The defining experience of watching Nick Kyrgios play tennis is waiting for his Moment—the bad line call, or double-fault, or unseen internal implosion that irrevocably derails a fine match. In that sense, and in that sense only, his first tournament of the year would have left you twiddling your thumbs. Or clapping…
The Tennis Integrity Unit, the sport’s governing body for investigating corruption, typically describes its work in anonymizing generality, which can be frustrating for anyone who wants to know the gory details beyond “Which tournament was it?” In August, the TIU did however make an unusual move: It specified a…
Former top-20 player Alexandr Dolgopolov came under the scrutiny of tennis’s anti-corruption group last week because of strange betting patterns around one of his matches. The Tennis Integrity Unit tends to speak in generalities rather than naming particular contests, but when asked, a spokesperson confirmed that the…
Most talk of match-fixing in tennis comes cloaked in too many layers of anonymity to feel genuinely juicy. When the Tennis Integrity Unit, the independent body charged with sniffing out corruption in the sport, releases its quarterly report, there’s a section detailing matches that raised suspicions, but these matches…
Kei Nishikori is the fifth-best tennis player in the world and even his practice sessions get mobbed in his native Japan. His trademark shot is the down-the-line backhand, a smoothly flicked frozen rope. You might have last seen him in January taking Roger Federer to five sets in the quarters of the Australian Open.…
One complaint lobbed at today’s game is that everyone is content to play the same style of tennis: Just stand at the back of the court and hit hard topspin groundstrokes over and over until your opponent, who’s attempting the same, can’t keep up. We live in a “power baseline” era, and it didn’t use to be that way, the…
