French journeyman Julian Benneteau, who peaked at world No. 25 in 2014, retired from tennis this year, freeing him up get candid about how favors actually work on the professional tour. Tennis is hush-hush about its rampant conflicts of interest and less than transparent about the benefits afforded to its biggest…

Roger Federer has cut an unusual path into the fourth round at Paris: he played just two sets of tennis to get there. He had a first-round bye, then second-round opponent Milos Raonic withdrew from the tournament, and then he defeated the sleepy pirate Fabio Fognini, 6-4, 6-3. So all of a sudden, a slightly creaky,…

Today at the Shanghai Masters, Roger Federer played his first match since he left the U.S. Open looking like he’d fallen in the pool. Federer barely survived a sharp Daniil Medvedev to win 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, but the Russian, who ripped through seven wins last week to qualify and win Tokyo, made the shot of the night. In…

Happy birthday to Marin Cilic, who turns 30 today, and thanks for making tennis history. As of Sept. 28, no men’s tennis player under the age of 30 has won a major. This has never occurred before in the sport. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka, Juan Martin Del Potro, and now Cilic…

Anyone who organizes a tennis tournament that involves Roger Federer should be concerned when this sentence comes out of that man’s mouth, as it did Monday night, while discussing the conditions of his match:

Pick a handful of points at random from Roger Federer’s fourth-round U.S. Open loss to John Millman and you are liable to find some extremely un-Federer moments. Maybe he lines up a backhand slice only for the ball to drip to the ground two feet away. Maybe he shanks a routine overhead into the net, or goofs the…

A fatless and notably tall-headed man going by the name “Novak Djokovic” spent a lot of his time on tennis courts over the last 18-odd months, and succeeded even in being granted entry to some important professional tournaments. There he beat some solid tennis players, even though, off the court, his emotional world…

Roger Federer won his first-round match Monday at Wimbledon in straight sets, but as the tennis media would tell it, the most meaningful thing he did was pick out his wardrobe before the match. Try as I’d like to resist the perverse Rovellian fascination here ... I can’t. It’s weird. It feels weird. The extremely…

Tennis itself produces good sounds, but it is not always surrounded by good sounds. That’s because tennis happens all over the world, and not always in some majestic tucked-away corner of it. In Paris and Rome, to take just two recent examples, the on-court action is occasionally soundtracked by the faraway wail of…

After hibernating through the clay season, with good reason, Roger Federer has woken up again. Today at the Stuttgart Open, he played his first match since March. Millions of fans and also his wife were pleased by this development.

Jason Gay wrote a profile of Roger Federer for WSJ Magazine that covers everything from Federer tearing his meniscus while trying to give his kids a bath (the recuperation preceded two Grand Slam titles last year) to what Anna Wintour thinks of Federer’s potential move into the fashion world after he eventually…

This has been a heated topic of debate for many years, most recently in The Atlantic and on the Hello Internet podcast: Are tennis balls green or yellow?

Robin Haase started strong but appeared to vomit into a garbage can during a changeover in the final set of today’s 4-6, 6-1, 6-1 loss to Roger Federer. With the third-round victory at Rotterdam, 36-year-old Roger Federer will become the oldest No. 1. in the history of the ATP, reclaiming the top rank 14 years and 17…

Long-time Roger Federer victim Philipp Kohlschreiber just played an excellent match, earning two set points in the first set before dropping the tiebreak, then committing some untimely double-faults in his final service game to lose 7-6 (8), 7-5 in the second round at Rotterdam. Kohlschreiber spent the whole match…

The 36-year-old even did the ceremonial net-cord hand-wave apology after, as if to say, “I am sorry that I took up this sport, which you play for an honest living, and play it like a glitchy video game.”

Fresh off winning his second-straight Australian Open, Roger Federer has taken a wild card to play Rotterdam next week. In his old age/late empire, Federer has opted for a light tournament schedule, and he hasn’t played this particular 500-level event since 2012. But he lost just two sets at the Australian Open,…

A friend of mine pointed out that Mirka Federer, after attending her 30th Grand Slam final, still bothered to record the trophy ceremony for her husband—whose every offhand utterance, let alone metal-hoisting victory speech, is documented by a flickering panopticon of cameras and instantly cemented into Tennis…

Old man Roger Federer beat sixth-seeded Marin Cilic 6-2, 6-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 in the Men’s Singles final at the Australian Open, for his 20th career Grand Slam title. Per ESPN:

The semifinal between Roger Federer and breakout Hyeon Chung had little chance of being a close match, something like dropping a tired, brave guppy into the mouth of a shark and hoping something interesting might happen. Due in part to Chung’s blisters—built up over two weeks of tough matches and plenty of his…

There is perhaps no active player who has been as owned by the Big Four as painfully as Tomas Berdych. Poor, big-hitting Tomas Berdych, one of the fixtures of the men’s game, constantly found loitering in the later rounds of the majors, but never winning them. The Czech quasi-star has surged as high as No. 4 in the…