Review: "Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter"
The Kid Stays in the Picture
The Kid Stays in the Picture
Review: "Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter"
Review: "Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter"
By Owen Lewis
August 20, 2026
Novak Djokovic after his opening round loss to Thiago Agustín Tirante in Cincy. // Getty
Novak Djokovic after his opening round loss to Thiago Agustín Tirante in Cincy. // Getty
It’s hard to write an ending to a good story. The plot twists, letdowns, happy surprises, and tear-jerking moments bear extra weight on the final act. All you can really ask for is a landing representative of the quality of what came before, which is a higher standard than it sounds like—the better and more complex the story, the more elusive the exit. I just finished reading the Attack on Titan manga, a breathtakingly intricate and violent story that left me completely floored at dozens of points over the 34-book series. The ending kind of sucked, and I’m not even sure if there was a way for it not to suck. I’m just grateful it didn’t ruin my perception of the whole work; my partner still gets venom in her voice whenever we talk about Lost.
So, Novak Djokovic. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know how or when to wrap up his legendary career. I speculated about his retirement more than a year ago, and it doesn’t feel like he’s any closer to calling it quits. He spent Saturday puking and ailing in a first-round loss in Cincinnati’s putrid heat. Seems like a pretty miserable way for a 39-year-old with a lovely family and hundreds of millions in the bank to spend his time, but call it the price of GOAThood. Asked whether he’d make it back to the tournament, Djokovic said, “I certainly hope so, but it looks more likely not, unfortunately.” Scalding my esophagus with the contents of my stomach often makes me want to return to the site of my torture, too.
All this is to say that the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter were dealt a tough hand. I had a Zoom call with director Jason Hehir—of the renowned The Last Dance—on the 13th, and asked him if there was any topic that Djokovic didn’t want to touch.
“He was very reluctant to even discuss the notion of retirement,” Hehir told me. “The word itself, he bristles at it…. To the point where he said, ‘Why don’t you just take the word retire or retirement and replace it with the word longevity throughout the doc, and that’ll be fine.’ Which is obviously grammatically and logistically impossible.” Given the complexity of the story and the initial reluctance of the subject to hit on the theme of the documentary, the resonance in this film is hard-won.
We begin with Djokovic’s childhood. The beats are familiar to longtime tennis followers, but no less arresting in a visual medium. Djokovic, wielding a pink racquet as a child, looking like a young Kevin Arnold. Djokovic, answering questions with the seriousness of a judge at kindergarten age, understanding his role already. NATO’s bombs falling on Serbia. The old story of his father placing the equivalent of 10 dollars on the table and announcing it was all they had; his father asking Novak for total dedication. Djokovic telling a story of falling as his family ran from the bombs, his yells going unheard, looking around and seeing the bombs falling on a hospital. When we get to Djokovic gate-crashing the favored rivalry of the masses, Jelena, his wife, suggests that tennis mandated elegance. “Novak was not the chosen one,” she says. The subtext is legible: Djokovic going pro and making enough money to provide for his family is a success story on its own. In a sport with less of a Fedal fetish, that’s what might have defined his legacy to the masses.
The storytelling of Djokovic’s career is sure to ruffle some feathers. There’s nothing on the 2012 Australian Open final here, or the 2018 Wimbledon semifinal, or the 2019 Wimbledon final, or Djokovic’s disqualification from the 2020 US Open. Nadal appears as a talking head to attest that playing Djokovic is “very difficult” and that “you have to be at your 100 percent, and even then it might not be enough,” and says little else. There’s no insight from Nadal on the animalistic particularity of their battles, or any specific moments in their rivalry. There’s nothing from Federer, period. A passage on Novak’s prime is mostly narrated by journalists rather than Novak himself. His defense is heralded through generalities from Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, overlaid onto his 2007 Miami win over Nadal—four years before Djokovic hit his defensive peak.
Hehir told me that his goal was to explore this precise moment in Djokovic’s career—no longer at his peak, but too good to retire—not to tell the story of the career as a whole. He didn’t reach out to Federer, and planned to include the 2012 AO final in a previous version of the doc. (“This doc went through so many iterations,” he told me. “Every time we thought we were done, he was threatening to win another major.”) So know these omissions were not made lightly, or out of ignorance. That doesn’t mean they were all necessarily the right move. The doc does dwell on Djokovic’s iconic match-point-saving return at the 2011 US Open, the one that reduced Federer to salty bafflement in press. Bringing back Roger—who, in Nadal’s doc, retains plenty of his faux-humble arrogance in retirement—and asking him about that moment, and Novak’s tennis, 15 years later, would have been fascinating. A Last Dance-esque format, extrapolating the story out over multiple episodes instead of a movie-length monolith, might have let Hehir explore both Novak’s career and his retirement predicament.
There are some revelations here. We learn that the line in Djokovic’s 2022 social media post that kicked off the deportation saga, drawing millions of eyes to Djokovic’s unvaccinated status—heading to Australia on an “exemption permission”—remained in the post because Djokovic insisted it was vital, despite his wife advising him to leave it out.
We linger on the deportation saga. Hehir gets a chance to ask what so many have wondered from the couch: “Why didn’t you get vaccinated?”
“I didn’t feel like I needed it,” Djokovic says, as if it’s perfectly obvious. “Why? Why should I get the vaccine? I’m healthy, I’m an athlete.” He goes on to say, “That fundamental right that you have as a human being on this planet, freedom to choose, was taken away from a lot of people on this planet.” He seems not to consider the infectious disease of it all, that it’s not just about him here, or the trypanophobic. He says the anti-vax movement made him an unwitting hero, but then he had to know how gleefully that group deals in bad faith, and the implications of him treating walking disease factory RFK Jr. like a buddy. (Also unexplored here is Djokovic’s role in the disastrous Adria Tour.) Look, it’s clear Djokovic was deported for political reasons rather than rule-breaking. But what’s most striking about this passage is how Djokovic lays out his vaccine philosophy with more conviction than anything else he says during the film. In fitting with the man’s many contradictions, he’s simultaneously at his least convincing.
There’s a fascinating bit after Djokovic’s heroic win over Carlos Alcaraz at the 2025 Australian Open, executed from a set down and through a hamstring tear. As he’s recovering, it’s clear the match shook something loose. The quotes come thick and fast: “Mentally, I’m at the stage where I’m almost losing my mind.” “The brain, it’s like it has had enough.” “I cannot enjoy.” “I cannot be 100 percent dedicated to tennis. It’s not my life anymore.” It’s at once an insight into Djokovic’s mortality and superpower. Throughout the documentary, Novak deems himself his harshest critic. His mind seems like an unpleasant place to be sometimes—all those emotions during often uncomplicated matches! But he’s uniquely capable of either rendering his performance unaffected by those emotions, or spinning them into a boon at just the right time. “He will find his way out,” his wife, Jelena, says of his retirement. “I don’t want to be the one telling him how.” At one point Djokovic muses on the topic himself: perhaps one more major, perhaps 15. He’s not smiling when he says 15. Maybe what’ll mark the exit for Novak is that ability to compartmentalize diminishing at some point.
This doc won’t blow up like The Last Dance, for all kinds of reasons. I’m not even sure it’ll convert many Djoko-haters into fans—the vaccine bits will go a long way toward sinking that ship. But it’s hard to imagine anybody watching it and not respecting Djokovic’s body of work, or, for that matter, the difficulty of navigating this last act. He has written a good enough story that the merits of its ending are as close to irrelevant as possible. Unfortunately, the one person with sufficiently high standards to disagree is the author.
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When Rehab Becomes "Content"
Healing in Public
Healing in Public
When injuries become "content."
When injuries become "content."
By Carole Bouchard
Aug 20, 2026
Then and now: Thomas Muster and Holger Rune.
Then and now: Thomas Muster and Holger Rune.
It seems going through monthslong, painstaking rehab isn’t enough anymore for the ever-expanding roster of injured players. No, now rehab doubles “content,” whether it comes from a clear strategy or from a generation that has absorbed social media as if it’s an essential life-sustaining element. Receiving public support while going through trying times surely helps. It’s also good for personal brand maintenance—and communicating with the fans while staving off pesky inquiries from the press—and finding a way to stay relevant. Sponsors are getting exposure, fans are getting news from their favorite player, and media has tidbits to recycle and repost, all while the player doesn’t feel isolated dealing with what can be a traumatic experience. Where is the harm? Well, there are instances that make one wonder.
In 1989, Thomas Muster gave tennis one of its indelible images in the form of a picture of him on a chair hitting his infamous lefty forehand, on a clay court, with his left leg in a cast. It’s probably the image most associated with him, despite having peaked at No. 1 and winning the French Open. In 2026, it’s becoming the daily norm in picture or video form, with an inspiring text swearing they will come back stronger than ever and have found new motivation. The tennis equivalent of Hollywood’s “stay tuned!” to turn long-term injuries into serialized content to fill the void. Can’t play tournaments? No problem. The warm embrace of social media is waiting for you.
Last October in Stockholm, Holger Rune saw his young career severely derailed by a torn Achilles tendon. We knew it’d be a miracle to see him back on a court before the end of 2026 at the very best, but Rune became the poster boy for a new playbook for injured players with solid résumés and followings. A week after surgery, he posted a picture of himself hitting a few balls in a chair on the court, surely an homage to Mr. Muster. A month later, a video circulated of him trying to hit balls in a boot, awkwardly jumping on his sole valid leg, and the content hasn’t stopped since, with interviews, an ATP feature to see “inside” his recovery, magazine covers, regular quotes from his mother, content at the gym, sponsored posts, public appearances, training session videos, and podcasts. All along this, we had announcements about a faster-than-fast return to competition. In May in Hamburg? It didn’t happen. Then it was going to be Roland-Garros. Didn’t happen. Queen’s, Wimbledon, Cincinnati? It didn’t happen either. It will soon be a year since his injury, and only now his return is looming, which is normal. What hasn’t been is this yearlong public saga.
Hailey Baptiste broke all tennis people’s hearts at Roland-Garros when she dramatically injured her left leg on May 27. The moment she hit the ground, you knew it’d be a very long recovery. Two days later, she gave news on Instagram, then on June 5 posted the now mandatory post-surgery picture, and by July 8, she posted content of her on court and doing rehab with a racquet. The new coping mechanism is to go through it live. Consider me worried. Victoria Mboko, injured at the Queen’s, has been out there in a knee brace in Toronto, making appearances for a WTA 1000 that, of course, needed her in one way or another. The Canadian star, winner in Montreal last year, hasn’t shared anything from the rehab process but still has to regularly be out there for sponsors and public appearances. Rehab in peace is a thing of the past, especially for young top players who have just started being big business. There’s never been more money to take in tennis, even when they can’t play.
Carlos Alcaraz hasn’t played since April and yet is in the news every other week: “He’s been seen training, he’s gonna be back soon! Oh no, he’s been seen in a cast, it doesn’t look good. Forget about that, he posted a training session, watch out!” It’s like he has to prove he can hit the court here and there because the stakes have become too high for social media ghosting. Sponsors are still paying big money, contracts are still signed or renewed, future appearance fees remain on the table, so something has to be given publicly. The days a player like this could just go MIA for months to focus on healing are over. Now the mandate is to reassure people. Now there’s a fear of not being seen for too long. If you don’t see them, do they still matter? It’s also a never-ending source of content, as shown by Alcaraz and Rune sharing a practice week in Murcia, for all social media and media to see, ahead of a US Open nobody knows they’ll be able to play. The story is the point.
But what is really displayed? What do we really learn? Nothing. I have no idea of the severity of the damages done by any of these career-hampering injuries or of the potential relapses. I don’t know how rough rehab has been. I don’t hear about the doubts. All we see is smiles and determination. Who said monthslong rehab was hard? They keep the most crucial part behind closed doors, and unfortunately, it’s surely the part that would help the most. Not the glossy filter on that rehab ordeal. Yet the goal isn’t to share, but to manage the consequences of the ordeal, and to soothe the anxiety of players brutally cut from their sport at a time when a lot of their brain space is taken up by social media and personal branding, whether they’re aware of it or not. Some are. Some have agents, managers, or parents who are.
They’re not wrong about that playbook because, yes, it’s a business. They don’t want to risk losing lucrative deals because they’re going to be out for a year or because some might start wondering if they will even be back to the top. And so they post. And so they honor off-court engagements. Some may also need wild cards on their return, and so investing in keeping their public profile high could help. Others will get such a wave of support during these times that it can in itself become brand-worthy.
Yet isn’t it an added pressure to an already demanding process to try to turn it into a social media feel-good story? Will Rune feel fresh coming back after nearly a year spent both in rehab and in a PR campaign? Isn’t there a moment when staying relevant becomes a concerning obsession? I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to come back to bite the players in the end by keeping the expectations so high. I don’t doubt that for some it’s genuinely helping them go through this, but it’s now becoming a copy-and-paste guideline of how to manage long rehab stints that isn’t going to end well for everybody.
In the end, it’s all about intent: healthy or calculated-out-of-anxiety. If it’s the latter, it’ll often be for reasons that have nothing to do with the player’s well-being, and that’s where it becomes potentially harmful performative healing, bringing pressure from everywhere. Genuinely sharing the process has to help and is incredibly valuable for others to get inspired, but it depends on how and why it’s done. Being injured has become crisis management and business as much as healing, yet the body will take the time it needs to heal: That’s not algorithm-dependent, and it can’t be scripted.
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Book Review: The Cruelest Game
Tour Spiel
Tour Spiel
Book Review: The Cruelest Game by Matthew Futterman
Book Review: The Cruelest Game by Matthew Futterman
By Joel Drucker
August 18, 2026
Courtesy of Doubleday
Courtesy of Doubleday
New York Times staff writer Matthew Futterman’s 2022 arrival as a full-time tennis reporter coincided with a mega-occurrence that greatly frames his compelling book, The Cruelest Game.
Call the early 2020s, “The Twilight of the Gods.” Roger Federer played his last singles match in ’21. What appeared to be Serena Williams’ farewell took place a year later. Venus Williams searched for form. Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray retired in ’24. Novak Djokovic downsized his schedule.
Much as these greats have inspired fans, while reading The Cruelest Game, there is a sense that for contemporary contenders, they intimidate. Imagine a young rock band, starting off in the early ‘70s. The prior decade had seen the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan. In the face of recent massive monuments, now what can a poor boy-girl do?
“This is the part of the sport that so many players despise, the unfairness of it all,” writes Futterman. “At their best, this is the part of the sport that Roger and Rafa and Novak and Serena and Carlitos and Sinner and Coco and Iga and Aryna love, even when it goes against them. The part that asks you over and over to figure out how to show up, how to be enough in the face of something that feels existential.”
The Cruelest Game is about pressure. Sadly, for many of the pros Futterman examines, pressure is more burden than privilege. But that finding is hardly based on distant observation. Aided by having one of the few full-time staff jobs in tennis journalism, Futterman’s superpower is his ability to hunt and gather.
Amazingly, in a world where tons of tennis media outlets are shrinking, Futterman’s tennis beat has grown even larger since the New York Times disbanded its sports section in 2023, Futterman and others transitioning to the Times-owned, The Athletic.
From press conferences to off-week practice sessions, to matches, chance encounters, and, rare in today’s world, one-on-one interviews with players and support team members, Futterman’s skill at culling nitty-gritty detail is impeccable. He tracks one tale after another of emotional tumult, drawing on the tennis-is-toxic narrative that began with the burnout of early Open era great Bjorn Borg, transitioned into the mid-life angst voiced by John McEnroe and Boris Becker, attained cross-over literary cache with Andre Agassi’s book Open, and by now has become a highly accepted assumption for articulating tennis’ specific difficulty (though not one I entirely buy into).
“But why?” asks Futterman about pro tennis in the 21st century. “Because tennis isn’t a Jane Austen novel. It’s The Hunger Games.” Then again, it always has been. “When I played,” Jimmy Connors once told me, “you had to win big to win big money.”
So is contemporary tennis inherently more pressure-packed than law, medicine, scholarship, accounting, the arts, or any other field where one seeks greatness? How can one gauge that? Or is it that since tennis is an individual sport, its exposed performers are placed in a fishbowl like none other, creating unmanageable external expectations? Or is it because tennis is nowhere as popular as football, basketball, or baseball? Pressure to do or be what?
Consider “Chasing the Unicorn: Taylor Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, Tommy Paul and the Legacy of Andre,” the book’s chapter about the quest for an American man to earn a major singles title for the first time since 2003. The premise underlying this quest – and, of course, Futterman isn’t the first one to explore it – strikes me as business-driven, as if a publishing or TV executive is more concerned with tennis as economic marketplace than personal athletic endeavor. Imagine dialogue in offices and conference rooms: Only if an American man can win a major is this dumb-ass, puny sport worth our while. Never mind that for decades, the most popular tennis players in America have been a pair of global icons from Switzerland and Spain, preceded by other favorites from Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Romania.
As Futterman witnessed the 2024 US Open semifinal between Fritz and Tiafoe, he zeroed in on Tiafoe: “The lungs can’t possibly get enough oxygen to keep everything together to the finish line. And not just one finish line but seven of them, one every other day, to win a coveted Grand Slam title with the competition growing stronger with each match. That’s a steep hill to climb for someone who works as hard as anyone else and with a singular purpose. For someone with a wavering attention span, oddball form, and commitment issues when it comes to his profession. So, is Big Foe supposed to be here? Does he have what it takes?”
Ah, what it takes – also the title of Futterman’s chapter on Novak Djokovic, a 31-page deep dive that offers as thoughtful a portrait of him as I’ve ever read, filled with telling details and keenly juxtaposed assessments. As an example, one paragraph notes that, “He craves the quiet of the woods and the wilderness that brings him back to his childhood,” followed by the next that reads, “A racket in hand, a title at stake, he is a ruthless assassin.”
Naming that chapter “What It Takes” is also Futterman’s conscious homage to a book by the same title – an epic detailing the efforts of six men seeking to win the 1988 American presidential election. Should you wish to compare pro tennis to American politics, it’s fair to consider Djokovic a president.
Does the comparison fit? Must we conclusively evaluate any pro tennis player for his or her ability to capture the sport’s biggest prizes? Addressing the struggles of Aryna Sabalenka, Futterman notes that “no one truly cares about the Silicon Valley Classic,” a reference to a WTA event in California. Alas, blame Ivan Lendl and Pete Sampras for commencing the MBA-like notion that the only tournaments that matter are the majors.
Get back to that executive in the American conference room who believes that homegrown champions will generate more readers and viewers. Might that well be a view more from the outside than the inside? As that superb competitor Rafael Nadal showed, isn’t the idea to take every match seriously as a way of building the superb work habits that might in time help one capture even bigger titles? And even if those titles aren’t won, must all contenders be considered of negligible interest? Can we really say that if players as skilled as Fritz, Tiafoe, Jessica Pegula or Karolina Muchova never win a singles major that they did not have “what it takes” and were therefore unsuccessful? Define success.
Please note that my critiques are collegial quibbles. In a dream world, more media would have the chance to cover tennis as extensively as Futterman – and, even better, the sport’s handlers would provide ample access to players and other sources. Meanwhile, as tennis media continues to morph, cherish this first-rate journalistic effort: tons of reporting, interpreted with powerful prose.
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Big Ben Is Back
Big Ben Is Back
Big Ben Is Back
Ben Shelton rights the ship in Montreal.
Ben Shelton rights the ship in Montreal.
By Owen Lewis
August 14, 2026
Big Ben in Montreal this week. // Getty
Big Ben in Montreal this week. // Getty
Who is this man roping backhand winners down the line, and where did he come from? Yes, Ben Shelton excels in Canada. But last year, he won the National Bank Open in Toronto mostly thanks to the fact that his backhand held up in crosscourt exchanges with the forehands of Taylor Fritz and Alex de Minaur, letting the rest of his game do the work. In defending his title in Montreal this past week, his backhand has been a damn weapon. This man of the historically abysmal return has broken serve almost at will. Take his quarterfinal against Jakub Mensik: a 6–3, 6–1 demolition in which Shelton broke one of the best servers in the world four times, never faced a break point himself, and hit three unforced errors. Two of them were in the last game. That is 2014 Shanghai Novak Djokovic shit.
In the final on Thursday night, Shelton dismissed Brandon Nakashima — a fairly utilitarian, unimaginative player with a terrific first serve — 6–3, 7–6 (4). Reader, I saw sights to challenge my vision. On set point in the opener, Shelton somehow got his racquet on a perfect Nakashima serve down the T, the kind that looks like it’s going out until it somehow catches a piece of both lines, then anticipated Nakashima’s approach shot and blasted a forehand winner down the line. The first point of that game saw Nakashima hit three winner-caliber shots, only for Shelton to chase them all down and finish with another scorching forehand pass, this time crosscourt. Has Nadal been coaching him in secret? Did Rafa de-age by 20 years and play the match himself, wearing a Mission: Impossible-style Shelton mask?
Shelton wasn’t really in danger all tournament, save being down a break in both sets he played against Joao Fonseca, before the Brazilian became possessed by a melting-down Aryna Sabalenka at 1–0, 40–15. But it’s less that he didn’t drop a set against Jenson Brooksby, Zizou Bergs, Fonseca, Mensik, and Nakashima and more that he played at a level befitting a world No. 1 for meaningful stretches. Anybody would have had their hands full with this version of Shelton in the final. You wouldn’t think it, given his shotmaking abilities and tumultuous shot tolerance temperature, but Shelton’s struggles are more with his peak than his consistency. He’s reliably in the mid-late rounds of majors, excepting hiccups on the natural surfaces this year. He’s landed titles on all three surfaces. But his best win is either over a 2023 Jannik Sinner (who’s since won 22 consecutive sets over him) or Taylor Fritz, making me a devout skeptic that he can find a wide-enough gap in the Sincaraz regime to win a major. This run has me questioning my faith.
Shelton is an occasionally maddening player to watch. He’s relentlessly positive during his matches, yelling in a somewhat nasal voice after everything from brilliant winners to win sets to bland service winners at 1–1, 15–love. Then he’ll blast a low-percentage forehand down the line wide to lose a five-setter at Wimbledon and show so little anguish that I wonder if he’s sufficiently bothered to correct the erroneous impulse next time out. Easy to forget now that he’s defended his title in Canada and looks like a potential Tier 1 US Open favorite pending the health of Sincaraz: Shelton is 1–2 at the last two majors, losing in straight sets to Raphael Collignon and from two-sets-to-one up to Otto Virtanen. There wasn’t much indication heading into Canada that Shelton would play the best tennis of his life; this article began as a pitch about him being in a slump. Almost as impressive as the tennis in Montreal was how Shelton summoned it as if out of necessity, with more than a quarter of his ranking points on the line.
Canada Shelton is an intimidating sight for any player. He patched up his backhand and added some spikes. He returned as well as anybody in the tournament besides Rafael Jodar, who looked like a plausible champion before making a fatigued exit against Nakashima. His forehand was a weapon even from behind the baseline — look at the thunderbolt down the line he hit on championship point. With his usual weaknesses either papered over or turned into strengths, what’s a player to do against Big Ben? Sinner will keep hitting with such unrelenting pace and depth to negate all his attacks. Carlitos will conjure magic in even greater quantities than Ben can. It’s a tough ask to repeat the best tennis of your life more than once a year, and if Shelton can simply peak like clockwork in Canada each year, that’ll be a fine legacy. But if what we saw this week was sustainable, he’ll be grasping at shinier hardware before long.
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If You're Feeling Sinister
If You're Feeling Sinister
If You're Feeling Sinister
How lefties create chaos.
How lefties create chaos.
By Saikeerthi Rachavelepula
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Originally Featured Volume 2 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
If You're Feeling Sinister
How Lefties Create Chaos.
By Saikeerthi Rachavelpula
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Originally Featured Volume 2 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Armed with rulers and an aversion to all things sinister, Catholic nuns are known to go around slapping the wrists of children holding pencils in their left hands. In Latin, “sinister” means both left-handed and inauspicious, generating an institutional bias that extended even to King George VI, who, despite being naturally left-handed, was forced to write with his right hand. The trauma of the involuntary conversion is thought to have produced his stutter, the subject of the film The King’s Speech and a classic case of what psychologists call “misplaced sinister.”
Given his thick Spanish accent, it is difficult for me to say if Rafael Nadal developed a similar impediment when his coach and uncle Toni forced him to change hands. As the apocryphal story goes, he told a 12-year-old Nadal—who eats, writes, and golfs with his right hand—to play tennis with his left in order to gain a tactical advantage. That unconventional decision proved pivotal. Nadal, who retired at the 2024 David Cup, forged one of the most successful careers in tennis history, with 22 Grand Slam titles over a 23-year-long career.
Despite his retirement, a quick glance at his countryman Carlos Alcaraz’s biceps affirms that tennis will never be a perfectly symmetrical sport. This is because, in tennis, the significance of left-handedness goes beyond any individual player’s musculature or tactical advantage. It reflects a larger asymmetry at the heart of a sport that is ultimately about clashing styles and shifting power dynamics. As it turns out, the Taoist belief that the interaction between opposites creates life applies to good tennis, too.
Conventional wisdom tells us that being left-handed is an advantage in tennis. Junior players love to repeat this in the face of defeat. But even professional players admit that this familiar fact gets under their skin. Before the 2021 French Open, Italian Matteo Berrettini told a reporter that playing a lefty is “really annoying.” Around the same time, two-time Wimbledon champion and top lefty Petra Kvitova smugly admitted, “Everybody doesn’t like to play lefties because it takes more thinking.”
Comments like these have given rise to scientific research programs dedicated to identifying the extent to which left-handedness is an advantage in professional sports. When the subject was first studied in the ’80s, researchers believed it was because left-handers were biologically better suited for athletics. According to one theory, this is because they possess larger right hemispheric brain regions associated with visual and spatial functions. According to another, it is because they exhibit more dominant and aggressive personality traits. (The latter theory was also used to argue that left-handers are more likely to be criminals.)
Research has since progressed past this essentialist view and toward the more commonsensical one: Because left-handers are the statistical minority, most players are less familiar facing them. Thus, lefties can upset the rhythm of an opponent accustomed to the typical set of patterns and spins.
The tactical advantage is not exclusive to tennis. Boxing, baseball, fencing, table tennis, and cricket have all been shown to exhibit a greater degree of lefty advantage than tennis. This is partly because the advantage increases with added time pressure. Less time to react means a greater reliance on prediction and instinct. Added time pressure, therefore, increases a lefty’s chances of catching their opponents off guard.
In addition to time pressure, there are other factors correlated to lefty advantage, such as the coordination problems arising from team dynamics. But this does not help us grasp the significance of left-handedness in tennis. If some player has a biological advantage, so what? As servebots remind us, that doesn’t necessarily make things more exciting. It doesn’t explain the thrill of a good lefty-righty battle, why it’s able to scratch our brains and divide our houses.
David Foster Wallace’s 7,000-word love letter to Federer in The New York Times tries to explain this with the claim that the stark character contrast—“Apollo and Dionysian, scalpel and cleaver, righty and southpaw”—provides the conditions for good (Federer) to triumph over evil (Nadal). The logic of his eloquent fangirling, however, is erroneous, for even Djokovic fans can admit the kinetic beauty displayed in the Federer-Nadal rivalry. No matter what DFW says, tennis matches do not thrust us into a mythic realm of angels and demons.
No—it’s more like a return to the mirror stage, a chance to bask in the visual splendor of a matrix of reflections. A kind of infinity room, the grinding juxtaposition of styles is able to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Athens versus Sparta, yin versus yang, Team Edward versus Team Jacob. To witness opposites interact is to be reminded that there is always more than one mode of being, and there is always more than one object of desire.
While the aesthetics of handedness explain our primordial fascination, they do not explain what it is about the interaction of opposites that’s able to create something larger. After all, why can’t some other mash-up of styles achieve the same effect?
If you thought the one-handed backhand was a dying breed, consider the lefty one-hander. // Infographic by Larry Buchanan, featured in OPEN Tennis Vol. 4.
If you thought the one-handed backhand was a dying breed, consider the lefty one-hander. // Infographic by Larry Buchanan, featured in OPEN Tennis Vol. 4.
To understand the impact of left-handedness, we need to look beyond the typical ways of approaching unpredictability in tennis. When analyzing matches, we talk too much about luck. By now, we all understand that players are not machines. They are susceptible to good days and bad days. Sometimes Fortuna is on their side. Other times, she is not. Blah blah blah…
The issue with luck talk isn’t that it’s misplaced or that it discounts hard work and talent. The issue is how luck is used as a conversational roadblock. Saying that a player had a “bad day” or a “lucky break” is an easy way for a commentator to fulfill their job description. Similarly, players know that they shouldn’t reveal their game plans and deepest inner thoughts, so they blame the intangibles, the ineffable, the weather… Almost always, these are strategies to oversimplify the complexity of a match they paid professionals to analyze. Almost always, there is more going on behind the scenes. To cite luck is a performative way of throwing one’s hands up and saying, “Next question.”
But even the weather is not a system governed by chance. It is a system governed by chaos. Framing things in terms of chance is not only overdone, but it obscures the role of chaos in a tennis match, its ability to shift momentum and instate disorder.
In physics, a dynamical system is called chaotic if a small change in initial conditions produces a large change in outcome. Until recently, it was thought that small changes in inputs could only produce small changes in output. In the ’60s, however, physicist Edward Lorenz showed that a difference in the thousandth decimal place (the difference between .506 and .5061) in ocean-surface temperature could have a profound impact on future weather patterns. The difference between a devastating storm and low tide.
What’s unique about chaos is that it generates unpredictability without the involvement of chance. Unlike flipping a coin or rolling a die—simple systems that offer few surprises—the unpredictability of chaos stems from its complexity. In a chaotic system, there are many physical laws at work, and, crucially, these laws push in conflicting directions. In chaotic systems like weather patterns or fluid dynamics, forces such as momentum, pressure, and temperature can simultaneously amplify and counteract one another. The tug-of-war of opposing forces makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to predict the system’s behavior over time. (Famously, the three-body problem, in which three celestial bodies orbit one another, has been shown to describe a chaotic system that has no general solution.) In such cases, even if we understand the causes, the effects elude us.
Chaos also tells us that the relationship between input and output is not always linear. Contrary to popular belief, there are many cases where it is possible to get out more than you put in. Flipping one’s forehand onto the ad side is one such case.
A lefty-righty matchup continuously subjects the ball to maximal changes in trajectory. Each player produces an opposing set of forces in an arduous attempt to make sure their particular set of spins, angles, and curvatures wins out in the end. A lefty-righty matchup expands the possibility space of physical states that the ball can occupy. The possibilities only increase as we advance in the match. As we move from shots to points to games to sets, the complexity and therefore unpredictability compound. Even if we think we know what’s coming, we can’t help but get aced out wide.
What lefties do for tennis, therefore, is not just create awkward angles. They create chaos. As agents of chaos, they do not just alter the physical elements of a tennis match, but also the psychological. A missed backhand return, a shanked overhead, a seemingly unremarkable bunt that falls a little too short and out of reach—each of these can introduce psychological disorder. A lefty’s ability to constantly redirect the ball along all physical dimensions makes each of these disruptions more likely. If you are in doubt, just watch one of Adrian Mannarino’s matches. Standing atop the baseline and cutting off angles like he’s making it up as he goes, the left-handed Frenchman became 17th in the world in part by drawing errors from frustrated opponents.
Ultimately, tennis is not about luck, nor is it about control. It is about the small, errant shifts that go unnoticed until they’ve already changed everything. A lefty-righty matchup, in this sense, is a demonstration of chaos. It’s not God or chance that dictates the outcome, but a system teetering on the edge of instability, where the downstream consequences of every decision, every misstep, travel further than we could ever expect. We like to think we understand what’s coming, but we never do. And in that uncertainty, in that entropy, lies the beauty and the annoyance.
Among other things, the rapture of the lefty-righty dynamic is in the physics. Newton’s third law tells us that for every force, there is an equal and opposite one. When rival forces come together on the tennis court, the angles bend unnervingly, the ball doesn’t know which way to spin, and we’re left with no option but to wait and watch what happens next.
Though chaos by definition resists long-term prediction, a 12-year-old Nadal seemed to know which hand to hold his racquet in to create disruptions years down the line with his hooking forehand on the run and slice out wide. No one embodies the ethos of chaos more than Nadal, with his belief that the position of his water bottle, the tightness of his Bermuda shorts, and the number of sprints he runs in the locker room have the power to change the outcome of the match.
With Nadal’s retirement, there is an even greater need to push for more chaos in the sport. While those like Nick Kyrgios think this should come in the form of tattoos, trash talk, and smashed racquets, this solution misunderstands the nature of what has been lost. To break the rules is one thing, but to expand what is possible within them is another. Chaos does not mean noise. Chaos, as Nadal practiced it, is an insistence on expanding the physically possible, on doing what the game itself had not yet imagined. The answer is not louder. The answer is deeper, a return to the fundamental principles that make tennis’ particular kind of destruction inevitable—rhythmic, even.
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What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
By Takashi Williams
Illustration by Dalbert B Vilarnino
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
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What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
By Takashi Williams
Illustration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
Illustration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
Illustratration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
A beach paddle from the dollar store served as Sachia Vickery’s introduction to tennis. Growing up in Miramar, Fla., she was able to take tennis lessons because her mother juggled multiple jobs. From hitting against a wall to a career-high ranking of 73rd in the world, Vickery’s 15 years on tour encompass a miraculous feat for the first-generation Guyanese American. Yet after all the obstacles faced and accumulating more than $2 million in prize money, an injury revealed the fiscal deficiencies of her lifelong profession—even at the highest level.
In 2025, Vickery was sidelined for six months due to a shoulder injury. With the hiatus came a halt in pay, as is the case for most professional tennis players: No tennis played means no prize money earned, unless you possess the lucrative sponsorship deals and marketable likeness capable of landing a Vanity Fair cover shoot away from the court. And even with over $50,000 in prize money earned that season before her injury, expenses on tour add up quickly. A common practice for players on tour has become reinvesting roughly 90 percent of earnings back into the profession they earned it from.
“You need another source of income,” Vickery explained. “Paying coaches, nutritionists, hotels, food, coaching fees, all this stuff. It’s not sustainable just off of prize money.”
The very same month she took a step back from tennis, OnlyFans presented itself as another source. The subscription-based platform—known primarily for its pornographic content—offered Vickery a spot on its pickleball-themed TV show Smash City, hosted by fellow tennis player Nick Kyrgios.
“At first I was hesitant, knowing the background of OnlyFans,” Vickery said. “It was one of those things where you’re more on the back end [of your career], and you’re like, ‘Well, who doesn’t want to make more money? And easily at that.’ It’s just the easiest thing I’ve ever done to make money.”
Upon agreeing to the deal, Vickery appeared on the show and created an account on the site as an OnlyFans Athlete—receiving $20,000 in doing so. At first, Vickery only intended on sharing “behind-the-scenes stuff and a little bit of edgy photo shoots.” She was expected to post tennis content and be on the site for only a month. After winning the Smash City game show, however—and the $20,000 prize that came along with it—her following on the site grew immensely. With this boom in subscribers came a sneak peek of just how viable an income stream OnlyFans could be.
Once Vickery’s first month on the site concluded, she made more than $80,000 and went on to make over $1 million that very same year—five times more than what she earned in prize money the year prior. And with this new source of income came multiple benefits in her playing career. She was able to hire a chef, a nutritionist, and a trainer, and to pay for her coach to travel with her to more events—luxuries that seemingly can only be enjoyed by those in the upper echelons of the sport. How these luxuries were afforded through OnlyFans presents a gray area regarding how athletes can garner significant success on the platform. “Me being a pro tennis player at a high level helped the marketing side of it. I still do OFTV episodes with other creators where I give them tennis lessons,” Vickery said. “But to be really honest with you, when I passed over the six-figure mark, it was only content that I posted pushing the limits, pushing the boundaries, showing more skin, doing lingerie photo shoots. It sounds harsh, but it’s the reality: Any man that goes on OnlyFans, he doesn’t really care about watching the end of your practice. He wants to see you with the least amount of clothes on as possible.”
Founded in 2016, OnlyFans was created with the intention of connecting musicians and influencers to their respective fan bases. Explicit content and pornography were even banned from being shared on the platform. After a year of underwhelming interest from those demographics, however, the ban was lifted, and with it came the site currently valued at roughly $8 billion. An 18+ social media platform, creators retain 80 percent of what they earn from subscription fees, tips, paid messages, and pay-per-view media. Through this setup, these same creators have received more than $25 billion in profit since the site’s creation. The banning of pornographic content was later revisited in 2021, but to no avail. Nonetheless, OnlyFans has continued to try to distance itself from its not-safe-for-work reputation through the launch of OFTV later that year, and now through sports.
“Professional athletes from around the world are increasingly choosing to join OnlyFans to monetize their content, grow their online presence, and meaningfully engage with their fan communities,” an OnlyFans spokesperson wrote to OPEN Tennis. “We are especially passionate about creating opportunities for athletes in sports where earning opportunities can be more limited outside of the very top tier of competition. Tennis is a global sport with highly engaged fan communities, and many players are looking for new ways to connect with supporters and build their personal brands beyond traditional sponsorship models.”
Kyrgios, who was the first active tennis player to join the site, in 2023, is now joined by the likes of Alexandre Muller, Pedro Martinez, Panna Udvardy, Arina Rodionova, Oceane Dodin, and Chloe Paquet. While some may have signed up for OnlyFans on their own will, others, such as Muller, signed annual sponsorship contracts that include requirements for wearing the OF merchandise and even sporting the logo on court. The latter has been difficult due to an outright ban of the OnlyFans logo at sanctioned events.
What differs for each athlete is what they choose to post, whether they are an OnlyFans Athlete or not. More than 285 professional athletes “share exclusive content including training sessions, coaching tips, gym workouts, nutrition, travel, and behind-the-scenes access,” according to the spokesperson. For the male tennis players such as Kyrgios, Muller, and Martinez, their content doesn’t stray far from this statement, with exception to a cheeky bio on Muller’s account reading “Don’t think too much…. Just follow and you will see 😈.”
Muller politely declined to comment on his sponsorship with OnlyFans.
For the women, however, their pages play much more into the sexual nature of OnlyFans. Udvardy and Paquet will advertise bikini photos as pay-per-view content along with their tennis content and selfies. Both women do not acknowledge the sexual content, mildly at that, in which they post. “You can not compare what Sachia Vickery is doing on the app with me 🙃 I think I am doing like Panna.” Paquet wrote. “I sponsored by OF to try to change their image. I share my life on tour, my travels, my practices and talk with the fans! No nude, no hot videos! The same thing that I can possible share on my insta! The only thing is there I can speak with fans in exchange of money (3$ by message) compare to insta that I do not answer!” For Vickery and Dodin, they both focus primarily on sexual and erotic content, with subscribers recently receiving this message for a paywalled post after Dodin’s Roland-Garros qualifying win on May 18: “To celebrate a victory at French Open, a super hot video… striptease 🥵 Face, boobs, ass—everything’s there for your greatest pleasure. Let’s enjoy this victory together 😈.”
Dodin produces X-rated content while Vickery has yet to cross that boundary on the platform. Either way, the difference in content between male and female tennis players reveals more about the site than it does the athletes on it. Paquet claims she is sponsored to “change their image,” yet she plays into the sexual nature of the site instead of solely posting tennis content. So while the men have not felt the need to market themselves in this manner, the women choose to. Along with the OnlyFans spokesperson acknowledging that these are athletes in a sport where “earning opportunities can be more limited,” this begs the question of whether the reputation of OnlyFans is something that can be fixed by the creators themselves, or if the inclusion of female athletes in need of secondary income streams will only result in them adhering to the sexual precedent set by the most successful women on the platform—and ultimately sanctioned by OnlyFans. “Those other players only posting tennis content, they’ll probably do okay, but I think at some point they’re going to plateau,” Vickery said. “They’re going to realize, ‘I’m not really making as much as I can.’ And that might have them thinking, ‘Well, what if I showed a little more?’”
The temptations of “pushing the limit” for female athletes on OnlyFans are real. Doing so is also a lucrative opportunity to capitalize on the constant focus on women’s sex appeal in the sport rather than their playing ability. With financial compensation in professional tennis on both sides being extremely inadequate for players, women face a pay disparity in the prize pool as grave as $3 million. So even when they look to brands for another source of income to relieve certain stresses, the sexualization and critiques of their appearance come from such brands as well. Former world No. 21 Sorana Cirstea revealed that she was once told by adidas that “it’s better to look good and be in the top 20 than to not look that good and be No. 1.” Vickery even claims she was dropped by Lacoste because her “body didn’t fit the mold,” citing the lack of curvy Black women with major clothing brand sponsorships. By joining OnlyFans, these women are able to have more control regarding how they monetize their appearance. But it also highlights the risks women who have spent more than a decade on tour are willing to take because their appearance is often compensated more generously than their performance as tennis players.
“If players were happy with all the money that they were making, I don’t think they would be exploring OnlyFans. So maybe that’s something internal with the system they need to work out,” Vickery said. “I played a tournament last week, and I made $300. This is a 100K event, one of the strongest, toughest tournaments on the calendar…. I couldn’t even imagine if I didn’t have that [OnlyFans] backing. It’s really not good. They were calling me crazy at first for joining the platform, but mark my words: A lot more people are going to join. They’re gonna put two and two together and realize that $300 a week isn’t gonna cut it after years and years on the tour.” And with more than six top 100 players reaching out to Vickery after she joined the site, the appeal is undeniable. Now tennis’ governing bodies must decide whether simply hiding the brand’s logo is sufficient, or if they are willing to invest real money to show that they value these women more as tennis players than the public values them for their sex appeal?
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Gael Monfils: Wild Styles
Wild Styles
Wild Styles
Gael Monfils winds down an electrifying career.
Gael Monfils winds down an electrifying career.
By Giri Nathan
Aug 7, 2026
La Monf in Montreal this week. // Getty
La Monf in Montreal this week. // Getty
Looking in from the outside, a farewell tour looks like a lot of work. Not that there could be any easy way to step away from a sport that has defined a person’s entire life, but tennis seems to make that ordeal especially gritty. There’s no option to ride the bench and hop in for some lighthearted, inconsequential minutes. It’s still a season full of plane rides and hotel stays, scrounging for wild cards, not expecting much on the court, maybe a feel-good win here or there, all to achieve a sense of closure. But if there were ever an ATP player deserving such a tour, it is Gael Monfils. That’s a player to whom tribute should be paid in person, with direct witness, because that seemed to be the whole point of him playing tennis—to be witnessed.
A crowd favorite the world over, the people’s champion, Monfils won them over with his impish acrobatics, his vertical leap, his trick-shot whims. If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to explain it to you, just go watch any of the dozens of compilations of his on-court magic. It’s tennis that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment. Of course, as any hardcore fan of his could tell you, the week-to-week experience of watching Monfils was considerably less euphoric. He never committed to a style of play that could have produced the results many thought he was capable of; despite his considerable offensive weapons, he preferred to play a more passive game interrupted by occasional blazes of creativity. Showmanship was inseparable from his match play, sometimes to his own detriment, often to our delight. But I think collective sporting memories are not defined by win-loss records but rather by sharp emotional spikes: marathon matches, indelible highlights, vulnerability with the crowd. And Monfils was the master of producing such moments. Anybody who has paid even glancing attention to the sport over the past two decades has cached away a Monfils moment or three.
Unsurprisingly, the man who approached tennis that way has been showered with adulation at every stop on tour, and I’ve enjoyed hearing a 39-year-old Monfils reflect on each of these tournaments, too, jotting down his thoughts on social media and talking directly to these crowds. The fans have gotten the opportunity to say goodbye throughout 2026, and I’ve equally enjoyed the fact that so many of his young colleagues seem so stoked to have gotten that same opportunity too. Before they were pros, they were also just fans of Gael Monfils, like everyone else. At the end of their Monte-Carlo match, Alexander Bublik—who is wired similarly to the Frenchman when it comes to entertainment value—gave Monfils a big hug and fondly remembered how, at that same tournament exactly 10 years ago, he’d been a teenage hitting partner for the veteran, and that Monfils had told him he’d make it. At Roland-Garros, Monfils lost his first-round match to his younger countryman Hugo Gaston in five sets, after midnight, and through it all he was regaled by all the singing and shouting one would expect from his home Slam. “It was quite a strange feeling when, at the end of the third set, everyone was shouting, ‘Gael, Gael.’ I wanted to shout with them,” said the 25-year-old Gaston afterward.
Monfils’ exit from Canada this week might have been the best such moment to date. In his second-round match he took on Learner Tien, who was born four months after Monfils won his first title on tour, in August 2005. Despite logging 53 unforced errors, Tien won, with a very Monfils-coded score line, 6–3, 0–6, 6–3. Afterward, the Frenchman had his back turned to the court as he signed autographs for fans in the crowd, only for Tien to nudge him and present him with his own tennis ball and Sharpie. In a world of grimly contrived viral videos, here was an unmistakable wholesome moment, another Monfils moment, this one without any racquets involved; the truth was in the enormous grins sported by both players. Before he left the court, Tien had to sign something too: the camera lens, on which he wrote “legend!” After the match, he posted a picture of the ball, along with a caption: “First time asking for an autograph.” I’m sure Gael would have liked to win a Slam, sure, but when it comes to the question of who endures in memories of actual people, he’ll leave a much rarer legacy.
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Cruz Hewitt Takes the Baton
Son of a Gun
Son of a Gun
Cruz Hewitt takes the baton.
Cruz Hewitt takes the baton.
By Giri Nathan
July 31, 2026
Cruz in DC this week. // Getty
Cruz in DC this week. // Getty
It’s a little surprising that tennis isn’t more dominated by the offspring of former top pros, who presumably pass along the genetics, know-how, and wealth needed to construct a good tennis player. On the ATP side, the most prominent examples right now would be Sebastian Korda and Casper Ruud, sons of a world No. 2 and a world No. 39, respectively. If those pedigrees weren’t good enough, we now officially have the son of a world No. 1 tearing up the hard court: Cruz Hewitt, son of Lleyton, the Aussie who dominated the early aughts with his point-to-point intensity, backwards hat, and jumping backhands. I’m officially old enough that the guys that we used to imitate at tennis camp now have sons racking up ATP points. Horrifying to consider.
Anyway, the 17-year-old Cruz is a real talent, though different in style from his predecessor. Perhaps all they have in common is the orientation of their hats and their determined dispositions on court. Lleyton was the counterpuncher to rule all counterpunchers, undersized but overzealous with his court coverage. During his prime in the early aughts, the sport was about to be overtaken by powerful baseliners, but Lleyton, at 5-foot-10, still managed to climb to the top of the tour with his mild forehand, scrappy returning, and flawless point construction. This guy had a 7–2 winning record over Roger Federer until 2003! At which point that man, and the new power he ushered in, simply washed over everyone else. (Federer went on to win 16 of their remaining 18 matches.) I’m not sure we’ll ever see a player of that low-power counterpunching archetype win Wimbledon on the men’s side ever again. Just to hammer home the point, after Lleyton won his title there in 2002, Roger took five in a row.
Hopefully Cruz won’t have to fight quite as viciously for every point, compared with his dad. His strokes are bigger and loopier, and he can average 120 mph on first serve over the course of a match. During his run to the boys’ Wimbledon final earlier this month, the younger Hewitt was asked to estimate his current height; he guessed “6-foot-2-ish,” and perhaps he’s not yet done. Under the paint job he’s believed to be using one of the power racquets du jour, the EZONE 98. Cruz joins a very different pro tour than his dad’s, technologically and tactically, but appears to be reasonably well-equipped for the fight. It’s too early to tell for sure. He spent much of this season grinding Futures and Challengers, raising his ranking from No. 735 at the start of the year to No. 612 at the start of this week.
It turned out to be a momentous week. Offered a wild card into the qualifying rounds in Washington, Cruz benefited from two consecutive retirements (Dusan Lajovic was down 5–2, though Zachary Svajda was up 2–0 in the third set). Strange circumstances, but that sent the teenager to his first ATP main-draw match, at a tournament his dad won in 2004. In Tuesday’s first-round match, Hewitt played world No. 80 Marcus Giron. Hewitt won 6–3, 6–4, claiming 83 percent of his first-serve points and not facing a break point. After winning, Cruz did his dad’s signature celebration: four fingers pointed right at the eyes. What’s the deal with it? Cruz hilariously wasn’t even sure, as he admitted in a Tennis Channel interview. “It’s called the ‘vicht,’ I think. I think! I need to check on that, to be honest…. When I was little, I’ve just seen it, I never really asked about it.” It is indeed called the “vicht,” and it originated with Swedish players Mats Wilander and Niclas Kroon, who took Kroon’s celebratory gesture while playing Yahtzee and translated it to the tennis court in the 1980s. The elder Hewitt must have borrowed it from the players he grew up watching. And his son did the same.
For his next act, Cruz had to take on a friend and mentor he’s known for a decade: Alex de Minaur, the top Aussie on tour, and perhaps the present era’s analogue to Lleyton himself. De Minaur has spent so much time with the Hewitts that Cruz said he was “like an older brother.” They hit together regularly. Thursday’s second-round match was straightforward work for the tournament’s top seed, 6–2, 6–3, who admitted in his on-court interview that it was “definitely weird” to be playing Cruz already: “I knew I was going to play him on the tour someday, but I didn’t actually expect it to be this week.” At the net, de Minaur told him they’d be playing for the next 10 years of their lives and wished him good luck. With his first-round win, Cruz Hewitt has leaped up to No. 368 in the live rankings. Among players under 18, only the breakout Frenchman Moise Kouamé is currently ranked higher. If he hopes to keep clashing with his big brother on tour, he still has a long climb ahead of him.
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A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
By Owen Lewis
July 23, 2026
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
Aryna Sabalenka couldn’t shake herself out of her funk in time to make a run at the Wimbledon title. Naomi Osaka was supreme in defeating her—there again was the first serve and backhand that propelled her to four major titles—but the circumstances of the loss were telling. It was the first time Sabalenka had lost at a major in straight sets since 2020. The first time she’d lost a tiebreak at a major since the US Open, and she lost it badly, 7–2, after winning the opening point. Iga Swiatek fell a round earlier, not coming close to defending the title she won ruthlessly in 2025. Elena Rybakina is in the midst of a mystifying loss of form; from the would-be successor to Sabalenka’s No. 1 ranking in March, she now looks fundamentally incapable of producing good tennis for the requisite length of time. She lost meekly to Elise Mertens the same day Alex Eala upset Swiatek.
There is unrest atop the WTA, and at Wimbledon we saw the rain-blurred landscape clearly. Each time the draw seemed to produce a favorite, the field promptly dumped them out of the tournament. After beating Sabalenka, Osaka looked like the sharpest player in the draw: She hadn’t dropped a set through four rounds and had just earned the best win of her career since her duels with late-career Serena Williams. (You can imagine Serena, watching the first half of the season from home, feeling that there wasn’t a player on tour she wouldn’t have a chance to beat.) As a four-time major champion, Osaka had only ever lost one match beyond the fourth round of a Slam. Instead, she didn’t win another set. At one point Jessica Pegula was a popular winner pick, before Coco Gauff thoroughly outplayed her for the last two sets of their quarterfinal. It was hard to imagine anybody beating the Gauff of those two sets, so next she stood out from the rest. Like Osaka, she fell to Muchova, and after having a chance to put away a short forehand on match point. Surely the stars had aligned for Muchova, then. Nope. She put up an almighty fight in the final, but only truly looked like a better player than Linda Noskova for the hallucinogenic half hour in which she wrestled control of the second set from 2–5, saving five championship points along the way.
So is it Noskova, at just 21 years old, who’s best positioned to climb atop this fractured summit? Maybe—in the final, it felt like I was watching an all-time great at 31. Her serve was relentlessly precise, her returns stifling and aggressive, her movement assured, her ground strokes and slices cleverly angled. How is there enough time in two decades to build a game that complete? But there’s so much competition that you’d still take the field over Noskova at any tournament. Leaving aside the top four, any of whom could regain their form at any time, there’s newly minted major champion Mirra Andreeva to contend with. There’s Amanda Anisimova, also in a slump but instantly deadly once she recovers the timing on her mighty ground strokes. Elina Svitolina, in arguably career-best form at 31. Marta Kostyuk, who made the semifinals in both Paris and London and hasn’t lost a match besides since March. The teen terrors of Iva Jovic and Victoria Mboko, who I expect to get right back to breaking brains once she recovers from her MCL injury. En route to the Wimbledon title, Noskova had to save a match point against 36-year-old Sorana Cirstea, who’s in the midst of the last and best year of her career. Anybody can beat anybody at any time.
Though peak Sabalenka or Swiatek chewing up a tournament is far from boring, this is the tour at its best. Pity those who claim to love predictability—in the absence of Carlos Alcaraz, any given ATP tournament is Jannik Sinner’s to lose, barring his body’s intermittent and violent rebellions against itself. The texture of men’s tennis has grown same-y, too. The top of the tour is a glut of ball-bashers and servebots (tellingly, Sinner is both those things), plus 39-year-old Novak Djokovic. There’s too much predictability in the ATP’s results, but what’s even worse is that you know what most of the tennis will look like: big forehands, bigger serves, some slow backhand-to-backhand rallies, a drop shot once every 10 or 15 points. Alcaraz is a vital presence because he’s the only player who can disrupt the Sinner monarchy, but also because—at least until, hopefully, Learner Tien develops a killer serve—he’s the only top player whose style varies wildly and thrillingly from the baseline.
The WTA, though? Power still has a loud voice, but each champion is wonderfully distinct from one another. In her semifinal against Gauff, Muchova hit two superhuman volleys under duress. She hit one of them while diving, and the other somehow was more impressive, following a path from the middle of the court to the sideline so thin and faint that even Muchova seemed to think she’d missed. Gauff has won two majors and risen to No. 3 in the world with a game entirely comprised of the negative space around the stale serve-plus-one archetype. Diana Shnaider’s vicious lefty forehand rips up typical baseline patterns and creates new ones. Kostyuk’s background in gymnastics is evident in each of her improbable defensive stabs. Even the best servers on tour don’t win as many as three-fourths of their service games, maintaining a healthy degree of unpredictability each time they toss the ball. The WTA is more than capable of losing any one player to injury for a while without feeling as though its soul has gone missing. Rivalries are sparse, something I’ve lamented before, but even that’s a tribute to the women’s game in a way—you can just watch a tournament unfold and expect to see something compelling rather than tuning half-out when the most telegenic player crashes out early. An alien would think that’s the distinguishing characteristic of what deserves to be the more profitable tour, and I do too.
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Bernie Tomic is Back in the Winner's Circle
Born Again
Born Again
For the first time since 2018, Bernard Tomic is back in the winners circle.
For the first time since 2018, Bernard Tomic is back in the winners circle.
By Giri Nathan
July 24, 2026
Bernard Tomic during Australian Open qualifying this year. // Getty
Bernard Tomic during Australian Open qualifying this year. // Getty
Bernard Tomic? You haven’t heard that name in years. Only true Tomic heads—and I’m not sure many exist in 2026—would be keeping close tabs on the surly Australian, still somehow only 33 years old, who squandered considerable talent and goodwill over the years, both on and off the court. But he’s now in the middle of something like a “born-again” tennis career, which peaked this weekend when he earned his biggest title in eight years. And that deserves a little bit of context. Enough time has elapsed since his “prime” that there’s a whole new cohort of tennis fans who know nothing of his lore. Forgive me if you were around for all this; hopefully it’s amusing enough to revisit.
Tomic was the world top junior. He also had a quintessential toxic tennis dad, which might help explain his future apathy toward the sport. But together they honed an original and effective game style. Despite standing 6-foot-5, Bernie didn’t overpower opponents. His was a finesse game, defined by ball control, deception, and change of pace. He could play his ground strokes so ridiculously flat that they stopped being flat; I don’t think I’ve seen any player, before or since, hit more baseline groundies that actually arrived with sneaky underspin. His style was already slightly anachronistic at the time, and in today’s power-oriented game, it is unimaginable. Tomic was a brilliant ball-striker, but not at all in the present-day Jannik Sinner sense. Just a guy with phenomenal hands and a keen intuition for perturbing his opponents. He had good enough hands that he could afford to get a little lackadaisical with his footwork…and conditioning, and mentality, and…yeah, pretty much everything else.
As it turns out, good hands can take you incredibly far in a sport predicated on the precise manipulation of a sphere with a racquet. Tomic’s weird style worked not just against fellow teenagers but against touring professionals. In 2009, when he was 16, he became the third-youngest player ever to win a Challenger title. In 2011, he made it to the quarterfinals of Wimbledon, becoming the youngest man to reach that stage of the tournament since Boris Becker. At that juncture, he looked like he’d be one of the most talented players of his generation. He soon ascended into the top 50, then plateaued for a few years but peaked at No. 17 at the start of 2016, before it all began to fall apart. He’s one of those cases where the Wikipedia headings tell the story more succinctly than I ever could:
2018: Rankings downfall, reality television stint and fourth ATP title
2019: Severe downfall in form and ranking
2020: Inactivity due to COVID-19
Along the way, there was a lot of nastiness, apathy, tanking, and other behavior too insipid to recount here. Suffice to say, by 2022, he was ranked outside the top 800. Bernard Tomic would have never struck anyone as the type to keep grinding at the lower levels of tennis and revive a moribund career; a full-time pivot to scammer/influencer would have struck me as a much more likely outcome. But he did in fact choose to grind away from the baseline, in unglamorous and ill-paid tournaments all over the world, as if he’d never had a taste of life at the top of tennis. In late 2022, Tomic started at the ITF level and built his ranking back up again until, by late 2024, he was back in the top 250 and securely in the Challenger tier of the tour.
He even made it back to Challenger finals again. In 2024, he lost the Fairfield final to future star Learner Tien, 6–0, 6–1, in 39 minutes, which was the shortest championship match in Challenger history, indicating that the new Tomic still had a bit of the old Tomic in him after all. In 2025, he made and lost two more finals: a three-setter in Lexington versus Zachary Svajda (who is enjoying a breakout summer) and a walkover in Barranquilla that handed the title to Arthur Fery (a freshly minted Wimbledon semifinalist). But in 2026, Tomic took two months off the tour, which he later explained was due to the birth of his first child. In the days leading up to the Lincoln Challenger, he later revealed, he felt he “hit a brick wall” and wanted to call this his last season on tour. Going into the final against Mark Lajal—you might recall the distinctive pineapple-style haircut he used to sport—Tomic was the clear underdog.
And yet, at the end of that two-hour, 41-minute final, it was Tomic who reigned supreme, 4–6, 7–6(4), 7–6(3). Lajal was playing his run-of-the-mill power baseline game, and Tomic was lazily massaging the ball all over the court. It’s a pretty refeshing style to watch, when his head is actually in it. Seventeen years after his first Challenger title, Bernie has notched another—that one a mark of blazing prodigy, this one of unexpected tenacity. Will it be his last? “I said this was going to be my last year, so I guess I have to reassess a few things now,” Tomic said after claiming the Lincoln title. He looks like he’s in the best shape of his life. “Now that I won, I’m going to have to go back to the table. I’m probably going to play another 20 years,” he said. It’s not a sequence of words that I expected to type in 2026, but here goes: Bernie Tomic, you have my respect.