This gripe will be all too familiar to anyone who has followed men’s tennis, but the sport doesn’t have any gosh-darned kids. A cabal of 30-something legends still run the show, coming in and out of injury and picking up where they left off, stomping flat a whole generation of hopefuls. The No. 2 player in the world…
Kei Nishikori, you were missed. The Japanese star popped a tendon in his right wrist in mid-August, closed up shop for the year, and then sat out the Aussie Open last month. Since then he’s warmed up with some low-key Challengers, and this week entered just his second tour-level event since his injury, at Acapulco.
Twenty-year-old Frances Tiafoe came to Delray Beach as a wild card entry with a wild forehand. He left as the youngest American to win an ATP title since Andy Roddick got his back in 2002, and with an impressive pile of bodies in his wake. Taking down Juan Martin del Potro was the first omen of big things, but many…
A rite of passage, for any young tennis player, is figuring out how to defeat the servebot. A servebot is a large person with two simple desires: to crush serves as fast as possible and to move around the court as little as possible. The servebot will not play long rallies. He will give you no chance to establish a…
It’s Friday afternoon, as good a time as any for your sporadic and entertaining Denis Shapovalov update. Today he was scrambling to all four corners of the court and getting awfully delicate with his forehand to break serve against Croatia’s Viktor Galovic.
The last time Denis Shapovalov met Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, he could have easily been confused for a half-fluke, a lucky amoeba. At 18 and barely breaking the surface of the ATP tour, he’d been competing mostly at the Challenger level. A flip switched suddenly. Fresh off beating Juan Martin del Potro and Rafael Nadal in…
Tennis players often snack on bananas during changeovers. The light meal is routine and usually without drama, but Day One of the Australian Open featured two banana incidents.
Denis Shapovalov, Canadian golden child with over-cinched hats and a liberated style of play, was the breakout player of 2017 men’s tennis. If you were expecting him to fully “make the leap,” the year’s early returns might have left you cold. He lost in the first round at Brisbane to the big-hitting Kyle Edmund, and…
Before first-round play at the Brisbane International Monday, an announcer chopped up Canadian wonderteen Denis Shapovalov’s name into tiny pieces and then spit them out as an incoherent mess.
Denis Shapovalov is in the middle of a tense five-set match against Andrey Rublev at the NextGen tournament in Milan. This tournament is testing out an unusual format of four-game sets, with no ad-scoring, no lets, and automatic line-calling, among other changes, but one big one is televised coaching sessions.…
This week, the highest-ranked male tennis players 21 and under have been assembled in Milan to play a year-end tournament. These included the 18-year-old Denis “Shapo” Shapovalov, the flashy, long-locked Canadian who bulldozed into the fourth round of the U.S. Open this year; 20-year-old Russian Andrey Rublev, who…
With today’s first-round victory at Basel, Canadian wonderteen Denis Shapovalov has officially qualified for Milan, the new, strangely formatted “Next Gen” tournament intended to gin up interest in the rising cohort of men’s tennis stars. Only the top seven players 21 and under get to qualify, plus an Italian…
The slice is one of the most basic tools of tennis, a versatile shot that can do any of the following and more: safely chip back big-ass serves, buy time to recover from aggressive attacks, inject a surprise change-up to the rhythm of a rally, send an annoyingly low ball to an opponent, or handle a peskily high ball…
A friend of mine from Vancouver likes to joke that it’s possible to spot a product of Tennis Canada—Canada’s national governing body for tennis—from a mile away, like some kind of giant inflatable Tennis Person. These Tennis People are, in Tennis Canada’s own words, “full-time athletes” committed to “producing…
Sure, tell a story about tall boy who’d grown out of the pinstriped pajamas that Pharrell Williams designed for him, rolled down the swaggy calf-high socks after they got uncomfortable, and let himself be crushed under the weight of a half-dozen glossy features hailing him as the future. Alexander Zverev—just 20 and…
No. 8 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga won the point of the match, and probably the point of the night, against 18-year-old potential trend-setter Denis Shapovalov early in the second set of their second-round clash on Arthur Ashe Wednesday night. Feeling the crowd’s energy and trying to pump himself after dropping the first set,…
Denis Shapovalov, the 18-year-old Canadian hereafter known as El Shapo, achieved something big today: He wore a normal hat without a busted-ass strap.
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