’s name.”

Then, with a smile, Andreescu made a confession.

“I actually changed that,” she said. “It’s so easy to change things on Wikipedia. And my height, too. It said I was 5’5”; I am not 5’5”. I changed it to 5’7”.”

This story can serve as a metaphor for Andreescu’s first year on tour, when her game grew more rapidly, and she had success come more easily, than anyone expected. At the start of the 2019 season, she was ranked No. 152; by year’s end, she was No. 5.

Along with winning Indian Wells and Toronto—no Canadian had won the Rogers Cup since 1969—Andreescu became the first Canadian to win a Grand Slam singles title, and she did it in suitably grand style, by defeating Serena Williams in the US Open final. A few days later, Andreescu found herself standing next to Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as he chanted “She the North!”—her new catchphrase—along with thousands of their compatriots.

It wasn’t just Andreescu’s meteoric rise that was stunning; it was how she went about making it happen. She won with power, with touch, with surprising spins and angles, and sudden injections of pace. According to The New Yorker, watching her was like watching pitcher Clayton Kershaw out-think an opposing batter. For the year, Andreescu went 8–3 against Top 10 players, and from the start, she never seemed to doubt that she belonged on the same court with them.

“She’s one of the few players who can play offense and defense; it’s that fantastic mix that has worked so well for her,” says three-time Grand Slam champion Lindsay Davenport. “The finishing power, but also the ability to hang in rallies and give her opponents different looks.”

The most meaningful assessment may have come from Serena, who already sees something of herself in this brazen teen.

“I think we’re really similar in terms of we both are fighters and we both are really intense,” Williams said after their US Open final. “…she goes out and she plays hard.”

“It’s a really special feeling,” Andreescu says of hearing those words from Serena. “Growing up, I watched her all the time and looked up to her so much. For her to say those things about me is honestly surreal.”

Andreescu has an impressive variety of weapons, but none are more important than her fearlessness and finishing power. (Getty Images)

Yet like any ambitious young athlete, Andreescu isn’t just in it for the praise. For her, facing someone like Serena is a means to an end.

“I’m really lucky to be in a position where I can play against her and other amazing players,” Andreescu says, “because that’s what’s going to make me the best player I can be.”

The aftershocks from Andreescu’s season are still being felt across Canada. Last year, she became the first tennis player to win the nation’s Athlete of the Year award.

“Coverage has been off the charts,” says Michael Downey, president of Tennis Canada. “This is a hockey country, and Bianca was the most followed Canadian athlete in 2019.

“People dressed up as her for Halloween, and some even went as her mother,” Downey added, referencing Maria Andreescu, whose voluminous hair and pitter-pat clapping style made her a social-media phenomenon during the US Open.

“There were 100,000 kids playing tennis in Canada a few years ago. This summer, there were 200,000. That’s a huge jump, and we can credit a lot of it to her.”

Andreescu, the first player born in this century to win a Grand Slam title, has returned tennis to the days of the teenage prodigy, when unstoppable forces like Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati rocketed up the rankings. What explains her seemingly inexplicable success?

Her mother and father aren’t world-class athletes, tennis coaches, or stereotypically pushy parents. If anything, the family’s story is very normal, in a multi-cultural, can-do Canadian way. Andreescu’s father, Nicu, is an engineer, and Maria is a compliance officer at an investment firm. In 1994, they left their native Romania and settled in the Toronto suburbs—carrying, as Andreescu’s grandfather, Grigore, told The Globe and Mail, “one bag and a frying pan.”

"My mom's a straight G. I’ll never be that cool," Andreescu tweeted after watching a viral video of her mother's muted celebration during the 2019 US Open final. (Getty Images)

The Andreescus channeled their only child’s rambunctious energy into sports, and introduced her to tennis during an extended stay in Romania when she was 7. By 10, back in Toronto, she was working with coaches from Tennis Canada. But rather than move to Montreal to practice at the national training center, Andreescu remained at home. Today, rather than quit their day jobs so they can hover over their daughter full time, Nicu and Maria have kept their old lives and routines intact.

“They’ve been great tennis parents, because they’ve been extremely supportive of her,” coach Bruneau said. “Even with me I felt they haven’t been intrusive at all. They’ve been giving us a lot of space.

“They’re a very close family, and I think that’s good, actually, for her.”

Despite the hands-off approach, Maria helped give Bianca what she refers to as her “secret weapon”: the power of visualization. When Bianca was 12, Maria introduced her to meditation; today, Bianca starts each day with 15 minutes of it, “to get in tune with my body, my mind.”

“You use your mind to visualize what you want to accomplish,” Andreescu says. “I think the mental part is the most important because it controls your whole body, right?”

As for Andreescu’s father, he had trouble believing how rapid his daughter’s progress would be. When Bianca was 12, Nicu, who played some tennis in high school, bet her $50 that he could beat her in tennis. He never saw the money again.

“I creamed him,” Bianca told The Globe and Mail with a grin.

“Did we expect all this from her so soon? Probably not,” Downey says. “But coaches here always saw a mentally strong young player, who could lift her game when she needed to.”

“It’s been a crazy ride, truly a Cinderella story,” Andreescu said after beating Garbine Muguruza, Elina Svitolina and Angelique Kerber to win her first WTA title at Indian Wells last March. She won her second title in August, at the Rogers Cup, defeating Kiki Bertens, Karolina Pliskova, Sofia Kenin and Serena Williams along the way. (Getty Images)

Louis Borfiga, Tennis Canada’s junior-development mastermind, was an early and ardent believer in Andreescu.

“I remember Bianca beating [Yaroslava] Shvedova in 2017, and Borfiga saying, ‘She’s going to win a Grand Slam,’” says Canadian journalist Tom Tebbutt. “That was uncharacteristic, because he’s normally very mild-mannered. But he saw something in her.”

Now that Borfiga’s seemingly wild prediction has come true, he sees even more in Andreescu.

“What’s going to happen in tennis a is about Bianca,” Borfiga told Tebbutt and other reporters at the US Open. “In other words, a player with variety in her game, but also capable of hitting the ball with extreme power. That’s how we have to train the young kids today.”

First, Andreescu has to tend to her own future. The new decade got off to an inauspicious start when she withdrew from the Australian Open with a left knee injury that flared up at the 2019 WTA Finals in Shenzhen. She wasn't able to return to action before the coronavirus forced the tours to postpone tournaments through June 7. This isn’t the first time Andreescu's body has betrayed her. The current No. 6 has experienced back problems, and she was sidelined by a shoulder issue last spring. By now, she understands this probably won’t be the last of her physical woes.

“There are definitely things I can fix to try to avoid them,” says Andreescu, who travels with a trainer. “But the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that injuries come with being a professional athlete. It’s how you learn from them that helps to push you through the tough times. I’m listening to my body more.”

If there’s a worry for Andreescu’s future, it’s her history with injuries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her background in meditation, Andreescu has accepted they come with the territory of being an athlete by trade. (Getty Images)

If her brief history in the sport is a guide, the resilient Canadian will bounce back quickly.

“I wouldn’t say that my preparation has changed too much,” Andreescu says, as she contemplates 2020. “I had a pretty incredible season last year thanks to my pre-season, so I think I’ll want to keep a similar regimen.

“There are a couple of differences, like aiming to be No. 1 in the world this year, but I still want to approach every practice and match as a chance to be better and stronger.”

At 19, Andreescu already knows how to be a champion, and expects nothing less from herself. The No. 1 ranking is in her sights, and why wouldn’t it be?

She also knows that while her body may be vulnerable, her real power lies in her mind. Like that error-riddled Wikipedia page from last year, there’s nothing Andreescu has encountered so far that she can’t fix herself.

FFT shifting Roland Garros was a desperate move, but 2020 calls for it

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 19:52:00 +0000

In times as dire as these, it almost feels good to have an old-fashioned, tennis-can’t-get-out-of-its-own story to follow and argue about, doesn’t it?

And we have a doozy, one that puts the sport at cross-purposes in virtually every way imaginable. On Tuesday, officials at Roland Garros announced that, due to the threat of COVID-19, the tournament would be played from Sept. 20 to Oct. 4, instead of on its usual dates in late May and early June. Apparently, the organizers dropped this scheduling bombshell without any advance warning to the players, the tours, or the other three majors.

Reaction was predictably swift and outraged—by tennis’s polite standards, anyway.

“Excusez-moi?” Naomi Osaka tweeted.

“That’s insane,” Vasek Pospisil told The New York Times.

The US Open, in announcing that it won’t be changing its dates for the time being, shot some side-eye across the Atlantic: “At a time when the world is coming together, we recognize that such a decision should not be made unilaterally, and therefore the USTA would do so in full consultation with the other Grand Slam tournament, the WTA and ATP, the ITF, and our partners, including the Laver Cup.”

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On Wednesday, the ATP and WTA issued a joint statement to announce that they were cancelling the rest of the clay-court season and freezing the rankings. There was no mention of Roland Garros, or the 10 events that are supposed to be played during its new dates. But the tours did close their press release with this pointed paragraph: “Now is not the time to act unilaterally, but in unison. All decisions related to the impact of the coronavirus require appropriate consultation with the stakeholders in the game, a view that is shared by ATP, WTA, ITF, AELTC, Tennis Australia, and USTA.” Conspicuously missing from that list: The French Tennis Federation.

Finally, officials from the Laver Cup, which is scheduled to be held in Boston from Sept. 25 to 27, stated that their event will go on as planned for now, despite the “many questions” that Roland Garros has raised with its move.

As we can see from the above statements, this rescheduling is almost perfectly designed to expose tennis’ lack of unity, and its circular-firing-squad approach to governance. Because Roland Garros is a Grand Slam, it has no stake in the ATP and WTA events that it will be overrunning in September. Because the Laver Cup is backed by the USTA and Tennis Australia, the FFT also has no problem decimating Roger Federer’s team exhibition event, no matter how popular it is. And because Roland Garros needs to pay for its recent expansion and new retractable roof, it couldn’t worry about starting just eight days after the US Open ends.

The sport is right to send some side-eye in Roland Garros’s direction. Like Wimbledon, the French Open is famous for doing things in its own stubborn way. But why drop a bombshell like this from out of the blue? Even Rafael Nadal, who probably stands to gain the most from this announcement, will now be asked to defend 4,000 ranking points—from his 2019 US Open and Roland Garros titles—in the space of five weeks. Along with Rafa, every other player will be asked to transition from hard courts to red clay, and from New York to Paris, in the space of a week. This should be a moment for cooperation, even in tennis.

On the other hand, most tennis players don’t have any guaranteed income; all of it comes from prize money, and last year Roland Garros offered $50 million of it, including $50,000 for first-round losers. And while money may be at the root of the FFT’s decision, new arenas and retractable roofs—and all the other things the federation does for French tennis over the course of the year—don’t pay for themselves. Plus, no matter what the songs say about springtime in Paris, the weather is warmer there in September than it is in May.

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There’s no denying that this is a desperate move. But 2020 is a desperate year. Controversial scheduling and insider complaints aside, right now the prospect of watching Roland Garros in September fills me with joy and hope. The thought of players sliding across the red clay, and ball kids maniacally rolling the balls to each other, the way they do in Paris, makes me think the world might be OK after all. At this moment, I’d love nothing more than the opportunity to watch two unknowns grind through a five-hour war on a side court in Paris.

There’s no guarantee that the French Open, or any other tournament on the schedule, will be played this year. At least for now, though, Roland Garros, in its bullying, big-footing way, has given us a chance to dream. If the world is really ready for the tournament to be played in September, I’m going to thank the tennis gods, and any other gods I can think of, for the chance to see it.

The player-fan relationship: We miss hearing the roars from the crowds

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 20:43:00 +0000

“If I show up to an arena and there are no fans in there, I ain’t playing.”

Can you believe it was just 10 days ago that Lebron James, the most famous athlete in the United States, uttered those briefly infamous words? James long ago walked them back, of course, and it was soon apparent that he wasn’t going to have any choice in the matter anyway. Last week, after one of the league’s players tested positive for the coronavirus, the NBA suspended its 2020 season indefinitely. Not only would there be no fans in the arenas, there would be no teams on the courts, either. Virtually every sports association, professional and amateur, has followed suit.

Tennis, as you’re surely, and painfully, aware, was one of them. As of now, the men won’t resume until late April, and the women won’t return until early May; both layoffs could obviously last much longer. If it wasn’t clear last Sunday that officials at Indian Wells were doing the right thing by cancelling the BNP Paribas Open, it should be by now. If the tournament had gone on as planned, it would still have nearly a full week to go.

The anguish over these events is more proof, if anyone still needed it, that sports, far from being a mindless diversion, help drive and define our world. It took the NBA ending its season to wake many Americans up to the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, and when the NCAA canceled its men’s basketball tournament, you could almost hear a collective cry go up: “Not March Madness!” While the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event in the U.S., nothing is as unifying, or as fun, as the NCAAs each spring.

For tennis fans, something similar could be said for the tournaments in Indian Wells, Miami, and Monte Carlo. The first two have been aptly nicknamed the Sunshine Double. And the view of the Mediterranean we see from the top of the Monte Carlo Country Cub each April is a picturesque metaphor for the expanding sense of horizons that spring brings with it.

What have we missed without sports, and in particular tennis, over the last week? At the most basic level, the drama of a match serves as an immediate distraction from the news. At a more personal level, fans have missed the chance to see their favorites, their heroes, do whatever it is they admire about them most. One of those things is winning, of course, but it goes beyond that. The player-fan relationship in tennis may be more personal than in any other sport. Loyalty isn’t based on what city you live in, or even what country; it’s based on how much you relate, one on one, to a player. Fans of, say, Rafael Nadal are missing a chance to see him rip his forehand and pump his fist. But they’re also missing a chance to see how he handles a range of situations: adversity, success, pressure, victory and defeat. Tennis fans miss the sport’s personalities as much as we do the play itself.

But there’s something else I’ve found myself missing since sports disappeared, and it’s the same one that Lebron James anticipated missing: the fans themselves. Yes, I’ve wanted to watch the star players of tennis and basketball, and their aces, dunks, 3-pointers, and drop shots. But it’s the roar of the crowd that I’ve missed more. The silence from my TV over the last week has been deafening.

Jon Wertheim on how much has changed since the postponement of Indian Wells:

Sports, at the simplest level, is a way to see and hear other people. Where else can Americans get a look at 100,000 of their fellow countrymen and women in one swoop of a Spider-cam, the way we can during a college football broadcast? (The same is true, I’m sure, during soccer games in other countries.) How else can we fully appreciate the beauty and effect of Roger Federer’s game without the audience explosion that accompanies all of his winning shots? Skilled athletes give us contests worth watching, but audiences turn them into emotional, meaningful occasions, even for those of us watching from the other side of a TV screen.

It’s possible that Roland Garros and Wimbledon could stage their fortnights without fans this year. But if someone hits a spectacular shot and there’s no one there to clap for it, how spectacular will it seem? For now, I’m already looking forward to seeing James, Federer, Nadal, Serena Williams and dozens of others do their thing on court again. But what I’m really looking forward to is hearing the first roars from the crowd when they do.

Social distancing, tennis style: Club tennis in the coronavirus era

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 02:00:00 +0000

“You see a lot of fist bumps and elbow bumps, but not a lot of handshakes these days,” says Greg Moran, owner of the Four Seasons Racquet Club in Wilton, Connecticut. “Instead of a high-five, you might see two players tap racquets.”

“No hugging, no kissing, no air kissing,” concurs Todd Snyder, a Brooklyn teaching pro. “If you used to stand three feet from someone on court, you probably stand four feet from them now.”

Call it social distancing, tennis style.

Moran and Snyder both work in one of the nation’s hot zones for the coronavirus. Wilton is 30 miles east of New Rochelle, the first town in the country to be put on lockdown, while New York City is home to more than 60 cases so far. But neither of these veterans of the tri-state recreational scene have noticed many other changes at their respective facilities over the last few weeks. Yes, every ball hopper, countertop, and hand rail is being scrubbed within an inch of its life. Yes, everyone is trying to cough and sneeze into their elbows. Yes, some players are showing up in masks and gloves and carrying baskets full of hand sanitizer. And yes, there’s a fair amount of nervous banter in the air. But even as the world seems to be collapsing around them, tennis players in this area are still coming out to play.

Jon Wertheim's reaction to the latest canceled and postponed events:

“We’ve had a cancellation or two, but mostly it’s business as usual,” Moran says.

“My lessons aren’t down,” Snyder says. “I just had my first cancellation, from someone upstate who wanted to stay up there, because there aren’t many cases in that area yet. Honestly, I thought there’d be more of that.”

Even as professional sports leagues, including the ATP, shut down, the apocalypse doesn’t seem to have trickled down to the rec level yet. “I’m not buying into the hysteria,” one player says. “A lot of people think it’s overblown,” says another. “ I haven’t noticed anybody changing their routines so far,” says a third. That could all change in a hurry, of course; by next week every gym and club in the country could be in mandatory lock down. So far, though, even in this perilous moment, the tennis court has remained the same refuge it has always been for players looking to stay sane and blow off a little steam. And that includes those who are over 60.

“It’s a way to lessen the load,” of all the recent news, Moran says.

“There hasn’t been any diminution in older players,” Snyder says. “They’re out there like they always are.”

Players react to the ATP's six-week suspension of tour:

Is tennis a safe way for people to gather? In singles, you spend most of the time on the opposite side of the net from your opponent. In doubles, you can keep to yourself in your own quadrant of the court most of the time. Even when you need to be in closer proximity, such as during a lesson, adjustments can be made, according to Snyder.

“If I’m showing someone a Continental grip, I might normally take their racquet and switch it in their hands,” he says. “Now I’ll show them on my racquet.”

That said, there are still a lot of unknowns about the virus. It isn’t carried by sweat, but if someone sneezes or coughs on a tennis ball, how long can it live on its felt?

“I had someone ask me, ‘Are the balls safe?’ and I wasn’t sure how to answer,” Snyder says. “No one seems to have figured it out.”

For that reason, Moran says he’s leaving nothing to chance. On Thursday, he met with a member of the Wilton Health Department and spoke to an infectious disease doctor about best practices for dealing with the coronavirus.

“I outlined to both all the procedures we’ve initiated to sanitize the club,” Moran says. “Both said to continue with what we’re doing and offered some additional suggestions.”

Unknowns aside, the prevailing attitude around the metropolitan area seems to be: If we can’t watch tennis, at least we can keep playing it—safely and responsibly, of course. We’re going to need the sport in our lives for as long as we can have it.

Facing the coronavirus, tennis is in a battle to keep its season alive

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 16:55:00 +0000

There had to be a first domino to fall, a tip of the coming iceberg, and the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells turned out to be it. Unluckily for the event—but perhaps luckily for some fans who would have risked their health by attending it—the coronavirus reached the nearby Coachella Valley in Southern California just as the tournament was about to begin. On Sunday, less then 24 hours before qualifying matches got underway, officials announced that the local Riverside Public Health Department had declared a state of emergency, and that the tournament, “following the guidance of medical professionals, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the State of California,” would be canceled for the first time in its 46-year history.

Players, most of whom had already made the trip west and paid for expensive hotel rooms, were predictably stunned and upset. The same was surely true for the thousands of tournament employees and media who planned to work on site over the next two weeks, and the fans who had planned vacations around the event. Judging by social-media responses, many in the tennis world felt that the tournament overreacted. But cancellations like this were inevitable, not just in tennis, but in every sport and every walk of life. Experts say that the coronavirus is at least five times deadlier than the flu; that each person who has it infects between three and four people; and that banning mass gatherings, especially ones that significant numbers of people travel to attend, is one of the few methods we have to slow its spread.

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Indian Wells was the first mass gathering to fall, but it almost surely won’t be the last. The Miami Open is theoretically set to begin in two weeks, but its host city recently canceled two other major area events, the Calle Ocho and Ultra music festivals. Roland Garros is theoretically set to be the host Grand Slam, but France just announced a ban on all assemblies of 1,000 people or more. The fate of the Italian Open in May is obviously in doubt; Italy has already begun staging its sporting events in empty arenas.

Which brings us to the next question: Is there any way for tennis to keep the 2020 season alive? Could the sport follow Italy’s lead and hold its events with no fans in attendance? This once-unthinkable idea has crossed a few minds.

“Just want to share my thoughts on the BNP Paribas Open event being canceled,” Sascha Bajin, the coach of Dayana Yastremska, tweeted on Sunday night. “Was there no chance to have the event without the public, but then just televised?”

According to Steve Simon, the WTA’s chief executive, the possibility was seriously discussed.

“We were supportive of the concept,” Simon told The New York Times. “But ultimately the tournament didn’t feel it was in their best interest.”

Jamie Murray on tennis' immediate future:

Even a tournament owned by Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men, is likely to balk at having to forego all ticket, concession, merchandise and parking revenue. But now that we know that total shutdown is a possibility, can other tournaments find a way to put on their events without spectators, and the money they bring in? Can they be staged for TV alone? Tennis is famously bad at presenting a unified front, or coming together for the greater good, but that’s likely what it will take in this case. Would prize money need to be renegotiated or draw sizes modified? The players, the tours, the tournaments, the TV partners: this is obviously an all-hands-on-deck moment. No one wants to stage any event in front of empty seats, but it may become the norm across the sporting world very soon.

Tennis has gone away before in times of global strife. Wimbledon wasn’t played from 1915 to 1918 because of World War I, or from 1940 to 1945 because of World War II. These next two weeks, as players scramble to find way to make up for their lost revenue, and the rest of us try to find other ways to entertain ourselves, will give us a taste of what life would be like without the sport in our daily lives. The first domino has fallen. Can we find a way to keep the others standing?

Stronger Together: how can tennis continue to advance gender equality?

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Can a revolution begin with a dating question?

It was the spring of 2017, and Sloane Stephens was sidelined with a foot injury. In her downtime, the future US Open champion tried her hand, and her sense of humor, as a talk-show host for Tennis Channel. Stephens was a natural, of course, and not afraid to dig into her fellow players’ private lives, most memorably in her interview with Vasek Pospisil.

After a few quips and giggles between the American and the Canadian, Stephens got down to the business at hand.

“I hear that you’re single and ready to mingle,” she said, before ticking off Pospisil’s selling points to any potential suitors in the audience: “He’s playing great tennis! He makes lots of money!” By the end of the week, ESPN.com was calling for Stephens and Pospisil “to have their own TV show.”

Fast forward two years, and while they hadn’t turned into a comedy duo, Stephens and Pospisil had teamed up again in a more significant way. By the end of 2019, they had reached across the aisle that typically separates ATP and WTA players, and joined forces in an effort to pressure the Grand Slams for more prize money. The verdict is out on how effective that initiative will be, but it was a sign of cooperation in a sport where men and women have traditionally fended for themselves, which the men have been OK with.

“What affects one side affects the other,” Pospisil said.“It just makes sense to collaborate and communicate, especially at the Grand Slams.” “I’m really super-impressed with Sloane,” he added. “I had some good conversations with her.”

Billie Jean King's message of equality has been heard for decades, and spread by WTA peers like Chris Evert.

Stephens, who turns 27 in March, was elected to the WTA Player Council last year. There she joined a new wave of younger members that includes Donna Vekic, Madison Keys, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Johanna Konta. Together they reflect a tour that, with the rise of new stars like Sofia Kenin and Bianca Andreescu, appears to be undergoing a generational shift. Will the new blood on the court be matched by new ideas off of it?

“I’m really excited to see the ATP and WTA join forces in this campaign,” U.S. pro Nicole Gibbs says. “There had been whispers about this sort of push for a while, and I was concerned the ATP might not include the WTA in their advocacy. Seeing the ATP make teamwork a priority is awesome, and speaks to the quality of player advocates on both tours.”

The subject of gender equality in sports is in the headlines again, as the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team pushes for equal pay and equal treatment with the men’s national team. It’s an issue that tennis has dealt with for much longer than any other major sport. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the first all-women’s tour, the Virginia Slims circuit, an occasion forever commemorated by the photo of the Original 9 women pros holding their one-dollar bills high in Houston in September 1970.

Half a century later, with soccer stars like Megan Rapinoe taking up the banner for female athletes, the question may be: How does tennis continue to advance the cause of gender equality in the sports workplace? Equal pay, after much foot dragging, has been achieved at the Grand Slams. What should this new generation of WTA players, and their sympathetic ATP counterparts, push for next?

The Original 9: Billie Jean King, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss, Judy Tegart Dalton, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville Reid, Nancy Richey and Rosie Casals. Despite threats of losing their national rankings and being blocked by the majors, these women signed $1 contracts with Gladys Heldman on September 23, 1970, for the first Virginia Slims Invitational at the Houston Racquet Club.

The first person to ask, of course, is Billie Jean King. At 76, the woman once dubbed Mother Freedom believes there’s just as much to fight for now as there was in 1970.

“Coretta Scott King has this great quote—do you know it?—about how struggle is a never-ending process,” King says, “and every generation has to fight for its own freedom.”

For King, that fight began in the 1960s with the drive for Open tennis, a movement that briefly united male and female players.

“The plan was to be together, and we could change the world,” says King, who in 1968 joined the first modern dual-gender pro tour, the National Tennis League, with Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Rosie Casals and other stars.

But the dawn of this new era came with a pair of “rude awakenings” for King. After winning the first open Wimbledon, in 1968, she looked down at her winner’s check and saw that it was for $750, instead of the $2,000 that Laver would receive the following day. (“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a pretty big difference,’” King says.

Soon after, the National Tennis League folded. While the male players’ contracts were snapped up by Lamar Hunt’s WCT Tour, the women were left in the cold. Instead of changing the world together, King and the Original 9 had to change it on their own.

“I don’t think people realized when we held up those dollar bills, the men would freeze us out,” King says.

Fifty years later, King can sound wistful for those heady years of revolution on the courts. In comparing the game’s past and present, she holds onto the ambitious dreams of the ’70s, even as she remains hard-headed about what constitutes success for women in sports.

“We still need to ask, ‘How many women have jobs in the business?’” King says. “How many can make a living?"

To her, success of the American soccer-players’ quest depends less on the national team, and more on whether they can make their sport viable at the professional level. “I want to hear about the leagues, and how they can be sustained,” King says.

When it comes to tennis in 2020, King still dreams the old dream—for the men and women “to be together.” In the five decades since she first entertained that idea, tennis has slowly fulfilled her vision for its future. You can see it in the prize money the women command, which topped out with a record $4.42 million winner’s check at the WTA Finals last year. You can see it even more clearly at the big dual-gender tournaments, which are now the game’s most popular and lucrative events. Yet rather than combine their marketing power, the tours remain separate; the men and women play the same sport, but work for two different companies.

Today, tennis royalty such as Serena Williams and Roger Federer can earn the same prize money on the Grand Slam stage. The US Open was the first major tournament to award equal pay, in 1973, when both champions took home $25,000. Twenty-eight years passed before another major, the Australian Open, followed suit. Pay parity was finally achieved across the board in 2007, when Wimbledon went equal.

“In a perfect world, we’d have one association,” King says. “They don’t have to be tied at the hip, or play every event together, but the interests of the men and women would be aligned.”

What King would like to see in today’s players is a commitment to more than just their own bottom lines. The WTA’s early trailblazers had to do whatever they could to help their tour thrive.

"Players worry about money, and what comes next for them. I wanted to understand budgets, sponsorship, ownership, all of their challenges,” says King, who has advocated for the WTA to create a “rookie school,” to teach young players the business side of tennis. “I’d always talk to tournament directors; they risk a lot for the players.”

If today’s players have become more adept at promoting anything, it’s themselves. But according to Courtney Nguyen, who writes the WTA Insider column on the tour’s website, that newfound power over their images has led to its own form of progress.

“I think we’ve moved on from the time of glamorizing the athletes and making aesthetics the focal point,” Nguyen says. “With social media, that control is now in the players’ hands. I think that’s a great evolution, to see the players celebrated for their athleticism, toughness and achievements.”

As Billie Jean and Coretta Scott King knew, though, every progressive action comes with a reaction.

Despite the success of dual-gender tournaments, the sport has swung back toward men’s-only events. Laver Cup, ATP Cup, the Next Gen ATP Finals, the new-format Davis Cup: all have debuted since 2017, all are backed by major national federations, but none have made room for women. (The Fed Cup will implement a similar updated format this year.) At the same time, Hopman Cup, a semi-serious exhibition that had brought men and women together to kick off the season since 1989, was discarded this year.

To Nguyen, these developments send a “fairly consistent and very disheartening message.”

Like the WTA, the ATP has a player council in place to advocate interests and address grievances. Novak Djokovic (President), Kevin Anderson (Vice President), Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, John Isner, Sam Querrey, Yen-Hsun Lu, Bruno Soares, Jurgen Melzer and Vasek Pospisil comprise the current elected group, whose term runs through Wimbledon this year.

If anyone is going to overcome the sport’s obstacles to progress, history says it will be the players. From the Original 9 in 1970, to the Wimbledon men’s boycott in 1973, to the “Parking Lot Revolution” that formed the modern ATP in 1988, meaningful change in tennis has come when its athletes band together.

King, for one, has high hopes for the WTA’s new stars.

“I think Bianca [Andreescu] is amazing; she could be a leader, rather than just a great player,” King says. “Ash Barty has been great, too; she comes from the team-sports world. I listen to their winners’ speeches, and I like that they say “we” instead of “‘I,’” and really mean it.”

Gibbs says that she has seen attitudes change on both sides of the gender aisle. Andy Murray, who may be the first ATP player to describe himself as a feminist, has called for equal pay across the board; Pospisil and Stephens have thrown aside convention to work together; and there’s youthful energy on the WTA Player Council. The idea of a co-gender player union no longer sounds as fantastical as it once did.

“I think this latest push for player rights has been a beautiful example of the tours coming together and seeing the potential that we have as a combined force,” Gibbs says. “It sounds cliché, but I think the tours are steadily realizing that we’re stronger together.”

“Stronger together”: It’s a slogan that failed to win the day in the 2016 United States presidential election, and it may fail to win the day in tennis, too. As long as the tours are separate enterprises, they’ll have separate agendas. Still, the sport remains one where a female athlete like Stephens can evolve from talk-show host to tour leader.

The mixed-gender Hopman Cup was not staged in 2020, making way for the ATP Cup. The men’s-only team event was held across three cities in Australia, but drew criticism when scheduling in Brisbane pushed prominent WTA players, including world No. 1 Ashleigh Barty, off Stadium Court. “They got what they wanted, girls to the side,” Sloane Stephens said.

Stephens, who admits that she hasn’t always loved life on tour, and who may be most famous for gawking at the size of her US Open champion’s check in 2017, might seem an unlikely candidate for a politician. But her experiences as a teenager helped her understand the trials of players fighting their way up the rankings, in a sport where few outside the Top 100 earn a decent living.

“I feel like the girls that are [ranked] below us that struggle a bit more, they deserve a little bit more, because they’re part of our tour,” Stephens told Reem Abulleil for TENNIS.com last fall. “I think now the tides are changing a little bit, it’s getting a little younger. I think they just need a little bit of support.

My biggest thing will just be making sure they get that support.”

Helping more players make a living: it’s a concern shared by all of Stephens’ fellow Player Council members, on both the ATP and WTA sides. If they can make that happen, they’ll be carrying on the work of King and the Original 9. Fifty years after they hoisted their dollar bills, their legacy still leads the way.

A global threat to a global game: coronavirus' potential tennis impact

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 18:05:00 +0000

Editor's Note: See below for updates on tennis' response to the coronavirus.

In January, when tennis fans began speculating about the 2020 season, we wondered how successful the sport’s Big Four—Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer—would be at the Grand Slams. How innocent we all were. Now, a mere two months later, many of us are wondering if those tournaments will be held at all. Recreational players, if they’re like me, may be wondering how much they’ll be able to play the game they love in the near future.

“You never know what’s going to happen next” in tennis and life, of course, but the coronavirus has the potential to be the medical and psychological equivalent of a meteor slamming into the planet and sending us all of us running for cover. In a matter of 10 weeks, it has put all other stories, issues, problems and trends, no matter how seemingly serious at the time, firmly in the rearview mirror. Oh, for the days when we were worried about…virtually anything else. Even climate change feels more abstract than it did a fortnight ago.

As far as tennis is concerned, a global threat will almost surely have a major effect on a global game. So far not much has changed. Outside of China, tournaments are still being played, and a few hundred thousand people are still scheduled to descend on Indian Wells over the next two weeks. There’s even been a positive development: In Fed Cup and Davis Cup ties, ball kids aren’t being forced to handle the players’ towels. Hopefully this is a permanent change, and one that will be instituted everywhere.

The Davis Cup qualifying match between Japan and Ecuador, in Miki, Japan, is being played without fans due to the coronavirus outbreak. (Getty Images)

Unfortunately, other, more drastic changes are likely coming. Like the Olympics, which may be postponed, tennis tournaments are international events where thousands of people gather in close proximity to one another for a week or two, and then re-disperse to their own countries. Italy, which currently has 3,800 coronavirus cases, has banned spectators from its sporting events through at least April 3. It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening at the Foro Italico in May; it’s also easy to imagine players from other countries not wanting to make the trip to Italy at all.

In France, where cases have now passed the 500 mark, the Paris marathon has been postponed. Will Roland Garros follow suit? In New York, there are currently 2,700 people self-quarantined; what are the numbers in this city of 8.6 million going to look like by the time the US Open rolls around in August? It should go without saying that, despite the financial hit they’ll take, tournament officials shouldn’t hesitate to cancel all of these events if they’re deemed a public-health risk.

A security officer wearing a face mask stands guard during the singles match between Go Soeda of Japan and Emilio Gomez of Ecuador. (Getty Images)

You might say that tennis is a luxury item in a time like this, and you’d be right; the world can live without Wimbledon for a year or two or more. But for those of us who play the game, it’s also a way to de-stress, stay healthy and sane, and join a social group with none of the pressures of work and home. Will we be able to continue doing that? A sport where you run and sweat in the close company of others, and potentially spend hours together, may not seem like the refuge it did just a short time ago. The tennis and squash facilities where I play have each sent out somber emails over the past week, urging members who feel ill to stay home and reminding people to “overuse” the hand sanitizer stations that have been hastily installed.

For now, all we can do is hope the spread of the virus slows in the summer months, or doesn’t spread as widely as feared. In the meantime, hopefully, all of this will make us appreciate how lucky we’ve always been to be able to do something as simple as watch and play tennis together.

UPDATE—On Friday, the BNP Paribas Open, the ATP Masters 1000 and WTA Premier Mandatory tournament which begins next week in Indian Wells, Calif., released the following statement regarding coronavirus (COVID-19):

Following the direction and guidance of Dr. David Agus, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and Martin Massiello, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Eisenhower Health, the BNP Paribas Open is taking action to continue prioritizing the health and safety of the fans, athletes, and everyone involved with the tournament.

First and foremost, any patron who has purchased tickets directly from the tournament may request a refund for the 2020 tournament, or a credit for the 2021 tournament. Patrons can visit www.bnpparibasopen.com/coronavirus to request a refund or credit.

Additional actions include:

—More than 250 hand sanitizing stations have been placed throughout the facility
—Players will be required to manage their own towel on court and ball kids will not touch or move player towels. A chair will be placed at the back of the court for them to place their towel on for usage during the match.
—Ball kids will wear gloves
—Restaurant and food supply workers will wear gloves
—Volunteers taking tickets at entrances will wear gloves
—N95 masks are being secured for first aid and health personnel to be prepared for any circumstances that would necessitate the use thereof
—Organized player and fan interaction will be limited at the tournament
—All common areas throughout the facility will be cleaned daily with an antiviral application
—Coordinating with local hospital and CDC approved testing for all individuals with symptoms

Further actions are being considered and evaluated on a daily basis in order to continue to ensure the safety of everyone associated with the event.

The ATP and WTA also released this joint statement:

Following medical advice by health experts, the precautionary measures, which are taken in the interest of the health and safety of players, staff, fans and the wider tennis community, are as follows:

· Players and mascots will not hold hands when walking out on court

· Ball kids will be provided with gloves to wear on court

· Ball kids will not handle player towels during matches

· Ball kids will not handle player drinks during matches

· Players will be instructed to not distribute used towels, headbands, shirts, sweatbands, etc. to fans following matches or practice

· Players will not accept pens, tennis balls or other items to hold for autograph signing

“The health and safety of our players, fans, staff and tournament personnel is paramount and, as the outbreak of COVID-19 continues, these are common sense precautions for us to take,” said the ATP and WTA in a joint statement. “We continue to monitor this closely on a daily basis, working with our players and tournaments, as well as public health authorities as the situation evolves globally.”

The precautionary health measures will be implemented across all WTA events and ATP Tour and ATP Challenger Tour events through the 2020 spring season, with a further review to follow.

Please visit www.bnpparibasopen.com/coronavirus for updates.

UPDATE—On Saturday, the ATP and WTA announced they will implement combined precautionary health measures at the Indian Wells and Miami tournaments:

As the outbreak of COVID-19 continues to cause concern on a global scale, the ATP and WTA have jointly announced a series of precautionary health measures that will be implemented on-site at upcoming events including the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, the Miami Open presented by Itaú and WTA’s Volvo Car Open in Charleston.

Players and mascots will not hold hands when walking out on court
Ball kids will be provided with gloves to wear on court
Ball kids will not handle player towels during matches
Ball kids will not handle player drinks during matches
Players will be instructed to not distribute used towels, headbands, shirts, sweatbands, etc. to fans following matches or practice
Players will not accept pens, tennis balls or other items to hold for autograph signing
“The health and safety of our players, fans, staff and tournament personnel is paramount and, as the outbreak of COVID-19 continues, these are common sense precautions for us to take,” said the ATP and WTA in a joint statement. “We continue to monitor this closely on a daily basis, working with our players and tournaments, as well as public health authorities as the situation evolves globally.”

The precautionary health measures will be implemented across all WTA events and ATP Tour and ATP Challenger Tour events through the 2020 spring season, with a further review to follow.

UPDATE—On Sunday night, the BNP Paribas Open was cancelled due to a confirmed local case of the coronavirus in the Indian Wells, Calif. area. Please click here for our detailed, running story.

Weekend Winners: No stopping Novak & Rafa; Sabalenka clobbers Kvitova

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 19:57:00 +0000

Could the secret to Novak Djokovic’s success at Grand Slams be…playing more like he does at 500s?

Djokovic was all business, all week during his title run in Dubai. If he slammed his racquet, threw his hands in the air, barked at his player’s box, or indulged his frustration in any of the ways we’ve come to expect, I missed it. After an exciting point in his semifinal with Gael Monfils, the Frenchman fell to the ground and looked in Djokovic’s direction with a smile, probably expecting a similarly light-hearted response in return. He didn’t get one. Djokovic turned and walked quickly in the other direction; this wasn’t a day for showmanship, as far as he was concerned. Monfils, prone on the court, was left to smile all by himself.

Soon, Monfils would be left by the side of the road, mowed down by the Djokovic machine for the 17th consecutive time. This was the closest the Frenchman had come to beating him. You can’t come any closer—he had three match points, two on his own serve, in a second-set tiebreaker. Even then, Djokovic remained stoic and focused. He never pulled the mental ripcord, despite the fact that Monfils was the better player for the majority of two sets.

When you’ve beaten someone 16 straight times, you probably tend to think (a) you can find a way to do it again, or (b) your opponent can find a way not to do it again. Djokovic was right on both counts. He stopped missing, while Monfils, visibly weighed down by the pressure of trying to slip past Djokovic for the first time, sent a backhand wide and a forehand long, and then double-faulted at set point.

Saving match points, of course, is something of a Djokovic specialty, and he had an interesting answer when he was asked about it afterward. According to him, there’s no strategy for what to do when you’re match point down, except to treat it like the only point you’re ever going to play.

“It’s like being on the edge of a cliff,” he said. “You know there is no way back, so you’ve got to jump over and try to find a way to survive, I guess, and pray for the best, and believe that you can make it, that there is something is going to help you.”

WATCH—In Dubai, Novak Djokovic defeats Stefanos Tsitsipas, 6-3, 6-4

Djokovic didn’t need to do any praying in his final the next day against Stefanos Tsitsipas. Early on, I thought Tsitsipas was onto something. Every chance he had, he moved forward and tried to take Djokovic’s time away with his forehand. When he was able to execute that plan, it worked; it may be the only way to do damage against Djokovic from the baseline. But just when Tsitsipas had gained the advantage in the rallies, Djokovic grabbed it back with an unreturnable serve.

“It was a little bit of a slow start from me. I was fortunate to hold my service games,” Djokovic said of securing his 79th career title. “He was very close to break my service games that I had in the first set.”

Was Djokovic fortunate? Or is he feeling more confident relying on his serve these days, with Goran Ivanisevic in his corner? So far this year, they’ve made an unbeatable team. Djokovic is 18-0, and he joked yesterday about having a “perfect season.” He’s been close before, and if he’s as business-like at the bigger events as he was in Dubai, he could be close again in 2020.

*****

If you ever wanted to understand the difference in mental make-ups between Djokovic and his rival Rafael Nadal, you only have to look at the way they reacted to their respective titles this weekend. While Djokovic was entertaining the idea—at least for a second or two—of a perfect year in Dubai, Nadal was doing the opposite in Acapulco.

“This title doesn’t mean that I will have a great season,” Nadal said after beating Taylor Fritz 6-3, 6-2 for his 85th tournament win. “It means another good start to the season for me…I played solid, with the right intensity and the right passion, and my forehand worked well.”

Where Djokovic thinks and dreams big, Nadal never gets ahead of himself—he knows that peaks always come with valleys, and he doesn’t want to miss the chance to savor the view from this particular summit.

“At the end of the day, I’m still competing for these feelings that I’m having right now,” Rafa said. “Regardless of the result, I’m always happy playing here.”

WATCH—In Acapulco, Rafael Nadal defeats Taylor Fritz, 6-3, 6-2

This was Nadal’s third win in Acapulco, and his first title of 2020. He didn’t drop a set in five matches. While only one of them came against a seeded player (Grigor Dimitrov in the semifinals), any title that Nadal can win on hard courts is “important,” as he puts it.

The final was one-sided, but it was also a good example of the variety that Nadal can inject into a baseline game that is often dismissed as “one-dimensional.” Nadal kept Fritz at bay and off balance by slicing one backhand, and hitting the next with high-bouncing topspin; by looping his forehand crosscourt two times, and then flattening it out down the line.

Rafa will always be more at home on clay, but he may be more entertaining on hard and grass courts. It’s there that he reveals one of the secrets of all great players: they create their own comfort zones.

*****

Nadal and Djokovic were the headliners this weekend, but the WTA gave us a win of potentially greater significance, in Doha. That’s where Aryna Sabalenka bludgeoned her way to her second straight Premier 5 title. After surviving a couple of close calls early in the event—you really wouldn’t expect a tournament to be entirely smooth sailing for Sabalenka—she finished with a 6-3, 6-3 final-round win over Petra Kvitova that may have been her most convincing performance since her breakout year in 2018.

WATCH—In Doha, Aryna Sabalenka defeats Petra Kvitova, 6-3, 6-3

When I say “bludgeoned,” I mean it in the most admiring way—this was Sabalenka at her most purposeful and tactical. Her grunts and shrieks, which varied in length and volume with every shot, made the court feel like a boxing ring, but she wasn’t throwing wild haymakers the way she sometimes does. Knowing that Kvitova also wins with power rather than consistency, Sabalenka hit the ball hard, but she kept it well within the lines. Kvitova didn’t have time to wind up and slug the ball the way she likes, yet she wasn’t left with any other options.

“I wasn’t playing probably what I wanted to, but she didn’t give me anything to play my game,” Kvitova said.

Sabalenka has been driven in recent months by the recent death of her father, Sergey. “I’m doing it for him,” she says.

From the depths of that tragedy, the 21-year-old may reach new heights in 2020. If so, there may not be a limit to how high she climbs.

A complicated competitor: Maria Sharapova's cloudy, unresolved legacy

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:05:00 +0000

This has been an era of greater and greater glory in tennis. The older the top players get, it seems, the better they become.

Once upon a time—before March 7, 2016, to be exact—we might have expected a similarly satisfying fate for Maria Sharapova. The Russian was one of the game’s grittiest competitors, one who had survived significant injuries when she was younger, and willed herself to success on her worst surface, red clay. She couldn’t beat the best player of her generation, Serena Williams, but with a career Grand Slam to her name, Sharapova had carved out a place in the game’s history books for herself. She turned 29 in 2016, and she hadn’t won a major title in two years, but she was still in the Top 10, and there was little reason to think this most willful of athletes couldn’t scale the WTA mountain again in her 30s. She seemed to be made for the challenge.

But there wouldn’t be any final hurrahs or Indian Summers for Sharapova, the way there have been for so many of her peers. On Wednesday, she announced her retirement at 32, after years of injuries and increasingly frustrating, stop-and-start returns to the court.

There won’t be a farewell tour or a final send-off for Sharapova. Instead of going out on top, or near the top, she exits with a ranking of No. 373. Instead of being remembered solely for her skill and her will, she leaves behind a cloudy, unresolved legacy, one that will likely always exist in the eye of the beholder.

Getty Images

Sharapova titled her 2017 autobiography Unstoppable, but in reality she had already been stopped in her tracks a year earlier. In March 2016, in a Los Angeles hotel ballroom covered by what she correctly described as a “fairly ugly carpet,” Sharapova announced that she had tested positive for the recently banned substance meldonium. She would serve a 15-month suspension, and as a player essentially never recover. After coming back in 2017, Sharapova won one tournament, in Tianjin, and reached one Grand Slam quarterfinal, at the 2018 French Open. Last year she lost in the first round at Wimbledon and the US Open, two tournaments she won as a teenager.

So how should we think of Sharapova, with her playing days officially behind her? As one of the sport’s foremost fighters, or its foremost example of the power of performance-enhancing drugs? Is her rapid post-comeback decline evidence that she wasn’t the same player without meldonium? Or was it simply the logical end for an injury-prone athlete? Even Sharapova’s doping history can be seen two ways. She took a performance-enhancing drug for a decade (she said she began using it because of a family history of heart conditions and diabetes), but for almost all of that time, the drug was legal in tennis.

How you answer those questions will probably depend on how you felt about Sharapova—her shriek, her shivery strut, her slam-bang game—all along. I found a lot to admire in her. I admired her total commitment. From the moment she walked into an arena—upright, poker-faced, with purposeful little steps—she set the tone, and her opponents had to react to her. I admired the way, despite her many endorsements and cover shoots, she was a competitor first—she liked her job. I admired her point-by-point persistence, which never flagged even through the longest, most draining contests; her record in marathon matches is a testament to that. I liked her two-handed backhand drive and her one-handed backhand drop; her game wasn’t as unsubtle as its reputation. I liked the respectfully businesslike way she shook hands at the net, win or lose; drive-bys and hugs weren’t her style. I admired how, despite her 2-20 record against Serena, and her interminable streak of defeats at her hands, Sharapova never seemed embarrassed or daunted by what had become a spectacle of futility. She kept trying, kept losing, and kept coming back for more.

Sharapova won 36 titles and five majors, and spent 21 weeks at No. 1. But what I liked most about her was the way she lost. In her post-defeat press conferences, she was thoughtful and often funny, and rarely settled for a canned answer. As her “fairly ugly carpet” comment showed, Sharapova could keep her sense of humor even when disaster struck. In Indian Wells in 2011, she played dreadfully in a one-sided final loss to Caroline Wozniacki (when things went wrong for Sharapova, they often stayed wrong, no matter how hard she tried to right them). She was predictably down at the start of her presser, but talking seemed to help, and her answers grew longer, deeper, and funnier. By the end, she was ruminating on her childhood and joking that she “didn’t have the guts” to smash her racquet.

That night, during her loss to Wozniacki, I had thought to myself, “There’s no way Sharapova is winning another Slam.” By the time her presser was over, and I saw how quickly she had rebounded emotionally, I found myself revising that opinion. The following spring, she won the French Open, and then won it again two years later.

Sharapova will be remembered in many different ways. I won’t forget that she took meldonium and was punished for it. But I’ll also remember her as a complete competitor, one who always came to win, and who took her losses like a champ.

Preview: Djokovic, Nadal and Barty all return for prime week of events

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 21:33:00 +0000

The stakes on both tours go up as February winds down. This week the women play their first Premier 5 level event, in Doha, while the top two men, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, return for 500-level tournaments in Dubai and Acapulco. Indian Wells and—maybe, hopefully, possibly—spring are around the corner.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, here’s a look at the five events on tap this week.

Qatar Total Open (WTA)

Doha, Qatar

$3,240,445; Premier 5

Hard court

Draw is here

The courts have hardly had a chance to cool down in Dubai, but matches were already underway on Sunday in Doha. What’s the difference between the two tournaments? Essentially, Doha is Dubai times two—last week’s 28-player draw has grown to 56 this week, and the prize money has grown to $3.2 million.

Getty Images

The players, not surprisingly, have followed. Ashleigh Barty, Karolina Pliskova, Belinda Bencic, Elina Svitolina, Sofia Kenin, Kiki Bertens, and Petra Kvitova round out the Top 8. No. 11 Garbiñe Muguruza is already through to the second round in three sets, over Daria Kasatkina. One big name who won’t be there is Simona Halep; she pulled out even before winning a long final in Dubai on Saturday. So far, the woman she beat, Elena Rybakina, is still in the field; she’s scheduled to face Sorana Cirstea in her opener.

Dubai Duty Free Championships (ATP)

Dubai, UAE

$2,950,420; 500 ranking points

Hard court

Draw is here

No rest for the weary, and not much more for the good, either. Three weeks after winning the Australian Open, Djokovic comes back to the tour as the top seed in Dubai. A few days after winning his first tournament of 2020, in Marseille, Stefanos Tsitsipas will take his place as the second seed here. Could we see a generational-battle final between them next weekend? The Serb and the Greek have split their four career meetings 2-2.

Getty Images

But let’s not pencil Djokovic and Tsitsipas into the final quite yet. Gael Monfils, the No. 3 seed, is coming off back-to-back titles in Montpellier and Rotterdam. He’s on Djokovic’s side of the draw, and will start against Marton Fucsovics.

First-round matches to watch:

Tsitsipas vs. Pablo Carreño Busta

Fabio Fognini vs. Dan Evans

Abierto Mexicano Telcel (ATP)

Acapulco, Mexico

$2,000,845; 500 ranking points

Hard court

Draw is here

The last time we saw Rafael Nadal in Acapulco, he was losing, unhappily, to Nick Kyrgios in the second round. The Spaniard and the Aussie return 12 months later, but this time they’re in opposite halves of the draw. Nadal, who, like Djokovic, will look to pick up some points this week, starts against Pablo Andujar. Kyrgios, who is defending 500 champion’s points, starts with a potential test against Ugo Humbert.

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But there’s more to the draw than just Rafa and Kyrgios. Last year’s runner-up, Alexander Zverev, is back, as are Stan Wawrinka, John Isner, Grigor Dimitrov, Felix Auger-Aliassime, and Reilly Opelka. FAA and Opelka don’t have byes, but they could use them after reaching the finals in Marseille and Delray, respectively, this weekend.

First-round matches to watch:

Nadal vs. Pablo Andujar

Kyrgios vs. Humbert

Chile Dove Men+Care Open (ATP)

Santiago, Chile

$674,730; 250 ranking points

Red clay

Draw is here

The Golden Swing through South America comes to Santiago, for a tournament whose name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue: the Chile Dove Men+Care Open.

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The top two seeds, fittingly, have been the top two performers on this clay-court mini-tour so far: Cristian Garin, champion in Cordoba and Rio, and Christian Ruud, champion in Buenos Aires.

Abierto Mexicano Telcel (WTA)

Acapulco, Mexico

$275,000; International

Hard court

Draw is here

Sloane Stephens could use a win. She’s 0-3 so far in 2020, and ranked just 35th. Acapulco, where she was the champion in 2016 and where she’s the top seed this year, would seem to be a logical place for her to get her season into gear.

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Also here: Venus Williams, Coco Vandeweghe, and last year’s winner, Yafan Wang

Weekend Winner: Simona Halep rides peak brand of tennis to Dubai title

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:41:00 +0000

What happens in Dubai usually stays in Dubai. The WTA’s edition of the Duty Free Championships is a Premier-Level event, and a highly lucrative one, yet its results rarely last in the sport’s collective memory. The majors, the Masters 1000s, the Premier Mandatories: Fans are apt to remember who won those tournaments at the end of the season, and cite them whenever they compare two players’ career achievements. Dubai? If you’re like me, by the time the Grand Slam season rolls around, you have to think hard to recall who won.

So why is the brief Arabian swing, through Dubai and Doha, always such a pleasure to watch from afar? Maybe it’s the sight of warm weather and outdoor tennis in the middle of a North American winter. Maybe it’s the atmosphere—polyglot, casual, engaged—that prevails in both arenas. Maybe it’s the fact that the stakes are relatively low, and a tennis match is just a tennis match, not a matter of earth-shattering significance.

All of that was true again in Dubai over the past week, but this year the result, and the road that took us there, shouldn’t be so easily forgotten. For entertainment value, it may be hard to beat all year. That’s mostly due to the performances of the two finalists, Simona Halep and Elena Rybakina. In their roundabout marches to the championship match, one proved herself to be a player for the future, and the other proved herself to be a player to watch now, every time she walks on the court.

The phrase may getting a little tired, but in this case it’s true: This was Peak Simona Halep. If a fan of the future wants to know what the Romanian’s game was all about, and what her appeal was all about, the four matches she won last week would make for a good time capsule.

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In her first match, she saved a match point and won a back-and-forth thriller over Ons Jabeur. In the quarterfinal round, she came back from a set down to beat the taller and more powerful Aryna Sabalenka Having been granted a second life, she rolled over Jen Brady 6-2, 6-0 in the semifinals. Finally, Halep capped her week by fending off the seemingly unstoppable force of Rybakina’s ground strokes, in another third-set tiebreaker. It was Halep’s 20th career title, and her first since Wimbledon last year.

“It feels great that I could do it. Actually, it feels amazing,” Halep said. “She fought till the end. She did give up any balls. It was really tough mentally. The pressure was very high. But I wanted it badly, so that’s why I fought to the end.”

In her mind, it was also a sign that, at 28, she’s not slipping.

“I’ve done a lot of results, many results these six, seven years. I’m staying here in the Top 5, Top 10, which is not easy. I’m proud of my job. Also, this tournament gives me a lot of confidence that I’m still here.”

Halep is still here, and still winning the way she has always won. In Dubai, she did it with her customary mix of scrappiness and stubbornness, speed and shotmaking. In the final, she kept chasing down Rybakina’s drives, kept throwing up lobs, kept coming up with passes, kept staying alive any way she could, until Rybakina finally missed.

Halep is a fighter, as she likes to say, but she can also let her frustration get the best of her for stretches. She hates making errors, she hates falling behind in the score, she hates when she chooses the wrong shot, she hates any imperfections in her game. I don’t think this is how most sports psychologists would advise an athlete to think or act on court; imperfections are inevitable in tennis, and it’s best to put them out of your mind as soon as possible. The good thing about Halep is that her mood can swing from negative to positive just as quickly; a couple of winners, and she’s pumping her fist and believing in herself again. The fact that Halep, whether she’s up or down, can’t hide how much she wants to win is a big part of her appeal. Simona gives us a lot to watch, and few players take part in as many epic matches as she does.

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In this epic, Halep had the perfect foil in Rybakina—their games and personalities are polar opposites. The 6’0” Moscow native hits with immensely easy power from both sides, can create winners from anywhere, and doesn’t hesitate to go for them, whatever the situation. Just as important is her demeanor; even at 20, she seems to understand that mistakes will be made, and there’s no reason to berate herself for them, or let one miss lead to another. With Rybakina, it can be hard to tell whether she’s won or lost the previous point, and her post-win celebrations have mostly consisted of her walking straight to the net and shaking hands with her opponent.

Whatever Rybakina is doing, it’s working. To say she has been on a roll in 2020 would be an understatement. She has played five events this year, and made the final of four of them; only at the Australian Open did she fail to reach the title match. In Dubai, she came from a set down to beat fellow 20-year-old Sofia Kenin, she took out No. 2 Karolina Pliskova in straight sets, and she saved a set point in each set in a two-tiebreaker win over Petra Martic in the semis. No miss, and no deficit, seems to faze Rybakina. Even after coming up two points short of her second title of the year, she kept her perspective.

“In the beginning of the week I didn’t expect that I can be in the final,” said Rybakina, who was coming off a runner-up finish in St. Petersburg. “So it’s been a great week for me.”

So far, 2020 has belonged to Elena Rybakina, but this week belonged to Simona Halep. Whether or not we remember what happened in Dubai for long, it was fun while it lasted.

What does Roger Federer’s knee surgery mean for his 2020 Slam chances?

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 19:42:00 +0000

Nothing ever goes according to plan, not even a tennis season. It took a little more than a month for 2020 to throw us its first major curveball: on Thursday, Roger Federer announced that he has undergone arthroscopic surgery on his right knee, and that he’ll have to miss the next five events on his schedule—Dubai, Indian Wells, Miami, Bogota and the French Open. He’ll also skip Madrid and Rome, which he played last year in the run-up to Roland Garros. Just when the Big 3 looked liked they might really go on forever, one of them has shown his human side again.

“My right knee had been bothering me for a little while,” Federer said. “I hoped it would go away, but after an examination, and discussion with my team, I decided to have arthroscopic surgery in Switzerland.”

“I can’t wait to be back playing again soon, see you on the grass!”

For Federer fans, that final, cheerful phrase—“see you on the grass!”—probably softened the blow a little. The eternal optimists among them might even see a silver lining in all of this. At 38, Federer’s focus is obviously on the Grand Slams now, and his best chance of grabbing one of them will come at Wimbledon. He hasn’t won the French Open since 2009, and the US Open since 2008, but he was one point away on Centre Court last year. According to Federer’s statement, he’ll back in time to try for his ninth title at the All England Club. Nobody wants to have to recover from knee surgery, but if there was a time for Federer to do it, this was it.

Federer, at Wimbledon in 2019. (Getty Images)

Federer has been here before. In February 2016, he underwent surgery after tearing the meniscus in his left knee. He returned that spring, but struggled. After losing to Milos Raonic in the Wimbledon semifinals, he took the rest of the year off. But what looked like the possible end of the line for Federer—he turned 35 that summer—was in fact a prelude to a late-career renaissance. In his first tournament back in 2017, he won the Australian Open.

What, if anything, does Federer’s 2016-2017 tell us about his 2019? It depends which comeback you choose.

Looking at his return to Wimbledon in 2016, it seems clear that it won’t be easy for him to shake off surgery and perform at the same level on grass right away. He nearly lost to Marin Cilic in the quarterfinals, threw in two inexplicable double faults at a crucial moment again Raonic in the semis, and ended up slipping on the turf in the fifth set and aggravating his knee injury. This obviously wasn’t the Federer we had come to expect on grass.

Federer, at Wimbledon in 2016. (Getty Images)

Those looking for a more upbeat forecast should focus on his 2017 comeback in Australia. Despite having not played a real match in six months, and having not won a major title in nearly five years, Federer made it through three five-set matches Down Under, including one against Rafael Nadal in the final, to win his 18th major title.

What does Federer’s surgery this year mean for him long-term? It’s possible that the time off will leave him fresher and more eager to play in the second half of 2020. But it also seems clear that Federer’s career will end not because of an erosion in his skills or his speed or his desire to play. It will end because the injuries will pile up and prevent him from giving his best at the tournaments he wants to win most. At last year’s US Open, he lost in the quarterfinals due in part to an injury. At this year’s Australian Open, he nursed another injury to the semifinals. No matter how much Federer wants to add more majors to his total, I doubt he’ll compete in them for long if injury becomes the norm.

For now, the Big 3 has become the Big 2. Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal are both healthy and confident at the moment, and along with Dominic Thiem, they may already have been looking ahead to a three-man showdown in Paris. Will they begin to look ahead to Wimbledon, too? Either way, Rafa and Novak will be the big drawing cards everywhere they go this spring. Those tournaments—Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Rome, Paris—can only hope that Federer’s absence this year will make him more likely to want to play again, in a possible farewell tour, in 2021.

At the start of this season, before this curveball came down the pike, I wrote that Djokovic would win the Australian Open, Nadal would win the French Open, and Federer would win Wimbledon. I wasn’t exactly going out on a limb then, but I will go out on a limb now by sticking with all of those predictions.

Week in Preview: Clijsters returns; Thiem, Kyrgios, Halep in action

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 01:00:00 +0000

“Quality over quantity” is the mantra of most. Once we get to the middle of February, though, I start to doubt the wisdom of those words. While there aren’t any majors, Masters, or Mandatories played this month, there are plenty of tournaments, from plenty of different locales, on plenty of surfaces, with plenty of champions giving plenty of happy winner’s speeches. What more could a true fan want? Here’s a look ahead at the big WTA event, and three smaller ATP events, on tap this week. Along with all of those players and matches, we’ll also be getting the year’s most stunning comeback story.

Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships (WTA)

Dubai, UAE
$2,908,770; Premier
Hard court

Nearly $3 million for 28 players makes Dubai one of the most lucrative tournaments, per person, of the year. And it has attracted a field worthy of that reward. Simona Halep, Karolina Pliskova, Elina Svitolina, Belinda Bencic, Sofia Kenin, and Aryna Sabalenka are the Top 6 seeds, and Australian Open finalist Garbiñe Muguruza is No. 9.

But it’s the unseeded woman who Muguruza will play in the first round who will make the big news of this week. Kim Clijsters is coming out of retirement for a second time, at age 36. Can she still hold her own with players 10, 15, even 20 years her junior? There are two reason to say yes: (1) The last time Clijsters came back, she won the US Open in her fourth tournament; (2) Serena Williams is still reaching Slam finals at 38. Clijsters isn’t at Serena’s level, of course, but she’s among the most naturally gifted athletes the game has produced.

First-round matches to watch:

Alison Riske vs. Ons Jabeur
Maria Sakkari vs. Aryna Sabalenka
Clijsters vs. Muguruza
Belinda Bencic vs. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova
Kenin vs. St. Petersburg finalist Elena Rybakina

Rio Open (ATP)

Rio de Janeiro
$1,915,485; 500 ranking points
Red clay

If Dominic Thiem was looking for the perfect way to put his five-set loss in the Australian Open final behind him, a trip to Rio was probably just the thing. Here he is, back on his favorite surface, at a tournament he won in 2017, with a chance to bank 500 ranking points, and no one in the Top 20 to oppose him. The second seed is 23rd-ranked Dusan Lajovic, and third is 26th-ranked Cristian Garin.

Breakthrough player: Casper Ruud won his first title in Buenos Aires last week; he could face Thiem in the third round here.

War of the Syllables: Spain’s Alejando Davidovich Fokina vs. Brazil’s Thiago Seyboth Wild

Open 13 Provence (ATP)

Marseille, France
$850,000; 250 ranking points
Indoor hard court

Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, David Goffin, Denis Shapovalov, Karen Khachanov, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Jannik Sinner: Open 13 Provence sports one of the season’s stronger 250-level draws. The competition should be helped by the fact that three of the top young players here—Medvedev, Tsitsipas, and Shapovalov—have gotten off to disappointing starts in 2020, and could use a strong week. Tsitsipas, who is the defending champion, should feel like he’s back at home.

First-round match to watch: Marton Fucsovics vs. Alexander Bublik

Potential second-round match to watch: Medvedev vs. Sinner

Delray Beach Open (ATP)

Delray Beach, Fla.
$673,655; 250 ranking points
Hard court

Giants roam the beach, or at least the courts, in Delray. Nick Kyrgios, Milos Raonic, Taylor Fritz, and Reilly Opelka—all 6’5” or higher—are the Top 4 seeds. Of particular interest is Kyrgios. He played committed tennis in Australia in January; will that continue in the U.S. in February? We’ll find out when he goes up against Tommy Paul in a potentially explosive opener.

First-round matches to watch:

Kyrgios vs. Paul
Frances Tiafoe vs. Tennys Sandgren
Kyle Edmund vs. Ugo Humbert

Wild card: Jack Sock. He’ll try again to get his first win since 2018, this time against Radu Albot.

No Longer The Great What If: Monfils more than good enough for tennis

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 21:41:00 +0000

“The Great What If.” That was the title of a post I wrote about Gael Monfils seven years ago, after he squandered a two-set lead to Tommy Robredo in the fourth round at the French Open. The Parisian native had, not for the first time, raised the hopes and voices of his home fans with his acrobatic brilliance, only to dash them again when he tripped himself up a few steps short of the finish line.

Of course, The Great What If referred to more than just one of Monfils’ matches. For years, many of us wondered, “What if he had become No. 1 in the world?” What if he had been a dominant champion rather than a mercurial talent? Would he have broadened tennis’s appeal, or changed its image around the world? I wondered it again at the US Open in 2014, when Monfils built a two-set lead on Roger Federer, had NBA star Kevin Garnett leaping out of his luxury-box suite to cheer him on, reached match point twice—and ultimately folded in five.

Watching Monfils this Sunday, six years after that memorable night in New York, it seemed to me that the Frenchman had left the “what if” label behind, and at 33 had become the player he was meant to be all along. No, he hasn’t reached No. 1 or changed the sport’s image. What he has done, though, is make himself into some almost as important: a reliably entertaining presence at the tour level. This weekend in Rotterdam, Monfils won his 10th career title. None have come at the majors or the Masters 1000s; instead, they’ve come in less-legendary locales like Montpellier (which he won for the third time last week), Washington, Doha, Metz, Stockholm, and Sopot.

Once upon a time, that may have seemed like a disappointing fate for a guy who nearly won all four majors in a single year as a junior. But in an era when the Big 3 concentrate their efforts on the Grand Slams, Monfils continues to bring life, and fans, to the smaller tournaments that remain the lifeblood of the tour. His smile, his sportsmanship, his shot-making flair, his healthy refusal to prioritize winning over friendship: For all of that, I think most of us have learned to forgive him his head-scratching unpredictability, and his lack of a major champion’s killer instinct.

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As we saw over the last two weeks, when Monfils went 9-0 and dropped just one set on his way to back-to-back titles in Montpellier and Rotterdam, he has found a happy, controlled, effective medium for his game. He still can’t turn down a chance to pulverize a leaping overhead, and he’ll never be a stone-cold closer. But over the years Monfils has learned to win the old-fashioned way: By getting free points with his serve; by camping behind the baseline and making lots of balls; by working himself into position to hit forehands; by picking his spots to change direction and go for broke; and by finishing points at net. In the Rotterdam final, Monfils dominated Felix Auger-Aliassime not by out-hitting him, but by putting up a defensive wall that the teenage Canadian couldn’t find a way through. Players are always encouraged to be more aggressive, but Monfils understood that, against a young opponent on a big stage, there was a smarter way.

“It was a passive match from me,” Monfils said. “I chose to be in defense quite a lot…I knew physically, it would be tough for him to come through me. I was doing this great.”

Monfils was in complete control when he served for the match at 6-2, 5-2, and went up 40-15. But old habits, and old nerves, die hard, and he became tentative with the title on his racquet. Auger-Aliassime saved both match points, broke Monfils, and held to make it 5-4. Were we about to see the return of the old, wobbly La Monf? Not this time; he kept it simple and hit three unreturnable serves for the title.

Afterward, Monfils was ecstatic about the victory; like Washington, D.C., Rotterdam is a tournament that one of his tennis idols, Arthur Ashe, won in the 1970s, and we know that it makes Monfils proud to see his name on a list of champions that also includes Ashe’s. But Monfils didn’t sound satisfied. Perhaps inspired by his girlfriend Elina Svitolina’s own Slam chase, Monfils still believes he can take home the game’s ultimate prizes.

Champion's Speech:

“[I’d like] to reach the final at another Masters 1000, why not try to win and keep the dream alive?” said Monfils, who would also like to crack the Top 5 for the first time. “The dream is to win a Grand Slam and that is what I’m playing for and training for. It’s tough, but I believe that maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to win one.”

Even if Monfils never fulfills that dream, he has still enriched the game and helped change it for the better. More than his play this weekend, I was struck by his post-match handshakes with the two players he beat in the semifinals and final, Filip Krajinovic and Auger Aliassime. Both times, Monfils put his arm around his vanquished opponent, grabbed his hair affectionately, and said something that made him smile, and, for a second, seemingly feel better about his defeat.

Instead of thinking of the tour as a cutthroat, kill-or-be-killed arena, Monfils has always thought of it as a brotherhood—the experience he shares with his opponent on court is just as important as the end result. That’s an attitude that has rubbed off on many of his fellow tour-mates over the years—not all of them, but enough to make the ATP a more sporting place than it once was. It’s an attitude that likely appeals to fans just as much as his leaping overheads do.

Monfils is no longer The Great What If. What he became has been more than good enough for tennis.