Walking Tall
Walking Tall
Walking Tall
Diego Schwartzman forced the issue.
Diego Schwartzman forced the issue.
By Giri Nathan
February 20, 2025
Diego Schwartzman takes flight at Roland Garros, 2018. // Getty
Diego Schwartzman takes flight at Roland Garros, 2018. // Getty
Imagine, 50 years from now, looking back at the current era of the ATP, but seeing its players only as outlines, shadows cast against a paper screen. You’re trying to remember who is who. Many of those silhouettes would be lost to time; you’d lived plenty of life since then. Plenty more would seem interchangeable, as there are so many ATP players with roughly the same proportions, to say nothing of their same-ish styles of play. But one silhouette would be unmistakable. The racquet, dangling at rest, almost grazes the ground. A backwards hat sits on top of his head. He seems like he’d have to strike most balls at head height. There’s no mistaking Diego Schwartzman, who retired from tennis last week. He looked like no one else out on the court, and his tennis looked like nobody else’s tennis.
On a tour dominated by fast serves struck from high vantage points, and powerful ground strokes levered by long arms, Schwartzman was an outlier, officially listed at 5 foot 7. When I had a chance to hang out with him for a profile a few years ago, I realized that figure was probably two inches overstated. Quite often, at the coin toss or at the handshake, Schwartzman was clearly a full foot shorter than his opponent. And during his peak, which began at the end of 2017 and ran through 2021, he could beat almost all of them. In 2018, when he first entered the top 10, he was the shortest player to do so in 37 years.
Most of the shorter players in the sport opt for a counterpuncher’s style, patient and opportunistic. Schwartzman, meanwhile, was thrilling because of how persistently he forced the issue. He was short, but such an explosive athlete that he could access power anyway. And he played with a racquet that was two inches longer than the standard, the maximum length permitted on tour, which extended his reach and leverage. He used an extreme semi-western grip on his forehand that made it easier to manage high balls. On the flip side, it can be harder to deal with low balls—fortunately not an issue for Diego, who could easily meet them where they were. His return was among the best in the world; for six seasons he landed in the top three in percentage of return games won. The serve was weak, sure, but once the rally had gotten to neutral, he was as pure a ball-striker as anyone alive. To me this was one of the greatest sights in this or any sport: the diminutive Argentine, hurling himself off the clay to hit a high-bouncing ball about six feet high and plucking a winner out of the air.
Diego in tennis paradise, 2021 // David Bartholow
Everything he accomplished, he did it by outhitting his opponents from the baseline, no cheap points. And in time all the qualifiers fell away; he wasn’t just good on clay, he wasn’t just good for a short guy, he was just plain inarguably good, with an excellent résumé: the No. 8 ranking, four titles, and deep runs at the Slams (four quarterfinals, one semifinal). His most memorable match, for many fans, might even have been a loss. Back in 2018 he went up a set and a break on Rafael Nadal at Roland-Garros, looking as good as anyone ever had against Rafa on Court Philippe-Chatrier, putting him in a peril that very few players managed over a two-decade span. Then rain suspended play. Nadal came back the next day and won. But two years later, in Rome, Schwartzman did add his name to the prestigious list of players who managed to beat the king of clay. In one interview he told me that he could feel himself accumulating respect in the locker room with every big win he pulled off on the court.
Once you got to know Schwartzman’s backstory—his upbringing in poverty during Argentina’s economic depression—you could see that his success was statistically unlikely in ways beyond just the height. He’d had to work. But he bristled at having his success reduced to mere persistence. He was also, it bears reiterating, an otherworldly talent. Persistence alone won’t get you a first step that fiery, or a touch that soft. I liked how he put it in a recent first-person retirement essay: “Just being a fighter does not get you to the top. I was there because I was good at this sport. Nobody gave me a gift. I earned this.”
In that same essay, Schwartzman identified the precise moment of his decline. During a match at Hamburg in 2022, he felt an unfamiliar sensation, cramping and shaking. That feeling persisted and his results never recovered. He fell out of the top 100 the next season. Here was another reminder not to take any of your favorite players for granted. For a time, Diego and his close friend Dominic Thiem played brilliant matches against each other, and both men seemed like they’d be tour staples for years to come. As it turned out, their primes were stunning but brief. Neither man extended his success into his 30s, and both retired at ages that might as well be mid-career in the contemporary game.
Schwartzman announced that he would hang up his racquet, at age 32, at his home tournament in Buenos Aires. He’d won the title there in 2021 without dropping a set. Heading into last week, Schwartzman had barely played at all in the prior six months, just one Challenger match—a loss—to tune up for his last stand. There, Schwartzman produced one final miracle: a three-set defeat of the No. 40, the big-serving Nico Jarry, extending his career one more match. That was about as far as he could go. In the final points of his very last match, against Pedro Martinez, Schwartzman was cheered by the entire stadium. The umpire tactfully let them sing their hearts out before eventually cutting it off. There were tears in Schwartzman’s eyes during those last few rallies. His peers, too, sent him off in a chorus of praise. Holger Rune remembered the time, as a rookie short on cash, that Schwartzman walked up and paid for his food. We may never again see a top 10 player quite like him. The man known as El Peque can have the last word: “I have a small body, but it gave the biggest players in our history bad moments.”
The Hopper
—CLAY Tennis on Beatriz Haddad Maia’s US Open run.
—Giri on Iga Swiatek’s loss to Jess Pegula.
—Jon Wertheim’s mailbag is full this week.
—Sara Errani and Andrea Vavasori have won the US Open mixed doubles.
—Tim Newcomb on Taylor Fritz and Asics.
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Mixed Results
Mixed Results
Mixed Results
The U.S. Open shakes up the mixed doubles format.
The U.S. Open shakes up the mixed doubles format.
By Ben Rothenberg
February 13, 2025
Taylor Townsend and Donald Young, runners up in the US Open mixed doubles draw in 2024, the last of its kind. // Getty
Taylor Townsend and Donald Young, runners up in the US Open mixed doubles draw in 2024, the last of its kind. // Getty
All sorts of Olympic sports—archery, curling, judo, sailing, shooting, swimming, track, and more—have contrived newfangled mixed formats in recent years because of how dynamic and appealing mixed-gender competitions are considered to be. Tennis, meanwhile, was invented with mixed doubles already at the forefront: One of my favorite factoids is that when Major Walter Clopton Wingfield published the first set of lawn tennis rules back in 1873, the lone illustration in the rule book depicted a mixed doubles match.
But instead of adding new trophies, mixed doubles has been atrophying.
It’s evident what makes the public care about mixed doubles: the participation of singles stars. It’s that simple. There have been two spotlight moments for mixed doubles in the past decade, and both involved Serena Williams and a member of the Big 4: when she played against Roger Federer in the 2019 Hopman Cup, and when she partnered with Andy Murray to play the mixed at Wimbledon later that same year.
But those were unicorn events, and as singles stars opt out over and over at the majors, doubles—both same-gender and mixed doubles—has steadily become the domain of an increasingly separate population of players: doubles specialists. And doubles specialists have consistently not been able to generate crowds or attention or value for the biggest tournaments.
The U.S. Open, to its credit, recognized this reality. Rather than mindlessly running another irrelevant, dead-weight mixed doubles competition this year, the U.S. Open believed enough in the potential of mixed doubles to breathe life into the format with a radical revamp, as they officially announced Tuesday after weeks of leaks:
“TENNIS’ BIGGEST STARS WILL HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO COMPETE FOR A COVETED MIXED DOUBLES GRAND SLAM TITLE, A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR PURSE AND A $1 MILLION PRIZE.”
Instead of taking place during the final week of the tournament, when all the biggest stars are laser-focused on late-round singles matches (or already on flights home if they’ve lost), the mixed doubles competition will be an amuse-bouche before the main draw, taking place on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the tournament. Instead of being shunted to the outer courts, mixed doubles matches will be held exclusively at Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium. And instead of mixed doubles champions being paid peanuts, there will be $1 million for the winning pair, and an overall prize purse in the millions.
To make participation less daunting on the eve of a major, matches will be streamlined into best-of-three-set matches with short sets to four games, no-ad scoring, tiebreakers at 4–all, and a 10-point match tiebreak in lieu of a third set. The final will be a more standard-length mixed doubles match, a best-of-three-set match with sets to six games, no-ad scoring, tiebreakers at 6–all, and a 10-point match tiebreaker in lieu of a third set.
The biggest change: Instead of being contested almost entirely by doubles specialists who haven’t captured the public’s attention or imagination in previous editions, the draw will largely be filled with singles stars. The U.S. Open mixed doubles field will be made up of 16 pairs, with eight entries based on singles rankings only—rather than singles or doubles rankings as it was previously—and the other eight entries being wild-card teams.
Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula, the two runners-up in the U.S. Open singles draws last year, both indicated a desire to participate in the U.S. Open’s press release on the new reformatting.
The complaints from traditionalists—and doubles specialists outraged at being shut out—have been predictable and, I think, easily shot down. Most prominently, the reigning U.S. Open mixed doubles champion pair of Andrea Vavassori and Sara Errani put out a statement calling the new format a “pseudo-exhibition.” But surely mixed doubles at majors, by not giving ranking points, already met the most common definition of an exhibition event? Although if mixed doubles was an exhibition event before, admittedly, it was a bad one: Exhibition events are designed to draw crowds and sell tickets to see stars, and those star players collect big paychecks for participating; mixed doubles at majors hasn’t met any of those appealing criteria for a long time. If mixed doubles has become a bona fide “exhibition” event with this change, that’s an upgrade from the afterthought it was before.
Vavassori and Errani also cited “tradition and history” as reasons for keeping things the old way. But the meaningful “tradition” of mixed doubles, historically, wasn’t to assure that no one gave a shit about it, which is all a lack of change would accomplish with the current trajectory of the category. To be more blunt, the idea that a mixed doubles title was something worthy of the “Grand Slam” label in its recent iterations has seemed increasingly hollow as the mixed doubles fields grew weaker and more anonymous, and as the pay gulf became so stark as a result.
There’s been a lot of pity for doubles specialists on social media since this announcement—much of it from the doubles specialists themselves—and I don’t think that will prove helpful to their cause. What would be helpful, I think, is for this to be a wake-up call. If this comes off as harsh toward doubles specialists, it’s meant to: I think they’ve had their chance to prove themselves as attractions for years now—especially with every doubles match now fully produced and available to stream—and they’ve consistently shown that they cannot. The idea that the U.S. Open should maintain a system of handouts or charity for doubles specialists rather than revamp the mixed doubles event into something worthy of being showcased at a Grand Slam is unconvincing, especially because the prize money for the event that they’re whining about missing out on was so paltry compared with the more-than-quadrupled amount the tournament thinks mixed doubles can be worth now.
My hope is that the U.S. Open deciding to make mixed doubles into something that people will watch and care about—and how they determined the best way to do that—will light a fire under the complacency of doubles specialists about their places in the business model of the sport, if they care enough to fight for it. And even without learning to win singles matches, there’s still a way into the mixed doubles draw: They can learn to become entertaining, compelling, and popular enough in the next few months to convince U.S. Open organizers that they should be awarded some of those wild-card entry spots.
If they can do that, the sport will be stronger for it, and everyone will win big.
An expanded version of this story can be found at Bounces, Ben Rothenberg’s new Substack newsletter about the world of professional tennis, which you can subscribe to here.
The Hopper
—CLAY Tennis on Beatriz Haddad Maia’s US Open run.
—Giri on Iga Swiatek’s loss to Jess Pegula.
—Jon Wertheim’s mailbag is full this week.
—Sara Errani and Andrea Vavasori have won the US Open mixed doubles.
—Tim Newcomb on Taylor Fritz and Asics.
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Wilson Drops Marta Kostyuk’s New Intrigue
Wilson Drops Marta Kostyuk’s New Intrigue
By Tim Newcomb
February 11, 2025
Image courtesy of Wilson
Images courtesy of Wilson
Wilson’s premier head-to-toe athlete, Marta Kostyuk, has been sporting a version of an on-court tennis shoe she’s helped design since the 2024 U.S. Open. She even wore a player-edition colorway for the 2025 Australian Open. Now Wilson is preparing the retail release of the women’s-specific Intrigue this month.
“Focusing on a women’s-specific design was our main goal from the very beginning,” Tate Kuerbis, Wilson senior director of footwear design, tells me about the project. “To do this correctly, we started working immediately with our head-to-toe athlete Marta Kostyuk.”
Kostyuk helped lead the design from every step, giving the Intrigue a narrower heel and more generous forefoot fit needed for a female player. Designers also added additional comfort underfoot from the start. The Intrigue features three new technologies for Wilson, including an engineered mesh upper, a lacing system meant to allow customization, and a thicker sockliner focused on cushioning.
The new Intrigue lineup will feature a Tour, Pro, and Lite version, each with differing price points. Kuerbis says the Lite may double as both a casual performance and off-the-court style. Kuerbis calls the aesthetics of the Intrigue lineup clean, modern, and simple. His goal was to create “iconic and timeless designs that can stand the test of time, especially for a legacy company such as Wilson.”
The Intrigue name ties back to a line of women’s-focused tennis products Wilson launched in 1992. That 30-plus-year-old lineup even included a shoe. So, even while the new Kostyuk-led lineup may borrow a name from the ’90s, everything else about the Intrigue comes fresh for 2025.
Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.
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Dynamism & Struggle
Dynamism & Struggle
Dynamism & Struggle
Simona Halep didn’t always make it look easy.
Simona Halep didn’t always make it look easy.
By Giri Nathan
February 7, 2025
Simona Halep calls it a day in Cluj-Napoca. // Getty
Simona Halep calls it a day in Cluj-Napoca. // Getty
I had been expecting a slow but steady Simona Halep comeback. Not a sudden retirement this week at age 33. But this last phase of her career has been sad and murky, at every turn, so this fits.
In 2022 she hired Patrick Mouratoglou as coach, which was followed soon by poor results, an on-court panic attack, and a public Instagram apology from Mouratoglou for those poor results. Later that year she made a Wimbledon semifinal and returned to the top 10. But she also received a provisional suspension after tests revealed the banned substance roxadustat—which Mouratoglou also eventually apologized for, since his team gave her the tainted collagen supplement. In 2023 there was the full-on doping suspension for irregularities in her blood samples over time. Then in 2024, after an appeal, that was shrunk from four years to nine months as she was found at “no significant fault or negligence” for the adverse test result.
After all that, she returned to the court as a wild card in Miami 2024 and immediately went three sets with Paula Badosa. That’s what had me suspecting a comeback. It was misleading. That was the last time she’d ever get remotely close to beating a player of her own stature. She played just five more matches in total, and won one. She said this week that she has been unable to recover from her injuries, in particular one to her knee cartilage. Thus, a brief retirement speech, in her home country of Romania, at the WTA 250 in Cluj-Napoca.
It’d be a shame if this dismal coda made people misread what is pretty clearly a Hall of Fame career. To pierce through the gloom, just return to memories and footage of Halep at her peak, from 2017 through 2019, as one of the most adept counterpunchers ever to play in the WTA. A short-statured, compact player, Halep ricocheted all over the court like a flung Super Ball. With her explosive first step and ease recovering from the corners, her court coverage could confound any opponent. Other people’s power didn’t bother her—she loved to redirect their pace—and her own low power was no problem. She simply figured out how to hurt her opponents in situations where they thought it impossible to get hurt. Even while careening from one sideline to another she could throw her full body weight into punishing counterattacks. Halep is an all-time elicitor of where did that come from?
One theme of her early career, though, was some reticence when closing out big matches. She lost her first three major finals, all in three-setters. Most conspicuously, Halep lost the 2017 Roland-Garros final despite being up 6–4, 3–0, to an unestablished teenager; the upside of that is that we can now say “Grand Slam champion Jelena Ostapenko.” Less troubling, but also disappointing, was her valiant 2018 Australian Open, where she played her way to the final on an ankle she had grotesquely injured earlier in the tournament, and lost narrowly after a defensive master class against Caroline Wozniacki.
At the next major in 2018, Halep arrived at Roland-Garros to rectify last year’s result. At that point she was world No. 1, in her prime at age 26, with $26 million in prize money, a fresh Nike deal, and still without a major title. She fell down a set and a break to Sloane Stephens in that final. And then, as she explained later, she remembered that she’d been on the opposite end of that score line the previous year. So she knew that a recovery was possible. She won that final by remembering how she lost it.
With her second major win, there was less intrigue, because she delivered arguably history’s cleanest performance in a major final. This was at Wimbledon in 2019, despite facing the tournament’s seven-time winner in Serena Williams. Halep dismissed her in 56 minutes, only hitting three unforced errors, a near-mystical performance. Halep, listening to audio from that championship point this week, said it was the most important and beautiful match of her career.
She didn’t always make it look that easy. Her matches were thrilling precisely for that reason, for all the dynamism and struggle. “I don’t want to cry. It’s a beautiful thing,” she said in her retirement speech, in Romanian. “I became world No. 1, I won Grand Slams. It’s all I wanted. Life goes on.”
The Hopper
—CLAY Tennis on Beatriz Haddad Maia’s US Open run.
—Giri on Iga Swiatek’s loss to Jess Pegula.
—Jon Wertheim’s mailbag is full this week.
—Sara Errani and Andrea Vavasori have won the US Open mixed doubles.
—Tim Newcomb on Taylor Fritz and Asics.
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Nike’s Vapor Franchise Expands to Start 2025
Nike’s Vapor Franchise Expands to Start 2025
New on-court shoe releases in March.
New on-court shoe releases in March.
By Tim Newcomb
February 5, 2025
Images courtesy of Nike
Images courtesy of Nike
If you’re a fan of the latest Nike Vapor lineup, you’ve got two new options to choose from for 2025, as the brand recently launched both the Vapor 12 and the Vapor Pro 3.
As Nike continues its confusing naming run of tennis footwear, the Vapor 12 features a reworked upper and updated traction pattern meant to be lighter than the Vapor 11. Returning to the line once made famous by Roger Federer is a Nike Air Zoom unit in the heel. A “firm midfoot plastic piece,” as the brand calls it, also makes a return to the lineup, which helps reduce rubber on the outsole while still offering stability when cutting.
With a reworked outsole also came an updated rubber compound designed to be lighter than the previous rubber. Nike reduced the weight of the upper and then created a “firm foot frame” wrapping the midfoot plate from the heel to the toe meant to improve stability.
The Vapor Pro 3 takes a different approach, with the Air Zoom unit not in the heel like the Vapor 12, but under the forefoot. The updated Pro 3 features a smaller unit than the previous version, but the brand says that also allows the shoe to offer more flexibility in the toe box.
The new rubber compound on the Vapor 12 is also available on the Vapor Pro 3. The midsole foam remains the same, but Nike did update the feel around the midfoot and heel meant to improve stability during cutting.
Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.
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Asics Drops the All New Gel-Resolution 10
Stalwart Asics Gel-Resolution Launches 10th Iteration
New on-court shoe releases in March.
New on-court shoe releases in March.
By Tim Newcomb
February 5, 2025
Image courtesy of Asics
Images courtesy of Asics
When it comes to Asics tennis, there’s little else as successful as the brand’s Gel-Resolution sneaker line. The most popular tennis product in brand history—and one of the most popular models in the industry—launched its 10th iteration in January, giving the Gel-Resolution X an update focused on comfort and support, the brand says.
A new midsole design includes both Flytefoam in the forefoot and FF Blast Plus Eco foam in the heel, paired with the brand’s signature gel cushioning, meant to improve the underfoot comfort of the model. An updated Dynawall stability feature on the upper now wraps the heel for improved support.
“The comfort and support in this new model are game changers,” says Brazilian tennis player Beatriz Haddad Maia.
Other design tweaks include a higher medial ankle cut meant to support the ankle and a customizable lacing system. Asics launched the model ahead of the Australian Open and features a range of colors for both men and women.
Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.
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A Jarring Tableau
A Jarring Tableau
A Jarring Tableau
Novak Djokovic added a master tactician
in coach Andy Murray.
Novak Djokovic added a master tactician in coach Andy Murray.
By Giri Nathan
January 31, 2025
Novak goes to the head of Andy’s class. // Alamy
Novak goes to the head of Andy’s class. // Alamy
After stepping away from the tour last summer, Andy Murray followed the destiny of many a retired tennis player: getting extremely into golf. On the side, he was also playing some phone tag with his old colleague Novak Djokovic. It’s a funny story, via Simon Briggs of The Telegraph: “Novak had messaged me, just wanting to chat. It was just before Shanghai [which started on Oct. 2], and we’d exchanged messages and missed calls and stuff. Then eventually I was on the 17th hole of the golf course, and the guy I was playing with said to me, ‘Do you know what’s next?’ I was like, ‘No, not really.’ He said, ‘Do you have any plans to do any coaching?’ And I said, ‘Honestly, I can’t think of anything worse to do right now.’”
After the golf, sitting in his car, he received a phone call from Djokovic inviting him to do just that: coach. Murray had to clear it with his family. They accepted it, on the premise that Djokovic was presumably winding down his career, so it wouldn’t be too extensive of a time commitment. It would also be on a trial basis. Player and coach would spend 10 days training in the offseason, take a break—Murray was headed on a ski vacation with his family—reunite for the Australian Open, and then evaluate the partnership after the tournament.
For Murray, it was a chance to work for a man he’d known since they were juniors, a peer who had once even been recruited to play for the same country. (One of the more amusing counterfactuals on the ATP is Novak Djokovic playing under the Union Jack.) After 36 matches against each other—Djokovic won 25—they’d finally have their incentives aligned. Murray could bring a few things to his rival: a fresh source of motivation for a man who had nothing left to win, an intimate understanding of Djokovic’s own game, the overall tactical savvy that Murray was known for, and scouting reports on the ATP players Murray had been competing with as recently as five months prior. When you poach your coach out of his first year of retirement, those insights are still hot and fresh.
Speaking after their offseason training, Djokovic reported that the partnership was enriching, if peculiar. “Just overall, a very nice and strange feeling to have him on the same side of the court. We have been rivals for 20-plus years and always kind of kept secrets from each other about the way we practiced, the way we prepared, and the way we approached the matches.” It was also peculiar for us watching from the outside. Thanks to the Australian Open’s new courtside coaching boxes, we could see Murray conferring with Djokovic mid-match, miming backhands, muttering his observations, delivering a fist pump here and there, calmly absorbing Djokovic’s outbursts. Murray’s demeanor in the box was quite mild, closer to his dry civilian persona than his vinegary on-court persona. “I felt a lot of nerves and stuff in the buildup to the matches,” said Murray after the tournament, “but when I was watching it I felt like I was able to sort of switch that off. I felt calm at the side and was sort of watching, trying to do my job.”
When the partnership was first announced, it sounded like a stunt, but as the matches went on, and I became desensitized to the jarring tableau, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal. Djokovic had the luxury of discussing nitty-gritty details with a player who’d always been known for his meticulous approach to the game. They spent their time puzzling out “how I can gain an inch more court positioning,” Djokovic said.
Murray, reflecting on their early days together, said in an interview on the Australian TV program The Project that coaching was “more demanding” than he’d expected. “I wish I’d known that when I was playing. Then maybe I would’ve been a bit easier to work with.” To his credit, Murray wasn’t skimping on any of his homework. According to Tim Henman on the Eurosport broadcast, the novice coach had prepared for Djokovic’s first-round match by watching 20 hours(!) of his opponent, who had never before played a main-draw match at a major. Even speaking as a big fan of the young Indian-American, that is just a staggering amount of Nishesh Basavareddy footage to consume.
If that was Murray’s standard, I can’t fathom how much Carlos Alcaraz footage he ate up in anticipation of their Australian Open quarterfinal. Murray, one of the most vocal proponents of young talent you’ll ever see, had identified Alcaraz as a future world No. 1 back in 2021, and in 2024 tweeted “Watching Alcaraz play tennis makes me smile,” with a blushing smile emoji and a heart emoji. Given those facts, it was a little surreal to watch him cheer a 10-time Melbourne champion on to victory over a rising superstar. But that’s what the money is for. After pulling off the spectacular four-set triumph on a bum hamstring, the player screamed in triumph, the coach could be seen letting out an enormous sigh, and the two shared a courtside hug.
A defeat of Alcaraz deep at a Slam was probably something like a 98th percentile outcome for this new partnership. But it also only lasted another set of tennis. Djokovic retired due to his hamstring injury after dropping the first set of his semifinal against Sascha Zverev. “I’ll definitely have a chat with Andy and thank him for being here with me. Give him my feedback, which is, of course, positive, and see how he feels and we make the next step,” said Djokovic after the match. He said they were still “hotheaded and disappointed” and would chat once they’d had a chance to “cool off.” He has yet to offer any public update.
Murray, meanwhile, also had positive reviews of his coaching experience, even if he did feel it was a bit “embarrassing” to get so much credit for Novak’s successes. He said that he felt equipped to handle the strategic and psychological aspects of coaching but still had a lot to learn about the technical side. He also sounded grateful as a pure fan of the sport: “I got to witness some amazing tennis, and one of the best matches that I’ve seen live, against Alcaraz.”
Right after he retired, he tweeted “Never liked tennis anyway.” This from a man who got a metal hip so he could play more of it. Nobody will ever manage to pry him away from this game.
The Hopper
—CLAY Tennis on Beatriz Haddad Maia’s US Open run.
—Giri on Iga Swiatek’s loss to Jess Pegula.
—Jon Wertheim’s mailbag is full this week.
—Sara Errani and Andrea Vavasori have won the US Open mixed doubles.
—Tim Newcomb on Taylor Fritz and Asics.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
K-Swiss Pinnacle
K-Swiss Reaches for New Heights with its Pinnacle
New on-court shoe releases in March.
New on-court shoe releases in March.
By Tim Newcomb
January 30, 2025
Image courtesy of K-Swiss
Images courtesy of K-Swiss
K-Swiss is calling its new March footwear release the Pinnacle, a name meant to telegraph exactly where the shoe falls within its tennis performance lineup.
“We needed to create a high-end, innovative shoe that could compete with the biggest names in the industry, especially at the pro-tour level,” M.J. Kim, K-Swiss footwear designer says. “The goal was to design a standout product that featured the latest technology and was worn by a top athlete like Andrey Rublev.”
Rublev is already wearing the model, having announced the partnership before the 2024 U.S. Open. As K-Swiss welcomes the release of the new Ultrashot 4, which was seen on K-Swiss athletes (and Frances Tiafoe, for that matter) during the 2025 Australian Open, the upcoming Pinnacle offers a tennis sneaker with a full-length carbon-fiber plate, the key technical calling card of the silhouette.
The curved profile of the front of the plate helps with movement in all directions, for improved stability and agility, Kim says. Sandwiching the plate between two types of midsole foams helps improve feel and comfort. The shoe also features a lateral support element, a high-durability outsole, a breathable mesh upper reinforced with TPU, and a lacing system with an internal strap for customized fit.
Kim says the see-through materials and changing opacities help subtly show the technology. “From a distance, the shoe looks like a clean, simple sneaker, making it versatile enough to wear off the court while still showcasing its innovation,” he says. Expect the Pinnacle to release in time for the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells this March.
Follow Tim Newcomb’s tennis gear coverage on Instagram at Felt Alley Tennis.
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High Voltage
High Voltage
High Voltage
Madison Keys plays the match of her life.
Madison Keys plays the match of her life.
By Giri Nathan
January 24, 2025
Madison Keys celebrates her win over Iga Swiatek on Thursday. // Getty
Madison Keys celebrates her win over Iga Swiatek on Thursday. // Getty
I can’t keep track of the number of times I felt convinced that Madison Keys was doomed.
Late in the third set of her Australian Open semifinal, she fell into a 0–40 hole in two different service games (and got broken once); she was down match point while returning serve at 5–6; she spent much of the decisive tiebreak trailing by a mini-break. And her opponent, Iga Swiatek, has never been one to flinch. In the five matches leading into this semifinal, Swiatek had lost an average of 1.4 games per set. She had been stamping out any signs of life; I’d mentally already written her into the final. Keys had managed to blitz her the second set, but the third set was looking far dicier.
Okay, if I’m keeping it real, keeping Melbourne hours is an imperfect art, and I was falling in and out of consciousness throughout the third set. I only watched the replay the next day after I already knew the result. So it was more a matter of how rather than if she won. And the how just kept eluding me. Watching the replay, I thought she would lose, even though I knew she had won. A Swiatek double fault there, a hard-won rally there—little hints of it. But the Keys win never felt plausible until I was watching them shake hands at the net.
Once the confusion faded and I looked back at the entirety of the 5–7, 6–1, 7–6(8) match, however, it was clear that this was the single best performance I’d ever witnessed from Keys. She’s a talented player who has nevertheless digested a lot of disappointment deep in these major tournaments. I attended her puzzling semifinal against Aryna Sabalenka in the 2023 U.S. Open, a match where she won the first set 6–0, served for the match in the second set, and even led by a break in the third set, but still lost. And last year there was pain at Wimbledon: a fourth-round match where she led Jasmine Paolini 5–2 in the third set, only to pick up an acute hamstring injury and retire in tears at 5–5.
This time, against Swiatek, there was no lapse, mental or physical. She barreled onward with signature Madison Keys tennis, which is powerful enough to leave even a defender like Swiatek flat-footed and hopeless. Until now I wasn’t sure that Keys could sustain her flat power against the best players in the world, under this much pressure, without spraying a few too many errors to survive. I watched rallies expecting the third or fourth ball to fly, but here she managed to keep that power under control.
Perhaps some of the credit for that control belongs to a bold offseason racquet change, a story laid out wonderfully by our friend Ben Rothenberg at Bounces. Keys had been playing with a Wilson racquet since she was a kid, but switched to a Yonex on the counsel of her husband-slash-coach, Bjorn Fratangelo, and despite the skepticism of her agent. Hoping she’d use equipment that was easier on her body, Fratangelo also got her to abandon her natural gut strings. With this new setup she noticed her wrist pain went away and the balls all started landing in. She hasn’t officially signed a deal with Yonex, but her performance at this tournament must be making any eventual contract that much sweeter. As for why the racquet works so well for her: “So to be totally honest, I have no idea why I like this racquet,” Keys told Rothenberg. I’ve always admired how players, even the well-spoken ones, can be quite numinous and vibe-y when discussing their racquet specs. Words are for us nerds; for the ones who can actually do the thing, at that level, all that matters is the feel.
Ten years ago, Keys was a teenager, making her first major semifinal at this tournament, setting expectations aggressively high and not quite meeting them. Now, at 29, her mind is open enough to experiment with the biggest variable in her tennis life, and she has been rewarded with her second major final appearance. She has dispatched a slate of seeded opponents like Danielle Collins, Elena Rybakina, Elina Svitolina. If this Swiatek match was the best match she’s ever played, she’ll need to order another one of those. Her opponent in the final is one of the few opponents who can match her power and even surpass it as needed: Aryna Sabalenka, hunting for an Australian Open three-peat. Keys, reflecting on their 2023 U.S. Open semi, said she played it too safe and felt bad. This time, though, she wants to embrace the discomfort of the moment, to play her boldest tennis and walk away without regrets.
The Hopper
—CLAY Tennis on Beatriz Haddad Maia’s US Open run.
—Giri on Iga Swiatek’s loss to Jess Pegula.
—Jon Wertheim’s mailbag is full this week.
—Sara Errani and Andrea Vavasori have won the US Open mixed doubles.
—Tim Newcomb on Taylor Fritz and Asics.
PURE, ORIGINAL TENNIS — SIGN UP!
Back from the Grind
Back from the Grind
Back from the Grind
Book Review: The Racket, by Conor Niland
Book Review: The Racket, by Conor Niland
By Patrick J. Sauer
January 22, 2025
Ireland Davis Cup captain and author Conor Niland // Getty
Ireland Davis Cup captain and author Conor Niland // Getty
Before we collectively embark on our 2025 tennis safari, there’s something we all need to do. Close our eyes, take a deep breath, and contemplate for a moment what it truly means to be the 129th-ranked player on the ATP Tour.
Let’s start by pointing out the obvious. Reaching #129 is an incredible achievement in and of itself, putting the owner of that ranking—held at the start of the Australian Open by 21-year-old Jaime Faria of Portugal—in rarefied air. It’s a ranking well within the somewhat arbitrary, but nonetheless long-standing, Top 150 upper echelon. And yet, #129 is a far cry from the more tennisly salient Top 100, which places the practitioner squarely on the ATP Tour with a now-guaranteed $300,000 basic income. A #129 ranking means trodding the lesser tours, a singular track in which dwelling amongst the 99th percentile—being better at this impossible game than nearly everyone on the planet—requires beating the bushes in front of few fans for little to no money, all in the hopes of climbing the points ladder. Where maybe, just maybe, you claw your way to playing an early-exit center-court millionaire-superstar-warm-up match at a major.
It’s a life Conor Niland, the greatest male tennis player Ireland has ever produced, knew all too well. In 2010, he topped out at #129 but managed to battle his way to an Arthur Ashe showdown against Novak Djokovic in the opening round of the 2011 U.S. Open. Unfortunately, with less than zero margin of error, Niland lost the physical battle with a night-before-the-match meal described as a “pork salad” and had to retire in the second set down 6–0, 5–1. Niland may have thrown up his chance at tennis immortality, but he can take pride in stealing a game off Novak, who went on to win his first of four U.S. Open chips. (Quick refresher on how insane Djoker’s career has been, he beat debutant Faria in the second round of the Aussie last week.)
Niland lays out his seven-year professional odyssey in The Racket: On Tour With Tennis’s Golden Generation—and the Other 99%, the deserving winner of the 2024 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. Niland’s blisters-and-all memoir is an ace, the liveliest craic about the struggles of life on the tennis margins I’ve come across. The Racket serves up a killer mesh of gallows humor and glorious heartbreak, a clear-eyed portrait of the liminal no-man’s-land where Niland was light-years from onetime peer Roger Federer (head-to-head teenage record; Niland 1, Fed 0), and also theoretically within a handful of lucky break points, of crossing the magical Top 100 threshold. Alas, as Niland says, he and every other tennis player have “a deep and lasting relationship with their highest ranking.” Niland’s numbers don’t lie, but it turns out, when told by a first-rate prosesmith, the journey to the middle—from #1,325 at 19 to calling it a #1,041 day at 31—is as fascinating and mystifying as one to the top of the tennis universe.
Along the way, Niland reached the stars, getting a mutual-respect social media boost from fellow non-Brit Andy Murray, helping get Niland a Wimbledon wild card, and hitting with 16-year-old #25-ranked Serena Williams at the Bollettieri Academy. In both cases, Niland quickly crashed back to Earth. In 2011, as the first Irishman to play at Wimbledon in 30 years, he choked away a 4–1 final-set lead to France’s Adrian Mannarino—a contest that warrants its own excruciating chapter, “The Longest Day”—dooming his dream Federer rematch on Centre’s holy grass. Still, Niland fulfilled his personal prophecy, which morphed from a childhood fantasy of winning Wimbledon to the more prosaic professional goal of simply playing there.
Oh, and over two hours of ground strokes, Serena never asked Niland what his name was. Win some, lose a whole lot more.
Fitting his Celtic roots, the no-tennis-ball-can-to-piss-in blarney is as thick and creamy as a pint of stout. (No joke, Niland describes the constant battle to find quality practice balls at sub-tier events as “reliably painful.”) The Irish is strong in The Racket. It feels like a story best unspooled over many nights in front of the fireplace at the pub, beginning with the fact Niland rose up from the streets of Limerick in the first place. Given the sport’s Victorian English origins, the Emerald Isle apparently has as much love and respect for tennis as the Queen Mum’s remains—there were no clay courts in Ireland in Niland’s era—and the country offered small potatoes support-wise. A lack of funds and an institutional buttress runs throughout The Racket, as Niland matter-of-factly details how after finishing up a flush college run at Cal-Berkeley, he was on his own.
Fellow countryman George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.” Niland takes that dictum straight to The Racket’s pages, laying out step-by-step how a Challengers existence puts future prestige to rest and becomes solely about making ends meet. Niland avoiding extraneous expenses by washing his kit in the bathtub, surviving on the free protein bars, and calculating whether it’s worth tanking a match to avoid flight-change penalties became the norm. But so did living up to the tennis wannabe’s mantra, “Keep working hard, it will happen,” which means travel, travel, and more travel. That ain’t cheap. At one point, Niland jets from Dublin to Doha hoping to secure an open slot, only to end up trying to convince himself a few Qatari practice rounds and a bit of ruddy face time with whatever governing organizer types were around was worth it. (Spoiler: It wasn’t.)
Niland’s intense low-level schedule shouldn’t be called a grind because that word has inexplicably gained positive pro-worker mindset connotations in certain circles. So we’ll go with “slog.” At his peak, the slog led to playing in 68 tourneys over 85 weeks, in places only the most dedicated cartophiles would recognize, like La Palma, Bucaramanga, Prostejov, Braunschweig, and Houston. Niland endured a bone-chilling –37 temp to play indoors in literal Siberia and battled debilitating 95-degree outdoor heat in Greece. The wildest chase of a precious ATP ranking point involved a seven-hour taxi ride across Uzbekistan with the luggage in his lap and a driver who took an extended lunch break. All for the glory of a Facebook post to a handful of followers back home, one declaring a Niland Bosnian flameout with the brilliant back-page tabloid headline “Conor is…Banjaxed in Banja Luka.”
Beyond the money, the starker reality of The Racket is there was none of the expected camaraderie to make the slog even a wee bit less lonely. Nope. Guys drank by themselves, because God forbid a player get a leg up knowing an opponent is slightly hungover instead of enjoying an entertaining night with the lads. After seven years on tour, Niland retains zero friendships despite crossing paths with countless dudes around his age surviving that brutal tennis life. As he describes it, making a name for oneself on the ITF World Tennis Tour or Challengers circuit isn’t about tennis abilities, “it’s about being able to cope with the strange bedfellows of regular boredom and constant uncertainty. Not many succeed.” And even fewer get the unrequited thrill of almost smashing a Zendaya threesome.
Niland would get his brief celebrity shine after the Novak crap-out, even appearing on an RTE talk show featuring Cuba Gooding Jr., Sinéad O’Connor, and McLovin, but it’s not like he was Stephen Cluxton or Noel Skehan or some kind of big shot. Niland claims contentment just by having gotten out of tennis without a “reflex resentment” of the game, impressive given his pretax earnings over those seven years amounted to $247,686. Do the math. Or don’t. It’s depressing. Therein, though, lies the brilliance of The Racket, and it can be calculated.
Even as a literary sports character, Niland isn’t an archetype. He’s not Rocky Balboa, a down-and-out ham-and-egger who gets his one do-or-die championship shot and seizes it. Nor is he Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, a supremely talented Icarus who can’t get out of his own way and flies too close to the 18th green. Neither underdog nor overdog, Conor Niland was a tennis stalwart who simply fell a cut below the top dogs and lived to tell the tale. The current captain of Ireland’s Davis Cup team made his peace—and a hell of a memoir—with all #129 of it:
I don’t believe it’s a contradiction to say that I didn’t fulfill my potential while also saying I couldn’t have tried any harder.
Fair to say, he’s already fulfilled his potential as a writer. Certainly, the irony of a tennis nobody possibly earning recognition and acclaim for being one such fella won’t be lost on his Gaelic wit. Good on ’ya, lad. Reflecting upon the book, what shines through in The Racket didn’t leave me shaking my head and pining for what Conor Niland’s career might have been. It left me nodding in respect for what it was.