The Long Rally

A centuries-old sport, still finding its place in the trading card world.

By Noah Shulman
Photography by Jeffrey Westbrook
As featured in OPEN Tennis Volume 5
BUY

The Long Rally

A centuries-old sport, still finding its place in the trading card world.

By Noah Shulman
Photography by Jeffrey Westbrook
As featured in OPEN Tennis Volume 5
BUY

My path to collecting tennis cards did not start with tennis at all.

It started in the ’90s, with my dad and Michael Jordan.

It was 1993, and the entire basketball universe felt alive. Rivalries were fierce, future Hall of Famers filled the rosters, and trading cards were everywhere. Bodegas, card shops, even street vendors. Basketball cards were everything to my dad and me, and we were serious collectors.

In the fall of 1993, Topps Finest Basketball appeared, and I remember my dad coming home with a few packs. The moment we opened them, it was clear this set felt different. Every card felt premium and futuristic, fully foiled with chromium technology that gave them an insane shine and weight. Suddenly, every card felt like an insert. The design was peak ’90s, with loud colors and aggressive textures. It looked like early Photoshop on acid.

That was also the year Topps introduced the refractor, a parallel version with an added optical sheen. More than 30 years later, refractors are a staple of nearly every trading card product. Back then, they were rare, difficult to pull, and highly coveted. I was 9 years old, and the Michael Jordan refractor was my holy grail. I didn’t have the language for why it mattered. I just knew it did.

Collecting began to fade when I entered high school. Sports became something to participate in more seriously, and I gravitated toward my creative side: photography, design, filmmaking. Without consciously deciding to, I moved on.

My collection sat in boxes stacked in a closet at my parents’ house for decades. They would occasionally ask when I planned to get rid of them, but it always felt like too big an undertaking. I wasn’t ready to let go of something that still carried emotional weight, even though the hobby was no longer part of my life.

When the world slowed in 2020, my dad drifted back into collecting. He pulled the boxes out, researched values, and began selling pieces from our collection. Before long, he was hooked and started collecting again.

One day, he invited me over, and sitting in front of us was a sealed box of 1993–94 Topps Finest Basketball. It felt like going back in time. The same cards that once felt untouchable were there for us to rip open.

Somewhere in the middle of the box, I caught the corner of a card with just a glint of extra shine. I knew immediately it was a refractor. But not just any refractor. It was the Michael Jordan refractor.

My hands were shaking as we screamed at the top of our lungs.

I was finally holding my childhood holy grail. Not bought. Not traded. Pulled fresh from a sealed pack that had been sitting in that box since 1993. What surprised me later was not just the thrill of the pull, but what it unlocked emotionally. That moment didn’t send me chasing basketball cards again. It reminded me why collecting ever mattered in the first place.

Collecting is an act of belief. You choose a person and follow their story over time. A card becomes a way of anchoring that belief, a physical reminder of a moment, a season, a version of someone you once invested in. Something small you can actually hold on to.

And once that door reopened, it didn’t lead me where I expected.

In 2023, my wife attended the Australian Open on a business trip and, simply put, came home obsessed with the sport, talking about everything except the final scores. She was drawn to the mental battles, the personal narratives, the psychological drama unfolding point by point. I got pulled in quickly, and soon enough we were watching matches, following Grand Slams, learning players, becoming real fans.

Tennis felt different from the sports I grew up with. You weren’t rooting for teams. You were rooting for people. You felt the drama, heartbreak, and frustration right alongside them. The best matches felt Shakespearean. It was the first time I had fallen back in love with sports in a meaningful way since I was a kid.

Around that same time, I became aware that Topps was preparing to release its 2024 Chrome Tennis set. For me, it was the perfect confluence: a sport I was investing in and a hobby that had just resurfaced.

Coming back to the trading card world after all that time felt like showing up at a new school halfway through the year. You recognize a few faces, but the rules have changed. Everyone speaks a language you don’t quite understand yet. I knew what cards were. I just didn’t know how the modern hobby worked.

It wasn’t until I attended Fanatics Fest about a month before the 2024 Chrome Tennis release that I grasped how small the tennis market truly was. Everyone was chasing Jordan, Kobe, and Wembanyama. I was looking for Agassi, Alcaraz, and Serena. Among hundreds of dealers and tens of thousands of cards, I spotted maybe a dozen tennis cards total. Tennis felt like a rounding error, probably less than 1 percent of the market. I felt slightly out of place but oddly comfortable there.

When Topps released Chrome Tennis in 2024, I bought a single box and opened it with my wife. That familiar anticipation returned. One by one we sifted through the packs and pulled a Carlos Alcaraz Pineapple Refractor numbered to 77. I felt that same quiet thrill.

That pull didn’t send me chasing the next card. It made me curious about what came before this.

We were binge-watching The Tudors when a scene at Hampton Court showed King Henry VIII ferociously playing royal tennis. Seeing the sport woven so casually into that world and time period reframed it for me. It wasn’t being introduced or explained. It was already embedded in culture long before it was something you could buy, sell, or collect.

As I started tracing the history of tennis and trading cards, I realized tennis doesn’t enter the card world the way other sports do. It shows up early, disappears for long stretches, then reappears, but never quite settles.

Tennis had been depicted for centuries in drawings, paintings, and engravings, often emphasizing ritual and setting more than competition. That same visual language carried into the Victorian era, when illustrated trade cards began circulating. These were business cards first, printed with company information on one side and illustrated scenes on the other, designed to catch the eye and suggest a certain kind of lifestyle. Tennis appeared there not as a sport to follow, but as a symbol of leisure and refinement.

Modern card collecting as we know it took shape in the late 19th century when cigarette packs included cardboard stiffeners that doubled as advertisements. Baseball and boxing thrived in that system, offering recurring rivalries and familiar stars that rewarded repetition. Tennis was present but often folded into “sports and pastimes” sets alongside golf, fencing, and croquet.

After World War II, gum replaced tobacco and children became the primary audience for collecting. Baseball and boxing cards continued to surge, and tennis moved elsewhere, into magazines, posters, souvenirs, and television.

Even during the Open Era, beginning in 1968, the pattern didn’t fully shift. Tennis had global exposure and stars like Bjorn Borg, Billie Jean King, and Arthur Ashe. On paper, it should have been the sport’s moment to establish a lasting home in cards. Instead, players appeared in international sticker albums, oversize cards, and occasional multisport sets. There was no consistent annual rhythm. No long-term home.

While other sports cards continued to build momentum through the decade, that inconsistent pattern around tennis cards carried into the 1980s.

It wasn’t until 1991 that NetPro arrived, widely considered the first officially licensed, tennis-specific card set in the United States. It was a meaningful foothold, but the scale was modest and the releases were sporadic, especially compared with the machinery behind brands like Topps and Upper Deck.

All of this unfolded during the ’90s junk wax era, when overproduction flooded the market and collapsed value. Tennis, already smaller and less established, was trying to find its footing in chaos.

That fragility kept finding its way into collecting through side doors. One of the most culturally significant tennis “rookie” cards of the ’90s era didn’t come from a trading card company at all. It came from issues of Sports Illustrated for Kids, where perforated card inserts were bound directly into the magazine. They weren’t designed to be precious. Decades later, a pristine Serena Williams rookie from those pages would sell for over $100,000 at auction.

When NetPro returned in 2003, the checklist felt like a catch-up, with contemporary greats like Serena and Venus Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Roddick alongside established names like Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. It wasn’t just another release. It felt like tennis trying to account for everything that had happened while cards had gone quiet.

But even that surge didn’t last. NetPro faded, and Ace Authentic emerged in the mid-2000s with limited, autograph-driven releases for a niche audience before being acquired by Leaf Trading Cards in 2012. Under Leaf, tennis continued through a mix of stand-alone and multisport products. It survived. It just never felt like it was accelerating.

A new chapter began in 2019 when Topps collaborated with the International Tennis Hall of Fame on a one-off 50-card set. It was thoughtful and celebratory but rooted in legacy rather than building something forward-looking.

But Topps Chrome changed that.

Chrome has long been one of Topps’ core annual releases across sports like baseball, basketball, and soccer. It debuted in 1996, growing directly out of 1993’s Topps Finest, the chromium-heavy, refractor-driven set that shaped my earliest memories of collecting. Decades later, I realized the product pulling me back in shared the same foundation as the one that first hooked me.

Topps officially announced its first Chrome Tennis release for 2021 with a full checklist featuring rising stars, Hall of Famers, inserts, numbered parallels, and autographs. All the visual and structural language that card collectors understood. But the set was delayed and didn’t release until 2023.

The real shift came in 2024.

For the first time, tennis cards didn’t feel like a side experiment. Chrome arrived on time, fully realized and clearly built to return. It felt intentional. Maybe that’s why people began paying attention in a different way.

That shift became visible across the market.

“Tennis cards are still a relatively niche category, but the market has grown considerably over the last two years,” says Aaron Nowak, founder of SlabStox, a sports card market reporting company and one of the largest online breakers of Topps tennis products. “Between Carlos Alcaraz’s rise and Topps’ product expansion, there’s been clear investment into the category.”

Soon after, tennis expanded deeper into Topps’ ecosystem with releases like Sapphire, Triumphant, Graphite, and Royalty, increasingly premium sets of the brand’s annual offerings. It was a signal that tennis wasn’t just being included. It was being taken seriously.

In 2025, a one-of-one Royalty autographed card of Carlos Alcaraz featuring the actual racquet knob from his Indian Wells win sold for $222,000 at auction. In tennis card terms, that’s a watershed moment. In hobby terms, it’s still early, especially when compared with long-established cards that have sold for more than $12 million. But every market starts somewhere.

Even with the recent momentum, you can still see the residue of that uneven history. Tennis cards are still often buried under “Other Sports” across major websites and official platforms. From tobacco inserts to modern Chrome releases, tennis has repeatedly been placed at the margins. That categorization is not just cosmetic. It reflects how the sport has been treated in the hobby for more than a century.

And yet, the shift feels real.

The 2025 Chrome release arrived in February of 2026 with a 300-card checklist, something that would have felt unthinkable not long ago. New collectors are joining, conversations are expanding, values are climbing, and the energy is building.

Tennis also behaves differently from other sports in the hobby.

“It’s one of the only categories where men’s and women’s players are combined into the same product, and in many cases, the women are actually driving the market,” says Nowak. “Players like Sabalenka, Gauff, and Swiatek often outsell most of the men.”

“The market also moves faster. One deep run at a Grand Slam can shift prices almost overnight, which you don’t see as often elsewhere,” he says.

Tennis cards don’t feel like the continuation of an uninterrupted tradition. They feel like the beginning of something that arrived late and is finally carving out space in a sea of cardboard.

What makes this moment different is that we’re stepping into it while it’s still taking shape.

“We’ve only seen a small percentage of the global tennis audience engage with cards so far,” Nowak says. “There’s a lot of room for this to grow.”

A few years ago, I didn’t know a single tennis card existed.

Now there are hundreds in my collection: signed Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka, Novak Djokovic, Frances Tiafoe, Tommy Paul, greats like Billie Jean King and Bjorn Borg, and young standouts like Mirra Andreeva and Joao Fonseca. Players I follow week after week, investing in their stories as they unfold, still catching myself looking for that shimmer in the corner of a freshly opened pack.

That’s what collecting is. A small physical act of belief.

And right now, tennis feels like something worth believing in.

For the first time, tennis cards don’t feel temporary.

They feel like they’re beginning to stay.

SPORTS CARD GLOSSARY

SPORTS CARD GLOSSARY

TENNIS. ART. CULTURE. FASHION. TRAVEL. IDEAS. — SIGN UP

by David Bartholow

Postcard from the Japan Open

TSS sends dispatches from Tokyo and the Kinoshita Group Japan Open.

By David Bartholow
October 2026

Kinoshita Group Japan Open
Tokyo, Japan
October 1 - 6, 2026

The Final // October 6
Alcaraz d. Lehecka
7-6(4), 6-4

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Day 5 // October 5

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Day 4 // October 4

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Day 3 // October 3

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Day 2 // October 2

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Day 1 // October 1

YOUR WEEK IN TENNIS — SIGN UP FOR THE SECOND SERVE NEWSLETTER

by David Bartholow

Zac Farro: Life Preserver

Life Preserver

Paramore drummer and solo artist Zac Farro talks music, photography and tennis.

By Jeffrey Silverstein
Photography by Zac Farro
September 18, 2026

Life Preserver

Paramore drummer and solo artist Zac Farro talks music, photography and and tennis.

By Jeffrey Silverstein
Photography by Zac Farro
September 18, 2026

Paramore drummer Zac Farro spent his formative years on tour while most kids his age were discovering the sports they’d play (or abandon) in years to come. He’s since built a creative career that extends well beyond music—as the founder of Congrats Records and an accomplished photographer—but it wasn’t until his 20s that tennis entered the picture. What began as an extracurricular has quickly become an essential part of Farro’s life, bringing balance, community, and a healthy dose of competition. We caught up with Farro at home in Nashville to talk about being an amateur, photographing tennis courts around the world, and why the game has become such a meaningful part of his everyday routine.

Where and how does tennis enter your life?
It’s fairly new to my life, but it’s also a massive part of it. Almost as big as music, for many reasons. I was born in New Jersey, moved down to Tennessee when I was 2. I’m one of five kids, four boys. We grew up on baseball. My dad loves the Mets. We were always an underdog family. I was almost going to be named after Lenny Dykstra if they won the World Series in 1990. That’s how I got the name Zac instead of Lenny. I didn’t really care for baseball—I was more excited about the snacks that the moms would bring after the games than playing. Around 9 is when I got into drums and music. My focus shifted quickly.

Paramore started when I was around 12 or 13. From, like, 9 to 12, a lot of kids are figuring out what sport they want to play. For me, I went right on tour. I never had a sport in my teenage years, it was all music. At 20 I’d left the band. I needed to jump off the road—it was kind of beating me up. I didn’t know if I wanted to do that forever. Turns out I do love it and would later rejoin the band. In that off time I started picking things up like tennis a bit. I moved to New Zealand, lived in a van, and had a surfboard under my bed. I lived like that for about nine months. I started to enjoy these extracurricular interests, not just music.

I was always the musician guy that was like, “I hate sports.” I’m not a jock, but now I’m watching tennis at dinner. My friends and my girlfriend are like, “Are you watching a game?” “Yeah, it’s the Open and Carlos Alcaraz is down on a break.’ I’m so into it. I’m 36 now. The older I got, I realized I was competitive. It’s one of those things you don’t always want to admit. For some reason I thought it’s not artistic to be competitive. But that’s why the Rolling Stones would hear a new Beatles single and be like, “Oh, we’ve got to make another record.” There’s healthy competition. We brought a Ping-Pong table on tour. I really did not want to lose. I don’t know if I grew into my competitive nature or if I always had it but just didn’t tap into it.

You carry a beginner’s mind when learning something new. Did this mindset help when starting to develop your tennis game?
As musicians, we’re always trying to find a reminder of why we started doing it. Starting something new reminds you that you’re not good at everything. If I get excited about something, I go all in. I love photography but for a long time would never call myself a photographer. Ten years ago, while I was in New Zealand, a dear friend of mine said, “What makes you think you’re not a photographer?” He encouraged me to buy a bunch of disposables and to just not think about it. Just go shoot a ton of stuff. And I did. I continued to grow from there. I jumped in headfirst with tennis, too. I’m going to watch my friend Troy play tonight. He’s also a musician and drummer. He played in high school, just has this natural talent for tennis. It’s almost intimidating to be like, “I’ll never get to that place.” Tennis has brought me so much joy and peace. Parallel to my personal life and my inner dialogue of how frustrated I get with myself and learning to combat negative self-talk.

Tennis is such a good outlet if people haven’t found something yet. Not only does it add years to your life, but the mental health benefits are huge. I actually drove over to my local tennis court to do this interview, we live really close. I play most mornings. Unless I’m on a bike ride or purposely meditating or being quiet, tennis is my only time to think for myself. If it’s an empty concrete court and it’s open, you’re just looking at the sky and trees. It’s really meditative.

When I’m out there in the morning, it’s the only two hours of the day where I’m not thinking like, “Should I turn that snare up in that mix? Should I have responded to that email?” I completely turn my brain off from that world and fully focus on, like, “Okay, I’m going to move my feet. How am I going to serve today?” Like just trying to like, don’t beat yourself up so much. You’re doing great. Look how much you’ve grown. I’ve been grinding every week with my coach Scott, who is this amazing, beautiful person. He has an astrology podcast; everything for him is connected. Tennis has a lot of parallels and metaphors hidden inside of it.

What is the connection between drumming and tennis from a physical standpoint?
The thing that I noticed early on is my endurance. I can be hitting for like two hours and feel like I’m just getting going. For a Paramore headlining show, it’s like 90 minutes. It’s a long, long set. You have to save your energy for the very end because that’s when you play the hits. I’m literally an hour and a half into this and now we have to play the heaviest three songs back-to-back. With tennis, I feel like I start waking up in the second set. I attribute that to playing live. Then there is timing. With drumming, you’re stationary. It’s sort of like footwork and running around. Having the timing of a drummer helped my serve develop quickly. I was better at serving but had no backhand, no volley, had no other part of my game besides a little bit of a forehand, and I could serve. It’s funny how it clicked right away.

Do you have a favorite type of environment to play in?
I prefer to go to a public court. Yeah. There’s a group of guys at the one by my house, these dudes that are so cool in their 70s. They all used to play basketball, but they got too old for it. There’s a huge crew of them. They’re so sassy, too. I just don’t think you find something like that at a club. We have a club that just opened here, six Italian clay courts. It’s super nice, but I prefer pickup games.

Where does photographing tennis come into play?
I always thought tennis courts were cool and aesthetically pleasing. Two summers ago we went on a four-month Taylor Swift tour. She only plays shows on the weekends, or she did on that tour. We would be in Paris or Zurich for a week. In Europe they primarily have clay courts. I was booking courts every day on our off day. You can only go to so many pubs or museums. I decided to make a trip out of it and see how many courts we could find. I made a tennis zine about it. I brought my camera to every court and documented everywhere we played.

Is this your photo book?
The zine I did is called Souvenir. It’s what I took away from those four months. It’s easier on tour because you stay at hotels that have gyms, but I don’t love going to the gym. Tennis tricks me into getting two and a half hours of cardio every morning. It’s given me a lot of balance mentally and physically. I can’t promote it more. It’s a frustrating sport that’s given me a lot of life.

Drumming, photography, and tennis all require being as present as possible. It feels like they’ve all helped keep you in balance.
Totally. It makes me love music more because I’m not putting all of my eggs in one basket. If you only do one thing, you can lose sight of how special it is. Healthwise I have something to look forward to forever. Knock on wood I’ll be playing till I’m in my 70s like these guys. I’m not really a network-y, go-meet-other-musicians kind of person, but I’ve met more musicians through playing tennis than I have through playing music.

TENNIS. ART. CULTURE. FASHION. TRAVEL. IDEAS. — SIGN UP

by David Bartholow

Gorilla vs. Bear Mix 3

Gorilla vs. Bear
x
OPEN Tennis

The third mix from OG music blog Gorilla vs. Bear.

By TSS
September 9, 2026

SIGN UP — TENNIS CULTURE. TENNIS LIFE. TENNIS PASSION.

by David Bartholow

Palmes Up

For Nikolaj Hansson of Palmes Tennis Society, the Converse Jack Purcell is personal.

By Tim Newcomb
September 8, 2026

Palmes Up

For Nikolaj Hansson of Palmes Tennis Society, the Converse Jack Purcell is personal.

By Tim Newcomb
September 8, 2026

All photography courtesy of Converse and Palmes.

All photography courtesy of Converse and Palmes.

For someone who skated in the Jack Purcell as a teenager, Nikolaj Hansson gravitated toward the shoe because it didn’t fit skating with its “elegance, its subtlety, its longstanding history in racquet sports.” Still, it worked, he tells The Second Serve: “I find very few shoes can feel equally at home at the tennis club and in the skate park, worn with worn-out jeans and a washed-out tee, or with a linen suit and polo shirt.”

Hansson, the founder of the Copenhagen-based sportswear brand Palmes, partnered with Converse on the brand’s latest rollout of the new-look Jack Purcell, this time with a Jack Purcell PDM x Palmes in two distinct designs, both embracing a duality of function that distinguishes the original tennis-adjacent signature sneaker.

Converse owns the rights to the famed silhouette featuring a curved “smile” across the toe box, releasing varying versions off and on over decades. But 2026 marks a major turning point, Converse having emptied the brand’s shelves of the model before remaking and relaunching the shoe in a Jack Purcell First String treatment, the brand’s premier level of design and materials reserved for the Chuck Taylor.

Now comes the second release in the reimagined silhouette, the Palmes partnership, launching today (Sept. 8), with the Jack Purcell PDM (podium) in the Palmes-designed Parisian Night and Mountain View colorways.

Hansson says both color treatments improve the more they’re worn. The blue-based Parisian Night edition features suede, meant to soften and wear over time. Contrast stitching highlights the navy, and the leather collar edge accents the material. Hansson opted for a coarse off-white canvas heel webbing to reference a 1930s pair from the brand’s archives, with a light blue and red outsole taken directly from the shoe’s history. The famed smile on the toe box features blue.

“I like how the navy suede feels elegant while changing in its surface over time,” Hansson says. “I’ve worn mine for weeks now and find that they become better with every scuff and scrape, adding small signs of life to the suede, which makes them more and more mine after each wear.”

The Mountain View model opts for both a different color perspective and a meaningful material choice. Using faded canvas, the green represents Hansson’s Palmes design and comes dyed to feel pre-worn. Additional Palmes touches include the brand’s abstract tennis ball mark with a subtle “P” on the heel in a vintage-looking chain-stitch embroidery and the Palmes name appearing on the license plate wedge.

Hansson loves things that feel lived-in, and he wanted the duck canvas of the Mountain View to have that sense of “lived-in-ness from the first time you wear them. They look like something I’d wear as a kid on endless summers, the sun fading out the green hues of the canvas with every passing day.”

The Palmes tie to tennis started when the brand formed in 2021. The name comes from jeu de paume, a 15th-century French antecedent to tennis. Hansson built the sportswear brand based on his connections to both skate and tennis, founding Palmes to infuse individuality in a sport focused on either prep or performance. He believes the Jack Purcell fits this mold, having always lived a double life, both in the clubhouse and at the skate park.

“Palmes came from an idea of showing how there is not an ultimate truth to what tennis is as a sport and culture, and I wanted to show the different personalities of the Jack Purcell here as well,” Hansson says. “I love the shoe’s simplicity and quiet elegance. I didn’t want to add too much to it. It was more about making a quiet noise. I like things that have a sense of permanence to them and wanted to use suede and canvas to communicate this.”

Originally created as a signature badminton shoe in 1935 by Canadian world champion Jack Purcell and the B.F. Goodrich Company of Canada, the model was soon usurped by tennis players as it captured key market share through the 1960s as a performance tennis shoe. Converse bought the rights to the shoe in 1972 and reissued it multiple times over the decades.

The complete rethinking of the model started with the First String and moved to the PDM (there’s more coming), using versions from the 1970s and ’80s as the muse. With that we get a new signature smile built into the toe cap—Purcell’s nickname was “the smiler,” so that was his personal touch from 1935 onward—more in line from the early 1980s. Other pieces taken from the past include a higher collar, a wider heel stay with updated stitching details, sunken vent eyelets, the design of the license plate on the heel, and additional stitching patterns. New for the premium experience is a fresh last to accommodate a wider foot, a Vibram outsole, premium leather uppers, and Nike foams and air technology for comfort.

If nothing else, the smile defines a Jack Purcell. When Purcell worked with the rubber company to craft the shoe in the 1930s, he personally created the rubber toe cap to add durability during drag. Purcell highlighted his nickname by embedding a smile within the toe’s rubber.

“I was a kid, skating in the Jack Purcell, dreaming of one day having my own skate shoe,” Hansson says. “Now I have a tennis-inspired clothing brand with its name on the Jack Purcell. It feels very surreal and humbling.”

Palmes founder Nikolaj Hansson.

Palmes founder Nikolaj Hansson.

TENNIS. ART. CULTURE. FASHION. TRAVEL. IDEAS. — SIGN UP

by David Bartholow

The 2026 US Open Shoe Report

It may be tricky to get noticed in New York City, but that doesn’t stop folks from trying. For the last major of the year, there is plenty of action afoot—so to speak—with a brand making a debut on the professional tour, On giving Ben Shelton some special treatment, more goodness from Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka getting metallic, and Carlos Alcaraz taking center stage with Travis Scott.

Off-court releases, small details and reimagined styles grace the grass at this year's Championships.

By Tim Newcomb
September 3, 2026

It may be tricky to get noticed in New York City, but that doesn’t stop folks from trying. For the last major of the year, there is plenty of action afoot—so to speak—with a brand making a debut on the professional tour, On giving Ben Shelton some special treatment, more goodness from Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka getting metallic, and Carlos Alcaraz taking center stage with Travis Scott.

Nike Zoom Vapor 12 HC Cactus Jack

Carlos Alcaraz

Cactus Jack took to Arthur Ashe Stadium from head to toe as Nike and Travis Scott (aka Cactus Jack) teamed up to outfit Carlos Alcaraz in a brown-and-white kit inspired by basketball, including a special Travis Scott-designed Nike Zoom Vapor 12 Cactus Jack. The shoe features a white base with brown detailing, the Cactus Jack logo on the tongue, and a nod to Alcaraz on the inside of the tongue.

PURCHASE

Vie Artlétique

Leylah Fernandez

A Shoe Report favorite, Leylah Fernandez has worn more shoe brands than any other top 50 player in the world over the past few years. She’s finally settled on one, becoming the first athlete to don a pair of the brand-new Vie Artletique shoes on tour. A group of tennis players, coaches, agents, and investors hired the GR Shoe Company to build a new shoe based on the idea of a highly technical shoe that intersects sport with art. The shoe features supercritical foam, a personalized last for Fernandez, new material for a durable toe guard, and a knitted herringbone upper that gives the Vie Artletique its distinct aesthetic in the tennis space.

PURCHASE

On The Roger Pro 3

Ben Shelton

On’s new Lights Out collection comes inspired by Ben Shelton’s life off the court, featuring off-court looks and a black-and-white on-court kit for the US Open. Also new is an all-black The Roger Pro 3 model Shelton first wore under the lights in round 1.

PURCHASE: NAOMI and JANNIK

New Balance Coco CG2

Coco Gauff

New Balance didn’t disappoint in ensuring Coco Gauff has her own look for every major of the year, shoes included (and those are at least available at retail). This tournament, Gauff’s signature Coco CG2s fall in line with the larger colorway from the brand’s footwear lineup, featuring the official colorway of “dawn glow and enoki,” which is basically a couple of light yellows set off with a dark navy accent.

PURCHASE

Nike GP Challenge 1.5 “Naomi Osaka”

Naomi Osaka

Forget the kit, let’s focus on the shoes. Nike continues to offer Naomi Osaka’s special-edition GP Challenge 1.5s at retail, and for the US Open that means plenty of black and metallic silver (and if you’ve seen her kit, that’s no surprise). The black base features ample metallic silver hits, including the “NO” logo on the tongue and footbed, a crossed tennis racquet charm, and “NYC” branding behind the Swoosh.

PURCHASE

K-Swiss Ultrashot 4

Frances Tiafoe

As K-Swiss celebrates its 60th anniversary with a range of special 60th Anniversary Edition colorways in white, black, and gold across its lineup—think Andrey Rublev in the K-Frame Speed Rublo—Frances Tiafoe continues to get a special player-edition Ultrashot 4 with the “Big Foe” moniker on the side of the shoe. Since K-Swiss is busy matching Tiafoe’s Lululemon kit, this version comes in a bright pink.

PURCHASE: NAOMI and JANNIK

Nike Vapor X

Serena Williams

Serena Williams played her two mixed doubles matches in the Nike Vapor X, the 2017-launched shoe that still has a following in the sport. Williams has opted for the shoe throughout her comeback year.

PURCHASE: NAOMI and JANNIK

Adidas selected a “distilled pink colorway” for the Barricade, Defiant Speed, Avacourt, and Adizero Ubersonic. The footwear designs match the brand’s latest New York Collection of maroon and white and draws its inspiration, Annette Steingass, senior director of specialist sports at adidas, tells me, from the “bold spirit of 1990s New York, taking real influence from the nightlife, fashion, and sporting culture of the iconic era in the city.”

Asics has a mix of colors for the US Open, with the three pinnacle models showing up in two options each, one for night matches and one for day. Graphite gray, blue fade, gunmetal, and pure silver lead the color story. The brand also has a Gel Challenger model in a taxi-inspired yellow-and-black design, but that won’t be worn on court at the tournament.

Wilson brings the men’s Rush Tour and the women’s Intrigue to New York in a bright white, Wilson red, and “microchip” colorway. The microchip is a metallic-looking accent that offers a distinct look for the two silhouettes.

Alex de Minaur, though, isn’t wearing the Rush Tour. Instead, he’s in a prototype shoe from Wilson, something that likely won’t come to light until sometime in 2027.

Yonex athletes have options in “pale lilac” and “black/yellow” for their Eclipsion 5. Elena Rybakina and Casper Ruud both can choose which to wear, while other players may just go with the pale lilac.

Mizuno players showcase the new flagship Neo Ace model. The US Open colorways feature white and orange with a blue accent for the men and a purple accent for the women.

Aryna Sabalenka continues to defy the Nike norms, opting to play in a discontinued-at-retail Nike Zoom NXT sneaker matching her custom dress.

Cam Norrie wore the Babolat Jet Mach in blue with yellow accents.

Nike’s colors don’t stop. Star players such as Alexandra Eala, Mirra Andreeva, and Amanda Anisimova are playing in the royal blue and light blue shades for the US Open.

Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.

PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP FOR THE TSS NEWSLETTER

by David Bartholow

Love in the Third

The world of I Heart Tennis, an LA tennis pop-up from The Courts in Borrego Springs.

By Jordaan Ashley
September 1, 2026

I Heart Tennis by The Courts. // Los Angeles

I Heart Tennis by The Courts. // Los Angeles

We all know the feeling of stepping inside our local tennis shop. Drop off a racquet, maybe pick up a few grips or some balls, and just like that we’re on our way. It’s not really a place where we linger. However, a new pop-up space on Los Angeles’ east side from The Courts in Borrego Springs, I Love Tennis, puts a very different spin on the pro shop experience as we know it.

Inside, Wimbledon reruns play on an old JVC television. There’s a standings board, maps and pamphlets from Borrego Springs, and a cutout of The Courts stalwart Coach Jaroslav and a simple “I ❤ Tennis” sign out front. Come at the right time and you might find an art show, a watch party, or an unexpected collaboration. It’s giving third-space energy, and that’s largely the point.

Adil Dara and Leah Goren opened The Courts in 2018, creating a place where tennis is about more than just what happens on court. With The Courts shuttered during its summer offseason, Dara needed an L.A. office for his graphic design practice, so he brought a little piece of The Courts to the city.

Part office, part clubhouse, the temporary space has become somewhere for L.A.’s tennis community to simply hang out. You’ll find The Courts’ very own thrifted finds, merch, tennis memorabilia, and, most important, all kinds of people brought together by a shared love of the game.

A recent collaboration with Dara’s good friend and Tennis T-Shirts founder Mike Cherman was a tennis enthusiast’s dream. During Wimbledon, I made it out to the shop to see it for myself, and it was easily one of the coolest tennis activations I’ve experienced in my decades in the sport. Visitors could customize their own pieces with tennis-inspired press-ons, including graphics pulled from moments unfolding at Wimbledon in real time. Roger Federer sitting alone in the Royal Box? Naturally, that one had to make it onto the tote I brought along.

“We work on other jobs that are a little more serious,” Dara says. “We just wanted this to be a purely joyous experience.”

The pop-up will be in L.A. through the end of September, with events and activations often coming together at the last minute. Before the duo head back to Borrego Springs for the fall season, Dara says more happenings are on the way as the US Open gets underway, so keep an eye on their Instagram. Or, as Dara puts it best: “Come hang when we’re open.”

YOUR WEEK IN TENNIS — SIGN UP FOR THE SECOND SERVE NEWSLETTER

by David Bartholow

Her Way

Tuning Out the Noise

Eva Lys is learning what fits.

By Jessica Schiffer
Photography by Lottermann & Fuentes
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY

Her Way

Eva Lys is learning what fits.

By Jessica Schiffer
Photography by Lotterman & Fuentes
Originally Featured Volume 4 of OPEN Tennis — BUY

Lotterman & Fuentes

Lotterman & Fuentes

When I meet Eva Lys in the player’s cafe at Indian Wells, she does not have the body language of someone who just pulled out of the tournament due to a knee injury. She’s practically beaming, delighted by the prospect of talking about fashion—one of her favorite topics of late—with a fellow obsessive. In between bites of sushi, she pauses to assess my outfit, gassing me up like we’re old friends. I’m struck by how easy it is to talk to her, a rising star in tennis whose vibrant, silly personality has not been diluted by the media-trained vaguespeak we’ve become accustomed to.

That disarming charm is an extension of her presence on Instagram, where she posts like a true 24-year-old: funny memes, mirror selfies, lots of outfits, and a heavy dose of self-deprecation. For a generation of players raised online, identity isn’t separate from performance—it’s part of the package. Lys seems to understand that instinctively, even as the tennis world around her is still catching up.

“I feel like ‘my brand’ is just being very free, I’m very authentic and that’s what I’m trying to be online as well,” she explained. “I never have the feeling that I’m better or superior, just because I hit a ball a couple more times than other people. I want everyone who comes to my page to feel like I’m their friend.”

That openness hasn’t always landed the same way everywhere. In Germany, where Lys is from, there’s a more rigid idea of what a serious athlete should look like, particularly online, she tells me. When she’s dared to do something enjoyable after a loss, for example, the backlash has been swift.

“It’s always like, you lost today, you played bad—don’t post from the beach,” she said. “You have to mourn the loss.”

That same negativity showed up more recently in Madrid after she lost in the first round to Zhang Shuai and German headlines read as if she had been in a years-long rut. “German tennis hope Eva Lys is sinking deeper and deeper into crisis,” said one on Sport.de. Lys took to her Instagram stories to speak out against the drumbeat of hyperbolic press, writing in part, “Of course, I’m not currently in my best form, after having to take 2.5 months off. Still, it should be possible to talk about that in an objective and fair way.”

Learning to tune out all of this noise has been its own kind of development curve, particularly when it comes to being herself online. “You can’t be liked by everyone,” she said. “So whatever I put out, I just accept that it can be criticized.”

That mindset didn’t come naturally. Although Lys comes off like your average Gen-zer, she’s of course anything but. She established herself early as one of Germany’s top tennis prospects, reaching No. 1 in the country’s junior rankings in 2018 and going on to win multiple ITF titles before breaking onto the WTA Tour in 2022. But it was at last year’s Australian Open, where she made it to the fourth round, that people really started paying attention. Since then, she’s been on a steady, if slightly uneven, climb—picking up deep runs, notching a Top 10 win, and briefly cracking the Top 40, all while figuring out how to handle the expectations and commentary that come with being in the public eye.

For now, she’s focused on easing back into the sport after injury rehab.

“I’ve never regretted a day I took it slow, because I have a very sensitive body, and my approach to everything is less is more,” said Lys, who has spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes pain, stiffness, and fatigue. “So I’m trying to keep it that way but, with the tennis schedule and the points I have to defend, I can lose sight of that mindset at times.”

Running parallel to her tennis career is a love of fashion that’s blossomed since she left Asics and signed with Lacoste in January, a switch that’s given her more fashion-forward looks and an open dialogue with the design team, allowing her to provide direct feedback on fit and style that could show up across the brand’s women’s tennis collections in the near future.

“The quality of their stuff is insane and I love how classic it is, but they also give me the opportunity to say what I would love to wear and let me put a new generation twist on it,” she said. The ability to play with the brand’s increasingly cool ready-to-wear clothes off-court for events and photoshoots has also been a dream come true for a girl who grew up scrolling Tumblr for outfit inspiration.

The partnership reflects a dynamic that’s becoming increasingly common in tennis—brands looking beyond the top 10 for players who can help shape not just how clothes perform, but how they’re perceived. Lys, with her mix of taste, openness, and growing visibility, sits squarely in that next tier: not yet a household name, but already influential in the ways that matter to fashion.

When I asked Pelagia Kolotouros, the creative director of Lacoste, why she wanted to sign Lys, she said it was a mix of her tennis potential, jovial personality, and taste for fashion. “Eva is authentic, spontaneous, a hard worker, very sociable and optimistic—all of these attributes fit perfectly with the brand.”

However aligned the new partnership may be, a kit can still be limiting for self-expression. “Tennis is a very conservative sport in some ways,” said Lys, adding that since she has to repeat her outfits often, she looks for small ways to express herself within the confines of the court, whether that’s with bright nails, gold jewelry, or charms on her racket bag.

Lys is passionate about bridging fashion and tennis more broadly, noting that while the luxury partnerships are understandably relegated to top players, she believes there’s space for fashion brands to get more involved with those who are outside of the top 10 and has been advocating for it behind the scenes.

“I think there’s room to do so much more with it,” she says. “If we’re having a tennis match and playing on court for two hours, you see two faces and if you don’t remember their names, you’ll remember what they were wearing.”

That interest in fashion has started to pull her into spaces far beyond the tour. Last year, she was invited to Vogue’sexclusive Forces of Fashion conversation series in Germany, where she unexpectedly found herself on stage and in the same orbit as the designer Jean Paul Gaultier, leading to photos of the two of them chuckling that she was quick to post online.

“I wasn’t even supposed to be in Germany,” she said. “It all came together last minute, and I was so nervous, but it was such an honor to be invited.”

For Lys, the moment wasn’t just memorable because of her proximity to fashion’s biggest names, but about what it unlocked for her: a sense that her interests outside of tennis are not so much a distraction but inspirational fuel for her tennis career.

“Being around people who have that much passion for what they do—it gives me energy,” she said. “And I can take that back into my tennis.”

Now, she regularly texts her management team about events she wants to go to one day—whether it’s a runway show or The Oscars—not to chase clout but out of sheer curiosity. It’s a little act of manifestation, as her generation likes to say.

“I just love meeting new, successful people and understanding how they got where they are,” she explains. “Like I know why athletes do what they do, but what drives someone in fashion or acting? I find those stories so interesting.”

I’m also told we can expect to see an on-court designer collaboration for Lys in the next few years.

In the meantime, Lys is still in that exciting in-between space—established enough to be noticed, but not yet so fixed that her path is defined. In a sport that has long rewarded conformity, her willingness to be seen as she is—online, off-court, and increasingly in fashion—offers a glimpse of what tennis could look like if it leaned into personality instead of sanding it down.

TENNIS. ART. CULTURE. FASHION. TRAVEL. IDEAS. — SIGN UP

by David Bartholow

A Mixed Blessing

The 2025 Mixed Doubles Invitational proved that tennis is best when it’s coed.

By Gerald Marzorati
Photography by Florence Pernet
Originally Featured Volume 3 of OPEN Tennis — BUY

A Mixed Blessing

The 2025 Mixed Doubles Invitational proved that tennis is best when it’s coed.

By Gerald Marzorati
Photography by Florence Pernet
Originally Featured Volume 3 of OPEN Tennis — BUY

Florence Pernet / @flo_pernet

Florence Pernet / @flo_pernet

Sir John Lavery was a notable society painter who rose to prominence in Britain in the years before the First World War. His landscapes and portraits limned what the well-off of his time saw (their estates, their vacation vistas) and how they saw themselves. It’s painters like Lavery who, by the last years of the 19th century, tended to capture their time, or, anyway, that of their age’s upper classes—their look, their sphere, their enthusiasms—as more original artists no longer sought to.

Lavery painted The Tennis Party in 1885. Lawn tennis had been around for just 11 years. It’s a late afternoon in late summer. A slanting sun dapples a fenced-in grass court and delicately pinks and purples the players’ white clothing. The grass in the foreground, outside the court, is dried in places to a dusty yellow. Summer, with its invitation to the Victorian era’s monied to set aside weekends for leisure, to head outside and play, is almost gone; a darkened woodland beyond the court broods to near black.

It’s mixed doubles that’s getting played. Men and women like those portrayed by Lavery would likely have known that Gentlemen’s Doubles and Ladies’ Singles had been introduced at Wimbledon the year before, after seven years of Gentlemen’s Singles only. Tennis was becoming a sport. These men and women would likely know, too, that there was no mixed-doubles championship at the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. (There wouldn’t be till 1913.) Mixed doubles, part of tennis from the beginning, depicted in so many illustrations of the time, remained a game.

It’s a game that Lavery manages to charmingly capture, the focused fun of it. The players are engaged but evince no strain. There’s a friendliness evoked by others on hand to watch, or sort of watch as they chat among themselves, or to wait, like one young girl with her racquet resting next to her atop the fence, for a chance to play. Perhaps this stretch of lawn was once a croquet pitch: That’s where Major Wingfield, beginning in 1874, advised those who ordered his patented portable lawn-tennis kits to set up their nets. British elites of the time were in the thrall of Hellenism; among other things, they’d come to prize the Ancient Greek aestheticizing of the human body in motion. Forget croquet: Pick up a racquet and start moving. Lavery has his men and women bending, swinging, sidestepping. The Tennis Party is, in its way, a dance party.

By the time it came to its frantic end, the US Open’s newly formatted, star-studded mixed-doubles championship had turned into quite literally a kind of dance party too, with a packed-to-the rafters crowd out of their seats and DJ Malski and DJ Saige—the first DJs, it’s safe to say, in the house for a mixed-doubles final—blasting their bangers and screamers. Who imagined? The United States Tennis Association, which runs the US Open, was product-launch sunny and carefully vague about the “why” when it announced last winter that it was moving the tournament’s mixed-doubles championship to the week before the start of the main draw event, a week long devoted in Flushing to qualifying matches. “What I would say is the reason behind this,” said Lew Sherr, the USTA’s executive director and CEO, “is to appeal to more fans and grow the fan base around the world.”

Accompanying the schedule shift would be the introduction of a shortened, quick-paced format (four games to win a set in all matches but the final; a 10-point tiebreak instead of a third set; no-ad sudden-death scoring at deuce) and an enormous prize-money increase (including $1 million to the winning team, or nearly seven times what the previous year’s champions split). The thinking was that together these changes would induce singles tennis stars to play mixed. A “Mixed Madness” event held during qualifying week in 2024 drew top-level singles players (Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka, Ben Shelton) and provided moments that were harder fought than a hit-and-giggle exhibition (which essentially it was). The bet was that enough of the game’s top players—enough to spread among 16 teams—would just as soon play a few hours of mixed doubles for a day or two to earn prize money and a trophy than simply practice, and that proved right.

A sense that qualifying week, which the US Open had already rebranded “Fan Week,” might need something more than qualifying matches—something involving tennis’ biggest names—is not ultimately about mixed doubles, it’s safe to say, if not for the USTA CEO to say. You can watch professional tennis for free during “Fan Week,” but you’re not watching the sport’s biggest stars. Watching tennis’ top players in person at the US Open has, for many fans, become an unaffordable luxury. Ticket prices during the tournament’s two main-draw weeks for the biggest show courts now approach the stratospheric on Ticketmaster’s resale site, where single-session tickets are available. This is especially the case at the business end of the Open, and of all top tournaments, when the best of the best tend to clash. It’s a problem for the sport—its branding, its vibe—that the sport has not been paying enough attention to.

The opportunity: Those biggest show courts at the US Open, Ashe and Armstrong, sat empty during previous qualifying weeks. If the game’s big names would play mixed doubles for two days and nights during that week, their matches could be played in those stadiums, and tickets would be priced low enough—because they’d have to be for an untested event—for most any fan to get a glimpse of the stars. Moreover, the move could provide a third week, or anyway part of a third week, of TV viewership. The players competing on the field courts in qualies, low-ranked and unknown to the casual fan, do not attract television viewers. The mixed-doubles overhaul would provide ESPN with qualies-week star power, as well as an opportunity to experiment with changes of its own, from on-court interviews with players at the conclusion of a set to new camera technologies able to provide fresh angles on the game.

As it turned out, what the US Open, ESPN, and the rest of us were treated to was ultimately about mixed doubles—a game that, even as a sport, has managed to hold on to the feels of a game. It was two days and nights of stupefying glimpses of what a 130-mph serve and mind-boggling baseline power can’t get you. It was to behold, with a shake of the head and a smile, what delicate angles and soft hands can. It was that rarest of opportunities to watch male and female athletes of the highest caliber cooperate with each other and compete against one another. It was seeing how the unisex gestalt of mixed doubles—the male-female team huddling after every point, the slapstick close-in volley exchanges between members of the opposite sex—lightens the moods of even the most gladiatorial singles stars, inducing laughs and cross-net banter. It was to savor, as a fan, watching at home or sitting, as I was through all of it, in seats I never paid more than $90 for, something that the unyielding potency and otherworldly athleticism of elite singles tennis, for all its jaw-drop dazzle, no longer has to offer, for the most part—something it’s been draining itself of. The players seemed to savor it too. Here was the game of tennis, the diversion of it, the quirkiness of it. Iga Swiatek, who with her partner Casper Rudd would reach the final, put it this way: “I think it’s a reminder that tennis should be fun…feel this positive energy and just have fun.”

I’d had a taste of this, or something like it, once before: Wimbledon, Centre Court, Saturday, July 6, 2019, Roger Federer having just eased past Lucas Pouille, last match of the day up next, twilight dimming the rectangle of sky framed by the stadium’s roof, the crowd going nowhere, standing and buzzing as it had not been all afternoon, awaiting a mixed-doubles match. The sustained roar that greeted the team of Andy Murray and Serena Williams: It was something I’d never heard on Centre Court. Their decision to pair up was the first-week story of Wimbledon that year, and in their first-round match on the sport’s most hallowed stage, they did not disappoint, earning 17 break-point opportunities and never dropping serve on their way to a 6–4, 6–1 win over doubles specialists Alexa Guarachi and Andreas Mies. “I think it was fun,” William said afterward. Then she said: “I had fun out there.” Then she said: “Some moments I thought were really fun.” I’m going to put it out there that a Serena press conference had never had more fun about it.

Williams was no stranger to mixed doubles. She’d won her first mixed-doubles championship in 1998, at Wimbledon, at the age of 16, partnering with Max Mirnyi. She also paired regularly with her sister, Venus, for women’s doubles at majors, winning 14 titles. As a doubles team they also won three Olympic gold medals. They were the last of their kind: celebrated singles players who routinely entered the doubles draw at Grand Slams, and once in a while at other tournaments, too.

The reasons why today’s top singles players no longer play doubles much—men’s, women’s, or mixed—are pretty well established: Singles has become both much more lucrative (who need the doubles money anymore?) and much more grueling (we need the off days for recovery). I’d add another reason: Singles and doubles are no longer what they were back when, games approached with similar playing styles: continental grip, serve and volley, chip and charge. What’s been left to debate is whether or how doubles has suffered as a result.

It was Reilly Opelka who, two years ago, surfaced on social media a point of view you’d heard in some form or another for years if you spent enough time around pro tennis. Opelka was on hiatus from tennis, recovering from a wrist injury, but he was posting. Asked on Instagram what he would change about the ATP Tour, he responded: “Get rid of doubles.” If singles players like himself no longer wanted to team up, do away with the game. In the years since, he’s kept up the trolling: Fans don’t care about doubles. Doubles didn’t sell tickets. Today’s doubles specialists were “the most overpaid athletes.” They took up resources at tournaments that singles players needed—practice courts, physios’ hours. Why keep a game on tour that’s simply for “failed singles players”?

Opelka unleashed the kind of conversation that certain corners of tennis today live for—an admixture of aggro (nothing like a burst of irritation and insult in a sport steeped in niceties) and soberly suggested fixes to a problem that may or may not be a problem (Opelka didn’t muddy his take with data). Among those who eventually joined the rage-baiting was Alexander Bublik, who pronounced that doubles was “not real tennis” but something more akin to pickleball. Jon Wertheim agreed with Opelka that doubles needed to induce singles stars to play, and proposed that tourney overseers move doubles to later in their events, the better to lure singles players who lost in the early rounds to team up.

The unexamined assumptions and begged questions in all this are myriad. Are singles players actually better at doubles than the doubles specialists? How much time would singles players need to hone their doubles games—and where in the schedule would that honing fit? Might there be inherent aspects of the doubles game—net play? teamwork?—that ultimately make it more suitable and comfortable, and thus more appealing, for those “failed singles players,” and not so much for leading singles players? Are those tournament attendees clutching the grounds-pass admissions they could afford really dissatisfied on the field courts watching specialists play doubles? If Reilly Opelka and Alexander Bublik crashed out of a Slam early (plausible) and stuck around to pair up as a doubles team, would their presence send ticket holders scurrying to their assigned court? National players draw crowds in their home countries. Carlos Alcaraz, Coco Gauff, Jannik Sinner, Naomi Osaka—the pop stars of tennis—can draw crowds to watch them play dubs anywhere (or, for that matter, do karaoke). Who else?

Serena and Andy, teaming up, they had that star power for sure. They lost in the third round to a pair of doubles specialists.

Andrea Vavassori is a 30-year-old Italian doubles specialist. His highest singles ranking was No. 128, reached in 2023. He does continue to play singles from time to time, but a couple of years ago he made a decision to make doubles his main focus. He says he wanted the chance that only doubles was proving to provide for him to play tennis on the most important stages, the show courts of majors. He wanted to play in the ATP finals, too, held currently in Turin, his hometown. And Italian tennis was suddenly dominating the world; he wanted to be part of Italy’s Olympic and Davis Cup teams. He teamed up with compatriots: Simone Bolelli for men’s doubles, Sara Errani for mixed. He and Bolelli have reached the Australian Open final twice. He and Errani won the mixed-doubles championship at the French Open this past June, having won the US Open mixed-doubles title in 2024. In the end, that US Open win is why they were the only team of doubles specialists to be invited in August to play the inaugural mixed-doubles extravaganza. How can you deny champions the chance to defend their title?

Vavassori didn’t accept the invite with quiet gratitude. He joined other doubles specialists in lamenting their lack of representation in the new event. Doubles pros were losing one of their best-paying gigs. And he didn’t hold back about what he thought of the it-sucks-as-is view of the doubles-sphere.

“I don’t understand the people when they talk shit about something and then they want to play,” Vavassori told Ben Rothenberg a couple of weeks before the Open. Vavassori was referring to Opelka, who would be teaming up for mixed with Venus Williams. “Honestly, I don’t understand. I think we are a community, and I don’t understand why when people talk shit about something. Because when you speak about swimming or you speak about running, there are so many different disciplines; singles and doubles is like this. Like, if you run the 100 meters, there is Usain Bolt. But then there is the 400 meters, there is the marathon, where you have to have different skills, you have to do different exercises to become great. In swimming, there are so many different disciplines. I don’t know why the people don’t understand that singles and doubles is two different things.”

Tennis, like any sport, has its instructive ironies. It was a sun-splashed Tuesday in Armstrong Stadium as the Open’s mixed-fest got underway, the stands slowly filling with the curious and star-seeking, most of whom were getting to watch for free by downloading a special digital pass. Errani-Vavassori finished off Elena Rybakina and Taylor Fritz (who’d partnered before at Indian Wells for an exo and were seeded second in this event) in less than an hour, thanks to the new sped-up format, and got to relax a bit while Karolina Muchova and Andrey Rublev sent off Williams and Opelka. (No trolling from Vavassori.) The defending champs returned to find a stadium that had filled, and a strong breeze coursing through the louvered walls at the stadium’s ends. They proceeded to dominate the first shortened set against Muchová-Rublev in 17 minutes, the breeze bothering their bigger hitting opponents more than them, and went on to win the second in a white-knuckle tiebreak. Their court positioning, anticipation, return placement, and net play were just more exacting when it mattered. That’s doubles.

Much of the sellout crowd for the Wednesday-night final was not paying a whole lot of attention to the tennis during the two semifinal matches that began the evening—but that’s how it often is in the far reaches of the upper bowl of Ashe, where I found myself among the chattering Honey Deucers and selfie-ists. Swiatek and Ruud eked past Jack Draper and Jessica Pegula in an absorbing three-setter—how solid is Jess on a doubles court?—before Errani and Vavassori dispatched Danielle Collins and Christian Harrison (the other doubles specialist included in the event) in straights. The final was tense, hard-fought, enlivened by cat-and-mouse points, dramatized by a second-set momentum swing. The crowd went all-in. The DJs cranked it. It was everything the organizers could have hoped for.

Everything but the outcome. Two players, neither of them ranked within the top 250 in singles, repeated as mixed-doubles champs. They celebrated the victory with a Bryan Brothers’ leaping chest pump, or, anyway, shoulder (hers)-brushes-midsection (his) bump. They’d won the third-set tiebreak with superior net play. (Vavassori put on a two-day poaching clinic.) Was there some sort of doubles-players-can justice to the whole thing when it was brought to an end by the No. 2 women’s singles player netting a volley?

“We show that in doubles there are more things than hitting the ball,” Errani said afterward. If Yogi Berra had been a tennis fan, he would have liked that. And maybe the USTA organizers will keep that in mind next year—invite more doubles specialists, pair them up with singles players, consider expanding the draw. Games, even the really fun ones, teach us things. We play and watch them because we like what’s going to happen. And because we don’t know what’s going to happen.