Big Ben Is Back
Big Ben Is Back
Big Ben Is Back
Ben Shelton rights the ship in Montreal.
Ben Shelton rights the ship in Montreal.
By Owen Lewis
August 14, 2026
Big Ben in Montreal this week. // Getty
Big Ben in Montreal this week. // Getty
Who is this man roping backhand winners down the line, and where did he come from? Yes, Ben Shelton excels in Canada. But last year, he won the National Bank Open in Toronto mostly thanks to the fact that his backhand held up in crosscourt exchanges with the forehands of Taylor Fritz and Alex de Minaur, letting the rest of his game do the work. In defending his title in Montreal this past week, his backhand has been a damn weapon. This man of the historically abysmal return has broken serve almost at will. Take his quarterfinal against Jakub Mensik: a 6–3, 6–1 demolition in which Shelton broke one of the best servers in the world four times, never faced a break point himself, and hit three unforced errors. Two of them were in the last game. That is 2014 Shanghai Novak Djokovic shit.
In the final on Thursday night, Shelton dismissed Brandon Nakashima — a fairly utilitarian, unimaginative player with a terrific first serve — 6–3, 7–6 (4). Reader, I saw sights to challenge my vision. On set point in the opener, Shelton somehow got his racquet on a perfect Nakashima serve down the T, the kind that looks like it’s going out until it somehow catches a piece of both lines, then anticipated Nakashima’s approach shot and blasted a forehand winner down the line. The first point of that game saw Nakashima hit three winner-caliber shots, only for Shelton to chase them all down and finish with another scorching forehand pass, this time crosscourt. Has Nadal been coaching him in secret? Did Rafa de-age by 20 years and play the match himself, wearing a Mission: Impossible-style Shelton mask?
Shelton wasn’t really in danger all tournament, save being down a break in both sets he played against Joao Fonseca, before the Brazilian became possessed by a melting-down Aryna Sabalenka at 1–0, 40–15. But it’s less that he didn’t drop a set against Jenson Brooksby, Zizou Bergs, Fonseca, Mensik, and Nakashima and more that he played at a level befitting a world No. 1 for meaningful stretches. Anybody would have had their hands full with this version of Shelton in the final. You wouldn’t think it, given his shotmaking abilities and tumultuous shot tolerance temperature, but Shelton’s struggles are more with his peak than his consistency. He’s reliably in the mid-late rounds of majors, excepting hiccups on the natural surfaces this year. He’s landed titles on all three surfaces. But his best win is either over a 2023 Jannik Sinner (who’s since won 22 consecutive sets over him) or Taylor Fritz, making me a devout skeptic that he can find a wide-enough gap in the Sincaraz regime to win a major. This run has me questioning my faith.
Shelton is an occasionally maddening player to watch. He’s relentlessly positive during his matches, yelling in a somewhat nasal voice after everything from brilliant winners to win sets to bland service winners at 1–1, 15–love. Then he’ll blast a low-percentage forehand down the line wide to lose a five-setter at Wimbledon and show so little anguish that I wonder if he’s sufficiently bothered to correct the erroneous impulse next time out. Easy to forget now that he’s defended his title in Canada and looks like a potential Tier 1 US Open favorite pending the health of Sincaraz: Shelton is 1–2 at the last two majors, losing in straight sets to Raphael Collignon and from two-sets-to-one up to Otto Virtanen. There wasn’t much indication heading into Canada that Shelton would play the best tennis of his life; this article began as a pitch about him being in a slump. Almost as impressive as the tennis in Montreal was how Shelton summoned it as if out of necessity, with more than a quarter of his ranking points on the line.
Canada Shelton is an intimidating sight for any player. He patched up his backhand and added some spikes. He returned as well as anybody in the tournament besides Rafael Jodar, who looked like a plausible champion before making a fatigued exit against Nakashima. His forehand was a weapon even from behind the baseline — look at the thunderbolt down the line he hit on championship point. With his usual weaknesses either papered over or turned into strengths, what’s a player to do against Big Ben? Sinner will keep hitting with such unrelenting pace and depth to negate all his attacks. Carlitos will conjure magic in even greater quantities than Ben can. It’s a tough ask to repeat the best tennis of your life more than once a year, and if Shelton can simply peak like clockwork in Canada each year, that’ll be a fine legacy. But if what we saw this week was sustainable, he’ll be grasping at shinier hardware before long.
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If You're Feeling Sinister
If You're Feeling Sinister
If You're Feeling Sinister
How lefties create chaos.
How lefties create chaos.
By Saikeerthi Rachavelepula
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Originally Featured Volume 2 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
If You're Feeling Sinister
How Lefties Create Chaos.
By Saikeerthi Rachavelpula
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Originally Featured Volume 2 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral
Armed with rulers and an aversion to all things sinister, Catholic nuns are known to go around slapping the wrists of children holding pencils in their left hands. In Latin, “sinister” means both left-handed and inauspicious, generating an institutional bias that extended even to King George VI, who, despite being naturally left-handed, was forced to write with his right hand. The trauma of the involuntary conversion is thought to have produced his stutter, the subject of the film The King’s Speech and a classic case of what psychologists call “misplaced sinister.”
Given his thick Spanish accent, it is difficult for me to say if Rafael Nadal developed a similar impediment when his coach and uncle Toni forced him to change hands. As the apocryphal story goes, he told a 12-year-old Nadal—who eats, writes, and golfs with his right hand—to play tennis with his left in order to gain a tactical advantage. That unconventional decision proved pivotal. Nadal, who retired at the 2024 David Cup, forged one of the most successful careers in tennis history, with 22 Grand Slam titles over a 23-year-long career.
Despite his retirement, a quick glance at his countryman Carlos Alcaraz’s biceps affirms that tennis will never be a perfectly symmetrical sport. This is because, in tennis, the significance of left-handedness goes beyond any individual player’s musculature or tactical advantage. It reflects a larger asymmetry at the heart of a sport that is ultimately about clashing styles and shifting power dynamics. As it turns out, the Taoist belief that the interaction between opposites creates life applies to good tennis, too.
Conventional wisdom tells us that being left-handed is an advantage in tennis. Junior players love to repeat this in the face of defeat. But even professional players admit that this familiar fact gets under their skin. Before the 2021 French Open, Italian Matteo Berrettini told a reporter that playing a lefty is “really annoying.” Around the same time, two-time Wimbledon champion and top lefty Petra Kvitova smugly admitted, “Everybody doesn’t like to play lefties because it takes more thinking.”
Comments like these have given rise to scientific research programs dedicated to identifying the extent to which left-handedness is an advantage in professional sports. When the subject was first studied in the ’80s, researchers believed it was because left-handers were biologically better suited for athletics. According to one theory, this is because they possess larger right hemispheric brain regions associated with visual and spatial functions. According to another, it is because they exhibit more dominant and aggressive personality traits. (The latter theory was also used to argue that left-handers are more likely to be criminals.)
Research has since progressed past this essentialist view and toward the more commonsensical one: Because left-handers are the statistical minority, most players are less familiar facing them. Thus, lefties can upset the rhythm of an opponent accustomed to the typical set of patterns and spins.
The tactical advantage is not exclusive to tennis. Boxing, baseball, fencing, table tennis, and cricket have all been shown to exhibit a greater degree of lefty advantage than tennis. This is partly because the advantage increases with added time pressure. Less time to react means a greater reliance on prediction and instinct. Added time pressure, therefore, increases a lefty’s chances of catching their opponents off guard.
In addition to time pressure, there are other factors correlated to lefty advantage, such as the coordination problems arising from team dynamics. But this does not help us grasp the significance of left-handedness in tennis. If some player has a biological advantage, so what? As servebots remind us, that doesn’t necessarily make things more exciting. It doesn’t explain the thrill of a good lefty-righty battle, why it’s able to scratch our brains and divide our houses.
David Foster Wallace’s 7,000-word love letter to Federer in The New York Times tries to explain this with the claim that the stark character contrast—“Apollo and Dionysian, scalpel and cleaver, righty and southpaw”—provides the conditions for good (Federer) to triumph over evil (Nadal). The logic of his eloquent fangirling, however, is erroneous, for even Djokovic fans can admit the kinetic beauty displayed in the Federer-Nadal rivalry. No matter what DFW says, tennis matches do not thrust us into a mythic realm of angels and demons.
No—it’s more like a return to the mirror stage, a chance to bask in the visual splendor of a matrix of reflections. A kind of infinity room, the grinding juxtaposition of styles is able to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Athens versus Sparta, yin versus yang, Team Edward versus Team Jacob. To witness opposites interact is to be reminded that there is always more than one mode of being, and there is always more than one object of desire.
While the aesthetics of handedness explain our primordial fascination, they do not explain what it is about the interaction of opposites that’s able to create something larger. After all, why can’t some other mash-up of styles achieve the same effect?
If you thought the one-handed backhand was a dying breed, consider the lefty one-hander. // Infographic by Larry Buchanan, featured in OPEN Tennis Vol. 4.
If you thought the one-handed backhand was a dying breed, consider the lefty one-hander. // Infographic by Larry Buchanan, featured in OPEN Tennis Vol. 4.
To understand the impact of left-handedness, we need to look beyond the typical ways of approaching unpredictability in tennis. When analyzing matches, we talk too much about luck. By now, we all understand that players are not machines. They are susceptible to good days and bad days. Sometimes Fortuna is on their side. Other times, she is not. Blah blah blah…
The issue with luck talk isn’t that it’s misplaced or that it discounts hard work and talent. The issue is how luck is used as a conversational roadblock. Saying that a player had a “bad day” or a “lucky break” is an easy way for a commentator to fulfill their job description. Similarly, players know that they shouldn’t reveal their game plans and deepest inner thoughts, so they blame the intangibles, the ineffable, the weather… Almost always, these are strategies to oversimplify the complexity of a match they paid professionals to analyze. Almost always, there is more going on behind the scenes. To cite luck is a performative way of throwing one’s hands up and saying, “Next question.”
But even the weather is not a system governed by chance. It is a system governed by chaos. Framing things in terms of chance is not only overdone, but it obscures the role of chaos in a tennis match, its ability to shift momentum and instate disorder.
In physics, a dynamical system is called chaotic if a small change in initial conditions produces a large change in outcome. Until recently, it was thought that small changes in inputs could only produce small changes in output. In the ’60s, however, physicist Edward Lorenz showed that a difference in the thousandth decimal place (the difference between .506 and .5061) in ocean-surface temperature could have a profound impact on future weather patterns. The difference between a devastating storm and low tide.
What’s unique about chaos is that it generates unpredictability without the involvement of chance. Unlike flipping a coin or rolling a die—simple systems that offer few surprises—the unpredictability of chaos stems from its complexity. In a chaotic system, there are many physical laws at work, and, crucially, these laws push in conflicting directions. In chaotic systems like weather patterns or fluid dynamics, forces such as momentum, pressure, and temperature can simultaneously amplify and counteract one another. The tug-of-war of opposing forces makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to predict the system’s behavior over time. (Famously, the three-body problem, in which three celestial bodies orbit one another, has been shown to describe a chaotic system that has no general solution.) In such cases, even if we understand the causes, the effects elude us.
Chaos also tells us that the relationship between input and output is not always linear. Contrary to popular belief, there are many cases where it is possible to get out more than you put in. Flipping one’s forehand onto the ad side is one such case.
A lefty-righty matchup continuously subjects the ball to maximal changes in trajectory. Each player produces an opposing set of forces in an arduous attempt to make sure their particular set of spins, angles, and curvatures wins out in the end. A lefty-righty matchup expands the possibility space of physical states that the ball can occupy. The possibilities only increase as we advance in the match. As we move from shots to points to games to sets, the complexity and therefore unpredictability compound. Even if we think we know what’s coming, we can’t help but get aced out wide.
What lefties do for tennis, therefore, is not just create awkward angles. They create chaos. As agents of chaos, they do not just alter the physical elements of a tennis match, but also the psychological. A missed backhand return, a shanked overhead, a seemingly unremarkable bunt that falls a little too short and out of reach—each of these can introduce psychological disorder. A lefty’s ability to constantly redirect the ball along all physical dimensions makes each of these disruptions more likely. If you are in doubt, just watch one of Adrian Mannarino’s matches. Standing atop the baseline and cutting off angles like he’s making it up as he goes, the left-handed Frenchman became 17th in the world in part by drawing errors from frustrated opponents.
Ultimately, tennis is not about luck, nor is it about control. It is about the small, errant shifts that go unnoticed until they’ve already changed everything. A lefty-righty matchup, in this sense, is a demonstration of chaos. It’s not God or chance that dictates the outcome, but a system teetering on the edge of instability, where the downstream consequences of every decision, every misstep, travel further than we could ever expect. We like to think we understand what’s coming, but we never do. And in that uncertainty, in that entropy, lies the beauty and the annoyance.
Among other things, the rapture of the lefty-righty dynamic is in the physics. Newton’s third law tells us that for every force, there is an equal and opposite one. When rival forces come together on the tennis court, the angles bend unnervingly, the ball doesn’t know which way to spin, and we’re left with no option but to wait and watch what happens next.
Though chaos by definition resists long-term prediction, a 12-year-old Nadal seemed to know which hand to hold his racquet in to create disruptions years down the line with his hooking forehand on the run and slice out wide. No one embodies the ethos of chaos more than Nadal, with his belief that the position of his water bottle, the tightness of his Bermuda shorts, and the number of sprints he runs in the locker room have the power to change the outcome of the match.
With Nadal’s retirement, there is an even greater need to push for more chaos in the sport. While those like Nick Kyrgios think this should come in the form of tattoos, trash talk, and smashed racquets, this solution misunderstands the nature of what has been lost. To break the rules is one thing, but to expand what is possible within them is another. Chaos does not mean noise. Chaos, as Nadal practiced it, is an insistence on expanding the physically possible, on doing what the game itself had not yet imagined. The answer is not louder. The answer is deeper, a return to the fundamental principles that make tennis’ particular kind of destruction inevitable—rhythmic, even.
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Subscribe to Survive
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Subscribe to Survive
What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
By Takashi Williams
Illustration by Dalbert B Vilarnino
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
Subscribe to Survive
What the growing presence of OnlyFans means for pro tennis.
By Takashi Williams
Illustration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY
Illustration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
Illustratration by Dalbert B. Vilarino
A beach paddle from the dollar store served as Sachia Vickery’s introduction to tennis. Growing up in Miramar, Fla., she was able to take tennis lessons because her mother juggled multiple jobs. From hitting against a wall to a career-high ranking of 73rd in the world, Vickery’s 15 years on tour encompass a miraculous feat for the first-generation Guyanese American. Yet after all the obstacles faced and accumulating more than $2 million in prize money, an injury revealed the fiscal deficiencies of her lifelong profession—even at the highest level.
In 2025, Vickery was sidelined for six months due to a shoulder injury. With the hiatus came a halt in pay, as is the case for most professional tennis players: No tennis played means no prize money earned, unless you possess the lucrative sponsorship deals and marketable likeness capable of landing a Vanity Fair cover shoot away from the court. And even with over $50,000 in prize money earned that season before her injury, expenses on tour add up quickly. A common practice for players on tour has become reinvesting roughly 90 percent of earnings back into the profession they earned it from.
“You need another source of income,” Vickery explained. “Paying coaches, nutritionists, hotels, food, coaching fees, all this stuff. It’s not sustainable just off of prize money.”
The very same month she took a step back from tennis, OnlyFans presented itself as another source. The subscription-based platform—known primarily for its pornographic content—offered Vickery a spot on its pickleball-themed TV show Smash City, hosted by fellow tennis player Nick Kyrgios.
“At first I was hesitant, knowing the background of OnlyFans,” Vickery said. “It was one of those things where you’re more on the back end [of your career], and you’re like, ‘Well, who doesn’t want to make more money? And easily at that.’ It’s just the easiest thing I’ve ever done to make money.”
Upon agreeing to the deal, Vickery appeared on the show and created an account on the site as an OnlyFans Athlete—receiving $20,000 in doing so. At first, Vickery only intended on sharing “behind-the-scenes stuff and a little bit of edgy photo shoots.” She was expected to post tennis content and be on the site for only a month. After winning the Smash City game show, however—and the $20,000 prize that came along with it—her following on the site grew immensely. With this boom in subscribers came a sneak peek of just how viable an income stream OnlyFans could be.
Once Vickery’s first month on the site concluded, she made more than $80,000 and went on to make over $1 million that very same year—five times more than what she earned in prize money the year prior. And with this new source of income came multiple benefits in her playing career. She was able to hire a chef, a nutritionist, and a trainer, and to pay for her coach to travel with her to more events—luxuries that seemingly can only be enjoyed by those in the upper echelons of the sport. How these luxuries were afforded through OnlyFans presents a gray area regarding how athletes can garner significant success on the platform. “Me being a pro tennis player at a high level helped the marketing side of it. I still do OFTV episodes with other creators where I give them tennis lessons,” Vickery said. “But to be really honest with you, when I passed over the six-figure mark, it was only content that I posted pushing the limits, pushing the boundaries, showing more skin, doing lingerie photo shoots. It sounds harsh, but it’s the reality: Any man that goes on OnlyFans, he doesn’t really care about watching the end of your practice. He wants to see you with the least amount of clothes on as possible.”
Founded in 2016, OnlyFans was created with the intention of connecting musicians and influencers to their respective fan bases. Explicit content and pornography were even banned from being shared on the platform. After a year of underwhelming interest from those demographics, however, the ban was lifted, and with it came the site currently valued at roughly $8 billion. An 18+ social media platform, creators retain 80 percent of what they earn from subscription fees, tips, paid messages, and pay-per-view media. Through this setup, these same creators have received more than $25 billion in profit since the site’s creation. The banning of pornographic content was later revisited in 2021, but to no avail. Nonetheless, OnlyFans has continued to try to distance itself from its not-safe-for-work reputation through the launch of OFTV later that year, and now through sports.
“Professional athletes from around the world are increasingly choosing to join OnlyFans to monetize their content, grow their online presence, and meaningfully engage with their fan communities,” an OnlyFans spokesperson wrote to OPEN Tennis. “We are especially passionate about creating opportunities for athletes in sports where earning opportunities can be more limited outside of the very top tier of competition. Tennis is a global sport with highly engaged fan communities, and many players are looking for new ways to connect with supporters and build their personal brands beyond traditional sponsorship models.”
Kyrgios, who was the first active tennis player to join the site, in 2023, is now joined by the likes of Alexandre Muller, Pedro Martinez, Panna Udvardy, Arina Rodionova, Oceane Dodin, and Chloe Paquet. While some may have signed up for OnlyFans on their own will, others, such as Muller, signed annual sponsorship contracts that include requirements for wearing the OF merchandise and even sporting the logo on court. The latter has been difficult due to an outright ban of the OnlyFans logo at sanctioned events.
What differs for each athlete is what they choose to post, whether they are an OnlyFans Athlete or not. More than 285 professional athletes “share exclusive content including training sessions, coaching tips, gym workouts, nutrition, travel, and behind-the-scenes access,” according to the spokesperson. For the male tennis players such as Kyrgios, Muller, and Martinez, their content doesn’t stray far from this statement, with exception to a cheeky bio on Muller’s account reading “Don’t think too much…. Just follow and you will see 😈.”
Muller politely declined to comment on his sponsorship with OnlyFans.
For the women, however, their pages play much more into the sexual nature of OnlyFans. Udvardy and Paquet will advertise bikini photos as pay-per-view content along with their tennis content and selfies. Both women do not acknowledge the sexual content, mildly at that, in which they post. “You can not compare what Sachia Vickery is doing on the app with me 🙃 I think I am doing like Panna.” Paquet wrote. “I sponsored by OF to try to change their image. I share my life on tour, my travels, my practices and talk with the fans! No nude, no hot videos! The same thing that I can possible share on my insta! The only thing is there I can speak with fans in exchange of money (3$ by message) compare to insta that I do not answer!” For Vickery and Dodin, they both focus primarily on sexual and erotic content, with subscribers recently receiving this message for a paywalled post after Dodin’s Roland-Garros qualifying win on May 18: “To celebrate a victory at French Open, a super hot video… striptease 🥵 Face, boobs, ass—everything’s there for your greatest pleasure. Let’s enjoy this victory together 😈.”
Dodin produces X-rated content while Vickery has yet to cross that boundary on the platform. Either way, the difference in content between male and female tennis players reveals more about the site than it does the athletes on it. Paquet claims she is sponsored to “change their image,” yet she plays into the sexual nature of the site instead of solely posting tennis content. So while the men have not felt the need to market themselves in this manner, the women choose to. Along with the OnlyFans spokesperson acknowledging that these are athletes in a sport where “earning opportunities can be more limited,” this begs the question of whether the reputation of OnlyFans is something that can be fixed by the creators themselves, or if the inclusion of female athletes in need of secondary income streams will only result in them adhering to the sexual precedent set by the most successful women on the platform—and ultimately sanctioned by OnlyFans. “Those other players only posting tennis content, they’ll probably do okay, but I think at some point they’re going to plateau,” Vickery said. “They’re going to realize, ‘I’m not really making as much as I can.’ And that might have them thinking, ‘Well, what if I showed a little more?’”
The temptations of “pushing the limit” for female athletes on OnlyFans are real. Doing so is also a lucrative opportunity to capitalize on the constant focus on women’s sex appeal in the sport rather than their playing ability. With financial compensation in professional tennis on both sides being extremely inadequate for players, women face a pay disparity in the prize pool as grave as $3 million. So even when they look to brands for another source of income to relieve certain stresses, the sexualization and critiques of their appearance come from such brands as well. Former world No. 21 Sorana Cirstea revealed that she was once told by adidas that “it’s better to look good and be in the top 20 than to not look that good and be No. 1.” Vickery even claims she was dropped by Lacoste because her “body didn’t fit the mold,” citing the lack of curvy Black women with major clothing brand sponsorships. By joining OnlyFans, these women are able to have more control regarding how they monetize their appearance. But it also highlights the risks women who have spent more than a decade on tour are willing to take because their appearance is often compensated more generously than their performance as tennis players.
“If players were happy with all the money that they were making, I don’t think they would be exploring OnlyFans. So maybe that’s something internal with the system they need to work out,” Vickery said. “I played a tournament last week, and I made $300. This is a 100K event, one of the strongest, toughest tournaments on the calendar…. I couldn’t even imagine if I didn’t have that [OnlyFans] backing. It’s really not good. They were calling me crazy at first for joining the platform, but mark my words: A lot more people are going to join. They’re gonna put two and two together and realize that $300 a week isn’t gonna cut it after years and years on the tour.” And with more than six top 100 players reaching out to Vickery after she joined the site, the appeal is undeniable. Now tennis’ governing bodies must decide whether simply hiding the brand’s logo is sufficient, or if they are willing to invest real money to show that they value these women more as tennis players than the public values them for their sex appeal?
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Gael Monfils: Wild Styles
Wild Styles
Wild Styles
Gael Monfils winds down an electrifying career.
Gael Monfils winds down an electrifying career.
By Giri Nathan
Aug 7, 2026
La Monf in Montreal this week. // Getty
La Monf in Montreal this week. // Getty
Looking in from the outside, a farewell tour looks like a lot of work. Not that there could be any easy way to step away from a sport that has defined a person’s entire life, but tennis seems to make that ordeal especially gritty. There’s no option to ride the bench and hop in for some lighthearted, inconsequential minutes. It’s still a season full of plane rides and hotel stays, scrounging for wild cards, not expecting much on the court, maybe a feel-good win here or there, all to achieve a sense of closure. But if there were ever an ATP player deserving such a tour, it is Gael Monfils. That’s a player to whom tribute should be paid in person, with direct witness, because that seemed to be the whole point of him playing tennis—to be witnessed.
A crowd favorite the world over, the people’s champion, Monfils won them over with his impish acrobatics, his vertical leap, his trick-shot whims. If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to explain it to you, just go watch any of the dozens of compilations of his on-court magic. It’s tennis that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment. Of course, as any hardcore fan of his could tell you, the week-to-week experience of watching Monfils was considerably less euphoric. He never committed to a style of play that could have produced the results many thought he was capable of; despite his considerable offensive weapons, he preferred to play a more passive game interrupted by occasional blazes of creativity. Showmanship was inseparable from his match play, sometimes to his own detriment, often to our delight. But I think collective sporting memories are not defined by win-loss records but rather by sharp emotional spikes: marathon matches, indelible highlights, vulnerability with the crowd. And Monfils was the master of producing such moments. Anybody who has paid even glancing attention to the sport over the past two decades has cached away a Monfils moment or three.
Unsurprisingly, the man who approached tennis that way has been showered with adulation at every stop on tour, and I’ve enjoyed hearing a 39-year-old Monfils reflect on each of these tournaments, too, jotting down his thoughts on social media and talking directly to these crowds. The fans have gotten the opportunity to say goodbye throughout 2026, and I’ve equally enjoyed the fact that so many of his young colleagues seem so stoked to have gotten that same opportunity too. Before they were pros, they were also just fans of Gael Monfils, like everyone else. At the end of their Monte-Carlo match, Alexander Bublik—who is wired similarly to the Frenchman when it comes to entertainment value—gave Monfils a big hug and fondly remembered how, at that same tournament exactly 10 years ago, he’d been a teenage hitting partner for the veteran, and that Monfils had told him he’d make it. At Roland-Garros, Monfils lost his first-round match to his younger countryman Hugo Gaston in five sets, after midnight, and through it all he was regaled by all the singing and shouting one would expect from his home Slam. “It was quite a strange feeling when, at the end of the third set, everyone was shouting, ‘Gael, Gael.’ I wanted to shout with them,” said the 25-year-old Gaston afterward.
Monfils’ exit from Canada this week might have been the best such moment to date. In his second-round match he took on Learner Tien, who was born four months after Monfils won his first title on tour, in August 2005. Despite logging 53 unforced errors, Tien won, with a very Monfils-coded score line, 6–3, 0–6, 6–3. Afterward, the Frenchman had his back turned to the court as he signed autographs for fans in the crowd, only for Tien to nudge him and present him with his own tennis ball and Sharpie. In a world of grimly contrived viral videos, here was an unmistakable wholesome moment, another Monfils moment, this one without any racquets involved; the truth was in the enormous grins sported by both players. Before he left the court, Tien had to sign something too: the camera lens, on which he wrote “legend!” After the match, he posted a picture of the ball, along with a caption: “First time asking for an autograph.” I’m sure Gael would have liked to win a Slam, sure, but when it comes to the question of who endures in memories of actual people, he’ll leave a much rarer legacy.
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Cruz Hewitt Takes the Baton
Son of a Gun
Son of a Gun
Cruz Hewitt takes the baton.
Cruz Hewitt takes the baton.
By Giri Nathan
July 31, 2026
Cruz in DC this week. // Getty
Cruz in DC this week. // Getty
It’s a little surprising that tennis isn’t more dominated by the offspring of former top pros, who presumably pass along the genetics, know-how, and wealth needed to construct a good tennis player. On the ATP side, the most prominent examples right now would be Sebastian Korda and Casper Ruud, sons of a world No. 2 and a world No. 39, respectively. If those pedigrees weren’t good enough, we now officially have the son of a world No. 1 tearing up the hard court: Cruz Hewitt, son of Lleyton, the Aussie who dominated the early aughts with his point-to-point intensity, backwards hat, and jumping backhands. I’m officially old enough that the guys that we used to imitate at tennis camp now have sons racking up ATP points. Horrifying to consider.
Anyway, the 17-year-old Cruz is a real talent, though different in style from his predecessor. Perhaps all they have in common is the orientation of their hats and their determined dispositions on court. Lleyton was the counterpuncher to rule all counterpunchers, undersized but overzealous with his court coverage. During his prime in the early aughts, the sport was about to be overtaken by powerful baseliners, but Lleyton, at 5-foot-10, still managed to climb to the top of the tour with his mild forehand, scrappy returning, and flawless point construction. This guy had a 7–2 winning record over Roger Federer until 2003! At which point that man, and the new power he ushered in, simply washed over everyone else. (Federer went on to win 16 of their remaining 18 matches.) I’m not sure we’ll ever see a player of that low-power counterpunching archetype win Wimbledon on the men’s side ever again. Just to hammer home the point, after Lleyton won his title there in 2002, Roger took five in a row.
Hopefully Cruz won’t have to fight quite as viciously for every point, compared with his dad. His strokes are bigger and loopier, and he can average 120 mph on first serve over the course of a match. During his run to the boys’ Wimbledon final earlier this month, the younger Hewitt was asked to estimate his current height; he guessed “6-foot-2-ish,” and perhaps he’s not yet done. Under the paint job he’s believed to be using one of the power racquets du jour, the EZONE 98. Cruz joins a very different pro tour than his dad’s, technologically and tactically, but appears to be reasonably well-equipped for the fight. It’s too early to tell for sure. He spent much of this season grinding Futures and Challengers, raising his ranking from No. 735 at the start of the year to No. 612 at the start of this week.
It turned out to be a momentous week. Offered a wild card into the qualifying rounds in Washington, Cruz benefited from two consecutive retirements (Dusan Lajovic was down 5–2, though Zachary Svajda was up 2–0 in the third set). Strange circumstances, but that sent the teenager to his first ATP main-draw match, at a tournament his dad won in 2004. In Tuesday’s first-round match, Hewitt played world No. 80 Marcus Giron. Hewitt won 6–3, 6–4, claiming 83 percent of his first-serve points and not facing a break point. After winning, Cruz did his dad’s signature celebration: four fingers pointed right at the eyes. What’s the deal with it? Cruz hilariously wasn’t even sure, as he admitted in a Tennis Channel interview. “It’s called the ‘vicht,’ I think. I think! I need to check on that, to be honest…. When I was little, I’ve just seen it, I never really asked about it.” It is indeed called the “vicht,” and it originated with Swedish players Mats Wilander and Niclas Kroon, who took Kroon’s celebratory gesture while playing Yahtzee and translated it to the tennis court in the 1980s. The elder Hewitt must have borrowed it from the players he grew up watching. And his son did the same.
For his next act, Cruz had to take on a friend and mentor he’s known for a decade: Alex de Minaur, the top Aussie on tour, and perhaps the present era’s analogue to Lleyton himself. De Minaur has spent so much time with the Hewitts that Cruz said he was “like an older brother.” They hit together regularly. Thursday’s second-round match was straightforward work for the tournament’s top seed, 6–2, 6–3, who admitted in his on-court interview that it was “definitely weird” to be playing Cruz already: “I knew I was going to play him on the tour someday, but I didn’t actually expect it to be this week.” At the net, de Minaur told him they’d be playing for the next 10 years of their lives and wished him good luck. With his first-round win, Cruz Hewitt has leaped up to No. 368 in the live rankings. Among players under 18, only the breakout Frenchman Moise Kouamé is currently ranked higher. If he hopes to keep clashing with his big brother on tour, he still has a long climb ahead of him.
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A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
By Owen Lewis
July 23, 2026
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
Aryna Sabalenka couldn’t shake herself out of her funk in time to make a run at the Wimbledon title. Naomi Osaka was supreme in defeating her—there again was the first serve and backhand that propelled her to four major titles—but the circumstances of the loss were telling. It was the first time Sabalenka had lost at a major in straight sets since 2020. The first time she’d lost a tiebreak at a major since the US Open, and she lost it badly, 7–2, after winning the opening point. Iga Swiatek fell a round earlier, not coming close to defending the title she won ruthlessly in 2025. Elena Rybakina is in the midst of a mystifying loss of form; from the would-be successor to Sabalenka’s No. 1 ranking in March, she now looks fundamentally incapable of producing good tennis for the requisite length of time. She lost meekly to Elise Mertens the same day Alex Eala upset Swiatek.
There is unrest atop the WTA, and at Wimbledon we saw the rain-blurred landscape clearly. Each time the draw seemed to produce a favorite, the field promptly dumped them out of the tournament. After beating Sabalenka, Osaka looked like the sharpest player in the draw: She hadn’t dropped a set through four rounds and had just earned the best win of her career since her duels with late-career Serena Williams. (You can imagine Serena, watching the first half of the season from home, feeling that there wasn’t a player on tour she wouldn’t have a chance to beat.) As a four-time major champion, Osaka had only ever lost one match beyond the fourth round of a Slam. Instead, she didn’t win another set. At one point Jessica Pegula was a popular winner pick, before Coco Gauff thoroughly outplayed her for the last two sets of their quarterfinal. It was hard to imagine anybody beating the Gauff of those two sets, so next she stood out from the rest. Like Osaka, she fell to Muchova, and after having a chance to put away a short forehand on match point. Surely the stars had aligned for Muchova, then. Nope. She put up an almighty fight in the final, but only truly looked like a better player than Linda Noskova for the hallucinogenic half hour in which she wrestled control of the second set from 2–5, saving five championship points along the way.
So is it Noskova, at just 21 years old, who’s best positioned to climb atop this fractured summit? Maybe—in the final, it felt like I was watching an all-time great at 31. Her serve was relentlessly precise, her returns stifling and aggressive, her movement assured, her ground strokes and slices cleverly angled. How is there enough time in two decades to build a game that complete? But there’s so much competition that you’d still take the field over Noskova at any tournament. Leaving aside the top four, any of whom could regain their form at any time, there’s newly minted major champion Mirra Andreeva to contend with. There’s Amanda Anisimova, also in a slump but instantly deadly once she recovers the timing on her mighty ground strokes. Elina Svitolina, in arguably career-best form at 31. Marta Kostyuk, who made the semifinals in both Paris and London and hasn’t lost a match besides since March. The teen terrors of Iva Jovic and Victoria Mboko, who I expect to get right back to breaking brains once she recovers from her MCL injury. En route to the Wimbledon title, Noskova had to save a match point against 36-year-old Sorana Cirstea, who’s in the midst of the last and best year of her career. Anybody can beat anybody at any time.
Though peak Sabalenka or Swiatek chewing up a tournament is far from boring, this is the tour at its best. Pity those who claim to love predictability—in the absence of Carlos Alcaraz, any given ATP tournament is Jannik Sinner’s to lose, barring his body’s intermittent and violent rebellions against itself. The texture of men’s tennis has grown same-y, too. The top of the tour is a glut of ball-bashers and servebots (tellingly, Sinner is both those things), plus 39-year-old Novak Djokovic. There’s too much predictability in the ATP’s results, but what’s even worse is that you know what most of the tennis will look like: big forehands, bigger serves, some slow backhand-to-backhand rallies, a drop shot once every 10 or 15 points. Alcaraz is a vital presence because he’s the only player who can disrupt the Sinner monarchy, but also because—at least until, hopefully, Learner Tien develops a killer serve—he’s the only top player whose style varies wildly and thrillingly from the baseline.
The WTA, though? Power still has a loud voice, but each champion is wonderfully distinct from one another. In her semifinal against Gauff, Muchova hit two superhuman volleys under duress. She hit one of them while diving, and the other somehow was more impressive, following a path from the middle of the court to the sideline so thin and faint that even Muchova seemed to think she’d missed. Gauff has won two majors and risen to No. 3 in the world with a game entirely comprised of the negative space around the stale serve-plus-one archetype. Diana Shnaider’s vicious lefty forehand rips up typical baseline patterns and creates new ones. Kostyuk’s background in gymnastics is evident in each of her improbable defensive stabs. Even the best servers on tour don’t win as many as three-fourths of their service games, maintaining a healthy degree of unpredictability each time they toss the ball. The WTA is more than capable of losing any one player to injury for a while without feeling as though its soul has gone missing. Rivalries are sparse, something I’ve lamented before, but even that’s a tribute to the women’s game in a way—you can just watch a tournament unfold and expect to see something compelling rather than tuning half-out when the most telegenic player crashes out early. An alien would think that’s the distinguishing characteristic of what deserves to be the more profitable tour, and I do too.
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Bernie Tomic is Back in the Winner's Circle
Born Again
Born Again
For the first time since 2018, Bernard Tomic is back in the winners circle.
For the first time since 2018, Bernard Tomic is back in the winners circle.
By Giri Nathan
July 24, 2026
Bernard Tomic during Australian Open qualifying this year. // Getty
Bernard Tomic during Australian Open qualifying this year. // Getty
Bernard Tomic? You haven’t heard that name in years. Only true Tomic heads—and I’m not sure many exist in 2026—would be keeping close tabs on the surly Australian, still somehow only 33 years old, who squandered considerable talent and goodwill over the years, both on and off the court. But he’s now in the middle of something like a “born-again” tennis career, which peaked this weekend when he earned his biggest title in eight years. And that deserves a little bit of context. Enough time has elapsed since his “prime” that there’s a whole new cohort of tennis fans who know nothing of his lore. Forgive me if you were around for all this; hopefully it’s amusing enough to revisit.
Tomic was the world top junior. He also had a quintessential toxic tennis dad, which might help explain his future apathy toward the sport. But together they honed an original and effective game style. Despite standing 6-foot-5, Bernie didn’t overpower opponents. His was a finesse game, defined by ball control, deception, and change of pace. He could play his ground strokes so ridiculously flat that they stopped being flat; I don’t think I’ve seen any player, before or since, hit more baseline groundies that actually arrived with sneaky underspin. His style was already slightly anachronistic at the time, and in today’s power-oriented game, it is unimaginable. Tomic was a brilliant ball-striker, but not at all in the present-day Jannik Sinner sense. Just a guy with phenomenal hands and a keen intuition for perturbing his opponents. He had good enough hands that he could afford to get a little lackadaisical with his footwork…and conditioning, and mentality, and…yeah, pretty much everything else.
As it turns out, good hands can take you incredibly far in a sport predicated on the precise manipulation of a sphere with a racquet. Tomic’s weird style worked not just against fellow teenagers but against touring professionals. In 2009, when he was 16, he became the third-youngest player ever to win a Challenger title. In 2011, he made it to the quarterfinals of Wimbledon, becoming the youngest man to reach that stage of the tournament since Boris Becker. At that juncture, he looked like he’d be one of the most talented players of his generation. He soon ascended into the top 50, then plateaued for a few years but peaked at No. 17 at the start of 2016, before it all began to fall apart. He’s one of those cases where the Wikipedia headings tell the story more succinctly than I ever could:
2018: Rankings downfall, reality television stint and fourth ATP title
2019: Severe downfall in form and ranking
2020: Inactivity due to COVID-19
Along the way, there was a lot of nastiness, apathy, tanking, and other behavior too insipid to recount here. Suffice to say, by 2022, he was ranked outside the top 800. Bernard Tomic would have never struck anyone as the type to keep grinding at the lower levels of tennis and revive a moribund career; a full-time pivot to scammer/influencer would have struck me as a much more likely outcome. But he did in fact choose to grind away from the baseline, in unglamorous and ill-paid tournaments all over the world, as if he’d never had a taste of life at the top of tennis. In late 2022, Tomic started at the ITF level and built his ranking back up again until, by late 2024, he was back in the top 250 and securely in the Challenger tier of the tour.
He even made it back to Challenger finals again. In 2024, he lost the Fairfield final to future star Learner Tien, 6–0, 6–1, in 39 minutes, which was the shortest championship match in Challenger history, indicating that the new Tomic still had a bit of the old Tomic in him after all. In 2025, he made and lost two more finals: a three-setter in Lexington versus Zachary Svajda (who is enjoying a breakout summer) and a walkover in Barranquilla that handed the title to Arthur Fery (a freshly minted Wimbledon semifinalist). But in 2026, Tomic took two months off the tour, which he later explained was due to the birth of his first child. In the days leading up to the Lincoln Challenger, he later revealed, he felt he “hit a brick wall” and wanted to call this his last season on tour. Going into the final against Mark Lajal—you might recall the distinctive pineapple-style haircut he used to sport—Tomic was the clear underdog.
And yet, at the end of that two-hour, 41-minute final, it was Tomic who reigned supreme, 4–6, 7–6(4), 7–6(3). Lajal was playing his run-of-the-mill power baseline game, and Tomic was lazily massaging the ball all over the court. It’s a pretty refeshing style to watch, when his head is actually in it. Seventeen years after his first Challenger title, Bernie has notched another—that one a mark of blazing prodigy, this one of unexpected tenacity. Will it be his last? “I said this was going to be my last year, so I guess I have to reassess a few things now,” Tomic said after claiming the Lincoln title. He looks like he’s in the best shape of his life. “Now that I won, I’m going to have to go back to the table. I’m probably going to play another 20 years,” he said. It’s not a sequence of words that I expected to type in 2026, but here goes: Bernie Tomic, you have my respect.
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A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
A Tour in Flux
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
More than ever on the WTA, anything could happen.
By Owen Lewis
July 23, 2026
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
The field is wide open. // Photo illustration by David Bartholow.
Aryna Sabalenka couldn’t shake herself out of her funk in time to make a run at the Wimbledon title. Naomi Osaka was supreme in defeating her—there again was the first serve and backhand that propelled her to four major titles—but the circumstances of the loss were telling. It was the first time Sabalenka had lost at a major in straight sets since 2020. The first time she’d lost a tiebreak at a major since the US Open, and she lost it badly, 7–2, after winning the opening point. Iga Swiatek fell a round earlier, not coming close to defending the title she won ruthlessly in 2025. Elena Rybakina is in the midst of a mystifying loss of form; from the would-be successor to Sabalenka’s No. 1 ranking in March, she now looks fundamentally incapable of producing good tennis for the requisite length of time. She lost meekly to Elise Mertens the same day Alex Eala upset Swiatek.
There is unrest atop the WTA, and at Wimbledon we saw the rain-blurred landscape clearly. Each time the draw seemed to produce a favorite, the field promptly dumped them out of the tournament. After beating Sabalenka, Osaka looked like the sharpest player in the draw: She hadn’t dropped a set through four rounds and had just earned the best win of her career since her duels with late-career Serena Williams. (You can imagine Serena, watching the first half of the season from home, feeling that there wasn’t a player on tour she wouldn’t have a chance to beat.) As a four-time major champion, Osaka had only ever lost one match beyond the fourth round of a Slam. Instead, she didn’t win another set. At one point Jessica Pegula was a popular winner pick, before Coco Gauff thoroughly outplayed her for the last two sets of their quarterfinal. It was hard to imagine anybody beating the Gauff of those two sets, so next she stood out from the rest. Like Osaka, she fell to Muchova, and after having a chance to put away a short forehand on match point. Surely the stars had aligned for Muchova, then. Nope. She put up an almighty fight in the final, but only truly looked like a better player than Linda Noskova for the hallucinogenic half hour in which she wrestled control of the second set from 2–5, saving five championship points along the way.
So is it Noskova, at just 21 years old, who’s best positioned to climb atop this fractured summit? Maybe—in the final, it felt like I was watching an all-time great at 31. Her serve was relentlessly precise, her returns stifling and aggressive, her movement assured, her ground strokes and slices cleverly angled. How is there enough time in two decades to build a game that complete? But there’s so much competition that you’d still take the field over Noskova at any tournament. Leaving aside the top four, any of whom could regain their form at any time, there’s newly minted major champion Mirra Andreeva to contend with. There’s Amanda Anisimova, also in a slump but instantly deadly once she recovers the timing on her mighty ground strokes. Elina Svitolina, in arguably career-best form at 31. Marta Kostyuk, who made the semifinals in both Paris and London and hasn’t lost a match besides since March. The teen terrors of Iva Jovic and Victoria Mboko, who I expect to get right back to breaking brains once she recovers from her MCL injury. En route to the Wimbledon title, Noskova had to save a match point against 36-year-old Sorana Cirstea, who’s in the midst of the last and best year of her career. Anybody can beat anybody at any time.
Though peak Sabalenka or Swiatek chewing up a tournament is far from boring, this is the tour at its best. Pity those who claim to love predictability—in the absence of Carlos Alcaraz, any given ATP tournament is Jannik Sinner’s to lose, barring his body’s intermittent and violent rebellions against itself. The texture of men’s tennis has grown same-y, too. The top of the tour is a glut of ball-bashers and servebots (tellingly, Sinner is both those things), plus 39-year-old Novak Djokovic. There’s too much predictability in the ATP’s results, but what’s even worse is that you know what most of the tennis will look like: big forehands, bigger serves, some slow backhand-to-backhand rallies, a drop shot once every 10 or 15 points. Alcaraz is a vital presence because he’s the only player who can disrupt the Sinner monarchy, but also because—at least until, hopefully, Learner Tien develops a killer serve—he’s the only top player whose style varies wildly and thrillingly from the baseline.
The WTA, though? Power still has a loud voice, but each champion is wonderfully distinct from one another. In her semifinal against Gauff, Muchova hit two superhuman volleys under duress. She hit one of them while diving, and the other somehow was more impressive, following a path from the middle of the court to the sideline so thin and faint that even Muchova seemed to think she’d missed. Gauff has won two majors and risen to No. 3 in the world with a game entirely comprised of the negative space around the stale serve-plus-one archetype. Diana Shnaider’s vicious lefty forehand rips up typical baseline patterns and creates new ones. Kostyuk’s background in gymnastics is evident in each of her improbable defensive stabs. Even the best servers on tour don’t win as many as three-fourths of their service games, maintaining a healthy degree of unpredictability each time they toss the ball. The WTA is more than capable of losing any one player to injury for a while without feeling as though its soul has gone missing. Rivalries are sparse, something I’ve lamented before, but even that’s a tribute to the women’s game in a way—you can just watch a tournament unfold and expect to see something compelling rather than tuning half-out when the most telegenic player crashes out early. An alien would think that’s the distinguishing characteristic of what deserves to be the more profitable tour, and I do too.
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Demon & Felix: Beyond Belief
Beyond Belief
Beyond Belief
What happens when elite players start to recognize their limitations?
What happens when elite players start to recognize their limitations?
By Carole Bouchard
Jul 17, 2026
The Demon during his round of 16 loss to Flavio Cobolli at Wimbledon. // Getty
The Demon during his round of 16 loss to Flavio Cobolli at Wimbledon. // Getty
Alex de Minaur’s distress in London echoed Felix Auger-Aliassime’s broken heart in Paris, as the two top players wondered aloud about their ceilings.
One of the most significant events of Wimbledon 2026 didn’t happen on the court; it happened in Interview Room 2, when Alex de Minaur met the press after losing in the fourth round to Flavio Cobolli. Shattered, he gave the stage to the little voice in the back of his mind that every top player tries so hard to silence. The Australian couldn’t take it anymore, so he uttered the words that had clearly been haunting him.
“You feel there are opportunities to be taken to make it to the next level, to become an even better version of yourself. And to fall short constantly, you start doubting yourself. You start doubting whether you’re going to be able to break through. As much as I’m in a great position, the fact that I want more and I’m not able to achieve more is a battle that I deal with every day. The goals, the beliefs, the dreams that you have, they start fading away, or feel a little bit further away than when they once were.”
It is an extraordinary statement, as you never hear a top-five player like de Minaur publicly say he’s scared he might have gone as far as he is capable of going, wondering if he has what it takes to achieve every top player’s dreams: winning Grand Slam titles and becoming world No. 1. I’m not even sure many allow themselves this kind of epiphany even privately. And yet it felt like he needed to get it off his chest. It, of course, matters to listen to the Sinners of this tennis world talking about how they achieve their dreams, but it also matters to see how those who don’t get there cope with it.
De Minaur’s statements were even more notable because they echoed what Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime said in Paris after losing in the quarterfinals against, yet again, Flavio Cobolli. “I’m in a place right now with my tennis career that it’s tough. I’m a little bit destroyed. My whole career, I was going back to training with optimism and positivity. Now I feel like I’m not the player I want to be. I’m growing more and more impatient. I’m 26 this year, and I’m not improving the way that I wish.”
Every other week, a player talks about wanting to or needing to get better every day to become the best version of themselves. It has gone from desire to injunction. The only way is up. You should always strive for more. Treat winning and losing the same way. And repeat. Everybody is chasing the version of themselves that will propel them to the top of the game. After a certain point it becomes less about doing the best you can within the frame of your abilities, but about somehow becoming more Superman than Clark Kent. Perhaps their generation is paying the price of taking inspiration from the Big Four instead of recognizing that era as the magnificent anomaly that it was. Yes, they kept improving and made the impossible possible, but treating their genius like common law is a road to disappointment for mere mortals.
For de Minaur and Auger-Aliassime, this is the friction point right now. Nobody dares say it. We’re in the manifesting era, so it would be a faux pas to table those kinds of sentiments. But what if the player they are now is the best version of themselves? What if they already got better every day until today, and that’s it? What if that’s as far as they’re going to go? What if they’ve met their ceiling and need to reframe the expectations and how they view their career?
Should they pack their things and go home? Surely not. Some players make peace with that and just keep doing their (very lucrative) job. By relaxing a bit, sometimes they end up achieving something huge right when it didn’t seem in the cards anymore. Others, like the Australian and the Canadian, will try to prove these odds wrong until they’ve used every drop left in their body and mind, because another voice keeps telling them they still have a shot at these dreams. And because they’ve reached a place so close to the sun that they can nearly feel the metal of that major under their hands. Tennis without these dreams is not what they’ve signed up for.
They’re also so good that there’s no way anyone can tell them they won’t make it. They’re the ones who, if stars align, could at least once touch their dreams. It’s the toughest spot to be in. The very wise Coco Gauff is known for often saying that at this level of the sport, to keep going and believing, one needs to be delusional. It’s either this or accepting to downgrade the expectations. The latter seems such a logical choice, right? But what about the players who cannot envision their careers without these expectations? If it’s the only thing that makes them pick up the racquet or go shed sweat and blood in the gym, then there’s gonna be no downgrading option.
“I was the young player very much awaited. I was also, at times, the player a little forgotten, in a few more difficult years. And then I’m a little more awaited again,” said Auger-Aliassime in London. “Now, with hindsight, it’s true that I know that every time, no matter the result, I’m going to have to keep being better than I am today. Even if I win this Wimbledon, I’m going back to training. At some point, I’m going to go back and try to be an even better player. That’s all I know. That’s really all I’m controlling. I’m someone who, deep down, is very emotional, and losing like that in the quarterfinals [in Paris] was very difficult, but two days later, I was really in solution mode and really focused on the future. So it’s true that today, again, I’m an eternal optimist.” FAA reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon and played this epic match against Novak Djokovic. He left crushed and empty, but more hopeful than after Paris, and revealed he had ended his decade-long collaboration with coach Frédéric Fontang.
The limit is the moment these sky-high expectations turn into an obsession or the scale by which players measure their value as a person. “It hurts like hell now. But I’ll get back up,” swore de Minaur. “I’m a competitor through and through. I’ll give myself another chance. I just want it to happen to keep giving me that hope. If not, this is a tough, tough sport to play with no hope.” And so they look at the ceiling they’ve acknowledged for the first time and search for another path to the sky.
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Noskova & Muchova: Styles Upon Styles
Styles Upon Styles
Styles Upon Styles
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion.
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion.
By Giri Nathan
July 10, 2026
Linda Noskova (left) & Karolina Muchova // Getty
Linda Noskova (left) & Karolina Muchova // Getty
The women’s final at Wimbledon is guaranteed to produce a Czech champion, and she will be the third Czech champion in the past four years. Either 29-year-old Karolina Muchova or 21-year-old Linda Noskova will lift the title at the Slam that has been consistently won by their countrywomen dating back to Martina Navratilova. Both finalists have been asked to account for why their nation of less than 11 million people has overperformed so spectacularly at the grass-court major. It doesn’t sound like anyone has a satisfying explanation. Muchova credited the country’s history of great players, including those a few years above her whose success instilled self-belief in her; she also later admitted that she was tired of getting the question and didn’t really know what else to say. Noskova, much earlier in her career, probably hasn’t yet heard the question as many times and gave it an earnest try: Despite different game styles, the Czech players were all very creative, and “grass allows us to use any side of tennis; serve and volley back in the old days, slices and volleys in this new era.” And she, too, admitted that she always tries to come up with a new answer to this question whenever she’s asked.
I certainly don’t have a better theory than those two. I saw that Tomas Berdych, a 2010 Wimbledon finalist himself, guessed there probably wasn’t a single grass court in Czechia. Muchova said she’d barely gotten much practice on this surface, and that she is in fact allergic to grass, competing only with the help of pills, eye drops, and sprays. (If she wins, I assume she will be skipping the Djokovic-style grass-eating celebration.) I don’t have any grand theories, but the one commonality I observe in all these Czech players is that they all have extremely sound technique on their ground strokes. The speed of play on grass can quickly expose technical weaknesses, but they just keep hitting the ball as clean as ever. And all of them can volley, too. But I think any attempt to connect the dots between these players too neatly and systematically would be misguided. They all come at their success differently, and when it comes to the two finalists, they play quite different brands of tennis.
Muchova’s all-court style enchants everyone. It’s the kind of fluent, feel-based tennis that anyone who’s ever held a racquet has hoped, foolishly, to replicate on court themselves. Her freshly broken four-year streak of losing in the first round at Wimbledon says more about her extensive injury history than her natural aptitude for the surface. Through six rounds she’s looked like a natural, and in particular, the audacity of her volleys separates her from the rest of the tour. Check out the two miracles she performed in the tiebreak of her semifinal against Coco Gauff, one a midcourt pickup from ankle height and the other a diving volley. If you think real tennis is about forward movement and great hands, then you’ve probably been sorely disappointed by the past 15-odd years of professional tennis, but you’re in luck right now, since there’s no better exponent of that style than Muchova. This is old-school grass-court tennis reskinned for the modern age.
That’s not the only style that thrives on grass in 2026, of course, and Noskova presents another archetype: big serve backed up by a first-strike baseline game. She has been the winningest player on grass courts since the start of 2025. And despite her low-key affect, Noskova has been an unmissable talent for a while, having achieved impressive pro results by her mid-teens and broken into the mainstream in 2024 with an upset of then world No. 1 Iga Swiatek at the Australian Open. Earlier in her career Noskova used to be a little wilder in her execution, but she’s since gotten control over her power, and her point construction at Wimbledon has looked smart and relaxed. She also has better hands than I’d realized, which allows her to quickly capitalize on all the advantages she produces from the baseline. By being impossible to break, Noskova has dominated her last three rounds, and the 6–4, 6–4 defeat of Marta Kostyuk in the semifinal was more authoritative than the score line suggests. I suspect she also has a chance to become the first Wimbledon champion with a septum piercing, though if there is somehow a precedent here, please let me know.
Both players won a grass-court title in the lead-up to Wimbledon, too, so they’ve gotten plenty of reps on the surface. Despite only one direct encounter at the pro level—a Muchova three-set win at the 2025 US Open—they played doubles together at the 2024 Paris Olympics and definitely know each other’s games. I expect an emotionally understated but tactically thrilling final, as Muchova tries to change up the pace with her tricks, and Noskova tries to barrel ahead with quick damage. They’ll let the tennis do all the talking.
