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.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
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.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
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.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Demon & Felix: Beyond Belief
Beyond Belief
Beyond Belief
What happens when elite players start to recognize their limitations?
What happens when elite players start to recognize their limitations?
By Carole Bouchard
Jul 17, 2026
The Demon during his round of 16 loss to Flavio Cobolli at Wimbledon. // Getty
The Demon during his round of 16 loss to Flavio Cobolli at Wimbledon. // Getty
Alex de Minaur’s distress in London echoed Felix Auger-Aliassime’s broken heart in Paris, as the two top players wondered aloud about their ceilings.
One of the most significant events of Wimbledon 2026 didn’t happen on the court; it happened in Interview Room 2, when Alex de Minaur met the press after losing in the fourth round to Flavio Cobolli. Shattered, he gave the stage to the little voice in the back of his mind that every top player tries so hard to silence. The Australian couldn’t take it anymore, so he uttered the words that had clearly been haunting him.
“You feel there are opportunities to be taken to make it to the next level, to become an even better version of yourself. And to fall short constantly, you start doubting yourself. You start doubting whether you’re going to be able to break through. As much as I’m in a great position, the fact that I want more and I’m not able to achieve more is a battle that I deal with every day. The goals, the beliefs, the dreams that you have, they start fading away, or feel a little bit further away than when they once were.”
It is an extraordinary statement, as you never hear a top-five player like de Minaur publicly say he’s scared he might have gone as far as he is capable of going, wondering if he has what it takes to achieve every top player’s dreams: winning Grand Slam titles and becoming world No. 1. I’m not even sure many allow themselves this kind of epiphany even privately. And yet it felt like he needed to get it off his chest. It, of course, matters to listen to the Sinners of this tennis world talking about how they achieve their dreams, but it also matters to see how those who don’t get there cope with it.
De Minaur’s statements were even more notable because they echoed what Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime said in Paris after losing in the quarterfinals against, yet again, Flavio Cobolli. “I’m in a place right now with my tennis career that it’s tough. I’m a little bit destroyed. My whole career, I was going back to training with optimism and positivity. Now I feel like I’m not the player I want to be. I’m growing more and more impatient. I’m 26 this year, and I’m not improving the way that I wish.”
Every other week, a player talks about wanting to or needing to get better every day to become the best version of themselves. It has gone from desire to injunction. The only way is up. You should always strive for more. Treat winning and losing the same way. And repeat. Everybody is chasing the version of themselves that will propel them to the top of the game. After a certain point it becomes less about doing the best you can within the frame of your abilities, but about somehow becoming more Superman than Clark Kent. Perhaps their generation is paying the price of taking inspiration from the Big Four instead of recognizing that era as the magnificent anomaly that it was. Yes, they kept improving and made the impossible possible, but treating their genius like common law is a road to disappointment for mere mortals.
For de Minaur and Auger-Aliassime, this is the friction point right now. Nobody dares say it. We’re in the manifesting era, so it would be a faux pas to table those kinds of sentiments. But what if the player they are now is the best version of themselves? What if they already got better every day until today, and that’s it? What if that’s as far as they’re going to go? What if they’ve met their ceiling and need to reframe the expectations and how they view their career?
Should they pack their things and go home? Surely not. Some players make peace with that and just keep doing their (very lucrative) job. By relaxing a bit, sometimes they end up achieving something huge right when it didn’t seem in the cards anymore. Others, like the Australian and the Canadian, will try to prove these odds wrong until they’ve used every drop left in their body and mind, because another voice keeps telling them they still have a shot at these dreams. And because they’ve reached a place so close to the sun that they can nearly feel the metal of that major under their hands. Tennis without these dreams is not what they’ve signed up for.
They’re also so good that there’s no way anyone can tell them they won’t make it. They’re the ones who, if stars align, could at least once touch their dreams. It’s the toughest spot to be in. The very wise Coco Gauff is known for often saying that at this level of the sport, to keep going and believing, one needs to be delusional. It’s either this or accepting to downgrade the expectations. The latter seems such a logical choice, right? But what about the players who cannot envision their careers without these expectations? If it’s the only thing that makes them pick up the racquet or go shed sweat and blood in the gym, then there’s gonna be no downgrading option.
“I was the young player very much awaited. I was also, at times, the player a little forgotten, in a few more difficult years. And then I’m a little more awaited again,” said Auger-Aliassime in London. “Now, with hindsight, it’s true that I know that every time, no matter the result, I’m going to have to keep being better than I am today. Even if I win this Wimbledon, I’m going back to training. At some point, I’m going to go back and try to be an even better player. That’s all I know. That’s really all I’m controlling. I’m someone who, deep down, is very emotional, and losing like that in the quarterfinals [in Paris] was very difficult, but two days later, I was really in solution mode and really focused on the future. So it’s true that today, again, I’m an eternal optimist.” FAA reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon and played this epic match against Novak Djokovic. He left crushed and empty, but more hopeful than after Paris, and revealed he had ended his decade-long collaboration with coach Frédéric Fontang.
The limit is the moment these sky-high expectations turn into an obsession or the scale by which players measure their value as a person. “It hurts like hell now. But I’ll get back up,” swore de Minaur. “I’m a competitor through and through. I’ll give myself another chance. I just want it to happen to keep giving me that hope. If not, this is a tough, tough sport to play with no hope.” And so they look at the ceiling they’ve acknowledged for the first time and search for another path to the sky.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Noskova & Muchova: Styles Upon Styles
Styles Upon Styles
Styles Upon Styles
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion.
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion.
By Giri Nathan
July 10, 2026
Linda Noskova (left) & Karolina Muchova // Getty
Linda Noskova (left) & Karolina Muchova // Getty
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion, and she will be the third Czech champion in the past four years. Either 29-year-old Karolina Muchova or 21-year-old Linda Noskova will lift the title at the Slam that has been consistently won by their countrywomen dating back to Martina Navratilova. Both finalists have been asked to account for why their nation of less than 11 million people has overperformed so spectacularly at the grass-court major. It doesn’t sound like anyone has a satisfying explanation. Muchova credited the country’s history of great players, including those a few years above her whose success instilled self-belief in her; she also later admitted that she was tired of getting the question and didn’t really know what else to say. Noskova, much earlier in her career, probably hasn’t yet heard the question as many times and gave it an earnest try: Despite different game styles, the Czech players were all very creative, and “grass allows us to use any side of tennis; serve and volley back in the old days, slices and volleys in this new era.” And she, too, admitted that she always tries to come up with a new answer to this question whenever she’s asked.
I certainly don’t have a better theory than those two. I saw that Tomas Berdych, a 2010 Wimbledon finalist himself, guessed there probably wasn’t a single grass court in Czechia. Muchova said she’d barely gotten much practice on this surface, and that she is in fact allergic to grass, competing only with the help of pills, eye drops, and sprays. (If she wins, I assume she will be skipping the Djokovic-style grass-eating celebration.) I don’t have any grand theories, but the one commonality I observe in all these Czech players is that they all have extremely sound technique on their ground strokes. The speed of play on grass can quickly expose technical weaknesses, but they just keep hitting the ball as clean as ever. And all of them can volley, too. But I think any attempt to connect the dots between these players too neatly and systematically would be misguided. They all come at their success differently, and when it comes to the two finalists, they play quite different brands of tennis.
Muchova’s all-court style enchants everyone. It’s the kind of fluent, feel-based tennis that anyone who’s ever held a racquet has hoped, foolishly, to replicate on court themselves. Her freshly broken four-year streak of losing in the first round at Wimbledon says more about her extensive injury history than her natural aptitude for the surface. Through six rounds she’s looked like a natural, and in particular, the audacity of her volleys separates her from the rest of the tour. Check out the two miracles she performed in the tiebreak of her semifinal against Coco Gauff, one a midcourt pickup from ankle height and the other a diving volley. If you think real tennis is about forward movement and great hands, then you’ve probably been sorely disappointed by the past 15-odd years of professional tennis, but you’re in luck right now, since there’s no better exponent of that style than Muchova. This is old-school grass-court tennis reskinned for the modern age.
That’s not the only style that thrives on grass in 2026, of course, and Noskova presents another archetype: big serve backed up by a first-strike baseline game. She has been the winningest player on grass courts since the start of 2025. And despite her low-key affect, Noskova has been an unmissable talent for a while, having achieved impressive pro results by her mid-teens and broken into the mainstream in 2024 with an upset of then world No. 1 Iga Swiatek at the Australian Open. Earlier in her career Noskova used to be a little wilder in her execution, but she’s since gotten control over her power, and her point construction at Wimbledon has looked smart and relaxed. She also has better hands than I’d realized, which allows her to quickly capitalize on all the advantages she produces from the baseline. By being impossible to break, Noskova has dominated her last three rounds, and the 6–4, 6–4 defeat of Marta Kostyuk in the semifinal was more authoritative than the score line suggests. I suspect she also has a chance to become the first Wimbledon champion with a septum piercing, though if there is somehow a precedent here, please let me know.
Both players won a grass-court title in the lead-up to Wimbledon, too, so they’ve gotten plenty of reps on the surface. Despite only one direct encounter at the pro level—a Muchova three-set win at the 2025 US Open—they played doubles together at the 2024 Paris Olympics and definitely know each other’s games. I expect an emotionally understated but tactically thrilling final, as Muchova tries to change up the pace with her tricks, and Noskova tries to barrel ahead with quick damage. They’ll let the tennis do all the talking.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Book Review: The Open Era
Ad Out
Ad Out
Book Review: The Open Era by Edward Schmit
Book Review: The Open Era by Edward Schmit
By Justin Kirkland
Jul 7, 2026
Courtesy of Berkeley/Penguin Random House.
Courtesy of Berkeley/Penguin Random House.
To say that sports-themed, men-loving-men (MM) novels are having a moment would be an understatement. Following the success of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series that inspired Heated Rivalry, publishers and fans alike have been feral for the next great intersection of intimacy and athleticism. But as it turns out, two soccer balls and a pair of pushed-back thighs do not a novel make. Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways of the niche genre’s moment in the spotlight is that it actually takes quite the skillful hand to balance sport and sensuality.
Edward Schmit takes a swing at giving tennis its big summer love story with the release of his debut novel, The Open Era, released June 2. Following up-and-coming tennis player Austin Hardy, the first chapter immediately drops readers into the heat of the US Open as Austin faces off against world No. 2 Diego Cruz, from Mexico. But by the end of chapter 1, it becomes clear that the pressures of the US Open are only one facet of the drama. Austin is at once the first openly gay male contender at the US Open and a qualifier on a hot streak, which makes him a viral sensation and a newly minted media darling, and, oh yeah—Diego kissed him two days before the match. Austin has a lot going on.
Far and away, what sets The Open Era apart from so many of its contemporaries is how evident it is that Schmit loves not just the sport of tennis but the culture. The vibes of the locker room, the pageantry of high-end sponsorships, the hot-and-cold relationship between players and the press; those small details are what immerse us in The Open Era, drawing a fascinating dichotomy between its two key players. We spend the majority of our time with Austin, admiring Diego, who seemingly has the tennis world around his finger. But on the other side, we get inklings of Diego, quietly longing to feel the same self-acceptance Austin does. That tension constantly vibrates below the surface.
Schmit approaches The Open Era as an “already out” story, as opposed to the “coming out” tales readers have come to expect. Austin isn’t someone who is reckoning with his sexuality so much as he’s navigating what it means for everyone else to reckon with it as his fame grows. There’s this adage in the queer community that you never stop coming out, and Austin’s story is no exception as he faces a maelstrom of curiosity about his sexuality and standing within the sport. And what sport offers a better backdrop for that struggle than tennis?
One of the most compelling aspects of The Open Era is seeing Austin navigate such a public moment (and Diego, a private one) in a notoriously lonely sport. Of all the novel’s ruminations on mental health, Schmit manages to capture this one particularly well. Tennis players have this quirky oddness about them—wunderkinds whose undeniable brilliance often comes at the price of normal teenage years. While other kids were experimenting and making mistakes, these two were practicing serves and shuffling from service line to baseline. Even Austin points out that tennis players largely spend their time with their teams or a small group of other players.
Schmit zeroes in on that experience, specifically when it comes to Diego. In one early scene, Diego sweetly leaves his Nintendo Switch behind in Austin’s room so the two of them can play Super Smash Bros. later. It’s a light touch that offers another perspective of his character—I mean, this is the world No. 2! One of the most dominant athletes in the world! And yet, the most intimate pieces of his character are revealed in these vulnerable, if not boyish, moments.
That said, much like Austin’s inaugural Slam, The Open Era isn’t without its occasional stumble. Schmit tries to juggle a lot, to varying degrees of success. The novel’s strongest moments are in its extremes, whether those are the nuanced, quiet moments between Austin and Diego or when the novel is firing at a breakneck pace, both on court and in the bedroom. But occasionally, those moments are undercut by a surge of emotion that feels added on for emphasis. There are times when Austin is mean to his team to the point of being cruel (not for naught, he’s also ranked deep in the 200s, so the lack of grace isn’t exactly endearing). He also has a specific love of the word “dick” when referring to Diego’s penis. In an attempt to underline an emotion, Schmit unknowingly crosses it out.
The Open Era, much like Austin, shows a lot of promise (which is good, because the novel is clearly angling for a series of its own. Maybe a competing love interest at the Aussie Open? A throuple for clay season?). Even with the small quibbles, Schmit closes out his first set in the genre with an imperfect, but decisive, win—not because the sex was impossibly hot or the tennis was elite, but because it’s clear that he’s a fan, writing about a sport that he loves. And frankly, if you’re not starting from that point, you shouldn’t be on the court to begin with.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
A Lot to Lose
A Lot to Lose
A Lot to Lose
Last year’s Wimbledon finalists will be tested early.
Last year's Wimbledon finalists will be tested early.
By Giri Nathan
July 3, 2026
How you doin'? // Getty
How you doin'? // Getty
Grass is fickle. Wimbledon is a revolving door. One frequently cited fun fact: There have been eight different women’s singles champions over the past eight iterations of the tournament. It’s hard to repeat, but it seems even harder at SW19 than anywhere else. Compared with the other Slams, which have seen plenty of holdovers from year to year, Wimbledon barely sees repeat finalists. Looking at those past eight championship matches, there have been only two names to recur: Serena Williams, presumed retired until her stealth return this year, and Ons Jabeur, on hiatus from the tour after childbirth but already off her top level due to injuries. It feels reasonable to assume that neither of them will ever appear in a Wimbledon final again. Other than them, the remaining finalists are a mix of players now retired (Garbine Muguruza, Angelique Kerber, Simona Halep, Ash Barty), closing in on retirement (Venus Williams, Karolina Pliskova), dealing with a potentially career-ending suspension (Marketa Vondrousova), or otherwise declining in form (Barbora Krejickova, Jasmine Paolini). There’s only one name in that mix that I fully expect to see back in a Wimbledon final someday, and that’s Elena Rybakina
Though I didn’t sort them into those categories, my skepticism extends to both of last year’s finalists, too, as good as they are. In 2025 Iga Swiatek and Amanda Anisimova met in an unforgettable—in terms of shock value, if not the actual rallies—final, which Swiatek won 6–0, 6–0 in just 59 minutes. On its surface, the match was a multi-Slam champ annihilating a player who had never been there before. But there was more narrative depth to it than that. For Swiatek, one of the defining players of her generation, this tournament was a surge out of a long slump, on a court surface that had frustrated her in the past. For Anisimova, a former prodigy, the runner-up finish was proof of her latent, blazing talent. Swiatek seemed like she’d gotten out of a bad funk and found chemistry with coach-of-the-stars Wim Fisette; Anisimova seemed like one of the best ball-strikers alive who would solidify a place on top of the tour, and indeed she went on to collect another runner-up trophy at the US Open two months later.
Flash forward to the 2026 season and instead of rocking up to Wimbledon as favorites, they both appear to be finding their footing all over again, swapping out coaches and working through uninspired seasons, Swiatek most of all. Fresh off losing in Miami to countrywoman Magda Linette, which broke a 73-match win streak in first-round matches, she split with Fisette as coach. She then sought to absorb some Rafa Nadal magic by hiring his former coach Francisco Roig, and there were indeed some delightful videos of Rafa modeling forehands next to Swiatek on court, but this did not bear fruit during her clay season. Once again, she seems to be stumped on the same old puzzle of how to be as good as she used to be—and in particular, as mentally unshakable as she used to be. At Wimbledon, after winning a first-round match over Taylor Townsend, a testy three-setter that saw a long passage of dubious quality from Swiatek, she wept. “I think the whole process of opening the court and playing as a defending champion is for sure really emotional,” Swiatek said. As surprising as it is to say about a defending champion, after studying her rather tame path to the title last year, it’s still unclear if she can beat the very best opponents on grass.
Meanwhile, Anisimova started 2026 with a solid stretch on hard court, but in the spring she swapped coaches and suffered a wrist injury that took her out of most of the clay swing. Her grass-season lead-in has been unusual too. After losing to Iva Jovic at Queens Club, Anisimova felt burned-out after her months in Europe and took a flight back home to spend five days in the U.S., only to fly right back to London for Wimbledon. Her first-round win was straightforward. But in the second round, I was reminded that she rivals current Swiatek in a key tennis metric: her ability to terrorize her own fan base by making winnable matches more complicated and emotionally rich than they should be. In her second match she took on Sofia Kenin, who is currently ranked No. 105, and as Anisimova sprayed error after error, she looked to be having a plainly awful time on court. She said as much, too: “Some moments were really awful. I’m just happy to be through to the next round,” she reported after a match that involved significant yelling. She was helped by playing Kenin, a returner so famously lax that Anisimova, whose serve is a weak point of her game, was able to reel off 20 aces, including two in the deciding tiebreak, which this match should not have reached. “I never thought I’d say this, but thank you to my serve. I’m not a good server at all, but after today, I can say that I am,” she said.
For both these players with lots of ranking points at stake and lots of uncertainty, the challenge begins in earnest in the third round. Swiatek gets Alex Eala, who is having an excellent grass season, and Anisimova gets Madison Keys, in what will surprisingly be just their second-ever meeting. No better way for last year’s finalists to answer the lingering questions than by beating these serious opponents.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Grigor Dimitrov: The Lovable Underdog
Almost Heaven
Almost Heaven
Grigor Dimitrov is Wimbledon's lovable underdog.
Grigor Dimitrov is Wimbledon's lovable underdog.
By Owen Lewis
July 3, 2026
Perfect form. // Getty
Perfect form. // Getty.
It felt too good to be true, and indeed it was. Grigor Dimitrov was up two sets on Jannik Sinner in the fourth round of Wimbledon, yet to lose serve in the third set. Sinner had fallen on his wrist early in the match, robbing his rally ball of the requisite sting to unravel Dimitrov’s one-handed backhand. Faced with a glitchy world number one, Grigor feasted. He ripped off the first set easily. He served for the second and Sinner broke him, showing more emotion in his celebratory roar than he displayed after winning at least three of his four major titles. Many an upset has died at this juncture: 5–4 to 5–7, 1–6, 1–6, good night. Instead: Dimitrov broke back immediately, his break-point chip return diving off the line and away from Sinner’s racquet. A tough service game later, and he was two sets to the good.
That Dimitrov blew out his pec while hitting an ace to hold for 2–2 in the third set was darkly fitting. Maybe the roof closing after the second set had a bit to do with it—Sinner getting a 15-minute break at just the right time smelled a bit of A-side favoritism—stiffening Dimitrov’s muscles before he had to keep firing serves at upwards of 130 mph. But it felt most likely that he just overextended himself. He’d been reaching back for a bit of extra zip on that serve all day to keep Sinner’s bruising returns at bay. The price of two sets and change of pristine serving might be a little extra give in the muscles, or a lot, at the worst possible time. Dimitrov needed to lift his right arm with his left to shake hands with Sinner; hitting another ball was out of the question.
It was Dimitrov’s fifth straight exit from a major via injury. As if the notion that his near career-best form was irrelevant because his body couldn’t sustain the force of playing it wasn’t dispiriting enough, his momentum cratered as well. He didn’t come back until the Paris Masters, won one match, then pulled out of that tournament, too. He lost nine of his next 11 matches, including one from a set up in the first round of Roland-Garros qualifying. Under a year on from having the best player in the world on the ropes deep in a major, Dimitrov couldn’t even crack a main draw.
Wimbledon simultaneously stood as the site of his trauma and a sorely needed opportunity. With his ranking already having tumbled out of the top 100, his fourth-round points from SW19 in 2025 peeling off as well would feel like a fatal blow to his career. Grigor finally strung together a couple wins in Mallorca before losing to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina—who went on to win the title!—but there was little reason to expect much from him on the London lawns.
A well-spent wild card vaulted Dimitrov into the main draw, where he dismissed Dave Sweeny in his opening match. But his fortunes figured to end against Jakub Mensik. Arguably the most dangerous server in the draw, Mensik’s delivery would scorch frightening shapes in the grass, hell for a one-handed backhand to return. He’d be even more dangerous here than at Roland-Garros, where he made the semifinals.
Somehow, Dimitrov found his 2025 form when he needed it most. It must have taken so much will—he admitted to some trauma after the pec injury this week, haunted by uncertainty over whether the first hard swat of a ball would send the muscle hurtling back into distress. His scything backhand slice exposed Mensik’s forehand as the horrid, limp shot it can be at its worst. He filled the highlight reel with crafty passing shots and inspired volleys. (If only tennis reinvented itself into the short-court game, where you can hit only touch shots, Dimitrov would be number one—or two, behind Carlos Alcaraz.) He even outserved Mensik: He made first serves at a lower rate and produced 10 aces to his opponent’s 31, but won 74.8 percent of his first-serve points to Mensik’s 72.8 percent. It wasn’t even close on the second serve.
I’ve watched the match point five times already. It’s an even rally, both guys trying harder to avoid being attacked than attack themselves. Then Dimitrov directs his backhand slice crosscourt. Grigor’s chop is one of the best few of all time, and Mensik couldn’t match it. He sliced low and short, the ball landing around the T. It would have been easy to just chip back under the tension of match point, to accept the gift and return it. But it was also, to the willing, attackable. Dimitrov pounced on it, clubbing a deep, cutting forehand to the right corner that gave Mensik no chance to reach the ball. The winner required courage from Dimitrov, but also permission to feel the joy he’d been denied for a full sweep of the calendar. I’m not in the business of insulting my readers, but if any of you watched him leap with pride and pump his arms and didn’t crack a smile on instinct, there’s no chisel incisive enough to deice your heart.
From the bird’s-eye view, Grigor’s career is one of almosts. He almost won the 2017 Australian Open semifinal over Rafael Nadal, his blistering performance carrying him to two break points at 4–3 in the fifth set before Nadal lit up even more brightly. He almost took Novak Djokovic to five in the 2014 Wimbledon semifinal; he had three straight in the tiebreak there before Djokovic beckoned reality back in. He almost won the Miami Open in 2024 but had to play Jannik Sinner right after he annihilated Carlos Alcaraz. Look back at his 2019 US Open quarterfinal against Roger Federer, and it’s surprising Fed was the one who came down with a back injury and lost 6–2 in the fifth. He’s almost a great tennis player, one tick of easy power and serve precision away, but has to work a bit too hard for his successes.
It’s thanks to these deficiencies that—despite his perfectly impressive career, his dating history and conventionally good looks, the fact that everybody on both tours seems to not only like him but love him (Mensik smiled as widely as Dimitrov did at the net after losing to him!)—Grigor Dimitrov is among the most lovable underdogs in tennis. After ruining his pec against Sinner, in the immediate aftermath as he writhed on the ground, Dimitrov actually grinned. It might have been a smile of shock—man, this hurts—but I wonder if he was marveling at his own bad luck. His late career has had its share of tragedies, more than. Yet his win over Mensik made me reconsider these past few years, and that won’t change even if he reinjures himself against Matteo Berrettini next round. Almost may not be what you want, but if you can find enough joy and brilliance on your way to the word as Dimitrov has, it can’t be such a sad thing after all.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Don't Sleep On Matteo Berrettini
A Wimbledon Wild Card
A Wimbledon Wild Card
Few players have Matteo Berrettini's pedigree on the turf.
Few players have Matteo Berrettini's pedigree on the turf.
By Giri Nathan
June 26, 2026
How you doin'? // Getty
How you doin'? // Getty
Quick: I am a former Wimbledon finalist who is unseeded in this year’s men’s singles draw, and I’m a name to keep an eye on. Who am I?
Nick Kyrgios? No chance, he didn’t get a wild card to Wimbledon, and, despite beginning his triumphant return to tour with a rare singles win (against Corentin Moutet (on grass)), he appears to be out again with injury, further challenging the tenuous notion that he is an active tennis player. No need to keep an eye here. Keep thinking.
Marin Cilic? Yes, even at age 37, he was 38th on the entry list for the tournament, which is quite impressive, and he is defending a ton of points here, since he pulled off that mighty upset of Jack Draper last year on his way to the fourth round. Shout-out to Marin Cilic, still playing solid tennis as all his contemporaries announce their retirements. But he’s not the one I had in mind either. Keep guessing.
Matteo Berrettini? That’s the one.
Given the narrative chaos of Roland-Garros, it was easy to lose sight of this storyline, but let’s look back at what happened with the 30-year-old Italian, whose promising career appeared to have been blown up by a succession of injuries. He hadn’t played Roland-Garros for five years heading into this year’s tournament. Though he was more or less back to playing a normal tour schedule again, he still hadn’t had a statement win in over a year, unless you’re willing to count his 6–0, 6–0 victory over Daniil Medvedev in Madrid, which was more a statement on the comical psychological depths to which Meddy can descend rather than the quality of Berrettini’s tennis. And it had been a long time since Berrettini had made much noise at a major tournament, specifically.
But that is what he did in Paris. He won match after match—some of them easy, like his straight-set victory over No. 22 seed Arthur Rinderknech, and some of them tricky, like his match against Francisco Comesana, an emotional and physical gauntlet that culminated in a fifth-set tiebreak. Berrettini had to play for five hours and save two match points before getting over the line. Then came another win, over Juan Manuel Cerundolo (who had upset top seed Jannik Sinner, or had at least stood there while Sinner’s severe cramps did the work). And then Berrettini was euphoric, speaking with great emotion about how tennis was “the love of my life,” and what it was like to forge on through all the injuries, and so on. With that victory Berrettini secured a place in the quarterfinal, his first time going that deep at any major since 2022. And at No. 105, he was also the tournament’s lowest-ranked quarterfinalist in 19 years.
That quarterfinal wound up being a duel between two Italian Matteos, with Arnaldi across the net. Berrettini began to struggle with pain at the end of the competitive first set, then slowed down in the second set, took an injury time-out off court, and ultimately retired from the match, having decided that it was a pain in his left hip he had never felt before. Thus his inspired run came to a frustrating, anticlimactic end. But even so, the tournament still lent itself to a positive spin: His body held up to grueling clay rallies and multiple best-of-five match wins in a single week’s span. I wasn’t sure he’d ever be sturdy enough to handle either of those things again. After the retirement he shared that medical evaluations showed no significant muscle injuries. And now, despite resting up through the grass warm-ups, he’s been practicing at Wimbledon, looking healthy again.
And as we enter the grass-court major, it’s worth remembering what a talent Berrettini is on this surface, where he has won four titles. Arguably no other player on tour combines these disparate elements: one of the tour’s biggest serves plus a world-class backhand slice. So in a world of low bounces, he can rack up the aces and also keep the rally balls at roughly shin height for his unhappy opponents.
Unlike last year, when he was the No. 32 seed (and still got upset in the first round), this year he will not enjoy the protection of seeding. But the field isn’t that scary, there are few players out there with his pedigree on the turf, and so long as he dodges the absolute scariest names in his opening round, he should be able to make a run. Look out for more signs of life in a career once presumed dead.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Fatal Flaws
Fatal Flaws
Fatal Flaws
Aryna Sabalenka’s yips are beginning to exert gravity over the rest of her game.
Aryna Sabalenka’s yips are beginning to exert gravity over the rest of her game.
By Owen Lewis
Jun 23, 2026
Aryna Sabalenka wilts in Berlin. // Getty
Aryna Sabalenka wilts in Berlin. // Getty
I’ve been watching Breaking Bad lately, which, as of early in the third season, seems to be a show about people doomed to die at the feet of their worst instincts. Though the fates of the protagonists are easy enough to guess, their slide into oblivion is studded with teases that they might divert toward salvation instead. One character passes up a museum date with his girlfriend in Santa Fe for a marathon meth-cooking session in the desert; he nearly ends up dying when his RV runs out of fuel. He agonizes over the mistake, but it doesn’t stop him from making plenty of similar ones over ensuing episodes. Though hopefully under less dire circumstances, I think we all know the feeling. You succumb to your vices—TV over homework, drugs over food, self over others—because it feels natural, not too different from a limb or a limp. For the characters, that the dark parts of their nature will ruin their day or week or maybe life is irrelevant next to the need to quiet their soul. They know it, I know it, and the moments that hint at them outgrowing their fates are the most frustrating parts of the show because they’re always followed by assurance that they won’t.
Naturally, the show made me think of Aryna Sabalenka.
There shouldn’t be much left to say about the world No. 1, who has maintained altitude atop the tour for 88 weeks in a row. She has a near-perfect baseline game with ground strokes immaculately poised between savagery and safety; nifty drop shots and volleys; more-than-sufficient defense; destructive returning. She also wears the groaning burden of self-sabotage, against which her immense talent fights endless battles. For years I’ve been able to see a projection of Sabalenka’s talent winning out and piloting her to the glorious land of double-digit major titles. I can see it so clearly. Then she disappears in another deciding set and makes me remember that she is who she is.
After Saturday’s 6–4, 6–7 (4), 6–0 loss to Jessica Pegula in the semifinals of the Berlin Open, Sabalenka didn’t show up to press. Though she’ll earn a fine, maybe some more jabs for being a sore loser, it’s for the best. How many thinly veiled therapy sessions with the fatally flawed, increasingly nihilistic world No. 1 can any of us take? An intrepid dictionary editor should commission Sabalenka to redefine “rock bottom” for all their future editions, because each time we think Aryna has suffered the roughest loss imaginable, she plunges to a new depth. Long iconic for her blown leads in late-round matches, Sabalenka burned a 6–2, 4–1 lead over Diana Shnaider in the Roland-Garros quarterfinals last month and ate a third-set bagel. (Her defeat from six match points up against Hailey Baptiste in Madrid barely registers at this point.) We don’t need yet another fraught group Q&A session for Sabalenka to tell us why the 6–0 disaster repeated itself against Pegula: For the first time in years, her implosions are outrunning her resilience.
The bagel sets didn’t look like catastrophes at first. In both of them, Sabalenka had chances to hold serve at 0–1. When she lost to Shnaider, she said she never recovered from her collapse in the second set. But against Pegula, Sabalenka entered the decider with momentum, taking set 2 with a kick of three straight forehand winners. And still, the eventual result was the same. At 0–3 in the third set in Berlin, Sabalenka began a must-win service game by missing a half volley. Afterward, she looked like she was on the verge of tears, completely vacant of her typical competitive rage. Pegula must have smelled blood from the tiger across the net chewing off her own paw in misery. In the 2025 US Open semifinal, Pegula outplayed Sabalenka in the deciding set, losing just four points on serve. The patient, steely version of Aryna that turned those four points into a decisive break, while fending off constant pressure on return, feels dormant. The one that won the Indian Wells final from match point down, that I thought might have found a breakthrough? Maybe it was just a stick shooting.
Sabalenka’s style oozes superiority in composition and effect. Her shots are just plain better than anybody else’s, but the way she plays is telling, too. She wants to attack, all the time. Anytime her opponent hits a winner, they’ve shown unforgivable audacity. I hit the winners, not you. The idea of a neutral rally, or trying to junkball an opponent out of the zone they’ve found themselves in, is alien, unnecessary. The way to overcome playing badly is to play better, because when she plays better she wins.
She is correct enough of the time to be a four-time major winner and a surefire Hall of Famer, and to make every major quarterfinal in sight. But it comes at the cost of losing in the same tragicomic way, again and again, with a trail of if-onlys leading up to every lost match point. The margins in best-of-three are small. Her peers are talented, and the ball takes funny bounces. (Like all those net cords that went Pegula’s way in Berlin.) Sabalenka plays with little respect for the opponent—and I don’t mean that in the concern-trolly way, that when she takes a loss gracelessly in a sport practically designed to force the ugliest emotions out of its participants, she’s committing some sort of crime against decorum. It’s simpler than that: She doesn’t believe her opponents can beat her, and in her fidelity to that belief she inadvertently ends up helping them do just that. Sabalenka should get a drink with Iga Swiatek, who continues to search for sanctuary in errant ball-bashing when a match isn’t going her way. If they can’t help each other, maybe they can harmonize on the agony of identical, avoidable losses.
Sabalenka’s efforts to escape this part of her game have seen her find various answers from others and within, not to mention a level of tennis only a couple dozen players in history can match. None of it has been an adequate fix. Sometimes a flaw is deep enough to be immune to erasure, or absorption into the parts of somebody that they like. If anything, Sabalenka’s yips are beginning to exert gravity over the rest of her game. The idea of her game curdling like Walter White’s home life is terrifying, but real. There’s nothing for her to do but keep trying to resist the pull of the void.