Mayhem in Madrid
Mayhem in Madrid
Mayhem in Madrid
Corentin Moutet and Jerry Shang deliver a classic… of sorts.
Corentin Moutet and Jerry Shang deliver a classic… of sorts.
By Giri Nathan
April 26, 2024
Future generations. // AP
Future generations. // AP
Earlier this week I was asked to name some potentially entertaining first-round matchups in Madrid. My sole pick on the ATP side was Corentin Moutet vs. Jerry Shang. I turned out to be completely correct. But at what cost?
We must preserve the memory of this match for future generations. On the one hand was Corentin Moutet, the slight Frenchman with soft hands, loads of trick shots, and a catastrophic temperament. Think of Nick Kyrgios, only divide the height by half and add a better sense of humor. (Just look how cleanly he punctures a Stefanos Tsitsipas fake-deep musing.) There’s something admirable about Moutet’s talent and resourcefulness. Just as he was on the doorstep of the top 50, he had a serious injury on his right wrist, so he taught himself how to hit a one-handed backhand for a season. Life’s not easy as a small-statured lefty suddenly bereft of a backhand; playing righties means a lot of crosscourt battles against heavy forehands. He somehow made it work. Now he slices a ton, runs around every backhand he can, and mixes in the occasional two-hander.
On the other side of the net from Moutet was fellow lefty Jerry Shang, a touted 19-year-old on the cusp of breaking into the top 100. Shang, who might be the most talented men’s prospect to ever play under the Chinese flag, was previously coached by former world No. 1 and noted screwball Marcelo Rios, so he must know a thing or two about excessively large personalities. “I told my team that the only player I didn’t want to play was Corentin,” Shang said afterward. “I don’t want to see him in the first round of the draw. When I got him I just told myself: ‘Win or lose I would have fun and enjoy every point.”‘ That’s one way to describe the relentless distraction games that Moutet specializes in.
No match is ever straightforward for Moutet, who needed nine set points to claim the first set. When he did finish the job, he treated the crowd to the “big balls” celebration, which is rare in the prim domain of tennis but good for a five-figure fine in the NBA. Early in the second set, as Moutet ran to the net to hit an easy put-away, Shang squatted deep and stuck his racquet straight up in desperate self-defense, only for Moutet to somehow put his ball directly into the strings of the outstretched racquet. The ball boinked back into play and Moutet lost the point. That lapse mattered, because later that game, Shang broke Moutet’s serve with a slick passing shot. As an enraged Moutet cocked his racquet back overhead, a poor ball boy nearby recoiled in fear, which says something about that boy’s read on what Moutet might do at any given moment.
The match ran late. In the second set, Moutet asked the umpire for coffee and was outraged to find that this was not a perk provided by the tournament. Always quick to find an angle for martyrdom, he wondered if it was because he wasn’t important enough. “Is it because I’m on Court 4?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter where we play,” said the umpire. “We don’t provide coffee.” A helpful fan eventually reached onto the court to hand over a paper cup of joe, which Moutet accepted.
He also had an underarm serve, and a lengthy demand that a particular fan be ejected, though those barely earn a place in the historical record of this match. Save room for stuff like this: Down 0–3 in the third set, in the middle of a rally, Moutet was doused with water. A groundskeeper hosing down a neighboring court had accidentally sprayed him through the fence. Moutet flipped out, and the umpire ruled it a let. Shang, who’d hit a clean winner only to have it negated, asks if that’s in the rules. Spontaneous dousing is probably not mentioned by name in the rule book, though a let does seem fair.
At 5–5 in the deciding set tiebreak, Moutet served; the racquet flew out of his hand and past the doubles alley, so when Shang’s return came back, Moutet simply attempted to kick it back. That loss of grip put him match point down. It took Shang a little longer still, as he only cashed in on his fifth match point, putting this match mercifully to rest with a forehand winner. Amid the madness there were some genuinely spectacular rallies between two great movers conditioned enough to battle for three hours and 59 minutes. That’s just four minutes short of the semifinal Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal played at this tournament in 2009, which was the longest best-of-three match in ATP tour history and one of the highest-quality clay-court matches ever played. This was…not that. But it was legendary in its own right.
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The Hopper
—Garbiñe Muguruza is ready to do nothing.
—The ATP denies rumors that a Masters 1000 in Saudi Arabia has been confirmed.
—The self-described “Taste of Tennis” interviews Hall-of-Famer Rosie Casals on the Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast.
—Mayor Sherif gets a win.
—A nice piece on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament from Defector.
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The Ghosts of Clay Past, Present and Future
The Ghosts of Clay Past, Present and Future
The Ghosts of Clay Past, Present and Future
Who’s who on the terra battuta.
Who’s who on the terra battuta.
By Giri Nathan
April 19, 2024
Rafaelito looked sharp in his first round match in Barcelona. Less so in his second. // AP
Rafaelito looked sharp in his first round match in Barcelona. Less so in his second. // AP
We’re knee-deep into dirt season now, and I trust that you’ve all managed to locate the tennis ball on your monitors. (That was a problem specific to Monte Carlo, a trick of the seaside light and ill-positioned cameras.) It’s a fine time for a check-in on the past, present, and future of clay-court tennis on the ATP.
THE PAST
Technically I’m calling this the past, but I could never comfortably relegate Rafael Nadal to the past. Even if he announced a “retirement” and I needed to write about it, I’d probably wait with my thumb hovering over the “Publish” button for another 50 years just to be safe. How many times has he returned from apparent bodily ruin to regain glory? But the man himself has been talking as if the end is near, and at some point he must be taken at face value. This week Nadal competed for the first time since his January injury at Brisbane; hip and abdominal woes have kept him off court in the intervening months. Nadal returned to the tour in Barcelona, where he is a 12-time champion, and where, after stepping onto court called “Pista Rafa Nadal,” and before playing a single point, he was greeted with a standing O. After dispatching the 21-year-old Italian Flavio Cobolli in the first round, Rafa declared himself “pain-free,” a victory in itself, even if the tennis wasn’t up to his usual technical standard. Most conspicuous: He hit his serves with tender caution, and explained he’d gone months without being able to practice the motion. There was no way to soft-pedal and still win his second-round match against Alex de Minaur, who acknowledged that the “only thing I might have on Rafa on clay is physicality at this stage of his career,” and accordingly made the points as long as he could. After a tight first set, the speedy Aussie ran away with the win, 7–5, 6–1. Nadal said he was more comfortable and happier than he’d been a week and a half ago. He didn’t want to overextend himself in Barcelona, as he is instead ramping up, tournament by tournament, so that he can peak when it matters. “It wasn’t today that I had to give everything and die; I have to give myself the chance to do that in a few weeks, or at least try to,” he said after. The target is still, and always has been, Roland-Garros. For the last time? I’m never gonna type that.
THE PRESENT
Casper Ruud is sneaking up on us as always, sneaking even into major finals as if he were tiptoeing through a creaky hallway for a midnight snack of olives. But this is his moment, and he has been eating. If asked which player has the most wins this ATP season, you might have safely assumed the white-hot, red-mopped Jannik Sinner; he’s been bumped down to second place by Ruud, who has played more tournaments than Sinner and done very well at most of them, building himself a 26–7 record at time of writing. The placid Norwegian has shed the malaise of last season and inserted himself back in the top 10, and watching him on clay, hunting those huge spinny forehands, it’s easy to remember why he’s so formidable on this surface. With Nadal fading, his once heir apparent Dominic Thiem on the verge of grim retirement, and the real-deal colossal talents still coming of age, why can’t the 25-year-old Ruud mature into the clay specialist of the modern era? He should be sneaking in a title every clay swing. Sadly that old bugbear—he owns no title above the 250-level—has yet to be banished, since he lost to Stefanos Tsitsipas in last weekend’s Monte Carlo final. But some key concepts seem to be clicking for him mentally. Last week he beat Novak Djokovic for the first time in six tries. He said he headed into the match considering the fact that Djokovic had lost to the unseasoned Luca Nardi in Indian Wells, that the great champion was “human” after all. That’s progress for the placid Ruud, who could benefit from being a little less deferential. However, this week, while gushing again about Rafa, he said, “I might sound like a fanboy, but I don’t care.” No, Casper! You’re backsliding again. There will be plenty of time to fanboy in the future, but for now these are ants to be squashed in zero-sum competition. Maybe he’ll only be liberated after they’re officially retired. We try to avoid armchair psychology in these quarters. But I think Ruud might just need to be a little more…impolite.
THE FUTURE
I leave you with a brief and forceful recommendation: Don’t miss an ATP match if 17-year-old Joao Fonseca is playing in it. We last checked in on this kid in February, when he got a wild card into his first ATP tournament and made it to the quarterfinals in Rio, his home city. Since then he has received two more wild cards into ATP events; he lost both times first-round, in extremely competitive matches. But in between those losses, Fonseca made his first Challenger Tour final and pushed his ranking inside the top 300. This week he’s in Bucharest, back on the big-boy circuit, having received his fourth wild card into an ATP event. And just as in Rio, he is into the quarterfinal at a 250-level event. He beat veterans Lorenzo Sonego and Radu Albot en route, proving that he’s one of those rare players who can comfortably hit through the clay, and he will be rewarded richly for that gift once he’s done growing. I’m still thinking of this ungodly kick serve—maybe a fluky bounce off a mound of dirt, but that makes it no less fun to watch on repeat. Fonseca is one of those extraterrestrially gifted ball-strikers, already mixing it up with top-50 talent, and he still doesn’t turn 18 until late August. I’m not saying this arc will be Alcaraz-esque, but perhaps it won’t be that far off.
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The Hopper
—A WTA tourney at The Queens Club is at the mercy of the men.
—Sir Andge will not need surgery, and is back training again.
—America’s coach checks in with Aussie John Millman on the Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast.
—A nice Defector piece on the WNBA draft.
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Tennis Bodies Keep the Score
Tennis Bodies Keep
the Score
Tennis Bodies Keep the Score
Challengers understands this grim and grimy side of a sport so traditionally depicted as clean, tidy, and polite.
Challengers understands this grim and grimy side of a sport so traditionally depicted as clean, tidy, and polite.
By AJ Eccles
April 18, 2024
Zendaya and Iga at Indian Wells in March. // David Bartholow
Zendaya and Iga at Indian Wells in March. // David Bartholow
Art Donaldson’s feet are disgusting.
A six-time major champion—he holds two titles at each major except the US Open—Art’s body has been through the wringer. As a physiotherapist inflicts elastic stretches upon Art’s legs, the camera lingers on a broken blister on his elevated foot. This breaks a cardinal rule of tennis: If you see a player removing their socks, avert your eyes or suffer psychological damage. The shot is fleeting, but it sets the stage for a film that relishes in the ugly blights as much as the enviable virtues of the athletic body.
In Challengers, Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a rising tennis star who suffers a career-ending injury during a college match at Stanford. Forever in her orbit are Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), childhood friends and former Junior US Open doubles champions whose relationship has dissolved as a result of their increasingly toxic battle for Tashi’s affection. Art, now married to Tashi, who also serves as his star coach, has achieved once-in-a-generation success; Patrick remains broke and eternally stuck on the carousel of the Challenger Tour.
Challengers is at once a study of sporting psychopathy and a muscular Cruel Intentions nostalgia play, akin to Emerald Fennell’s edgelord extravaganza Saltburn. This picture is—shot for shot—more successful than Fennell’s flimsier production, thanks to both the maturity of the three performers at its center and the boundary-pushing approach to a sport that is too often sanitized in onscreen adaptation. Director Luca Guadagnino—who most viewers may recognize as the man who captured Timothée Chalamet swooning under the Italian sun of Call Me by Your Name—plays with our physical relationship to the sport, at points literally launching the viewer across the net in a ball’s-eye view, with all the thrilling frenetic disorientation that entails.
Where recent tennis flicks King Richard and Battle of the Sexes owed their real-life protagonists the formal trappings of the biopic, a genre increasingly buckling under its own weight, Challengers requires no such creative restriction. Guadagnino takes advantage of this freedom, exploring at once the aesthetic appeal of his stars and the messy underpinnings of tennis itself.
Appropriate, for a screenplay deeply obsessed with maturing bodies at work and at play.
Indeed, the two inciting incidents of the narrative are moments of bodily expression. First, a beer-soaked flirtation between our three protagonists in a New York hotel room, just hours after Tashi has lifted the trophy as Junior US Open champion. Scantily clad in post-effort athleisure, the three gradually move from the floor to the bed, where a three-way kiss becomes an opportunity for Tashi to assert romantic authority over her admirers.
Though sex is ultimately never explicit in Challengers, the exertion of tennis is suggestive throughout. Embodied in climactic screams of “Come on!” after passionate rallies (Tashi vividly describes tennis as a relationship in which two players can fleetingly connect in perfect motion), or in sweat dripping off Art’s nose onto the camera lens as if to drench the audience in his exhaustion, it’s invigorating to see Guadagnino explore athletic pursuits as cousins to sexual opportunity. This isn’t news: The Olympic Village is infamous as a cornucopia of international sexual trade, and tennis is not immune. Players who enjoy the opposite sex have regular opportunities as ATP and WTA tours converge, and those who relish same-sex encounters share intimate spaces all year long. Your favorite player probably fucks.
"Canadian Doubles." / MGM Studios
"Canadian Doubles." / MGM Studios
Challengers’ second pivotal moment is Tashi’s catastrophic knee injury, which should come with a trigger warning for those of us who remember Bethanie Mattek-Sands’ gruesome knee snap at Wimbledon in 2017. Tashi’s knee crumples as she lunges for a ball just out of reach, the knee cracking and bulging under her skin. Rather than cut away—as any respectful sportscaster would in times of trauma—Guadagnino zooms in. You must watch and hear with startling clarity as Tashi’s career ends violently, too soon, filling the screen.
Though Tashi’s injury is the most visceral, she is not the film’s sole victim of tennis’ physical stress. Art is covered in wounds—particularly on his shoulder, where it’s hinted he suffered a similarly serious injury. Scars of multiple cuts are visible on his arm where a surgeon has supposedly patched the champion back together. And when Patrick lifts his shirt we see a red and purple bruise on his torso, perhaps the result of a fall or of a particularly brutal ball strike. These are young people in permanent disrepair.
Throughout Challengers, it’s difficult to separate these physical scars from the fate of real players on tour today: Tennis bodies are not perfect superhuman vessels for genius. To be human is to break.
Even at the top of the game we see players struggling with the reality of the human body. Rafa Nadal famously won his most recent Roland-Garros with his left foot entirely numbed by injected painkillers. Venus Williams has battled through Sjogren’s syndrome—an autoimmune disease that causes fatigue—for years. Matteo Berrettini, among the most physically admired men on the tour, suffered such intense stomach distress during one match that he was compelled to write “Imodium, Grazi” on an on-court camera post-victory.
Challengers, in all its frenzied psychosexual melodrama, understands this grim and grimy side of a sport so traditionally depicted as clean, tidy, and polite.
Is the film without flaw? No. An overreliance on slow-motion sometimes crosses over into the absurd. This is particularly true in the third act, where a tense match begins to overstay its welcome in a manner not seen since Isner vs. Mahut, halting momentum right as it should be racing toward a climax. The tennis itself is not always rendered perfectly, especially the ever-difficult-to-replicate service motion. Tashi and Patrick have particularly egregious service form, though in fairness to O’Connor’s performance, it should be pointed out that Patrick’s exaggerated motion is essential to the plot.
These minor distractions matter, but not enough to detract from the thrill of seeing tennis finally allowed to get a little dirty on the big screen. To see the joyous messiness of the sport—and the fragile humans who play it—rendered with fleshy exuberance.
As audiences experience Challengers in the weeks leading up to Roland-Garros, we should be open to kicking up some clay and inviting the dirt to stick to our blistered skin a little. Just please don’t take your socks off.
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The Patron Saint of Painful Sincerity
The Patron Saint of Painful Sincerity
The Patron Saint of Painful Sincerity
Tennis has grown up around Stefanos Tsitsipas.
Tennis has grown up around Stefanos Tsitsipas.
By Giri Nathan
April 12, 2024
It's a beautiful backhand. Stef in Monte Carlo. // Associated Press
It's a beautiful backhand. Stef in Monte Carlo. // Associated Press
We used to think about Stefanos Tsitsipas—not so much these days. What happened? This is a man who played in a Slam final just last season. And his buzziest feat thus far in 2024: falling out of the top 10, marking the first time since the ATP rankings were established in 1973 that there were no one-handed backhands in that elite tier. A neat factoid…also a nonideal reason for people to be talking about you. Tsitsipas first debuted in the top 10 back in 2019, a few weeks after his brilliant upset of Roger Federer in the fourth round at Melbourne—and his subsequent request that the entire stadium subscribe to his burgeoning YouTube channel. The patron saint of painful sincerity had been marinating in the top 10 for nearly five straight years before finally slipping out of it in February. The guy barely even posts to YouTube anymore. He has found love off court, with fellow pro Paula Badosa, but both of them are slumping. When it comes to on-court performance, Tsitsipas has not, as a wise Greek philosopher once prescribed, nourished his sensations very dutifully. He ended the 2023 season bowing out of his last tournament with a back injury so bad he struggled to get out of bed.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Once upon a time it looked like this talented player might take over the game from the Big Three, but instead a bunch of egregiously talented kids cut him in line. So blame Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who snuck in their Slams while this 25-year-old continued to roll his boulder, and then throw Holger Rune into that mix for good measure. Tsitsipas has also ceded ground to his long-legged contemporaries Daniil Medvedev and Sascha Zverev, who are staying competitive with the new blood in ways Stef hasn’t quite managed. There are some more curious names, too. I did not predict a day where Alex de Minaur would pass up Tsitsipas in the rankings, but that’s the current state of affairs. Tsitsipas is liable to dispense a win to anyone who wants one. Denis Shapovalov, playing with a protected ranking, wants a heartwarming win in Miami as motivation to keep going? Stefanos has got you: 6–2, 6–4, keep it up. (First top-20 win for Shapo since October 2022.) It feels a bit like tennis has grown around Tsitsipas as he sat relatively unchanged. The holes in his game have been public knowledge for years—dicey return game, the one-hander when rushed, a weak slice repertoire—and he hasn’t meaningfully patched them up.
If there were ever a place for a Tsitsipas rebound, it would be amid the crags and waves of the Monte Carlo Country Club, where he has won two 1000-level titles, even though that history hasn’t been enough to earn him an assignment this week, which he has sheepishly pointed out himself in interviews. Through three matches, Tsitsipas has looked like the natural he once seemed to be. He is an uncommon fusion: on the one hand, an all-court player who loves to follow his forehand to the net and carve up tough volleys; and on the other hand, a red-stained clay-courter to his core. The slower surface is good for his ground game, giving him extra time to solve some (if not all) the problems on his backhand side. He doesn’t mind diving for those stab volleys and getting dirty; he has endurance enough for the lung-busting points, and he can play with big spin when he wants to. There’s real value in players like Stef who can go a bit bolder and shake up what can feel like a monotonous clay swing ruled by the grindiest grinders.
As his third-round match against quasi-rival Zverev proved, Tsitsipas is far from a perfect player, but he is at least starting to look like the old Stefanos again. He’s still haunted by his own backhand, which far too often underdelivers in depth and bite, but that wing held up well enough to pull off a gorgeous running crosscourt pass to break serve and secure the first set. Tsitsipas rolled all the way to 5–0 up in the second set, too, before he fell into “a loophole of mistakes and errors,” as Zverev pushed his way to a tiebreak. There the Greek finally got his shit together, both in the micro (he won it 7–3) and the macro (he secured his first win over a top-five player since 2022), and in characteristically Stef fashion, he called this third-round straight-set victory “an adventure of a lifetime.” Okay, dude. Meanwhile he also just posted a vlog to his YouTube channel for the first time in a year—a sign of life if I’ve ever seen one.
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The Hopper
—Giri on Danielle Collins’s tremendous run in Miami, from Defector.
—Venus Williams, published author.
—Lots of fun action at the Billie Jean King Cup.
—Rafa is trying to come back in Barcelona next week.
—Gorilla vs. Bear vs. TSS: Mix 1.
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Gorilla vs. Bear Mix 1
Gorilla vs. Bear
vs.
The Second Serve
Gorilla vs. Bear
vs.
The Second Serve
The iconic music blog graces TSS with Mix 1, an eclectic mix of some of their favorite jams of 2024 (so far).
The iconic music blog graces TSS with Mix 1, an eclectic mix of some of their favorite jams of 2024 (so far).
By TSS
April 5, 2024
The Hopper
—It’s official: The WTA Finals are moving to Saudi Arabia.
—But Ons Jabeur is into it.
—And same sex couples will be allowed to share rooms, which is very magnanimous of them.
—“Coach” Craig Shapiro interviews Jose Higueras about his open letter on the state of American tennis on his eponymous podcast.
—New rules, designed to speed up the game, will be tested during the doubles in Madrid.
—Monte Carlo starts next week, if you’re going here’s a guide.
—However Rafa won’t be there.
—Clay magazine interviews Yannick Hangman about Alexander Zverev and other things.
—Goran Ivanisevic tells Tennis Majors he was ready to die for Novak.
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Postcard from Indian Wells
Postcard from
Indian Wells
Braving the desert vortex with the best players in the world at the BNP Paribas Open.
Braving the desert vortex with the best players in the world at the BNP Paribas Open.
Photography by David Bartholow
April 4, 2024
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Ice Ice Baby
Ice Ice Baby
Ice Ice Baby
Don’t take Elena Rybakina for granted.
Don't take Elena Rybakina for granted.
By Giri Nathan
March 29, 2024
Elena Rybakina is quick to the point in Miami. // Associated Press
Elena Rybakina is quick to the point in Miami. // Associated Press
Elena Rybakina is both here and not. Her calendar’s been littered with withdrawals over the past year. The world No. 4 often seems to be battling something—most recently a gastrointestinal illness that saw her walkover in Dubai and skip Indian Wells altogether, forfeiting the 1000 points she earned by taking the title in the desert last year. But whenever she’s actually there, on court, she’s certain to be whupping someone something terrible. You learn not to take her for granted. She’s like that elusive friend you’re lucky to pin down a few times a year, and it feels precious every time you do, if only your friend could also serve 125 mph and betray no recognizable emotions while doing so. Your friend could never win Wimbledon and offer the world only the tiniest fist pump and exhalation. That’s a whole other plateau of cool.
Sometimes Rybakina’s cool manifests in effortless deletion of her opponents. That was her mode this time last year, when she was barreling through the hard-court season, just falling short of a Slam in Melbourne and barely missing out on the Sunshine Double. Right now Rybakina’s form isn’t quite that pristine, but if anything, it’s made her wins that much more compelling. You have to get yourself into some adverse situations for the ice to really shine. On that theme, Rybakina has lost 69 games at this tournament, the most of any Miami finalist since the event began in 1985. She’s cast herself into some complicated three-setters, and along the way she’s thrown her racquet around, gotten a wildly uncharacteristic code violation for ball abuse, and bickered nonstop with her chatty coach Stefano Vukov, only to fatefully blast her way through the pressure regardless.
Truly, no easy matches for Lena in Miami. To open her tournament, a pair of three-setters against qualifiers: the powerful Clara Tauson and the mix-it-up ingenuity of Taylor Townsend. Rybakina briefly caught her breath with a straight-setter against Madison Keys. (Imagine being good enough to “catch your breath” against a booming Madison Keys on a hard court.) Then in round 4 Rybakina was assigned the freshly resurgent Maria Sakkari, who is all zenned out and challenging the WTA royalty once again. Rybakina got match points in the second set but couldn’t finish the job, and as she botched it, she was fighting so vocally with her coach that Sakkari couldn’t help but grimace and smile from across the court. It was over an hour later, on her fifth match point, that Rybakina managed to serve out the match with new balls. So that was two hours and 48 minutes of toil.
In any fight, it helps to have the biggest weapon, and Rybakina will nearly always claim that honor with the nastiest serve on the WTA. She struck 10 aces against Sakkari. She added 11 more in a fascinating and bizarre semifinal against Vika Azarenka, yet another three-setter. After taking the first set, Rybakina physically and mentally vanished in the second—her first bagel set received since August 2022—and then she looked to be in a temporary panic while trying to serve it out at 5–4 in the third, losing conviction in her net game. Azarenka broke, then held, and suddenly Rybakina was serving to stay in the tournament. No sweat: Simply cue up a cold sequence of servebot-like unconsciousness, winning 10 of 11 points to blow open the deciding tiebreak.
“I switched off the mind a bit for the tiebreak and I just went for it,” she said after a win that put her at 22–3 on the season. South Florida has one last challenge for this chilly killer: Switch off the mind during a title fight against a rolling Danielle Collins, whose backhand is fearsome enough to do cross-court battle with Rybakina’s impeccable two-hander, and who will be yelling more than enough to offset her quiet. Something tells me this one’s going three.
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The Hopper
—Andy Murray is injured, and it doesn’t look good.
—Agassi, Roddick, Gauff… Zendaya. Brad Gilbert consulted on the film “Challengers”, via Joel Drucker.
—Africa’s tennis talents tread long road to success, via The Guardian.
—Novak Djokovic and Goran Ivanisevic have broken up.
—Cool meditation on journalism ethics here, from Defector.
ICYMI from TSS
—Vicente Muñoz’s postcard from Phoenix.
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Voyage of the Beagle
Voyage of the Beagle
Voyage of
the Beagle
Darwin Blanch “understands the geometry of the court like it’s his living room.”
Darwin Blanch “understands the geometry of the court like it’s his living room.”
By Giri Nathan
March 22, 2024
Yung Darwin Blanch is growing up fast. / Associated Press
Yung Darwin Blanch is growing up fast. / Associated Press
Some old names returned to court this week. Simona Halep back after a shortened doping suspension, Kei Nishikori back after what feels like a century of injuries. Both out in the first round but both, for different reasons, happy to even be out there at all. Generally, though, tennis seems to belong to the kids these days. Iga and Carlitos just won in the desert; Djokovic fell early last week and is totally absent in Miami, freeing up the draw for the youth. And gazing even further out to the future, look at the unusual wild card in Miami granted to 16-year-old wunderkind Darwin Blanch, perhaps the most auspicious young name in American tennis right now. Blanch is not yet ranked inside the top 1000 on the ATP. A player that fresh and unproven might typically just get a wild card into qualifying, but he was granted entry straight into the main draw, which is either a testament to his rare talent, or a reminder that this tournament is owned and organized by IMG (the agency that represents Blanch), or both.
The truth is, he’s too good to need to rely on favor-trading. Blanch, who really does look like Ben Shelton if drawn from memory, already has a fine résumé to go with a worldly backstory. Darwin speaks four languages and spent his early childhood in Thailand, where his dad cleared out palm trees to put a tennis court in the backyard and hired a full-time instructor for the four Blanch siblings, all of whom developed into serious players. (Challenger tour connoisseurs might recognize oldest sibling Ulises, who reached a career-high No. 236 on the ATP.) Growing up, the Blanch kids made periodic trips to Florida to train with Rick Macci, who has helped coach a slew of American stars, including the Williams sisters, Andy Roddick, and Sofia Kenin. With respect to raw potential, Darwin, the youngest of the siblings, inspires the most awe. Macci has said that Darwin “understands the geometry of the court like it’s his living room,” that he will have one of the best forehands in pro tennis, and that he has the most biomechanically sound serve of any boy he’s ever coached. Macci has also written this very odd thing that I’m choosing to interpret as a high compliment: “The muscle memory is brainwashed to optimize execution in sync so you do not have a technical flaw.”
That hyperbole has been backed up by some stunning results to date. Darwin thrived as a junior, winning the prestigious under-16s at Kalamazoo as a 14-year-old in 2022. Earlier that same year he became the second-youngest player ever to win an ATP ranking point, by winning a match at the M15 in Villena, Spain. As he transitions into the pros, Blanch has already proved to be a popular hitting partner, getting in a session with Holger Rune this week in Miami and sparring regularly with Carlos Alcaraz at the Juan Carlos Ferrero Academy, where they both train. A 15-year-old Blanch was in fact the last person to hit with Alcaraz ahead of the 2023 Australian Open; Carlitos hurt himself going into the splits to retrieve a ball and had to pull out of the tournament, so feel free to blame that absence on Blanch’s too-good drop shot.
As the fifth-youngest player to ever appear in a Masters event, Blanch was predictably overmatched in his first-round match against Tomas Machac, the rapidly rising Czech ranked No. 60. The youngster, who had never played anyone ranked inside the top 200, handled himself well and had some cool flashes in the 6–4, 6–2 loss. It’s not all that hard to see the eventual vision. When I watched him play up close at the junior tournament in Roland-Garros last year I came away impressed: 6-foot-3 lefty, serve and forehand as punchy as Macci promised, a bit of lanky gawkiness that he’ll grow out of. He says his goal is to break into the top 500 this year. In American tennis circles, Blanch is already talked about with the hushed tones reserved for outright messiahs, a tone that has not been used for a few generations. We’ll see if he holds up—or if he lands in hot water, wilts, and needs an immediate ice bath. Is there a word for that?
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The Hopper
—The USTA’s Lew Sherr talks tennis’s Premier Tour with L. Jon Wertheim.
—Chris Eubanks has signed on as a clothing ambassador for J Lindeberg.
—The legendary Casa Magazines shop in New York City has been sold.
—Tim Newcomb interviews Tommy Paul.
—The self-described “Fifth Grand Slam” talks mushrooms and tennis with Giri Nathan.
—Aryna Sabalenka’s ex, Konstantin Koltsov, has died.
ICYMI from TSS
—We recap the Liveball Invitational at Mission Hills, brought to you by Brain Dead and LVBL.
—Joel Drucker’s history of the early days of Indian Wells.
—Vicente Muñoz’s postcard from Phoenix.
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Three Surface Slam
Three Surface Slam
LVBL and Brain Dead host the inaugural all-surface Dead Ball Invitational at the original home of Indian Wells.
LVBL and Brain Dead host the inaugural all-surface Dead Ball Invitational at the original home of Indian Wells.
By TSS
March 20, 2024
On March 10, LVBL and Brain Dead held the first all-surface Dead Ball Invitational at the iconic Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, original site of the Indian Wells Open, known in the 1970s as the American Airlines Tennis Games. The Wilson-sponsored tourney, which featured 150 participants in two brackets, hosted vigorous all-day liveball competition and marked the launch of the new Brain Dead Equipment tennis line, which was revealed at the event and is now available online and at all Brain Dead stores, including Brain Dead Fabrications in Silverlake, Los Angeles, where you can also pick up a copy of The Second Serve “Vol 0.5”.
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Sakk Attacks and Rune Runs
Sakk Attacks and
Rune Runs
Sakk Attacks and Rune Runs
At Indian Wells, Maria Sakkari finds her form, while Holger Rune showed what the future may hold.
At Indian Wells, Maria Sakkari finds her form, while Holger Rune showed what the future may hold.
By Giri Nathan
March 15, 2024
Maria Sakkari // David Bartholow
Maria Sakkari // David Bartholow
Something about the desert must be restorative for the brilliant if self-sabotaging Maria Sakkari. No matter her surrounding woes, she seems to arrive in Indian Wells with the clearest mind and biggest punches. She made the final in 2022, at which point she fell into the blender of the Iga Swiatek 37-match win streak. That result pushed Sakkari into the top 3 for the first time. Returning to Indian Wells in 2023, she fought to the semifinal and lost to an ascendant Aryna Sabalenka. Now Sakkari is back in the semifinal, sloughing off an inconsistent few months, playing the best tennis in recent memory. Hear it from the source: “I cannot remember the last time I played that well in a lot of matches,” Sakkari said after her three-set win over Emma Navarro in Thursday night’s quarterfinal.
Watching courtside as she rolled through Caroline Garcia in the second round, I was reminded just how compact and combustive Sakkari’s tennis can be. In my mind I’ve been replaying this one inside-in forehand, so artfully disguised that I would have signed documents stating that it went cross-court even as my eyes saw it three-quarters of the way down the line for a winner. She covers ground with the conviction of a sprinter—she once considered moonlighting as one—and serves far more imposingly than 5-foot-8 might suggest. Locked in, she looks unplayable. Sustaining that for the duration of a high-stakes match has proved to be its own puzzle, particularly when rewards are greatest. In 2023 she tumbled out of the first round in the year’s last three majors. And in decisive moments, those ground strokes can turn tentative and muscle-bound. This week she described herself as “a very stressful person” but praised her brand-new coach David Witt—recently in Jessie Pegula’s employ—for being a funny dude and breaking the tension.
Wins can still do things that a coach cannot, and Sakkari’s third-round victory over Diane Parry was your industry-standard confidence builder. Parry, a young French player with a serious and stylish game, went up an early break in the deciding set. Sakkari wrenched that match out of Parry’s grasp with a nasty backhand pass to break back in the 2–3 game. Three consecutive games later she was howling with typically Sakkarian intensity, the comeback complete. She’s been solid under duress all week. The next challenge for Sakkari is Coco Gauff, who would sit on the same elite tier if there were a WTA draft combine, but she’s up for the test. “Well, it’s nice to have girls that are actually athletic and fit,” she said, looking ahead to the duel of jocks. “Then you feel like, okay, it’s time to challenge myself and play against someone that is equally as fit as I am.”
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Holger Rune // David Bartholow
Holger Rune // David Bartholow
Holger Rune is no longer alive in the draw at Indian Wells, but his tennis this week was a reminder of how essential he might be to tour chemistry over the next decade. Yes, Carlos Alcaraz; yes, Jannik Sinner. Every time those two play is precious, and this is an instant-classic rivalry between well-mannered young fellas, one I’m overjoyed to witness and document in years to come. But you’ve also gotta have some Rune mixed in, someone to bring a little malice into the proceedings. That’s the recipe. What good is a totally purehearted tennis duopoly without some darker energy intruding from the margins?
Rune might just be too good to remain marginal, anyway, as I was reminded while he pieced together his comeback against Taylor Fritz in the fourth round on Wednesday. Late in the match, Fritz was serving well-placed bombs in the mid-130s, as is his nature. I wasn’t aware it was an option to take full cuts at said bombs, as if they were being fed harmlessly out of a hopper, but Rune did that over and over, staggering Fritz onto his back foot before he’d finished his service motion. There’s a restlessness, a slightly caged feeling to Rune’s tennis at its best, as he stalks around in his short-shorts and does vicious things to the ball as soon as possible. He brought some of his best to his windy quarterfinal with Medvedev, a spicy meeting between two guys with mutual fondness for a sneer. Medvedev took it in two close sets, and later praised Rune for being the sort of player who never gives you any rhythm to work with. While Rune has yet to define his own brand of tennis as confidently as Sinner and Alcaraz already have, he has proved that he has tools to bother the best, and needs to find a way to replicate that week to week.
This week was a well-needed rebound. Before the Fritz win, Rune had lost seven of his last eight against top 20 players. Partly this is because he was playing the tail end of last season through a back injury (and really looked it, too). The offseason must have been physically restorative, though it still didn’t resolve all doubts around his camp. After speed-dating coach Boris Becker, he has reunited with Patrick Mouratoglou, who has not covered himself in glory throughout the Simona Halep doping saga. Still, after listening to the recent interview our pal Craig Shapiro did with Holger’s mom, Aneke, I came away thinking that the Rune operation was pretty thoughtfully run as a whole. And after all, as Rune wrote in this tweet—which is either perfect deadpan or unintentional comedy—mom will remain in charge of all his supplements.
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The Hopper
—Giri Nathan and Patrick Redford interview the hero who humanely vacuumed thousands of bees out of a tennis stadium.
—Indian Wells has added mixed doubles.
—The self-described “Taste of Tennis” interviews Jim Courier on his Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast.
—Tim Newcomb reviews all the stadiums at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.
—Novak Djokovic is not playing Miami.
—Netflix has cancelled Break Point, but has announced a Carlos Alcaraz docuseries.
—The Saudis have made a $2 billion take-it-or-leave-it offer for tennis.
—Roger Federer signs on with Oliver Peoples.
—The International Tennis Hall of Fame has launched a cool online exhibit of tennis trophies.