Sorana Cîrstea: It's Late, But Not Too Late
It's Late, But Not Too Late
It's Late, But Not Too Late
Sorana Cirstea is playing the best tennis of her career, just as it's ending.
Sorana Cirstea is playing the best tennis of her career, just as it's ending.
By Owen Lewis
May 15 2026
Sorana Cirstea in Rome this week. // Getty
Sorana Cirstea in Rome this week. // Getty
Sorana Cîrstea’s press conference after her second-round loss to Naomi Osaka at the Australian Open wasn’t the most crowded of the tournament, but it might have been the most anticipated. The Romanian had taken issue with Osaka pumping herself up between first and second serves mid-match, leading to a frosty handshake and a visibly baffled Osaka. It’s a rare treat when real drama escapes tennis’ thick coat of decorum, so journalists were ready for more details. “You don’t want to miss this one,” another reporter said to me just before the press conference began. We piled into Interview Room 2, whose 10 or so seats were all filled, with another handful of people standing off to the side.
Down rained questions about the brief beef. Cîrstea, 36, was not amused. In December, she’d announced that the 2026 season would be her last, and was more inclined to talk about her 20-year history at the Australian Open. The moments of friction with Osaka also clearly didn’t move her as they did us. After staccato answers to the first two questions—no problem with Naomi, not the time to talk about this—the third in a row drew her ire.
“Is this the big thing that happened tonight?” she asked crisply, voice kicking up on the last word as her eyebrows arched. Perhaps the delirium of a long day provided an assist, but the quote instantly entered my mental pantheon of great tennis one-liners. How do you most precisely express your discontent with a line of questioning? “Stop asking me about this” is too intense, “No comment” too evasive. But is this the big thing that happened tonight? It’s the perfect pitch of petty.
Leaving tennis fans with that spectacular sound bite would have been a fine mic drop for Cîrstea’s career, in which she made two major quarterfinals and topped out at 21st in the WTA rankings. Instead, seeing the finish line of her career has been all she needed to play some of the best tennis of her life. After the Australian Open, Cîrstea went to the Winners Open, a 250 in Romania, and lifted the trophy without dropping a set. She won multiple matches at Dubai, Indian Wells, Miami, and Linz, eventually losing to a quality player each time. In Madrid, she took the first set off Coco Gauff and pushed the world No. 3 to 5–5 in the second before Gauff recovered and pulled away with the match. Cîrstea has played her way to a 29–6 record in 2026, climbing from 43rd in the rankings at the end of last season to 27th.
In Rome, Cîrstea authored her most impressive run of the year yet. After a dominant opening win over Tatiana Maria, she met Aryna Sabalenka. Despite a loss to Hailey Baptiste in Madrid—from six match points up!—Sabalenka has been the clear best player in the world for more than a year. She’d lost to Elena Rybakina, her closest challenger for that title, in the Australian Open final, but avenged it in the best match of the season in Indian Wells, then crushed Rybakina in Miami for good measure. Though Rome is not Sabalenka’s best tournament, her devastating ground strokes are weapons that work anywhere.
Aryna stormed out to a 6–2, 2–0 lead in 44 minutes, the most surprising part of which was that it took even that long. Cîrstea managed to not only claw back the deficit but recover when she failed to serve out the match at 5–4 in the third set. Sabalenka struggled with a back injury during the match, but Cîrstea’s 2–6, 6–3, 7–5 win was one of the most impressive victories of the season. You could even say it was the big thing that happened that night. As with her runs in Miami and Madrid, Cîrstea couldn’t get past Gauff in Rome, but making it far enough in tournaments to be stymied by one of the best players on tour is a feat plenty of players ranked higher than the Romanian can’t manage.
It’s an uncommon yet welcome phenomenon in tennis: Nearing retirement, a player’s game sharpens and sings, as if the unburdening that comes with hanging up the racquet precedes the action. With Cîrstea’s surge in form will come calls that she should ride this wave for as long as she can, retirement be damned.
I don’t quite see it. During a December appearance on the Tennis Insider Club podcast, Cîrstea outlined the story of her career, the pitch of which should be familiar to fans. Tennis was her father’s dream, not hers. She trained every day from 5 years old on. “There was no personal life,” she said. “I didn’t take a holiday until I was 25.” She eventually came to enjoy and appreciate tennis on its own terms, but “it took a long time,” and the same went for realizing there was more to life than tennis. One exchange between Cîrstea and host and retired player Caroline Garcia stuck out to me. Cîrstea asked Garcia if she’d played since retiring at the 2025 US Open, and Garcia mentioned a single half-hour hit in Riyadh when she’d attended the WTA Finals. But there was no surprise in either woman’s voice. There was no implicit guarantee they’d play tennis at any level after retirement.
Cîrstea isn’t the most sympathetic figure—see unfortunate Instagram stories and comments gone by. But her story resonated. She said that as the end of her career grows closer, she loves the game more and more. That doesn’t mean she wants to keep playing it. There are other things in the world to love.
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Book Review: Dad Had a Bad Day
All the Rage
All the Rage
Book Review: Dad Had a Bad Day
Book Review: Dad Had a Bad Day
By Patrick J. Sauer
May 15, 2026
Courtesy of Astra Publishing House
Courtesy of Astra Publishing House
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but American men—at least American white men of seemingly enough-to-live-on means—are in crisis. I first became aware of this alleged phenomenon when it was reported by every media outlet in every possible media format that’s existed for the past decade. The excuses—pardon me, reasons—for why modern dudes are having such a hard go of it are varied, complex, and, in many cases, wildly overblown. This isn’t to say the problem isn’t real; a 2024 poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that 30 percent of adults “experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week,” with 30 percent of the 18–34 demographic feeling lonely daily or multiple times throughout the week. Of course, acute isolation can lead to serious pathologies like substance abuse, self-harm, and the type of burning inner rage that somehow convinces angry young men that there’s deep profundity in Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker dance.
Sure, the broad outcomes of loneliness can be terrible, but “epidemic” is thrown around far too loosely. Being lonely sucks individually, but it’s not an actual spreading disease. A basic definition is even wobbly because social isolation—once better known as “being alone”—is used in concert, but it’s value-neutral. Chilling solo can be just as edifying as a night out with friends. What gets lost in the constant barrage of dewy-eyed profiles of the lonely fellas is that it’s a subjective feeling, and there’s a real underdiscussed chicken-egg aspect to the whole thing. For many (mainly white, reasonably well-off) American males, their state of disgrace is an own goal brought on by who they are.
The inverse male “loneliness epidemic” is that this country is inundated with assholes.
I’m not talking about the charming antiheroes of prestige TV of recent yore: Sirs Soprano, Draper, Bell, and Barksdale—the type of profoundly terrible dudes who would be great drinking companions. I’m referring to the whiny, grievous, self-obsessed, know-nothing, unfunny cretins who have poisoned the well of everyday life, from the smallest of human interactions to the biggest of world stages. While there is no way to prove there are more of these guys now than ever before, I, as someone who just turned 55, have been around long enough to confidently say: There are more guys than ever before openly taking public pride and malevolent glee in their whole-ass assholery.
We are all…so…tired…of men who, because they believe they’ve been shortchanged by life, feel entitled to take what they want, at the expense of any notion of the common good. The guys who get their rocks off punching down become the same men mewling about loneliness, yelling into the void as they morph into one-in-the-same-guy shunned by everyone of decent heart and mind.
Men very much like Ned, the tennis-obsessed main asshole in Dad Had a Bad Day, the brilliant pitch-black comedy novel by former Loyola Marymount University tennis player–turned–English professor Ashton Politanoff. A book that, much to my surprise and possible chagrin, given a constant low-simmering hatred for how these narcissistic, sociopathic, peevish, power-hungry monsters—of whom Ned is a prime example—operate, I found ferociously compelling, uncharacteristically banging it out in three sittings.
Dad Had a Bad Day is essentially a book steeped in an asshole ethos driven by the interactions between Ned and everyone else, save for Freddie, the 6-year-old he is now wholly in charge of after losing his job. To explain who Ned is today and how he got there, the plot utilizes parallel timeline plots batted back and forth like a Tretorn Micro-X. The present-tense story runs at a breakneck pace; Politanoff wants us to experience the weeks when Ned destroys everything in life he allegedly held dear, because of an insatiable thirst to win a men’s rec league title of zero importance by any unethical means necessary, almost as it unfolds in real time. When we meet Ned he hasn’t played in decades, but the old Slazenger racquet he finds in the garage sparks an immediate obsession with the game, and so he joins the tennis club of his youth…on a clandestine credit card, unbeknownst to his breadwinner wife, the one keeping the family on a tight budget, the one who has no clue that Ned has added brunch old-fashioneds, intended infidelity, outright criminality, and match-fixing sabotage—even roping Freddie into snipping his own teammates’ strings to better Dad’s singles line—to his daily country club rituals.
There is one jaw-dropping scene—spoiler alert for this paragraph—that captures the magic trick Politanoff pulls off in making Ned so compelling on the page but so revolting when considered as an actual human being. In real life, you wouldn’t want to spend five seconds with the guy! But damn if I wasn’t slayed by Ned scouting out the birthday party situation at a local park, then bribing his son with T. rex LEGOs to be dropped off, gift in hand, for Chester’s 5th birthday party—a kid he’s never met—so Pops can go play dingles. Winking the knowingest wink possible, Politanoff buttons the subterfuge with, “Sundays, as they say, are for the boys.” Right before shoving the rabbit back in the hat as the panicked dad scours the park for his lost son.
One aspect of Ned’s situation that I fully relate to is his role as full-time stay-at-home dad. I fulfilled that duty from the end of my wife’s maternity leave until, well, today. (At least nominally, as, since she’s a teenager in a non-car-owning family, I primarily serve to keep money in her account.) When the kids are young, though, it’s a weird wired existence. Random people treat you like a war hero, a breather of rarefied paternal air, while others have no compunction questioning your “babysitting” choices. Neither on point, but in both cases, espoused by women. Men mostly don’t get it, condescend to it, or, in the Commie Corridor of Brooklyn at least, sidle up and tell you how jealous they are. Chalk one up to the death of freelance journalism, but it’s a truism. Nobody knows what it’s like to be the SAHD man, except those who’ve been there—like Ned and I have—in the hours when the entire world isn’t paying attention, the time when stroller naps in darkened Wimbledon day-drinking pubs are a dad’s quiet hole-in-the-corner prerogative. (And yes, for time immemorial mothers have understood, but Dad Had a Bad Day is decidedly about a world of shitty men.) Politanoff nails a few beautiful moments between Ned and Freddy that never would’ve happened if he still had his regular nine-to-five, all the more heartbreaking because we know the depraved tennis scheme is going to cause his son permanent scars. The same ones Ned carries.
A highlight of Dad Had a Bad Day is its unique structure, which keeps everything off-kilter, toying with the reader’s mind a bit, almost like a sludgy bad-weather match where the underdog aims to muck up every shot to throw every game out of whack. The book has no chapters, and some pages have only a few sentences. There are self-serving italicized epistolary letters to his wife that get uglier down the line, sharp all-dialogue sections without quotation marks, and a series of questions Ned asks his younger self. The longer action-filled chapters in the present are offset by shorter ruminative chapters out of the past.
An alternative title for Dad Had a Bad Day could easily be Hurt Men Hurt Men. The flashbacks are a murderers’ row of toxic assholinity. They don’t excuse Ned’s current horrific decisions, but they do lay out how circles of hell will also be unbroken. Ned’s violent stepfather is of the Damir Dokic, Jim Pierce, John Tomic parental ilk—sporadic, instantaneous, violent acts a motif—while a brutal run-till-you-puke juniors coach turns the sport he loved as a boy into the win-at-all-costs ephialtes he hates as an adult. And that’s without even getting into a formerly heroic AWOL teammate whose mental breakdowns at the hands of a somehow bigger asshole old man, then and now, come into the pace of play. The Slazenger racquet is Proustian, but the madeleine is covered in maggots.
I’ve been thinking about Dad Had a Bad Day nonstop for a couple of weeks. It took me that long to get a few thoughts in order. Politanoff has delivered a reading experience I won’t soon forget, about a character I kinda wish I could. In the end, what can be said of Ned and his awful, life-ending choices? To paraphrase the ubiquitous declaration of our assholic times, “The cruelty? Match point.”
Dad Had a Bad Day will be published on May 19, by Astra Publishing House.
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Jasmine Paolini: A Season on the Brink
A Season on the Brink
A Season on the Brink
Jasmine Paolini needs a deep run in Rome to stay in the Top 10.
Jasmine Paolini needs a deep run in Rome to stay in the Top 10.
By Giri Nathan
May 8, 2026
Defending champ Jasmine Paolni in Rome this week. // Getty
Defending champ Jasmine Paolni in Rome this week. // Getty
As a wise man once said, what happened in Monte-Carlo happened, what happened in Barcelona happened, what happened in Madrid happened—and here we are, we are in Rome. In the heart of the clay season, we flock to the Foro Italico. (Your correspondent will be there next week; come say hello at a book event I’m doing on the evening of the 16th at Shell Libreria Bistrot.)
As we watch Italy’s biggest tournament, it’s an apt time to appreciate two great feats of one of its players. This week, Jasmine Paolini set a record: the first Italian woman to log 100 weeks ranked in the top 10. (Hers happen to be consecutive, which increases the degree of difficulty, but it’d be a record even if they weren’t.) There have been Italian Slam champs, of course, but no player had ever held on to an elite ranking for quite this long. Paolini first rose into the top 10 with her astonishing 2024 campaign, where she made two Slam finals, and she followed it up with a more understated but excellent 2025. The high point of last year was Rome, where she became the first Italian player, man or woman, to win Rome in 40 years and followed it up with a sincere, contagiously happy celebration.
But these two facts—the ranking record and the Rome title—come into tension this week. The 2026 season has been rough for Paolini, and her return to the Foro Italico means that she’s dropping the 1,000 ranking points she earned as a champion, while facing pressure from potential risers. To remain in the top 10, she will likely have to make a deep run on her home dirt. Looking ahead, she could be due for a big falloff by the end of the clay season. Given that Paolini’s rise was so dramatic and unheralded, and that her buoyant personality functions as a kind of tennis antidepressant for colleagues, journalists, and fans alike, I want to keep tabs on the situation here.
At time of writing, Paolini has not resembled a top 10 player in 2026. She hasn’t won three matches in a row. She has beaten only one player ranked in the top 50 (the venerable Laura Siegemund, No. 47). She also has lost to three players ranked outside the top 50. She wept during a straight-set loss to Zeynep Sonmez in Stuttgart in April. It has been more than two months since Paolini has logged a straight-set victory.
The wins she does manage tend to be arduous. On Thursday she played her first match in Rome, against No. 127 Leolia Jeanjean; it took three sets and nearly three hours to win, and she hit 57 unforced errors along the way. After the match, Paolini pointed out that her title campaign last year also had its “ups and downs,” which included falling down a set and 3–0 against Diana Shnaider in the quarterfinal, before a fortuitous rain delay. But her season has been defined by downs, mostly. And it makes you wonder whether the ups are coming anytime soon, and whether her reign at the top is due to end after a brilliant, anomalous two-year run.
Tennis is always unforgiving, but I daresay this is especially true for our short champions, whose game is viable only as long as their extreme athleticism can sustain it. Once that slips, they don’t have easy power or cheap points to fall back on. It’s premature to say whether this is the exact situation with Paolini, whose game looks out of sorts in a way that is hard to pin down, and may have as much to do with the psychology as it does with physical deterioration. But if you’ve seen her play, you know that much of her genius has to do with her sprightly all-court style, and the way she Super Ball-style bounces off the court to strike balls at well above shoulder height. She is now 30 years old, which was about the time that Diego Schwartzman, her kin in stature, fell off a cliff too. It’s too soon to get apocalyptic. Perhaps she just needs some stability in the player’s box, after firing two coaches in 2025, hiring a third, and then bringing in her friend and doubles partner Sara Errani as a secondary coach. But whatever she needs, she needs to find it soon, because after the Rome points fall off, she also has a fourth-round appearance at Roland-Garros to defend.
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Hailey Baptiste: A Cool Character
A Cool Character
A Cool Character
Big wins are starting to pile up for Hailey Baptiste.
Big wins are starting to pile up for Hailey Baptiste.
By Giri Nathan
May 1, 2026
Hailey Baptiste during her victory over Aryna Sabalenka in Madrid this week. // Getty
Hailey Baptiste during her victory over Aryna Sabalenka in Madrid this week. // Getty
I always knew that 24-year-old Hailey Baptiste was a cool character with a cool playstyle, but I did not know that she was capable of beating the No. 1 tennis player in the world. That would’ve required a stretch of the imagination; mentally I’d have had to do some Djokovic-ian splits. Baptiste, a D.C. native, grew up playing at the JTCC training center in Maryland, which also produced Frances Tiafoe. (They’re good friends, and his twin, Franklin, has coached Baptiste, including this week in Madrid.) She’s been on tour for a while now, and while there’s no mistaking her talent, it didn’t instantly translate into consistent results. It was only last summer that she entered the top 50, and it was only this year that she seems to have figured out how to duke it out with the best players in the world.
That’s a boon not just for Baptiste but for anyone who likes watching tennis. She’s a smooth mover and creative thinker who tends to reveal a rich repertoire of shots over the course of a match. She mixes in generous amounts of slice, rips her kick serve, hunts inside-out forehands, and will eagerly rush the net after a serve or even a return. Some of these elements are less prevalent on the modern WTA, making them all the more effective. Baptiste offered a stylistic origin story in a press conference at Roland-Garros last year: “I grew up playing with boys pretty much my whole youth. My coaches kind of coached me to play a little bit more like a guy…. Obviously it helps me, I think. Girls don’t love the kick serve and the slice.”
It’s one thing to have all those options, and it’s another to confidently select the right ones under match pressure. As her recently hired coach Will Woodall explained in a great interview with Ben Rothenberg at Bounces, they had to not just lock in “fundamentals” like fitness, diet, and recovery but also do the mental work to see her own game clearly. “I think she’s always known what her game should look like,” he said. “It’s been there—it was floating around—and I think now it’s tattooed in her brain, what she’s supposed to do in those moments.”
That self-knowledge has rewarded her all spring, as Baptiste has stacked wins and shot up the rankings. At Indian Wells she caught my eye with a gritty three-setter against eventual runner-up Elena Rybakina. We didn’t know it yet, but that was a mark of even better tennis to come. At Miami, Baptiste had the best result of her career, making it into the quarterfinals after taking down three seeded foes, including a white-hot Elina Svitolina. But her run ended with the toughest test in 2026 tennis: a hard-court date with Aryna Sabalenka, who was en route to completing the Sunshine Double. Sabalenka won that, 6–4, 6–4.
Baptiste didn’t have to wait long for a rematch. In Madrid this week, she went on another heater. (Though she did suffer greatly in her match against Belinda Bencic, where she blew six match points and smashed her racquet over her leg, as documented in this stellar photo by David Ramos.) Once again, she met Sabalenka in the quarterfinals. Baptiste arrived with a clear game plan, as she explained after the match. Since there’s no sense in trying to beat an in-rhythm Sabalenka from the baseline, she’d try to mix up the rallies as much as possible. While she is one of the players equipped with the right tools to actually execute that game plan, it’s still easier said than done against a player like Sabalenka, whose domineering style tends to override whatever cute ideas the opponent brought to the court.
But Baptiste has enough power and athleticism to hang with Sabalenka when exchanging heavy topspin blows from the baseline. And whenever she saw a chance to mix it up, she did, even under duress, as we saw at the end of the third set, when she faced five Sabalenka match points and won them all with a variety of audacious, thrilling plays. I can confidently say that, before this match, I had never seen a clay-court WTA match point defused by a second serve-and-volley, but now, thanks to Baptiste, I have seen it twice. Don’t sleep on the other match point she saved with a beautiful stab volley lob, either. Even Baptiste was laughing after some of these points, cutting through the tension. Just virtuosic stuff to secure the win of her career and break Sabalenka’s 15-match win streak.
In her semifinal, Baptiste lined up a few set points that would have taken Mirra Andreeva to a deciding set, but this time her ingenuity ran out. She has risen to No. 25 in the live WTA rankings and will be seeded for Roland-Garros, which would’ve been hard to imagine a year ago. I don’t know where she goes from here, but I’m eager to watch her every move. Especially whenever she’s match point down.
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Don’t call Rafael Jodar “The New Rafa”.
The Next Big Thing
The Next Big Thing
Don’t call Rafael Jodar “The New Rafa”.
Don’t call Rafael Jodar “The New Rafa”.
By Owen Lewis
April 29, 2026
Rafael Jódar Camacho in Madrid this week. // Getty
Rafael Jódar Camacho in Madrid this week. // Getty
It’s a little too cruel. We tennis fans are so stuck in the past that we’re on the constant hunt for a Third Man, to complete a new Big Three, as if dominant trios are just a fact of any given generation and not a happy accident. Jannik Sinner is constantly compared to Novak Djokovic, despite the many differences in their games. Carlos Alcaraz may be the proud owner of the most diverse, deranged skill set in tennis history, and yet we have spent much of his early career describing him as…an amalgamation of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Djokovic. Now, the tennis gods are having a laugh at our terminal nostalgia and lack of imagination, because the next promising ATP prospect is named Rafael.
His full name is Rafael Jódar Camacho, with only the former surname appearing on the scoreboard. He is 19 years old and just finished a blistering run at his home tournament, the Madrid Open. Unlike Nadal, he’s a righty, with a greater emphasis on linear power and a slighter build, the quiet student to Nadal’s jacked pirate. Do not call him “the new Rafa.” Do not do it!
Jódar is, however, the latest intriguing prospect on the ATP Tour. The stat du jour right now is that he’s won 17 of his first 25 matches on tour, more than Federer (9), Djokovic (12), Sinner (12), Alcaraz (14), Nadal (15), and Fonseca (15). But I could not be happier to let discussions of burgeoning generational talent wither and die on the vine. Alcaraz is out at least until the grass season (excuse me as I vomit into the sink). For all the maddening ways we use the past to frame the future, all we want right now is a worthy challenger to Sinner. If Jódar is up to it, that’ll be more than enough of a gift.
Jódar charted a path of destruction through the start of the Madrid draw, commanding considerable hype for the Sinner match. He destroyed Alex de Minaur, only granting the underpowered Australian four games. Jódar has more easy power in his pinkie finger than Demon has in any limb; it usually feels like this sport decides its champions unilaterally no matter how hard they work to change their fate. Jódar ran up against fellow prodigy Joao Fonseca in the next round. There are real stakes in these early clashes between talented youngsters—while they’re not necessarily indicative of how a rivalry will turn out, the players salivate at the opportunity to one-up a peer and inflict some mental damage. (Alcaraz is yet to lose to a player younger than him; you imagine it’s a point of pride.) After splitting sets, Jódar did just that by wiping out Fonseca in the decider, not allowing him a single winner until he was already down 5–0. Joao mangled a racquet in the midst of that demolition.
Even Jódar’s ouster, a 6–2, 7–6 (0) defeat to Sinner, illustrated his potential along with his shortcomings. Sinner looked antsy in the opening games, a show of mortality usually limited to his matches against Alcaraz. Here he missed an overhead from close range and a forehand second-serve return into the net (on break point, no less), a sign that this particular opponent made him uncomfortable. Jódar’s crackling pace off the ground was forcing Sinner onto the move, an aspect of his game we get to see less and less these days as he controls virtually every point against most opponents. Jannik also hit more drop shots in this match than I can remember him trying in any other. Between Jódar here and Fonseca’s close loss to Sinner at Indian Wells, we may be seeing the first draft of a very exclusive blueprint against the Italian. It’s also the direction men’s tennis is headed anyway: Hit hard and heavy ground strokes, then hit them even harder and heavier. This new world has its charms, but I weep for the lost days when variety and counterpunching defined the sport.
The first six games were intense enough to mandate a swoon in focus or physicality from one or both players. It made sense that the kid faltered; while Sinner has been forged and tempered in scalding Alcarazian fires, this was probably the most intense match point-to-point that Jódar has ever played. Despite having a break point at 2–1 and another at 2–3, and getting into a neutral rally on both occasions, Jódar lost the first set 6–2. On Sinner’s break point at 2–2, Jódar hit a sharply angled crosscourt backhand—exactly the kind of shot that Fonseca would have returned with a floater, if he’d been able to return it at all—only for Sinner to slide into it and thump a winner down the line. You play and you learn.
But the 19-year-old impressively knuckled down on serve in the second set. His greatest gift might be his fast-twitch levers, enabling him to attack even when the ball is coming at him at high speed. (Even Alcaraz struggles with this, his technique forcing him to block more shots back.) Jódar eked out two break points at 3–2 and two more at 4–3. A leaping 103 mph forehand winner down the line may have featured in there, who is to say? Sinner saved them all, but this wasn’t your garden-variety Sinner servebotting to save break points against Alexander Zverev. Jódar forced Jannik to use every bit of the court: a crosscourt forehand that could have been shot out of a gun, a low inside-out forehand winner, a stretch lob winner, an acute-angled backhand pass that tickled the line delicately enough that I was expecting an out call. Emboldened by his narrow escapes, Sinner closed the match by winning 11 straight points.
There’s more work to do. Jódar isn’t an elite defender, though with his wiry 6′ 3″ frame, he has a chance to become one. His serve is sporadically but not yet consistently damaging. He could make more frequent use of his nice touch at net (that said, you only get so many chances to come in even if you wanted to when you’re trading 85 mph ground strokes). Even in his raw form, Jódar’s as good a candidate to spice up the ATP as we have. “He pushed me to the limit,” Sinner said after the match. If Jódar can do that at 19, maybe someday he can push Sinner beyond it.
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Reading Between the Lines
Reading Between the Lines
Reading Between the Lines
In an algorithm-dominated world, Iga Swiatek is loyal to books.
In an algorithm-dominated world, Iga Swiatek is loyal to books.
By Courtney Nguyen
April 23, 2026
Iga Świątek: Bookworm.
Iga Świątek: Bookworm.
World Book and Copyright Day is an annual event organized by UNESCO to recognize the power of books as a bridge between generations and across cultures. It is celebrated on April 23 to honor William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who all died on that day.
In a world of screen-addicted doomscrollers, Iga Swiatek remains a steadfast breath of fresh air. The 24-year-old Pole has happily served as tennis’ resident bibliophile and reading evangelist, using the spotlight she’s earned as a six-time Grand Slam champion to encourage her Gen Z cohorts to put down their phones and crack open a book.
Why escape with an algorithm full of contextless short-burst content when you can disappear into the rich inner of lives fully lived and worlds meticulously built?
Swiatek’s love for fiction crystallized in her teens. It was Ken Follett’s 1,000-page tome The Pillars of the Earth that first opened her eyes to the power of the written word. Swiatek had never read a book so long and dense, yet she easily devoured the historical epic and wanted more. Follett still occupies the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on her list of favorite books.
“It just made me feel less lonely in the world,” Swiatek said in 2023. “It was just fun mixed with spending time well and getting to know the people that you read about. It’s more like you felt like they are your friends.”
Even as Swiatek’s Hall of Fame career has taken her from the quiet anonymity of the Polish suburbs into a globe-trotting, internationally recognized star, books remain her touchstone. Whether she’s winning or losing, her ever-present Kindle serves as a security blanket of sorts. Reading brings her peace and balance. Her TBR pile—“To Be Read”—is digital as well, a place where she jots down the literary ephemera that crosses her path on any given day. As with any and all book nerds, Swiatek’s TBR is growing faster than she can knock titles off the list. And while she remains coy of its specific contents, the books run the gamut of literary classics, modern biographies, historical fiction, and psychology books.
“Obviously I get many books, but I don’t really travel with them because it’s pretty hard to carry all of that,” Swiatek told me this week in Madrid. “I have a list of books that people tell me to read or I saw on the internet, and it’s getting bigger and bigger because obviously reading takes some time. I read basically every day a little bit, and I love that. That’s the best way to spend time.”
In March, Swiatek relaunched her Reading With Iga challenge wherein she once again challenged her fans to read at least 12 books over the year. The first iteration of the initiative came in 2023 and was accompanied by regular book reviews from Swiatek. In a sea of elevator selfies and funny pet content, there was the then-world No. 1 offering earnest dissection of the material. This year, she has already posted reviews of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting and Asako Yuzuki’s Butter.
“Obviously I love fiction, so anytime I have a good fiction book, I’m going to pick it because it’s just fun for me,” Swiatek said. “But at the top of my TBR list are some books about psychology and biographies that I want to read just to get to know about the world a little bit better. They are at the top because I feel they can also give me some perspective and help me learn some stuff.
“But somehow, if I have a fiction book, that will always be at the top of the pile.”
Nowadays, Swiatek is in her Cultural Curiosity Era. Reading is an escape from reality for her. She craves spending time in a world that bears little resemblance, at least on the surface, to her own. After reading Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Yuzuki’s Butter, she is now in the midst of Wild Swan: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.
“It’s about three generations of women in China from the second World War and on,” she said. “It’s really interesting. I love historical fiction, even though I think this is not actually fiction.
“It’s interesting because you can get to know the culture more and get some perspective.”
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A Return to Love
A Return to Love
A Return to Love
Joe Salisbury comes back from a mental health hiatus.
Joe Salisbury comes back from a mental health hiatus.
By Simon Cambers
April 21, 2026
Joe Salisbury at the Tour Finals in Turn last fall, where he made the finals with partner Neal Skupski. // Getty
Joe Salisbury at the Tour Finals in Turn last fall, where he made the finals with partner Neal Skupski. // Getty
Last year, Joe Salisbury reached two Grand Slam finals and four other finals on the doubles circuit, including the ATP Finals. The former world No. 1, who has seven majors to his name, was seemingly in top form and excited about his partnership with Neal Skupski, his fellow Briton.
It was at the ATP Finals in Turin, though, that Salisbury revealed something that had apparently been brewing for a while: He was suffering from acute anxiety and would be taking a lengthy break from the sport. It was a revelation that would resonate with many other tennis players, not to mention sportsmen and -women around the world. In an age when there are cameras everywhere and when social media allows fans to access their favorite players more than ever, players are under a lot of stress. And the fact is, you can never tell what’s going on in someone’s mind.
Mental-health-related issues, from depression to panic attacks, anxiety to burnout, are commonplace in society, and Salisbury is just one in a long line of players to suffer. Naomi Osaka, Amanda Anisimova, Bianca Andreescu, Andrey Rublev, Marketa Vondrousova, and Emil Ruusuvouri are among a growing number to detail their challenges.
It was only when Salisbury chatted with the BBC’s Russell Fuller, after the Turin final, that he revealed what he had been going through, detailing episodes of heart palpitations, feelings of dread, and feeling sick to his stomach with fear. Like Osaka and Anisimova before him, he needed a break, and so he did just that, focusing on his personal life—he got engaged to his girlfriend in January—and getting help. Too often tennis is talked up as a “survival of the fittest,” with any hint of weakness frowned upon. Salisbury, who is back on the tour with a new partner in Francisco Cabral, had not originally intended to be so open about his issues but is happy that he did.
“I guess I probably shared more than I was planning to at the time, but I don’t think that was a bad thing,” he said in an interview in Monte-Carlo earlier this month, his first tournament back. “I had a lot of messages of support from people, either just offering support or people saying they’re going through similar things, so I think being honest about things is never a bad thing. Sometimes it frees you up to deal with it and to accept it. I think lots of the time we try to hide the things that we don’t like about ourselves or maybe feel ashamed about. But I think often just being open about these things makes it easier to deal with and often helps other people as well.”
Salisbury didn’t find the actual act of playing tennis difficult; after all, he and Skupski reached six finals last year, and he ended the year ranked No. 10. Instead, it was behind the scenes, often during long periods away from home, where the anxiety ramped up.
“It was mostly around the tennis,” he said. “Often, once I got on the court—you kind of get yourself in a performance state, which is maybe slightly different to your personality and character off the court—often, I would be feeling okay. Not all the time, but it was more just around the tournaments, around the matches, where I’d not be feeling good and had to deal with it.”
Salisbury has tried medication but doesn’t like it. “I did have some, which I got prescribed if I wanted or needed to use it, but I don’t like to, and I’ve only ever tried it a few times, so normally I don’t take it,” he said. Instead, he has turned to experts for help on the mental side, as well as his coaches. Now, though he knows there may be tough patches ahead, he believes this year will be better than last.
“I feel better now,” he said. “I feel good. I feel like I’m more equipped to deal with it and hopefully to overcome it. I think it’s a big thing for me that I want to be able to deal with it and be comfortable with it. It’s probably not something that will ever completely go away, but I feel like it’s a challenge that I want to face and to become happier, kind of on and off the court, with my tennis, and…whether I play tennis for another year, two years, five years, whatever I want that to be, [I want it to be] because I decide that it’s the right time to stop for other reasons, not because of this.”
The support from other players, as well as people inside and outside of tennis, was enormously helpful. Now Salisbury wants to help others who are going through something similar.
“Of course, I’m happy to talk to anyone about it,” he said. “I’ve experienced it for quite a long time and had to deal with it in lots of different situations, and I think I’ve become quite good at managing it. I’d be happy to speak to anybody or to help anybody else that wanted to.”
Salisbury is enjoying the energy that Cabral brings to the court but admits he would like to play with Skupski again at some stage. “I was kind of saying to Neal, it’s up to him. Obviously, he started the year with Christian, and they won the Australian Open, so they are going to stay together for the year. But I really enjoy playing with Neal. So, in the future, maybe we’ll team up again.”
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Arthur Fils Is Up To the Task
Stress Test
Stress Test
Arthur Fils is up to the task.
Arthur Fils is up to the task.
By Giri Nathan
April 20, 2026
Arthur Fils during the Munich final, in which he defeated Andrey Rublev. // Getty
Arthur Fils during the Munich final, in which he defeated Andrey Rublev. // Getty
I’ve seen just one live match at an ATP tournament in 2026, and what dumb luck that it was the Arthur Fils victory over Tommy Paul in the Miami Open quarterfinal. Two of the best all-around athletes in tennis found themselves in a battle with the narrowest margins and the finest shotmaking. Zero breaks of serve, a flurry of 100 mph ground strokes, and to decide it all, a third-set tiebreak, where Fils heroically erased four straight Paul match points and stole the win, 6–7(3), 7–6(4), 7–6(6). Even Miami’s stadium-within-a-stadium, which can often feel so desolate and misshapen, was full of real energy. Easily the best tour match of the year for me and the loudest possible reminder of the talent of the 21-year-old Frenchman.
I needed the reminder because of how long he’d been absent from the court. Fils arrived at Roland-Garros last year at a career-high ranking of No. 14, but also with full awareness that he had a stress fracture in his back. He chose to stick around and win two rounds anyway—his first-ever victories at his home Slam—and only then withdrew from the tournament. Fils had dealt with back issues as a teenager, so it was an injury he felt familiar with, though as he later admitted in an interview with French outlet 20 Minutes, that familiarity might have led him to “skip some steps” in his return to action. After withdrawing in Paris he was back on tour just two months later in Toronto. And after just two matches in Toronto he shut it down again. It would be eight more months before he returned for good.
This time, he gradually built his body back, rushing nothing. And with his team, Fils plotted out ways to make his ultraphysical game style easier on his back—changing certain stances, not overrelying on kick serves—though he said that implementing these changes fully would take time, because he’d been playing a certain way for 15 years. What we’ve seen in the past few months bodes very well for the next 15 years.
Since returning in February, Fils has filled a certain void on the ATP. If the search for a challenger to the Sinner-Alcaraz duopoly feels futile, it’s because the parameters are so ridiculously strict. With their supercharged style of play, Sincaraz have raised the standard of athleticism on the ATP, such that any realistic challenger would need to have both top-end speed and top-end power, two traits that rarely coincide in the same athlete. Scanning the players younger than them, you can see Learner Tien (with the speed but not the power) or Joao Fonseca (the power but not the speed), but in Arthur Fils you can see both at the same time. It’s not even that Fils has played the most convincing matches against the two tyrants of the tour so far, because he hasn’t; it’s that at his best, he possesses the right physical and technical attributes to stress-test them in the years ahead.
Though he’s not quite there yet. Fils returned to tour in February, sporting a forehand with a shortened takeback. In just his third tournament back, he made the final in Doha—where he lost to Alcaraz in 50 minutes, if you needed to throw some ice water on the notion in the above paragraph. But he’s kept up those deep runs at every event since. Quarterfinals in Indian Wells, semifinals in Miami, and now a win in Barcelona, his fourth ATP 500 title. Watching him play the championship match against Andrey Rublev, I could see the gulf between these two as players. Where Rublev is a one-dimensional attack, a world-destroying bweh forehand attached to a serviceable two-hander, Fils did damage on both wings, playing with magnificent shape and moving much better to boot. Watching Fils on clay, in fact, reminded me of the golden days of Dominic Thiem. Can you see it? A fleet-footed RPM monster, never out of the rally, willing to trade body blows until medical death, capable of winners that clear the net by 10 feet. It’s a game style that few are physically stout enough to even attempt, but Fils, at just age 21 and freshly returned from injury, appears to be up to the task. Perhaps he, like Thiem, can occasionally defy the gods of his own era, even if he can’t unseat them completely.
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Twists and Turns
Twists and Turns
Twists and Turns
Jannik Sinner is in the ascendency in his rivalry with Carlos Alcaraz.
Jannik Sinner is in the ascendency in his rivalry with Carlos Alcaraz.
By Owen Lewis
April 13, 2026
Sinner is a winner in Monte Carlo. // Getty
Sinner is a winner in Monte Carlo. // Getty
Of course the weather for the Monte-Carlo final was awful. We’re always hearing about how this is the most picturesque spot on tour, and it’s hard to argue. On the Tennis Channel this week, we were greeted on changeovers by wide shots of the swaying Mediterranean sea shining with a blue to rival the Australian Open’s hard courts, enveloping the Monte-Carlo Country Club tennis courts embedded into the cliffs. It feels appropriate that after all that view porn, and all the hype for 2026’s first Carlos Alcaraz–Jannik Sinner summit, the day itself was overcast and viciously windy. Teach us to get too excited. The anticipation was inescapable—the last Sincaraz meeting on clay was the 2025 Roland-Garros final, a match you may have heard about—but nothing changes the mood like a stiff breeze blanketing our tennis.
Still, if not the Roland-Garros final’s equal, the Monte-Carlo final was a worthy sequel. Sinner’s 7–6 (5), 6–3 win was closer than the score and added plenty of subplots to the best rivalry of the era. A theme in this rivalry is Sinner underperforming on serve, even as he improves the shot to alarming levels. That continued today—he made 51 percent of first serves—but a new pattern is emerging of Sinner scrapping his way to wins over Alcaraz despite subpar serving. (And as Alcaraz made sure to point out in his postmatch presser, during the tiebreak, Sinner made all six of his first serves.) Jannik also pummeled Carlos’ backhand until it wilted, and hung tough through what felt like a thousand love–30 and 15–30 holes on serve. After Alcaraz beat him from three match points down in Paris last year, Sinner had lost five straight to his rival, many of them thanks to deranged Carlos comebacks. Ten or so months later, his resilience has borne fruit.
I thought a lot about their last match, at the ATP Finals, yesterday. Sinner won it 7–6 (4), 7–5, but I didn’t read much into it because Alcaraz tweaked his hamstring when the match was still young and even. Now I’m wondering if the players did draw a lot on what happened that day. The points in the Monte-Carlo final looked very different—slow clay here, fast hard there—but the major beats of the matches were the same. Sinner narrowly escaped being broken at 5–6 in both first sets before winning them in tiebreaks, and won both second sets from a break down. Carlos has had the mental edge in the rivalry for a couple years now; he’d be down 9–8 in the head-to-head instead of leading it 10–7 were it not for his match point saves. Jannik might have taken it from him.
I wrote recently about how Sinner’s style tends to strip his matches of their drama and entertainment value, given the lack of available solutions for the puzzle called “an unyielding storm of nearly perfect serves and ground strokes.” But Alcaraz has always been the lone opponent against whom Sinner’s gears begin to shriek and spark. You saw it early. Sinner, unbreakable in his semifinal, unceremoniously dropped his opening service game. With a break point in hand at 4–4, Sinner missed a forehand by a mile. (I heard the thud of Alexander Zverev punching a wall.) Jannik found his first serve late in the set and masqueraded as Ivo Karlovic for a while, repeatedly thundering service winners in the tiebreak. At 6–4, he blasted a bomb down the T; Alcaraz was so far back on the return that I couldn’t see him when he made precarious contact. The return floated delicately down the middle of the court from its invisible sender, barely over the net and short in the court, there for the pummeling. Sinner somehow netted it.
Yet Alcaraz, he of the match point saves, the winner of all three of his tiebreaks on clay against Sinner in 2025, offered a thank-you gift bigger than the original present by double-faulting the set away on the next point. You can rationalize most shockingly bad tennis shots if you try hard enough: That Alcaraz return at 4–6 was really quite low, and Sinner does get tight against his rival. Alcaraz was probably spooked by the threat of Sinner’s backhand return at 5–6, not wanting to get speared by a down-the-line winner like the one Jannik had hit a few games earlier. Still, when Alcaraz’s serve landed long, I was shocked.
And the second set! When Alcaraz broke serve at 1–1 with one of those points that only he can play (look at that blue blur on the far side of the court; how does he run like that?), it felt like a turning point. It felt like we were now headed for a four-hour thriller, the kind that people who couldn’t watch would insist was one of the best matches ever after checking out the highlights. (Those of us who really did watch would annoyingly remind them of all the forehand unforced errors.) Instead, the comeback never quite got off the ground. Alcaraz streaked to 40–love at 2–1 but let Sinner drag him into a drawn-out succession of deuces; though Carlos held, it gave Jannik the confidence not to flag. Sinner’s crunching forehands didn’t let Alcaraz have another game for the rest of the match, leaving him with a groaning grocery list of missed opportunities from this match to obsess over. Typically Alcaraz is the one dishing the list out. Blame the weather, maybe, but it feels like Sinner is in the ascendancy in the rivalry.
It’s interesting, both players’ inability to shake the other. “We aspire to be as good as him and hopefully one day be better than him, but at the moment we’re chasing Carlos, and we’ll continue to do that,” Darren Cahill said of Sinner after the 2024 Australian Open. Two years and change later, Sinner’s still chasing, except he’s now three major titles behind instead of one. (Though Sinner has gained ground in other areas, like weeks at No. 1 and Masters 1000s.) Then there’s Alcaraz—he’s inflicted pretty much the maximum imaginable amount of pain upon Sinner during their rivalry, dating back to their very first match in the Challenges, which Alcaraz won from 3–0 down in the third set. And still Jannik keeps throwing improved versions of himself at Carlos and vacuuming up any tournament in which they don’t play each other with ease. He’s now won four straight Masters 1000s, with the Tour Finals thrown in for good measure, dropping just one set across all those runs. He’s the first to win Indian Wells, Miami, and Monte-Carlo (Sunshine Triple? Wind Triple?) since Novak Djokovic. He also happened to grab the No. 1 ranking back from Carlos with this win.
After a brutal loss to Djokovic in Melbourne and a puzzling one to Jakub Mensik in Doha, Sinner has won 17 straight and is back in the driver’s seat ahead of Roland-Garros, which he’s said is his biggest goal of the season. He’ll want revenge over Alcaraz for the heartbreaking loss there in 2025 and the merely nauseating one in 2024. He can also prevent his rival from winning a third straight major, after Alcaraz swiped his US and Australian Open titles. If he can’t, you can imagine the press conference: “I think Jannik did a great job to get to No. 1. He won Indian Wells, Miami, and Monte-Carlo.”
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Home Court Advantage For Valentin Vacherot
Local Hero
Local Hero
It's home court advantage for Valentin Vacherot.
It's home court advantage for Valentin Vacherot.
By Giri Nathan
April 10, 2026
Valentin Vacherot on his local courts this week. // Getty
Valentin Vacherot on his local courts this week. // Getty
Respectfully: I had gone many decades of life without considering the notion of “Monegasque” identity, or even seeing the word “Monegasque.” I knew what Monaco was, of course. But I somehow hadn’t wrapped my head around the concept of being born there and living there full-time. I thought it was just a place you went to in order to hide from taxation, board big boats, gamble large sums, watch fast cars, things of that nature. It was only in the past few years, when I began to learn about Formula 1, that the word even entered my lexicon, courtesy of driver Charles Leclerc.
In fairness, my impression about Monaco wasn’t totally off base: According to a 2025 analysis by the Monegasque Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, of its tiny population of 38,857 residents, only 24 percent are Monegasque by nationality. One member of that vanishingly small subgroup is the 27-year-old tennis player Valentin Vacherot. If you know the name at all, it is probably due to his freak performance at the Shanghai Masters last year. Refresher course: Despite being ranked No. 204 in the world, and despite having only won a single 1000-level match in his career, he won the entire tournament. Also, he had to beat his own cousin—Arthur Rinderknech, who was himself on an uncharacteristic heater—in the championship match. Vacherot became the first player from Monaco ever to win an ATP title, and the lowest-ranked player ever to win a Masters title.
What’s remarkable is that Vacherot has backed up that result ever since. With a sturdy serve-and-forehand foundation, plus great rally tolerance and movement at 6 foot 4, Vacherot simply looks the part of a top 30 ATP player and has given no indication of an imminent return to pumpkin state. He has improved his ranking to No. 23 in the world. Since the end of his dream run in Shanghai, he has been competing at a higher layer of the tennis atmosphere—tour-level events—and he has gone a sterling 16–9. That includes a quarterfinal at the Paris Masters, a third-round showing at the Australian Open, the round of 16 in Miami.
That sterling record also includes the hot streak he’s enjoyed this week on his home courts. Vacherot was born in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which lies in France, just outside the periphery of Monaco. It is in Roqueburne-Cap-Martin where you will find the misleadingly named Monte-Carlo Country Club, which is not actually in the Monte Carlo area of Monaco, nor inside Monaco at all. Vacherot grew up hanging out and playing at the tennis club, which is a training base for tons of top ATP players, many of whom reside in nearby Monaco. It also hosts the Monte-Carlo Masters. That was his favorite week of the year, as Vacherot recalled in a recent episode of the AO podcast. He’d pray that it fell during his school vacation, so that he could stay on site from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., watching matches and getting autographs. Much later on, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, the local boy was awarded a wild card to compete in the main draw of that tournament. This year, he didn’t require the club’s generosity at all, because he was ranked so high he nearly had a seed next to his name—a measure of the distance he’d traveled in such a short span.
On Wednesday, Vacherot took down his first big opponent of the season: Lorenzo Musetti, last year’s runner-up at this tournament, who is now working his way back from the leg injury he suffered while up two sets on Novak Djokovic in Australia. Musetti isn’t yet back to the peak of his clay-court artistry, and Vacherot brought some of his best tennis of the year to complete the upset. “If someone had told me that my first top 5 win of the season would be here in the night session on this center court I’ve been hitting on since I’m 6 years, [I’d say] nothing can beat that,” Vacherot said after the win, which he spent riling up the home crowd.
For this one stop on the tour, Vacherot is the marquee name, and on Thursday it was he, not Jannik Sinner or Carlos Alcaraz, who got the last slot on Court Rainier III. His opponent was another Monaco resident, though not a native son: the great Hubi Hurkacz, finding his footing after a right knee surgery last year, who broke a seven-match losing streak here. Looking at their matchup on the scoreboard, it’s hard to miss that the Monaco flag is the Polish flag upside down. Vacherot came out sharper, racing out to 4–0 in the first set, only to lose it in a tiebreak. The character of the match changed with the passage of time. On paper, it was a battle of big servers, but in the cold wet reality of Thursday night, the balls slowed down and the rallies lengthened dramatically. Neither player could produce an easy winner; the tennis got scrappy and grunty. Vacherot, who said that he relishes a marathon match, triumphed after nearly three hours, to the delight of his friends and family at the club. He became the only Monegasque player ever to make it to the quarterfinal stage of this tournament.
“I’d rather win Monte Carlo than a Grand Slam, if I could, to be honest,” Vacherot said on the aforementioned podcast, reflecting on how integral this tournament is to his history. He’s now two wins away from realizing that unlikely dream. Perhaps it helps to have pulled off the whole unlikely dream thing before.