In order to solve the problem of damagingly long and pointless marathon men’s matches at Grand Slams—like this year’s men’s semifinal between Kevin Anderson and John Isner, which lasted a painful six and a half hours, including a three-hour fifth set which Anderson eventually took 26-24—Wimbledon brass took a baby…
Serena Williams’s long-time coach Patrick Mouratoglou—who, during the U.S. Open final in September, was deemed by the chair umpire to have coached Williams from his seat in the stands, thereby earning her a code violation, which set off one of the weirdest and most controversial sports meltdowns ever—today posted a…
Life came fast at Naomi Osaka. After she skipped the hype machine of the junior circuit, went pro, and won some local fame in Japan, Osaka won her first professional title of any kind at Indian Wells this year, and her second at (sheesh) the U.S. Open. Within days of hoisting that second trophy, she found herself on …
Two 35-year-old low-level professional tennis players you’ve never heard of, Ukrainian twins Gleb and Vadim Alekseenko, have been banned for life and fined $250,000 each, after being found guilty of match-fixing over an eight-month period in 2015 and 2016, the Tennis Integrity Unit said in a statement today. The…
At Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic reascended, and he’s more or less stayed there ever since. It took awhile to fully jar himself out of his blue period, but the Serb is back to dominating in all in the old ways, barely leaving so much as a scrap for anyone else. When Novak Djokovic is in full flow, he takes the air out of…
On Oct. 7, one day after Reuters first reported the alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Turkish officials later said was tortured and dismembered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Head of Saudi Arabia’s General Sport Authority Turki Al-Alshaikh announced Rafael Nadal and…
Like all games when played at the highest level, tennis often requires managing and toying with an opponent’s expectations. Do you think they’ll hit the ball cross-court? Ready yourself for that ball. But maybe they think you think they’ll hit it cross-court? Stay vigilant for the down-the-line. What if they think…
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…
Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian has been steadily posting online in support of his wife, Serena Williams, after her well-documented spat with an umpire in the U.S. Open final. One recent tweet by Ohanian called attention to an infamous Roger Federer outburst at the 2009 U.S. Open final, drawing an implicit…
During a second-round U.S. Open match on Aug. 30, umpire Mohamed Lahyani descended from his chair to give a mopey Nick Kyrgios a pep talk that included the words “I want to help you,” raising questions as to whether he overstepped boundaries as a neutral party. Lahyani has now been punished for his unusual foray into…
The Times of London reported Tuesday that some anonymous tennis umpires had considered boycotting Serena Williams’s matches after her spat with umpire Carlos Ramos derailed her U.S. Open final against Naomi Osaka. As this story has been picked up, shorn of context, and redeployed in unfamiliar contexts and epochal…
To riff on Serena Williams’s spat with umpire Carlos Ramos in the U.S. Open final, the Melbourne Herald Sun published an illustration of the tennis player, drawn by editorial cartoonist Mark Knight, which has since been met with international disgust. Today, like any normal newspaper, the Herald Sun opted to dig in…
If your tennis brain has only room for one takeaway from the U.S. Open, let it be this: Naomi Osaka was the most dominant player in the world over the last 14 days. With the exception of a fourth-round test of will, all of Osaka’s matches, including the final, were straight-set, open-and-shut, surgically efficient…
Through a series of statements, tennis’s governing bodies (the Women’s Tennis Association, the U.S. Tennis Association, and the International Tennis Federations) are staking out their positions on the sad and entirely avoidable debacle that was the U.S. Open women’s final.
The second set of Saturday’s women’s U.S. Open final was a total debacle, featuring a suspect code violation for coaching, and then an even more suspect game penalty for “verbal abuse,” triggering an insane and exhausting sequence where Serena Williams called down a tournament referee and brought the match to a…
Last night, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka beat Madison Keys in a U.S. Open semifinal match 6-2, 6-4 to advance to her first grand slam final, where she will face Serena Williams, who has played in 31 of them. How is Osaka feeling about playing Serena? Pretty good!
Every once in a while an athlete will just make you eat your words and your low expectations. Typically they’ll do this by winning; on Tuesday night, Dominic Thiem did it while losing his U.S. Open quarterfinal, pyrotechnically.
At the grand slams—Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open—men play best-of-five set matches, and these matches are often too long. (Men play best of three sets at all other tournaments, except the Davis Cup.) At Wimbledon this year, John Isner and Kevin Anderson played for more than six hours in their…
There was one close one—a fourth-round victory over Aryna Sabalenka that took her all three sets—but beyond that, the U.S. Open has been one continuous bloodbath for Naomi Osaka, the 20-year-old No. 20 seed. These are massacres on the order of Rafael Nadal carving up Roland Garros. Three times, she’s devoured her…
