Tennis Page 85 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Roger Federer Is Back, But The Youngsters Are Coming For Him
Lay out all the usual lame disclaimers: it’s Roger Federer’s first tournament back in the game since he hurt his knee giving his kids a bath and decided to take the whole rest of the season off. It’ll take him a while to get back to form, even his late-career, step-slower form. And the Hopman Cup is...
Serena Williams Loses To World No. 72, Commits 88 Unforced Errors
Serena Williams, the second-ranked woman’s tennis player in the world, lost to No. 72 Madison Brengle in a 6-4, 6-7(3), 6-4 upset at the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand last night. ...
Just Rafael Nadal Holding A Koala
One of the under-looked perks of tennis stardom is that you’re often being handed marsupials. Rafael Nadal got to hold this koala at the start of the Brisbane International. His grin and the bear’s claws appear to be saying very different things....
Juan Martin Del Potro May Not Play The Australian Open
The resurrection of Juan Martin del Potro was one of the quiet joys of 2016. He’d been out of the game for two years, he’d sunk lower than the No. 1000 ranking, and his wrists seemed like they’d never again be capable of bashing those flat, unforgiving groundstrokes. Yet somehow he snagged a silver ...
Petra Kvitova Says She Was Attacked In Her Home By Knife-Wielding Burglar, Suffered "Severe" Hand Injury
Petra Kvitova, currently 11th in the women’s tennis world rankings, says she was attacked inside her home in her native Czech Republic today by a man armed with a knife who attempted to rob her. In her struggle against the attacker, she suffered what she described as a “severe” injury to her left ha...
Novak Djokovic Parts Ways With Coach Boris Becker
Novak Djokovic, who had what you could call an “off-year,” if only by his obscenely high standards, split up today with coach and six-time Grand Slam winner Boris Becker. In the three years that he worked with the German, Djokovic tightened his chokehold on the entire men’s field, only slackening hi...
Juan Martin Del Potro Ends Comeback Year With Broken Finger, Trophy For Argentina
Juan Martin del Potro slogged past Croatia’s Marin Cilic in five sets on Sunday to help Argentina take the Davis Cup. Somehow, he beat the world No. 6 despite breaking a left pinky while trying to catch one of Cilic’s serves in the deciding set. He wasn’t the only one to suffer from an errant Cilic ...
The Four Best Men's Tennis Players Will Sort Out Where They Sit On The Food Chain
Novak Djokovic, who’s been blessed with some well-timed cakewalks lately, rounded up and slapped a group full of youngsters right in their apple cheeks. Meanwhile Andy Murray hacked his way through a death group, culminating in today’s dismissal of Stan Wawrinka (and a very respectable Stan, too) in...
Kindly Bozo Gets Fed To Novak Djokovic
Nobody really wants to stand across the court from Novak Djokovic right now, least of all a hobbled Gael Monfils. So when Monfils withdrew from the ATP World Tour Finals, citing a rib injury, I figured he was politely sparing Djokovic the hour or so it would’ve taken to thrash him. But it turned out...
The Good Stan Wawrinka Showed Up This Time
Stan Wawrinka woke up, shook off his three-match losing streak, and played passable tennis against Marin Cilic in the ATP World Tour Finals, winning 7-6(3), 7-6(3). It was a relief to see a different Stan this time in London....
Kei Nishikori Had All The Tools To Beat Andy Murray, But He Spilled Them All Over The Floor
That these three sets sprawled for three hours and 20 minutes should explain a lot about this grind session between tennis’s two fastest players. Eventually Andy Murray—or at least his empty, deadened husk—edged out Kei Nishikori, 6-7(9), 6-4, 6-4, in their consistently high-quality, often infuriati...
Novak Djokovic Survives Milos Raonic As He Pursues Top Ranking
The ATP World Tour Finals reward close attention because nearly every match is quality: the top eight players in the world do a little round robin, then a little elimination, with year-end rankings at stake. So far, no one in that elite field has beaten Novak Djokovic, who withstood Milos Raonic’s a...
You Never Know Which Stan Wawrinka You're Going To Get
Last we saw the third-ranked tennis player in the world, he was stumbling out of the first round in Paris, shown the door by the world No. 91. Before that, in Basel, he crumbled against No. 72 Mischa Zverev, facing visible mental collapse in the third set. And in today’s rematch of the U.S. Open sem...
Professional Tennis Player Takes Set While Serving Underhand
Mackie McDonald was up 4-3 in the first set against Peter Polansky during today’s ATP Challenger event in Knoxville, before taking an injury timeout. When he returned, he could no longer slam a strong and righteous overhead serve. So he settled for these little underhand slices. ...
Nick Kyrgios Accepts Psychological "Care Plan" To Reduce Suspension
In what is (hopefully) the final installment in Nick Kyrgios’s tanking saga, the Australian has agreed to a treatment from a league-approved sports psychologist, which would shrink his eight-week ban to three weeks, making him eligible to play on November 7....
Kei Nishikori Cuts Short Juan Martin Del Potro's Comeback Run
The recently exhumed Juan Martin del Potro—now equipped with functional wrists and his first title in 2 years—saw his seven-match win streak severed by Kei Nishikori today at Swiss Indoors Basel. 2016 has been a dope comeback year for the 28-year-old del Potro, but all this playing (and winning) may...
Is Juan Martin Del Potro Back?
The large, hard-charging Argentine is winning things again. Juan Martin del Potro just captured his first ATP title in two years at the Stockholm Open, an event he’d only qualified for by way of wild card. Most of those two years he spent addressing chronic wrist injuries and free-falling through th...
Dustin Brown Can Make A Lob Look Sexy
As far as outright winners go, lobs might be the least exhilarating way to terminate a point of tennis. You plop the tennis ball high into the air, way out of your opponent’s reach, and then it falls way back down into the court, hooray. You can respect the lob on a technical level—an especially def...
Nick Kyrgios Picks NBA Celebrity Game Over Tennis Tournament, Which Is Actually Good As Hell
Nick Kyrgios has done dumb things lately and has taken plenty of heat for it—from disappointed fans, from hand-wringing commentators, and from the ATP itself via heavy fines and suspension. They’ll all be tempted to wag their fingers again after Kyrgios’s latest move: pulling out of February’s Rot...
What Did The Ball Ever Do To You, Sir?
While I have no way of knowing exactly what was on world No. 44 Nicolas Almagro’s mind, he poured a lot of it onto this unsuspecting tennis ball during yesterday’s match against No. 86 Yuichi Sugita at the Stockholm Open. ...