Nick Kyrgios chose to shut down his season Thursday, citing a desire to recover fully from the hip injury he suffered during a nasty slip on the grass in July. Here’s the full explanation he offered after an uneven season in which he made two finals but failed to pass the second round of any major:
The coaching carousel in pro tennis has been picking up speed for years, but the frequent turnover generally involves low-drama transactions—a player fell a few spots in the rankings and wants to change tracks, for example. But this week, world No. 25 Barbora Strýcová accused her countrywoman and world No. 3 Karolina…
Apologies if you expected the channel to change after the two greatest split the year’s four majors evenly between themselves. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s enduring dominance, and the inconsistency of their most dangerous threats, have frozen everything in place. The hypothetical Next Generation of men’s tennis…
It’s no secret that tennis is populated by tempestuous dingbats, and today two such guys were struck with big fines for bad behavior.
Eighteen-year-old Denis Shapovalov cracked the top 50 this week, becoming the youngest player to do so since an 18-year-old Rafael Nadal in 2004. Congrats to Shapo.
Thursday will mark an important anniversary in Nick Kyrgios’s life: Last year in Shanghai he openly threw a match, abused fans in the stands, and earned eight weeks of suspension plus $41,500 in fines (later softened to three weeks after he agreed to meet with a tour-appointed sports psychologist). Today in Shanghai,…
How was your weekend? I got myself a nice bowl of pasta but some new mosquito bites. Nick Kyrgios, too, had both good and bad times.
Frankly this chunk of the tennis calendar, known as the “Asian swing” because it passes through China and Japan, is the easiest to tune out, especially for a viewer in a U.S. time zone. The year’s last major just wrapped up, the year-end finals are still months away, and the time difference makes it forbiddingly hard…
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…
The reason I enjoy watching Fabio Fognini is that he’s a sleepy pirate who produces ridiculous shots with no apparent effort or preparation. The reason I’m not more enthusiastic in my enjoyment is that he’s a chauvinistic turd who called a female ump a “cocksucking whore” in his native tongue, getting himself booted…
New York City police officer James Frascatore, who wrongfully tackled and arrested former star tennis player James Blake after mistaking him for a suspect in 2015, got off relatively easy: He wasn’t fired, despite a ruling that he used excessive force and having a history of excessive force complaints; instead, a…
Daniel Evans, a British tennis player with a hell of a forehand, was issued a one-year ban from tennis today by the International Tennis Federation after testing positive for cocaine in April. Evans admitted to using the drug outside of active competition and said he later put a packet of it in his “washbag” right…
Philadelphians are psyched as heck for the Sixers, but the excitement that the city feels for potential superstar Joel Embiid is something even purer and stranger than that.
Time to check in on Nick Kyrgios, the wildly talented but capricious Aussie who’s one of the best young players on tour when he gives a shit, but was last seen melting down during the first round of the U.S. Open, then describing his fluctuating dedication to the sport like this:
Steve Johnson is the fourth-best American in men’s tennis. Here is what he usually looks like.
“Irritable! Irritable!” shouted Deiton Baughman during his match Wednesday against Prajnesh Gunneswaran at the ATP Challenger Tiburon. After a forehand error to lose his serve at 7-6, 4-3, Baughman thumped a ball clean out of the court, earning a code violation. But that wasn’t his most inventive exclamation of the…
The worst-case scenario for the Laver Cup—a first attempt to construct an all-star game for men’s tennis, pitting the best players from Europe against the best players from everywhere else—was that it’d end up an elaborate, expensive excuse to smush nemeses Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal onto the same team for the…
Nick Kyrgios battled Roger Federer Sunday at the Laver Cup in another installment of what’s become one of the most desirable matchups in men’s tennis. Before the match began in Prague, with no anthem of any country playing, he took a knee.
The Laver Cup, which began today in Prague, is like a men’s tennis All-Star game—except good, because the players try. Over three days, some of Europe’s best are pitted against some of the best from everywhere else, on a greyscale court that makes every match look like an expensive cologne ad.
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…
