Tennis Page 61 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
This Is What It Looks Like When Serena Williams Takes Over
Momentum shifts in tennis are common, often slight, and always tenuous. Good tennis players capitalize on these tiny shifts—an unlucky bounce, an untimely double fault, a net cord. Great players, though, force the change themselves. That’s what Serena Williams did in her second-round French Open m...
Jared Donaldson's Legs Cramped Up, So He Had To Serve Underhand
American Jared Donaldson had an incredible performance in today’s second-round French Open match against the fourth-seeded Grigor Dimitrov, pushing the Bulgarian to the brink in the fifth set, before fatigue was the ultimate decider. Donaldson resorted to trickery to get around his cramping, but it...
Tennis Channel Has Taken The French Open Hostage
The fan experience of tennis has become exponentially richer with the advent of streaming. When a draw has 128 entrants, like the singles events at all four Grand Slams, its early days are stuffed with matches, and no single live broadcast can depict all the action worth watching. It’s an obsolete m...
Jack Sock Gets Messy
Jack Sock, who just a few months ago was hoisting the coolest-looking trophy in tennis and leaping to a career-high No. 8 ranking, has doddered through the 2018 season. It’s late May and the American has yet to log two consecutive wins. Sock lost at the French Open today in five sets to world No. 13...
A Tennis Player Seized His Last-Minute Chance To Play In The French Open, Drove 10 Hours To Paris, And Won<em></em><em></em>
In a series of events that sounds more like a TV comedy than real life, Argentine tennis player Marco Trungelliti—who had returned home to Barcelona after losing in the French Open qualifiers last week—learned that he had an opportunity to play in the main draw after a spate of players withdrew at t...
Tennis Player Nicolas Kicker Found Guilty Of Match-Fixing
The Tennis Integrity Unit, an anti-corruption watchdog, ruled today that Argentinian player Nicolas Kicker fixed two professional matches three years ago. Kicker, currently ranked No. 84 on the men’s tour, was “found guilty of contriving the outcome” of two matches in 2015—one at the ATP Challenger...
Roger Federer Says Serena Williams Is The Greatest Tennis Player Of All Time, Period
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 h...
Tennis Player's Meltdown Ends With Smashed Racket And "Broken" Banana
One tennis player’s violent racket-smashing meltdown at Sunday’s ATP Challenger final in Busan, Korea had devastating consequences for a banana....
The Drop Shot Can Be The Smart Play Even When It Fails
Simple distinctions are easy to latch onto. The typical groundstroke looks different from a drop shot: fast and long vs. slow and shallow. A groundstroke is hit hard with topspin, and the intent is (generally) to hit the ball with pace and placement so it is difficult to retrieve. A drop shot is hit...
Rafael Nadal And The Rain Kept The Future Of Tennis In Check
What if the rain hadn’t come? Maybe Alexander Zverev would have gotten his third straight title, and the most significant win of his life: Rafael Nadal on clay in a final. That’s not an especially big “maybe,” either, just a medium-sized one....
Cat Interrupts Tennis Match, Narrowly Escapes Overhead Smash<em></em>
A doubles tennis match in Rome today was interrupted by a feline interloper. While Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo played against Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah at the Foro Italico, a cute little cat ran across the court. Cat on the clay!...
Georgia High School Tennis Players Punished After Posing With White Bags Over Their Heads
White tennis players from Telfair County High School in Georgia have been punished for posing for a photo in which they wore white bags over their heads with the eyes cut out. The photo, which was taken on Snapchat and then distributed on Facebook in the days after the tennis tournament, was taken a...
Karolina Pliskova Unleashes Rage Upon Umpire's Chair
Forget the weak beeves you’ve been served in the past, all the gristly cheap stuff, and ready your palate for Grade-A Tennis Beef. Well-bred cows were fed only foraged wild grasses and massaged six to eight times daily to produce beef of this lusciously marbled quality. Appreciate it....
Every Promising Tennis Player Must Own Tomas Berdych At Some Point<em></em>
At this point in time, Tomas Berdych is more useful as a benchmark for the progress of young people than as a tennis player unto himself. This is a little cruel, maybe, but it is not wrong....
Dominic Thiem Did All The Dirty Work And Claimed None Of The Glory
Assume by default that Rafael Nadal wins any big event on clay. Take it as a given that his teeth are pressing into the trophy well before the first match gets underway. This has been true for many long swaths of the last decade, but it has maybe never been truer than right now, with Rafa still bull...
Dominic Thiem Resists Clay Colossus Rafael Nadal, Ends 50-Set Streak
Rafael Nadal’s incomprehensible streak of consecutive sets won on clay has ended at 50. And it was ended by the last person to have scraped a set off him on the surface, a full 51 weeks ago: Dominic Thiem. The upset demanded huge hitting from the world No. 7, who has had a somewhat uninspired week...
Rafael Nadal Eats Clay Three Square Meals A Day And Also Has It For Dessert
Does Rafael Nadal live in clay? He may. Is it where he likes to play? Yea—he has owned it for his entire career, and that dominance was made even clearer two weeks ago when he finally took the record for most consecutive sets won on clay. Today he claimed his 21st straight victim on the red stuff, a...
Gael Monfils Loses Rackets To Airline Mishap, Loses Match To Inferior Opponent<em></em>
This week at the Munich Open, the Frenchman Gael Monfils was due to play his first match since that “back injury” at Indian Wells. Getting to Germany was the first step. That should be the easy part, since the dude lives in Switzerland. But on an April 28 flight from Geneva to Munich, Monfils learn...
Stupid Tennis Beef Inspires Threat: "I'll Remember This"
Sample some cheap, greasy tennis beef from today’s Barcelona Open quarterfinal. Down 2-4 in a second-set tiebreak, Grigor Dimitrov delivered a first serve to Pablo Carreño Busta. There was no word from the linespeople or umpire. Nor was there any peep from Carreño Busta; he hit the ball back and wal...
Rafa Is Somehow Still Setting New Records On Clay
Today, playing at the Barcelona Open, a tournament he has won 10 times, on a court officially named “Pista Rafa Nadal,” Rafael Nadal won his 39th and 40th consecutive sets on clay. This extends an Open Era–record for consecutive sets on clay courts, per the ATP, that Nadal first set last Sunday in t...