Talent is the Armor That Protects Aryna Sabalenka
Demons
Demons
Talent is the armor that protects Aryna Sabalenka.
Talent is the armor that protects Aryna Sabalenka.
By Owen Lewis
March 25, 2026
David Bartholow
David Bartholow
In her press conference after losing the Australian Open final in January, Aryna Sabalenka couldn’t stop laughing. She was angry after losing to Madison Keys in the same match a year earlier, annihilating her racquet after match point. Dropping the Roland-Garros final to Coco Gauff in June after hitting 70 unforced errors made her feel something even worse. “Once a year even a stick shoots,” she said, disgustedly, as Elena Rybakina hit her off the court in the championship match of November’s WTA Finals. When my friends and I talk about who we think will win a tournament, I sometimes say, “Whoever plays Sabalenka in the final.” By the time Rybakina beat Sabalenka again in Melbourne this year—Aryna won five straight games to go up 3–0 in the third set; she had the match sewn up—there seemed to be no new negative emotions for Aryna to feel. Her laughter was regretful, dark, fatalistic, but still. The best player in the world’s inability to close out a tournament had become comedic.
Had Sabalenka fallen short yet again in the Indian Wells final, watching her press conference would have felt intrusive. “I’m so done losing these big finals,” she had said earlier in the week; when I read the quote, I figured it’d been said partially in jest, but Sabalenka didn’t have a trace of humor in her voice. She’d already cycled through—hell, maybe invented—the five stages of grief in top-level tennis: fury, heartbreak, confusion, rationalization, and nihilistic laughter. Some untold horror awaited her if she lost once more.
It looked imminent at a number of moments in the Indian Wells final, a Rybakina rematch. The matchup between the current two best players in the world is an odd one. Rybakina gives Sabalenka hell every time but tends to bleed faster when a match grows teeth, so she often loses in three sets if she can’t win in two. Rybakina breezed through the first set and went up an early break in the second before beginning to fade. She lost serve at 1–1 in the decider despite going up 40–love—something that should never happen given her top-flight serve, but it’s somehow unsurprising when she drifts into the ghostly background of one of her own matches. Not without difficulty, Sabalenka maintained the break throughout the set and served for the match at 5–4.
Of how many dominant No. 1-ranked players in history can you expect failure in that situation, and be right? Sabalenka only won one point in the game. But even I didn’t bargain for the three second-serve return errors she missed at break point up in the following game. This was the Australian Open final again, but magnified, each vital mistake she made there reproduced here in sharper and more agonizing color.
Sabalenka’s vices and virtues collided in a deciding-set tiebreak. Since the start of 2025, she has demonstrated a confusing excellence in breakers. You’d think a player so susceptible to the pressure of late-round matches would come apart in the emotional horror movie of a first-to-seven, win by two. But it’s as if the proximity of the finish line, even if she’s not first over it, frees Sabalenka from her demons. She won 19 straight tiebreaks in 2025. Here, she and Rybakina exquisitely teetered their way to five–all, at which point Elena thrashed a backhand winner down the line, giving her a match point on serve.
In the same situation in Melbourne, Rybakina hit an ace, then celebrated her career-defining triumph as if she’d unexpectedly found a quarter in her pocket. This time, her first serve was more tentative, landing closer to the middle of the box. Sabalenka returned it with authority, then, on her next shot, lashed a backhand winner at an acute crosscourt angle. It spent approximately a millisecond in my field of vision and felt like it cleared the net by a fly’s wing. It was an even braver backhand than Rybakina had just hit, struck under even more pressure. When Sabalenka had a match point of her own, she went for broke on the serve. Rybakina’s return sailed long. Sabalenka wept at the sky and clutched the air hard, as if seizing something ephemeral suddenly made tangible.
I am consistently floored by how good Sabalenka is. On a tour including Rybakina, Gauff, Iga Swiatek, Amanda Anisimova, and a fleet of other high-ceiling challengers, Sabalenka is a clear class above everybody and has been for 75 weeks and counting. Teenage terrors Victoria Mboko and Iva Jovic are already scaling the rankings; Sabalenka played both at the Australian Open and didn’t drop a set. She hasn’t missed a major quarterfinal since 2022, hasn’t lost in straight sets at a major since 2020, and has been in 12 of the last 14 major semifinals (of the two missing, she didn’t play one tournament and got sick in another). Most of her records are on hard court, but she’s a two-time Wimbledon semifinalist (and had to skip the tournament in 2022 and 2024) and a three-time Madrid champion, and she ended Swiatek’s 26-match winning streak at Roland-Garros by bageling her in the third set. Though her accomplishments haven’t yet caught up to Swiatek’s, Sabalenka feels like the defining player of the generation.
As I write this, Martina Navratilova just cried, “Queen Aryna!” on Tennis Channel at a successful Sabalenka serve-and-volley. Sabalenka has a drop shot in her arsenal, a net game. She hits sharp angles on both forehand and backhand as well as big blasts through the middle of the court. The strength of her second-serve return alone is enough to win many matches. Her defense, once a nonfactor in her game, is now yet another weapon. Sabalenka has yet to drop a set in Miami. Rybakina is making something of a challenge for the No. 1 ranking (she’s still more than 3,000 points behind), thanks to making three big finals in a row over the course of a few months. Sabalenka has been similarly reliable in getting to finals over the course of years.
And still, that vulnerability in those finals. She is incredibly susceptible to the chaos and anxiety wrought by a tennis match. In that way, her talent is an armor that protects her from the nerves. She’s bolstered it in every imaginable area.
But sometimes, that armor fails. The pressure of a final pierces it, or an opponent can match her on a given day. On those occasions, Sabalenka has to meet the moment with nothing but herself. It’s still when she’s most beatable, but Indian Wells proved it can also see her at her most spectacular.
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Peak Medvedev is Back
Medheads, Rejoice
Medheads, Rejoice
We are now re-entering an era of Peak Medvedev.
We are now re-entering an era of Peak Medvedev.
By Giri Nathan
March 20, 2026
Photo by David Bartholow.
Photo by David Bartholow.
Sometimes I compile a wish list at the start of the tennis season. I forgot to do it this year, but if I had, at the top would have been a Daniil Medvedev resurgence. Not that I would have written it down without any sheepishness. As much as I believe in his peculiar game, more than I believe in anyone else’s game in the rapidly obsoleting ’90s-born generation, the case for Medvedev’s relevance was getting shakier by the day. His 2025 season was a wasteland. His trademark on-court meltdowns continued at the usual rate, but he forgot to counterbalance them with the actual match wins. Not much fun when those proportions are off
I found myself in too many conversations where I insisted, “He’s the only guy that has recent wins over both of them at Slams,” only for the months to keep on passing by, such that a 2023 US Open win over Carlos Alcaraz and a 2024 Wimbledon win over Jannik Sinner got harder and harder to hang an argument on. And in the interim, Novak Djokovic took over as the guy with the most recent wins over both of them at Slams. Plus, Medvedev was entering his 30s, while the two boy-kings of the tour were barely into their 20s. Why exactly were anyone but his dead-end obsessives supposed to care about the man who won the 2021 US Open and reached world No. 1 in 2022, but in the meantime lost his potent serve and spent years attributing his decline to shoddier manufacturing of the tennis ball?
But Medvedev shook things up at the end of last year, splitting with longtime coach Gilles Cervara, replacing him with Thomas Johansson and Rohan Goetzke. Almost immediately he won a 250-level title in Kazakhstan, a sole bright spot at the end of a dim season. Then he started the 2026 season with two more early titles: a 250-level in Brisbane and a 500-level in Dubai. Though a fresh war severely complicated Medvedev’s travel plans—Dubai to Oman to Istanbul to Los Angeles was his eventual solution—he did make it to Indian Wells in time to compete in the year’s first 1000-level event. He had match momentum, and perhaps more important, the environment had been tweaked to his liking. The Indian Wells hard courts, known for being the slowest on tour—so slow that Medvedev complained in 2023, “I’m a specialist on hard court. This is not hard court”—sped up appreciably this year. That meant it would be easier to finish points, and given his persistent complaint that it is impossible to hit a winner on tour anymore without Sincaraz-level power, it would be a welcome change.
And Medvedev thrived. From Dubai through the first four matches at Indian Wells, he won 16 consecutive sets. His serve was big and accurate again, reminiscent of his peak years. And he’d managed to inject some much-needed pace back into his ground strokes. The core magic of Medvedev’s game is the infuriating trajectory of his ball through the air, and after the bounce—a flat, low projectile that cannot easily be attacked—but some extra pace and placement make him even more dangerous still. While Medvedev over the past few seasons had taken on the reputation of a defensive player prone to low-powered shots and lengthy rallies, it was fascinating to hear how differently he conceives of his own game. As he put it after his fourth-round win:
When I’m in confidence, I’m an aggressive player. If you look, like, the Grand Slam matches when I was making finals, I’ll play, like, Rublev or Felix, the guys you cannot be more aggressive than them, but I would hit more winners than them, because I would be great in defense to try to reduce their winners, but whenever I had opportunity, I could move in.
So of course when I’m a bit playing worse, that’s where I become defensive, but it’s not by choice, it’s more by when I’m playing not great, my shot power and everything drops a bit down, the percentage of the serve, et cetera.
So when I’m hitting the ball the way I hit now, I can be aggressive and can put a lot of pressure on my opponents and still being able to be great in defense, and that’s what makes it tough.
With that renewed aggression he restored a vision of peak Medvedev: the one who rattles off quick, unreturnable serves, barely pausing between points, holds, and then sinks deep behind the baseline, where he can put a lot of returns into play and stretch out the resulting rallies. Short and easy service games for him, long and excruciating service games for you—that’s how he looks when everything is clicking.
The Medvedev who took out Jack Draper in the quarterfinal looked like that. And the one who went on to upset Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinal, 6–3, 7–6(3), looked even more confident still. Sixteen matches into the season, Alcaraz finally lost his first match of 2026, and said afterward, “I have never seen Daniil playing like this.” The Medvedev forehand in particular was struck with a conviction I hadn’t seen since that win over Alcaraz in New York back in 2023. Since that day, he’d lost four matches in a row to the Spaniard, and this match in Indian Wells could have started turning in that direction when Alcaraz lined up two set points at 5–4 in the second. But Medvedev held his ground. He has internalized that he cannot win this matchup without taking slightly bigger risks and playing closer to the lines; any passivity can be punished by Alcaraz’s ability to end points at will, with his infinite menu of options. But Medvedev managed to reverse his fortunes against a player who had seemingly surpassed him for good.
The other player who fits that descriptor, Jannik Sinner, awaited Medvedev in the final. If Medvedev wanted to capture the last 1000-level hard-court title that still eludes him, he would have to consecutively beat the two players that no one else can manage to beat even once. (It might’ve been roughly comparable to David Nalbandian reeling off consecutive victories over the Big Three to win Madrid back in 2007.) Sinner had won their last three meetings since the upset at Wimbledon 2024, and he is the rare player on tour who does not fear backhand-to-backhand battles against Medvedev. It was a brilliant battle, a stress test of the renovations to Medvedev’s game, and, despite some real chances, a narrow loss, 7–6(6), 7–6(4). On the strength of the past few months, however, Medvedev reenters the top 10. He has very few points to defend the rest of the year and has shown that he can still hang with the untouchable duo at the top of the tour, despite using tools quite different from their ultra power and spin. I second Sinner’s post-match assessment: “I do believe that tennis needs him. He’s a very unique style of playing. Seeing him back at this level, it’s great.”
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The Great Outdoors
New Balance and Tommy Paul Go Outdoors
New Balance and Tommy Paul Go Outdoors
By Tim Newcomb
March 18, 2026
Image courtesy of New Balance.
Images courtesy of New Balance.
Tommy Paul, laid-back on an airboat, whipping through the Everglades: That’s the look New Balance is channeling with the release of a new special player edition CT-Rally v2 “Outdoor Court,” created alongside Paul and ready for the Miami Open courts.
The performance sneaker from the Boston-based brand has a true outdoor twist with a Realtree camo pattern reminiscent of Paul’s off-court lifestyle preferences, such as downtime spent on his family’s south New Jersey farm or in the wetlands of South Florida.
“Some of my favorite hours are spent outside, before sunrise,” Paul says. “I grew up working around the farm, tending to animals and fishing. These simple moments inspire and ground me, and creating a shoe that allows me to share my connection to nature on the court is truly special.”
The Outdoor Court version of one of New Balance’s most popular performance tennis sneakers is not exclusive to Paul and hits the retail market March 18. The version features the Realtree Edge camouflage pattern—one with a woodsy mix of browns, grays, and neutral tones—contrasted with an “electric blaze orange” New Balance logo. This is the first time Realtree camo has adorned a performance tennis shoe. The special edition retains the performance attributes of the Fresh Foam X cushioned model.
“The CT-Rally v2 Outdoor Court edition shares Tommy’s life in a way no other shoe could—reflecting his unique blend of grit, calm, and competitive drive,” says Josh Wilder, New Balance senior product manager. “We worked closely with Tommy to capture his connection to the outdoors and translate that into a design that feels original, personal, and truly unique in the tennis world.”
Image courtesy of New Balance
Images courtesy of New Balance.
Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.
SIGN UP — YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR SECOND SERVE.
SIGN UP — YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR SECOND SERVE.
Jack Draper Reminds Us How Good He Is
A Loud Return
A Loud Return
Jack Draper reminds us how good he is.
Jack Draper reminds us how good he is.
By Giri Nathan
March 13, 2026
Photo by David Bartholow.
Photo by David Bartholow.
Eight months of no Jack Draper made it easy to forget that he is, in fact, the defending champion at Indian Wells. But if ever there were a way to remind the world that you exist, it is winning a comically high-level epic over Novak Djokovic in just your second tournament back from injury. Draper’s run in the desert ended in the quarterfinals, but the 24-year-old’s return to tour was loud and intriguing. Any fans concerned about the competitive balance of the ATP should be relieved to see this big-serving lefty with the weapons to at least make life difficult for the duopoly at the top and, evidently, to defeat the elder Djokovic just trailing them.
This time last year Draper was emerging as one of the best players of this early-20s cohort, and then just one of the best players in the world. After the Indian Wells title, he enjoyed the best clay stretch of his career: runner-up at Madrid, quarters in Rome, fourth round at Roland-Garros. He got as high as world No. 4. But injuries have always intervened in his career, and during the clay season his left arm began to act up. He said he felt his arm “shutting down a little bit” when hitting his forehands and serves. Pain increased in the grass season. The diagnosis was a bone bruise on the humerus of that left arm. He skipped the summer hard-court events and even took a full month off hitting serves in practice. But he did arrive at the US Open to win one match and then withdraw. That ended his season for good. Just as he seemed to be ascending, he was grounded again.
After a late withdrawal from the Australian Open, Draper finally returned to competition in February, having played just one match in the previous eight months. During his time off he made one adjustment to his scalp (buzz cut) and two adjustments to his game, both with the intention of protecting his body, as he told Chris Eubanks on Tennis Channel. First change: changing his serve from a pinpoint to a platform stance—meaning he no longer drags his back foot up to meet the front foot, but rather keeps them spaced out, which gives him a more stable base (though he didn’t speak to its impact on his arm specifically). Second change: stringing his racquet with gut in the mains, because while gut doesn’t have the spin potential of poly strings, it is softer on the body, transferring less vibration to the arm.
Considering the length of his layoff and the novelty of these changes, it was surprising to see him play so well. There’s very little missing in his game. That well-roundedness makes sense when you consider his origin story: Draper hit his growth spurt late and grew up winning tennis matches without the benefit of the huge serve he would later acquire. He backs up that serve with general athleticism and elite ground strokes, qualities that explain why he is the rare elite server who is also elite on return: Over the past year he is fifth in percentage of service points won, and ninth in percentage of return points won, per Tennis Abstract. His contemporaries Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz are too good on both sides of the ball to be threatened by a one-dimensional player—not sure I’ll believe in the Ben Shelton threat until he can improve on being the worst returner in the top 50, for example—but Draper has a little bit of everything. (Some trivia: He is the rare player in their cohort to have beaten both players, both times at Queen’s Club, with an upset over defending champ Alcaraz in 2024 and a defeat of an admittedly embryonic Sinner in 2021.)
Draper’s all-around talent was plain to see in his fourth-round match against Novak Djokovic, who continues to play supreme tennis and will presumably continue to do so until stopped by boredom or nuclear winter. It was easily one of the matches of the season, culminating in a brutal, astonishing third set. Come for the crazed rallies like this one with the double lob; stay for the many post-rally shots of Djokovic laboring on all fours as if with child. Which brings me to a related point: How surreal is it that we rarely see an opponent manage to take away Djokovic’s legs, even though those opponents tend to be more than a decade younger than him? This is a testament to his still-incredible fitness, of course. But someone’s got to be up to the task. Draper’s shot tolerance and endurance allowed him to go toe-to-toe for long rallies, then press the pain button with well-timed drop shots. Djokovic later admitted that the exertion in that double-lob rally “cost me a break” two games later. He still managed to break back to survive at 5–4, because Djokovic must always be killed multiple times over, but Draper finished the task in a deciding tiebreak. (Which was so thrilling that Tim Henman apparently forgot his neutral role as Sky Sports commentator and delivered some kind of pep talk to his young countryman. So funny.)
Frankly, I’d forgotten just how good this tennis player he was. The backhand might be an obvious thing to appreciate in a lefty, because it is a prerequisite for having made it this far in the sport, but the Draper backhand really did everything he asked of it in this match: absorbing pace, generating pace of his own, abruptly changing direction, landing the coup de grâce on match point. That he delivered such a strong performance this early in his return bodes well for the season ahead. It was hard to imagine anyone bouncing back from that effort so quickly, and he lost Thursday’s quarterfinal against an in-form Daniil Medvedev. With some good health, though, Draper should be back inside the top 10 soon, and trying to steal a big title in the world of wall-to-wall Sincaraz. Just stay locked in, Jack—it’s not a crime.
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Give Mirra Andreeva a Break
The Discourse
The Discourse
Give Mirra Andreeva a break.
Give Mirra Andreeva a break.
By Owen Lewis
March 12, 2026
Mirra Andreeva puts a dollar in the swear jar. // Getty
Mirra Andreeva puts a dollar in the swear jar. // Getty
Mirra Andreeva left us with too many things to talk about from her loss to Katerina Siniakova at Indian Wells on Monday. On her way off the court, she shouted, “Fuck you all!” to the crowd, twice, which, on top of some other tantrums, has left the general viewership with the impression that she is a brat. She also fell short in her title defense, knocking her down a few spots in the rankings, out of the top eight and below fellow teenager Victoria Mboko. (Impression: Is Andreeva being leapfrogged? Did she fail to make the most of her form when she was the premier teenager on tour?) She went seven for 26 on break points, decelerating on her forehand on many of them in a way that reminded me, unfortunately, of Alexander Zverev. (Will this last forever, and if it does, how can she compete with clutch rivals who go big?) Andreeva chucked two racquets during the match. She punched herself in the leg, hard, three times. (Is she the WTA’s Andrey Rublev?) Every errant swipe on a standard ground stroke seemed to be Conchita Martinez’s fault. (When will she take responsibility for her shortcomings?) She’s won just one title since her triumph in the desert last year. Her world-beating form from back then is a distant enough memory that, if you wanted to, you could convince yourself it was an anomaly. (Was it?) In positive news, a fan literally clutching her pearls in reaction to Andreeva’s postmatch profanities will be GIF’d for generations.
It’s a bit hard to tell the difference these days between critical analysis of a loss and sweeping, premature predictions. Between tournaments in February, what felt like every tennis outlet and pundit spent some time meditating on Jannik Sinner’s slump; specifically, losses to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open and Jakub Mensik in Doha. Two losses! The possibility that Sinner just had a bad February must not have been a sexy enough podcast segment. According to this discourse, Carlos Alcaraz—14–0 in 2026 so far, and leading Sinner in major titles 7–4—is beginning to pull away. I suppose Alcaraz will indeed be pulling away if he wins Roland-Garros, and he won’t be if Sinner wins it. All we have to do is wait to find out, except that none of us are capable of waiting for anything anymore.
This is especially bad news for Andreeva, 18, a prodigy since forever but not yet a major champion. Her fallow stretch has been longer than Sinner’s but pockmarked with enough spots of brilliance to not be symptomatic of overhype. Look, it’s fun to be correct. It’s even more fun to be correct first, especially about a prodigy whose peak lies undiscovered in a haze way up in the sky. The trouble is that between YouTube, Reddit, and Nazified Twitter (please delete your accounts, friends), millions of people are constantly posting opinions from sensible to outlandish. To be correct first, you almost have to egregiously overreact to a seemingly innocent result. In pursuit of The Take, I’ve seen people online compare Alcaraz to Lleyton Hewitt (back when he had only two majors and went without a title between Wimbledon in 2023 and Indian Wells in 2024). Joao Fonseca has swung from “future No. 1” to “overhyped” to “so many people think he’s overhyped that he’s now underhyped.” Expect the pendulum to swing all the way back to where it started if Fonseca can sustain the level he produced against Sinner in a 7–6, 7–6 loss on Tuesday. Abandoning our opinions at the drop of a hat seems antithetical to the point of following sports; a player you rate having a disappointing series of results should disappoint us, not persuade us to reevaluate them until their results no longer register emotionally.
So, Andreeva. She’s 18! Every Roger Federer origin story begins by detailing his whiny, belligerent temperament on court in his youth, so there is at least a chance Andreeva grows out of this, rather than going down Nick Kyrgios Boulevard. She’ll certainly define her career in her 20s. While I do not recommend telling thousands of people who paid money to watch you play, “Fuck you all,” I also think it’s silly to pretend that she isn’t living an outrageously stressful life and isn’t old enough to have found her footing yet. Professional sports tend to make its participants crash out: See 29-year-old Celtic Jaylen Brown this week, or approximately 1,000 other recent examples. 18 is a difficult age, when emotions have jagged edges and don’t yet fit together quite the way they feel like they should; you feel separated from happiness by just a bit of experience and wisdom, if only you knew what you needed to endure and learn. Assuming that fame does not wipe away all those difficulties, I am advocating that any article or podcast captioned “What’s Going On With Mirra Andreeva?” be banished from the disintegrating internet.
Another factor, I think, is that we tend to expect players to be at their best all the time, and are disappointed when they aren’t. (We also criticize players when they’re anything less than smiley and wavey on one of the worst days of their professional lives; see Sabalenka, Aryna after last year’s final of Garros, Roland.) We all know that tennis is a game of errors, that no two shots are the same, that players aren’t truly at their best more than a couple times in a season. But at least for me, that doesn’t erase the visceral letdown when a player with a great forehand gets a look at a mid-court ball and either whacks it into the net or hits a nothing shot. So the reaction to Iga Swiatek’s demolition of Karolina Muchova on Wednesday figures to sway closer to “Iga is BACK” than “Wow, that’s the best Iga has looked in a few months.” Every reaction is vindication of an opinion, or a trend, or a previous version of a player. Players and matches are constantly defined in relation to other things and are not allowed to establish themselves as unique.
Between advanced stats, immediately accessible press conferences, and an atomized, omnipresent media environment, there’s more information about tennis players available now than ever. Ironically, we often arrive at wildly irresponsible conclusions from that information. (Did this suddenly turn into a politics blog? Who can say?) Maybe there is a result out there so damning to be seriously concerned about a prodigy, but a very young adult lashing out under intense pressure isn’t it.
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A Backhanded Compliment
A Backhanded Compliment
A Backhanded Compliment
In celebration of Lilli Tagger's epic one-hander.
In celebration of Lilli Tagger's epic one-hander.
By Giri Nathan
March 6, 2026
Lilly rips one during the girls French Open final last year. // Getty
Lilly rips one during the girls French Open final last year. // Getty
Has your enjoyment of professional tennis suffered because you can no longer find an Austrian who rips a ferocious one-handed backhand? We might have your Dominic Thiem replacement right here. Lilli Tagger, the 18-year-old talent, is that rare case: a promising young player who has opted to subtract one hand from her backhand. And that shift occurred surprisingly late in her tennis development, too. She’s running against the grain of present tennis dogma, which holds that one-handers are too demanding with respect to timing, too vulnerable when returning fast serves, and generally too shaky for the pace and weight of the modern game.
I’ve undergone an evolution in my attitude toward the one-hander. It could be loosely organized into phases. In my childhood: outright enthusiasm, with so many ingenious practitioners, from Justine Henin to Tommy Haas. Then: a decade noticing the one-hander’s many downsides in an evolving game—Rafa surely accelerated its obsolescence—and tiring of people who fetishized it as some aesthetic pinnacle. (There are plenty of other beautiful movements in tennis, relax.) Then a minor panic: Denis Shapovalov is not that dude, some of these supposed one-handers like Diane Parry just slice everything in sight, and the extinction of the topspin drive is a real possibility. By 2026: I’ve come full circle, craving its presence and praising all practitioners of this ancient art, who should be given grants from governments and museums for their feats of cultural preservation. I can’t raise a child in a world without one-handed backhands.
So we celebrate Tagger, who was initially deterred in her quest. “I wanted to switch it when I was 10, but everybody told me, ‘No, you shouldn’t do it, it’s not good for you.’” she told the WTA site last year. “Then when I was 12, I had a bet with my coach, and I told him, ‘Okay, let’s do this. If I win the tournament, I will change. Otherwise, I will never ask you again.’ And I went on to actually win the tournament that week.” This unnamed junior tournament might have been a critical moment for the sport’s technical future. (Also, I’m seeing conflicting reports about whether countryman Dominic Thiem inspired this decision; someone needs to get to the bottom of this.)
After a one-year adjustment period, Tagger, at the late age of 13, had adapted to her new backhand. That was around when she moved from Austria to Italy to advance her training. First she worked with Max Sartori—longtime coach of Andreas Seppi, early believer in a tiny Jannik Sinner—and then with Francesca Schiavone—2010 Roland-Garros champ and a one-hander herself. Tagger has some commonalities with Sinner, having also grown up as a skier just on the other side of the border—she in Austrian East Tyrol, he in Italian South Tyrol—and now she has the same manager as him, too.
Looking at the state of her game, I doubt she has any regrets about making the bold technical change that her coaches discouraged. Tagger, now 6 foot 1, won’t have many issues with the ball kicking high out of her strike zone, and possesses the long levers for big power. That backhand is a point-ending weapon. Early results are impressive. She won the 2025 junior title at Roland-Garros without dropping a set, which brought her some unfamiliar attention, including a congratulations message from Thiem, who did or did not inspire her one-handed backhand. “The first week after Roland-Garros, suddenly everyone wanted to be my best friend. Sometimes I was like, ‘I have never heard of you, but now you want to be my best friend,’” Tagger told the ITF site last summer.
After thriving at the ITF level, particularly on clay courts, Tagger transitioned gracefully into the top tier of tennis. Last November she made her WTA debut at the 250 in Jiujiang, where she was down triple match point in the semifinal and strung together 13(!) straight points to win, thus contending for a title in her very first tour-level event. While she lost that final, she earned enough points to hover right outside the top 150 at season’s end. To kick off 2026, she had a flurry of strong results, celebrated her 18th birthday in February, and earned a wild card into the main draw at Indian Wells. Which is where we find her now: in the second round, after a thorough 6–2, 6–4 defeat of world No. 58 Varvara Gracheva. I suspect it is the last time that Tagger will require a wild card at this tournament, and that the one-hander will persist on those super-slow hard courts for many, many years to come.
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Patrick Mouratoglou: The Provocateur
The Provocateur
The Provocateur
Patrick Mouratoglou is in the wilderness.
Patrick Mouratoglou is in the wilderness.
By Owen Lewis
March 5, 2026
Mouratoglou during the infamous 2018 US Open final. // Getty
Mouratoglou during the infamous 2018 US Open final. // Getty
Where should we start, Patrick Mouratoglou? You escaped much flak for saying, after Simona Halep tested positive for the banned substance roxadustat two years ago and claimed collagen contamination, “I feel responsible for what happened, because it’s my team, so me basically, who brought her this collagen.” More recently, your dubious analysis of the Novak Djokovic–Jannik Sinner Australian Open semifinal invited one Rafa Nadal—a champion so tech-averse that he refers to TikTok as a “young tool”—to dump a few mocking emojis in your comments. A couple days after that, Anna Kalinskaya said on Elina Vesnina’s podcast that your academy’s weight routine didn’t tailor to individuals, so she hurt her back when she trained there, and the injury still flares up on her. Or should we go back to the 2018 US Open final, back when you were coaching Serena Williams? You gestured that she should come to the net, which got her a coaching violation that set into motion the whole disastrous chain of events that unfortunately defined that final and robbed Naomi Osaka of the euphoric moment she deserved. Afterward, you admitted that you were coaching, but took some shots at the rule, as if you’d done nothing wrong. I know a politician who does that.
You once said, “Ten years ago the average age of the tennis fan was 51 years old. Today it’s 61. In 10 years it’s going to be 71,” to help market the inaugural edition of your Ultimate Tennis Showdown, as if the sport wouldn’t gain a single new, young fan in the following decade. (Seems to be doing pretty okay these days.) You refer to yourself in your Instagram bio as “THE COACH,” a stroke of breathtaking hubris that a professional athlete couldn’t match by calling themselves “THE PLAYER” unless their ranking had four digits in it. Your bio also lists the following accomplishments: “10 Grand Slams 🏆2 Olympic 🏅39 Titles 🏆,” as if you’d won them yourself, when in reality the numbers reflect players’ accomplishments while you coached them. Your posts include video shorts of you on podcasts, complete with graphics that pop up as you speak, reminiscent of the aspiringly profitable YouTuber (maybe you should market yourself as THE INFLUENCER); a thumbnail with pictures of Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz that reads “SAME OR DIFFERENT?” with the first and last word in yellow, lest we fail to grasp the emphasis of the all-caps (THE CLICKBAIT ARTIST); and an advertisement “Introducing Mouratoglou Apparel men’s underwear” (THE MODEL).
You once launched an NFT line. You’ve tweeted things like “Novak can tie Serena as the greatest tennis player of all times today,” and “The most difficult match of Novak’s entire career today,” before Djokovic beat Casper Ruud to win his 23rd major title. You have figured out, clearly, that pursuing provocation at the price of substance will net you more clicks, not fewer, from the casual fans, and that even those with standards tend to ignore you, but still treat you like the respected voice when you say something that starts a discussion.
You wear a lot of hats for somebody with a credential as impressive as “used to coach the GOAT.” And frankly, they’re all pretty annoying. They make you look like a quack, or a hack, when probably you have a decent tennis mind. You clearly don’t have enough shame to feel embarrassed about the fact that the quality of your tennis analysis these days isn’t really distinguishable from the YouTube channel Fuzzy Yellow Balls, whose entire shtick is making up names for basic rally patterns.
I have to ask, Patrick—what’s the motivation here? I know running an academy can’t be cheap, but if your financial sense is any better than Floyd Mayweather’s, between all the paychecks you’re cashing from the players you work with, the pretty penny you charge for lessons and camps, and your many other revenue streams, you’re fine for cash. Reputation-wise, surely you’d have fewer Reddit threads trashing you if you just sat back and let your association with so very many excellent tennis players speak for itself. The more skewed, spicy takes you serve up about Sinner and Alcaraz, the more Facebook posts you deliver that reek of AI, the more you’re suggesting that these players have succeeded in spite of you, and that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I must say, I cannot imagine any amount of social media revenue that would make banishing “coached Serena Williams while she won 10 of her 23 major titles” from the forefront of my résumé in favor of “irritating tennis shitposter” worthwhile.
Our society, these days, emphasizes profitability and capitalistic domination and ignores more relatable things like standards, or shame. There are too many examples of people who have stuffed themselves into this mold, making the world a more annoying place to live in doing so. You’re certainly tennis’s chief offender.
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Jessica Pegula Lives For the Grind
Yes She Can
Yes She Can
Interview: Jessica Pegula lives for the grind.
Interview: Jessica Pegula lives for the grind.
By Reem Abulleil
February 26, 2026
J-Peg won her 10th singles title last week in Dubai. // Getty
Jessica Pegula won her 10th singles title last week in Dubai. // Getty
Jessica Pegula is a mystery to many people. Zheng Qinwen, the Chinese tennis star, recently told her during a brief cameo she made in a video Pegula was filming that “in China we say, ‘Why [does] such a rich girl play tennis? Tennis is such a hard sport, why are you not in [that] high-class life?’” Pegula burst into laughter.
The 32-year-old American comes from a wealthy family that owns the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. Zheng’s candid moment in that video posed a question that crosses many people’s minds. It’s notable given her upbringing, however, that Pegula is one of the hardest-working players in tennis. A near-constant fixture among the top five in most matches played and most matches won during the past four seasons, Pegula lives for the grind and rarely complains about it.
She hasn’t lost before the semifinals since before the US Open last summer—that’s seven straight tournaments where she’s made the final four or better. And as she was battling through a tricky draw in Dubai last week en route to her 10th career title, the WTA announced Pegula as the chair of a newly established Tour Architecture Council, dedicated to introducing much-needed reforms to the tennis circuit’s schedule. Pegula has served as a representative on the WTA Player Council for the past six years, and she now has another role to add to her already busy work schedule.
When the announcement landed in my inbox, I had to ask Pegula where she finds the energy for these extracurricular activities, and more important, what’s been motivating her to take on these roles?
“I don’t know. People just ask me to do things, and I tend to say yes to everything,” she told me with her signature mix of nonchalance and deadpan humor. “I don’t really say no very often. I think in a sense, though, I’m pretty laid-back. I don’t get overly stressed very easily. I think because I’m able to manage a lot of things naturally, maybe, with my personality, that it doesn’t quite worry me and stress me out.”
The problematic tour schedule has been a hot topic for years, and players have been particularly critical of it in the past two seasons, ever since the WTA increased the number of mandatory tournaments in 2024.
Pegula and her fellow Player Council representatives have tried in vain to steer the WTA in a different direction, but their recommendations for the calendar have been pretty much falling on deaf ears. As it stands, players are required to compete in four Grand Slams, 10 WTA 1000s, six WTA 500s, and the WTA Finals, if they qualify for it, in a single season.
That mandate is getting harder and harder to fulfill, and players have started to take matters into their own hands by simply not showing up to events. The WTA 1000 in Dubai last week witnessed 24 withdrawals and retirements—including the world’s top two—before and during the tournament.
The idea of this new Tour Architecture Council is to implement necessary changes to the calendar as early as next season. Given her experience on the WTA Player Council, and the lack of action surrounding schedule reform, does Pegula have reason to believe this new committee will be any different?
The answer is: Yes. She says Valerie Camillo, the new WTA chair who was appointed three months ago, wants to make a point of really listening to the players and making a swift and positive impact.
“I think in the past the WTA has been a little bit slow to make some changes. So I think it’s more sending a message that [Valerie] is really committed to it, the council’s really committed to trying to make change,” said Pegula. “I think it’s kind of just a, ‘Hey, we hear you and we’re trying to make a difference here and we’re going to try and do this the best, fastest way possible.’
“I think just having my name there as a top player will kind of help steer that.”
Ultimately, Pegula accepts these behind-the-scenes roles because she believes change is necessary, believes she has the capability of accelerating that change, and believes her laid-back approach makes her a great candidate for the job.
Some people might not get why Pegula does the things she does, but she always has her reasons, even when she feels the masses aren’t necessarily backing her.
“I definitely get the feeling that people don’t want to root for me because it’s not more of like the fairy-tale, Cinderella story, which is fine, and I’m okay with that,” she once told me at the 2022 WTA Finals in Fort Worth.
Recently Pegula started a podcast called The Player’s Box with three of her fellow American tennis players—Madison Keys, Jennifer Brady, and Desirae Krawczyk. Their conversations are unfiltered and give you the sense that you’re part of their WhatsApp group chat, listening in to the random things that happen to them on tour. Pegula feels the podcast has made her and her cohosts more relatable to fans and has allowed them to showcase their personalities.
The video Zheng appeared in was one where Pegula and Krawczyk were tasting and rating an alarming number of the viral Dubai chocolate bars. (Pegula later made sure to clarify they filmed that video pre-tournament, and she was not eating a bunch of chocolates while she was playing, and winning, a tournament.)
It quickly turned into comedy gold when Krawczyk brought up the nickname Chinese fans have given Pegula, “Da fu,” which translates to “Big Rich,” and Zheng dropped that “high-class life” zinger.
I had to get an answer for the Chinese fans wondering why Pegula bothers to play tennis for a living.
“It’s something I’ve loved to do since I was a kid, since before I had anything about my family or money or the teams or stuff like that,” said Pegula. “I wanted to be No. 1 in the world when I was, like, 6 years old. It’s been my dream for as long as I can remember to be No. 1, to be able to play on tour, to be able to win Slams. I mean, it’s pretty cool that I can look back and say that I’m putting myself in contention to do that, living out my dream.”
At 32, Pegula says her source of motivation is making sure she doesn’t feel stagnant and that she continues to improve. She believes in “trying things” and says that drives her even more than victories and titles. She often overwhelms her coaches by throwing at them a million ideas of things they should be working on. They in turn urge her to slow down and tackle things one at a time.
“At the end of the day, are you really challenging yourself as a person and as a competitor and as a tennis player to get better?” she says. “That’s always been my source of motivation.”
Like I said, she always has her reasons.
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Arthur Fils Understands the Assignment
Back on Track
Back on Track
Arthur Fils understands the assignment.
Arthur Fils understands the assignment.
By Carole Bouchard
February 26, 2026
Arthur Fils found his form again in Doha last week. // Getty
Arthur Fils found his form again in Doha last week. // Getty
When Arthur Fils returned to competition in Montpellier this month, for the first time since Toronto last summer, the question was not how long it would take him to get back to his best level, but if he’d ever be able to find the form he needs to matter on tour. Fils stunned the tennis world by trying to come back in Toronto last summer after discovering two stress fractures in his spine at Roland-Garros, having struggled with back pain since Miami. He stunned in a different way last week in Doha by reaching the final just a few weeks after starting his 2026 season.
“I didn’t know I was going to play that well that fast, for sure,” Fils said in Doha. “You don’t really know what to expect when you are back from an injury like eight months. I’m pretty happy with the way I’m playing now. It’s not my best tennis yet, but we’re getting there. I found out I was pretty strong mentally, as I didn’t really ask myself whether I’d be back. I was sure I would be back at my level, and for sure at a higher level.”
Fils, who cut significant weight to protect his back, reached the quarters in Montpellier at the start of the month, beaten by future champion Felix Auger-Aliassime. He then lost his first match in Rotterdam against Alex de Minaur, who would go on to win the title. Nobody was reading too much into these matches for a player who had been out for months and was just starting to claw his way back, a climb that is notoriously more and more difficult these days due to the depth of the field. Well, Fils said “Hold my baguette” to all this and tore through the draw in Doha, defeating Kamil Majchrzak, Quentin Halys, Jiri Lehecka, and Jacub Mensik before falling, like everybody else this year so far, against Carlos Alcaraz. Guaranteed to get back into the top 40, Fils was so impressive that people started to ask him again about challenging the Jannik Sinner and Alcaraz duopoly!
Yet, after the way he got crushed in the final—losing in just 50 minutes—Fils saw that the gap was much wider right now than when he pushed Carlitos to the third set in Monte-Carlo last spring. Logical for someone just returning to it all, but still crushing. “I need to stay positive: It was a very good week, and I made the final. It was much more complicated for me, but these are things that can happen, and we have to move forward. I played less well than I did the rest of the week, but he’s No. 1, hasn’t lost a match since the start of the year, and I think you can see why. For now, it’s another level. I’m not there yet. I’m not there at all. I’ll work for it, but for now, I’m not there at all.”
But there’s a future where he can get there, and that’s the thing: Nobody doubts that Fils, who reached a career high of 14th last year, can be a legit contender for the biggest titles when healthy, with that heavy whip of a forehand and a fearless attitude. Nobody doubts how badly he wants it, either. Here’s a player who says he wants to win Grand Slam titles, who truly believes it and puts the work behind his words. It’s not always the case. New evidence of this occurred in Doha when, out of the blue, Goran Ivanisevic appeared in his box alongside his coach. You don’t commit to hiring that legend if you’re not serious about your ambition.
“He knows my coach, Ivan Cinkus, very well, so the connection was pretty easy. We decided to take a shot and try. It’s working pretty well for now. I have a lot of ambition: Since I was very young, I’ve wanted to be one of the best tennis players and to try my best to win some great titles, some Slams,” Fils said in Doha. “Everyone knows I’m one of the best when I play well, but I need to be one of the best when I play badly.”
I was personally reassured to hear Fils confirming he wouldn’t push his body too hard just now, whatever the results. He’s indeed now in a tricky situation: He’s young and very promising; he has sponsors to satisfy, money to earn; and after being deprived of competition for months, he’s very hungry to go out there and fulfill that potential. But there’s no way to avoid the fact that his career hangs on that testy back now.
His only way to the top will be through extreme cautiousness: “For now, everything is fine with my back. It’s holding up, so we keep going. Now it’s also about being smart about it all and not pushing too much.” Fils didn’t play in Dubai after his performance in Doha, withdrawing ahead of his first match against Jiri Lehecka, citing hip injury.
The reality is that Arthur Fils is surely France’s best hope to (finally) win a men’s Grand Slam title again and surely the player who’s the most ready to do what it takes to succeed, but he might also be the most fragile. In Doha, we had a glimpse again of how great Fils could be. Now it’s about him having the chance to turn it into a full-time reality, freed from that sword of Damocles that hopefully no longer dangles above his spine.
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Meddy and Stef: A Recipe For Weirdness
A Recipe For Weirdness
A Recipe For Weirdness
Medvedev vs. Tsitsipas doesn't mean what it used to.
Medvedev vs. Tsitsipas doesn't mean what it used to.
By Giri Nathan
February 20, 2026
Stef find his form against Meddy in Doha this week. // Getty
Stef find his form against Meddy in Doha this week. // Getty
Here’s a measure of how far the mighty have fallen: A matchup between Stefanos Tsitsipas and Daniil Medvedev was, for many years, appointment viewing. Here was one of the most charged rivalries on tour, between two rising superstars who entered tennis legend with their 2018 Miami Open scuffle. Or, as I will always remember it, the “Shut Your Fuck Up” summit, a day of absolutely unforgettable language hurled across the net. See also: “small kid who doesn’t know how to fight.” (Should you want a hat memorializing that day, we have got you covered.)
The Tsitsipas-Medvedev beef continued to simmer over the years, as they commented on their strange relationship (“definitely not friends”), carped about the other’s style of play (“boring”), and played a few classics, some of which involved on-court oddities. To wit: the “sting operation” during their 2022 Australian Open semifinal, where a Greek-speaking off-duty umpire lurked in the tunnel to bust the Tsitsipas family for illegal coaching from the player’s box. I loved watching them play. It seemed like a recipe for weirdness. And they were clearly poised to inherit the tour.
Fast-forward to February 2026, there’s a Medvedev-Tsitsipas match in Doha, and I forgot it was even happening, had to catch a replay. Each player has fallen from past glory and has been left wandering the desolate landscape of the tour. The Medvedev downfall is well-documented, though his recent tennis ball rant deserves a brief mention, before we shift to contemplating the demise of Tsitsipas. He entered 2025 still ranked No. 11 in the world, still clinging to his former top 10 stature. Here are the good things in the 2025 Stefanos Tsitsipas tennis season: won his first 500-level title in Dubai. As for the bad things: pretty much everything else. After mid-April, he did not win back-to-back matches for the rest of the season. He ended 22–20, having fallen to No. 34 in the world.
That’s the high-level story. The details are even grimmer. His primary struggle was with a chronic lower-back issue that had bothered him since the end of 2024. That loomed over his entire season. Then there was also the perennial issue of coaching. Longtime observers of the Tsitsipas family will have noted the queasy on-court relationship between Stefanos and his father-slash-coach, Apostolos. Aside from brief dalliances with Mark Philippousis and Dimitris Chatzinikolaou, Tsitsipas has relied only on his father for coaching. That’s why it was so refreshing when he announced his partnership with Goran Ivanisevic. The former Wimbledon champ, and highly successful coach of Novak Djokovic, was still in search of his first long-term client after splitting with the Serb in 2024 and attempting a doomed partnership with Elena Rybakina. On paper this collaboration would have been an excellent fit for both player and coach. They said nice things about each other at the inception in May.
By July, it had blown up. Tsitsipas retired in the first round of Wimbledon due to his back and revealed that he was still deciding “whether I want to keep going or not,” referring to his career in professional tennis. After that loss, Ivanisevic appeared to go on a miniature media tour to flame his own player, with a splendor that is simply no longer seen in their professional realm. “He needs to fix his back and get physically fit because physically—he’s a disaster. I can’t understand how a player of his level can be so unfit. After that, he can think about playing tennis again,” Ivanisevic told CLAY. “He has to find a solution for his back issue. I was shocked. I’ve never seen such a poorly prepared player in my life,” he said in an interview with SportKlub. “Me, at my age and with this bad knee, I’m three times in better shape than him. I’m not sure what he was doing in the previous 12 months, but his current shape is very poor.” He is one of the best quotes in the tennis world, but that’s not actually a desirable quality in a coach.
Before the end of the month they had officially split. The partnership lasted just two tournaments, and according to Tsitsipas’ public statement, it was a “brief but an intense experience and a truly valuable chapter in my journey.” Elsewhere, in an interview with Greek outlet SDNA, Tsitsipas said, without naming anyone in particular, that it was “very difficult to have dictators and people who speak negatively” in his team. He got back together with his first coach: his dad. Hard to cheer on that particular reunion. After a second-round loss at the US Open, Tsitsipas could not walk for two days. He then shut down his season. While dealing with his injury, he felt like “I was just an observer of tennis and the ATP Tour, rather than an active participant,” he said in an interview with Bolavip. Entering the 2026 season, the back injury still required management.
All that context makes Tsitsipas’ straightforward 6–3, 6–4 win over Medvedev on Wednesday in Doha all the more miraculous. He moved well, closed out points at the net, and notched his only victory over a top 20 player since July 2024, at the Paris Olympics. (We’re already at the next damn Olympics! That’s how long it took.) Conversely, this must be a devastating development for Medvedev, who had won the last three matches in their head-to-head and had been in okay form this year, compared with his own abysmal 2025. Yet there he was, falling to a familiar rival, as neither player could muster tennis that looked remotely capable of winning them the Slams they once looked poised to rack up. Life goes on, but no one wants to lose the battle of the washed.