tennis Page 41 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Science! Shows That Roger Federer's Backhand In Fact Defeated Rafael Nadal
Yesterday we argued that Federer’s unusually strong backhand anchored his Australian Open win over Rafael Nadal, and today we found a startling statistical basis for that claim. It comes courtesy of the always helpful Jeff Sackmann at TennisAbstract. Relative to other sports, tennis remains fairly d...
Roger Federer Played Free And Gave His Archrival The Back Of His Hand<em></em>
“I’m a different player due to Rafa’s presence,” Roger Federer said in a 2015 press conference, and if you needed it, yesterday’s 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 Australian Open win offered the clearest possible evidence. When your defensive-genius nemesis applies crushing pressure on you for more than a de...
Roger Federer Wins Australian Open For First Grand Slam Title In Five Years
Thirty-five-year old Roger Federer took down old rival Rafael Nadal in five sets to win the Australian Open—his 18th Grand Slam title, but his first in five years. ...
Serena Williams Is No. 1 Again
In terms of what it actually was, Serena Williams’s Australian Open victory was fairly straightforward; in terms of what it means, it’s totally overwhelming....
Roger Federer And Rafael Nadal Will Face Off In A Throwback Australian Open Final
This photo’s from 2005—they were about to meet in a Grand Slam for the first time, the 2005 French Open, a semifinal match Rafael Nadal won before claiming the title, his first of many. They’d then spend about a decade at the top of the game, sucking up all the available oxygen, dominating all major...
Old Man Federer Survives To Reach Australian Open Final
Thirty-five-year-old Roger Federer sputtered his way to the championship round of the Australian Open. Though his all-Swiss semifinal against Stan Wawrinka looked like a gutsy struggle on paper—five sets! 7-5, 6-3, 1-6, 4-6, 6-3!—it actually lasted just over three hours, and the two major inflection...
![Venus Williams Is Very, Very Happy To Be In The Final Of The Australian Open [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/dkyx6k7jbtyj4hirtqdn.jpg)
Venus Williams Is Very, Very Happy To Be In The Final Of The Australian Open [Updated]
All evidence suggests that 36-year-old Venus Williams is feeling good about reaching the final of the Australian Open. She defeated CoCo Vandeweghe 6-7 (3), 6-3, 6-2 to become the oldest women in a Grand Slam final since Martina Navratilova in 1994....
Now It's Just Rafael Nadal And A Bunch Of Gorgeous One-Handers
Rafael Nadal dug around and exploited two glitches in the Milos Raonic serving machine—two successfully converted break points, that is—to win his Australian Open quarterfinal 6-4, 7-6 (7), 6-4. And now he’s surveying a field full of the prettiest one-handed backhands in all the land. Roger Federer’...
Venus Williams Becomes Oldest Woman To Ever Reach Australian Open Semifinals
Venus Williams, aged 36, ranked No. 17, hasn’t dropped a single set en route to the semifinals at the Australian Open. Her 6-4, 7-6 (3) win over No. 27 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova made her the oldest woman in the Open era to run this deep into this tournament. ...
Stan Wawrinka Drained Jo-Wilfried Tsonga's Will To Live
The notion of athletes “wanting it more” than one another must be one of the most insufferably inane tropes of sports analysis, but halfway through an Australian Open match between Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Stan Wawrinka the commentators began flinging it, and at some point it actually began to stick. ...
Rafael Nadal Turned Off The Gael Monfils Show
Rafael Nadal put up a sweat-saturated 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 performance to end Gael Monfils’s run at the fourth round of the Australian Open. Through the first two sets it looked like old-school Nadal dominance. Both sixth seed Monfils and ninth seed Nadal are rangy scramblers who cover every inch of t...
No. 1 Andy Murray Upset By Unseeded Mischa Zverev
Top-seeded Andy Murray is no longer the favorite to win the Australian Open; instead, he’ll be going home earlier than expected. Murray fell to unseeded Mischa Zverev in today’s fourth round, 7-5, 5-7, 6-2, 6-4....
Roger Federer Was Better Than Vintage
“It’s not so much fun,” said Tomas Berdych, the 10th seed at the Australian Open, after getting picked apart in a neat 92 minutes. “I would rather be in the stands watching than on the court.”...
Gael Monfils, At The Peak Of His Career, Is Still A Good Clown
Gael Monfils cannot turn down an opportunity for a good show, not even with set point in the Australian Open. With the second set at stake, in the middle of a rally, the Frenchman chose to go behind the back. His second-round opponent Alexandr Dolgopolov, whether thrown off by the mild sidespin or ...
When Serena Williams Asks For An Apology, She Gets It
Serena Williams, fresh off her 6-3, 6-4 win over Lucie Safarova in the second round of the Australian Open, was in no mood to dwell on the negatives. So when a reporter asked about her 23 unforced errors, she was sure to extract an apology:...
Denis Istomin, The Bespectacled Wildcard, Dismantled Novak Djokovic
Novak Djokovic is often likened to a machine, and his wins share that metallic flavor: suddenly the teeth of the cogs are all lined up, they’ve been set in motion, and what once felt like a tennis match becomes a grind towards an inexorable conclusion. ...
Nick Kyrgios Stopped Giving A Shit And Crashed Out Of The Australian Open
Lots of choice words spill out of Nick Kyrgios’s mouth—many of them amusing, wounded, self-righteous—but you don’t need to hear a single one to understand how he feels about the game at a particular moment in time. You can see that spelled out on the court, in the way he chooses to swing his racket ...
Stan Wawrinka And Kei Nishikori Had To Work At The Australian Open's First Round
The first round’s over in the Australian Open and no giants have been toppled yet, but two are already exposing their vulnerabilities: No. 4 seed Stan Wawrinka and No. 5 seed Kei Nishikori were both stretched to five sets in their opening matches....
What Does Novak Djokovic's Body Mean For His Career?<em></em>
In today’s Beyond the Baseline podcast, tennis legend Martina Navratilova talks to SI’s Jon Wertheim about an issue that’d been haunting me lately: is Novak Djokovic looking a bit skeletal? He’s still winning, sure; last week in Doha he wrung the title away from Andy Murray in a gutsy three-set fina...