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Playing his first match after firing his whole coaching staff, Novak Djokovic struggled. Today, in the second round of the Madrid Open, he squared up against world No. 76 Nicolas Almagro—a player he had defeated in all four previous matches, losing only one set in a tiebreak—and teetered on the brink of loss, but came…
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MADRID (AP) Defending champion Novak Djokovic recovered from a 3-0 deficit in the third set to defeat Nicolas Almagro 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 and reach the third round at the Madrid Open on Wednesday.
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MADRID (AP) Defending champion Novak Djokovic recovered from a 3-0 deficit in the third set to defeat Nicolas Almagro 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 and reach the third round at the Madrid Open on Wednesday.
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The net, you’d think, is an unavoidable fact of tennis. As a ball approaches you, there are many interesting decisions you are free to make—where to play it, what kind of spin to apply, how hard to strike—but one decision is already made for you: you have to hit it over the damn net.
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MADRID (AP) To Maria Sharapova, the most disappointing part of leaving the Madrid Open was doing so in the second round.
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MADRID (AP) To Maria Sharapova, the most disappointing part of leaving the Madrid Open was doing so in the second round.
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It’s possible, but not probable.
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Alexander Zverev, one of tennis’s two fuckboy prodigies, claimed a tough win over Jan-Lennard Struff today and left the court on a pungent note. After beating his fellow German in this Munich Open quarterfinal, Zverev gestured at the clay and said, unmistakably, “This is my fucking court.” By the sport’s prudish…
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Novak Djokovic’s odd year continues. After parting ways with head coach Boris Becker in December and struggling in the first quarter of 2017, he dismissed the rest of his coaching staff today, some of whom have been in his camp for over a decade: coach Marian Vajda, fitness coach Gebhard Phil Gritsch, and…
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PRAGUE (AP) Third-seeded Barbora Strycova overcame a second set scare on the way to beating eighth-seeded Katerina Siniakova 6-3, 5-7, 6-3 in an all-Czech quarterfinal at the Prague Open on Thursday.
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Rafael Nadal kept himself busy in April, regaining his form on clay and raising trophies at Monte Carlo and Barcelona—freakishly, his 10th time winning each. What has his rival Roger Federer been up to in the meantime? Playing corny charity matches with Bill Gates and the guitarist from Pearl Jam, and rolling through…
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This time last year, Novak Djokovic was about to complete his fourth consecutive Grand Slam win—as dominant a run as the tour has ever seen. But this year, since the first week of January, he has yet to get further than the quarterfinals of any tournament at all.
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The French Open has a dilemma: Do tournament organizers grant two-time French Open winner, five-time grand slam champion, and recently returned doper Maria Sharapova a wild card into the main draw, ensuing she’s part of the tournament when the first round begins on May 28? Should she receive a wild card into the…
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Allow me to remove my foot from my mouth: Rafael Nadal is still the King of Clay, fine. He claimed his 10th title at Monte Carlo last week, and looks set to take his 10th Barcelona Open title too, unless Andy Murray snaps out of his daze or Dominic Thiem manages the upset. Maybe his 10th French Open lies just a few…
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Andy Murray, who’s looked sloppy and out of sorts in today’s Barcelona Open quarterfinal, broke Albert Ramos-Vinolas’s ankles on this point in the final set, and it may have even saved his match. As the chuckling commentators note, this is tennis’s equivalent of a crossover.
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How will women’s tennis welcome back Maria Sharapova—formerly its richest star, if not its most successful—after her 15-month ban for breaking its doping rules, however absurd those might be? Her return was bound to be messy. Because all of Sharapova’s ranking points dissolved during her absence from the tour, she’s…
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Maria Sharapova is set to return to competition on Wednesday at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart after receiving a wild card entry to the tournament. It will be her first tournament since she was banned from tennis for 15 months after testing positive for a banned substance last January. While the manner of her…
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Ilie Nastase is best known as a former world No. 1 who won Wimbledon in 1972 and rolled through the 1973 French Open without dropping a set, becoming the first man to complete that feat. He is now the captain of Romania’s Fed Cup team, and made some much uglier additions to his résumé at a competition this past…
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Following a two-year ban for doping, which was reduced to 15 months on appeal, Maria Sharapova is set to return to competition next week after she received a wild-card entry in Stuttgart. She was also given wild cards to Madrid and Rome. A handful of prominent players have questioned Sharapova receiving wild cards,…
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The Monte-Carlo Masters in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, is perhaps the most photogenic and least accessible of all tennis tournaments. Live vicariously through these shots of elite athletes competing in a place where rich people go to lose enormous sums.
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If you make a living standing outside and hurling an small yellow sphere up above your head so you can hit it down, sometimes an enormous yellow sphere is right behind it, and you just have to find a way to cope. Novak Djokovic, squinting and awash in light, couldn’t, as he lost to David Goffin 6-2, 3-6, 7-5.
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This towel-draped snowbird, posted up on the clay courts of Monte Carlo snapping photos of some of the world’s best tennis players, is my new hero. If you know who she is, please tell me so I can follow her life’s path.
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Grigor Dimitrov, the talented but streaky member of a generation of men’s tennis players that’s been largely overshadowed by the longevity of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic cohort, looked poised to break out in 2017 when he started the year by winning 17 of 18 matches, knocking off three top-10 seeds along the way.…
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Hours after Serena Williams, the most dominant tennis player of all time, appeared to announce her pregnancy by sharing and then deleting a photo of herself in a bathing suit captioned “20 weeks,” her publicist confirmed that she is indeed expecting her first child.
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Mike Cation heard a moan, and figured it was just two people in the stands talking loudly. The tennis announcer, working the USTA Pro Circuit’s Sarasota Open on Tuesday, looked at the crowd and saw everyone looking around. Then it became clear: This wasn’t two people talking. This was two people fucking.
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All the conditions seemed fit for Rafael Nadal. After so many hardcourt disappointments, a return to his dream surface, red clay, where every ball sails slow and high; a tournament where he’s posted a merciless 58-4 record in his career; no Roger Federers looming in the draw. Basically an invitation to loosen up,…
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Serena Williams, the best female tennis player of all time and current world No. 2, seemingly announced today that she is expecting a child in a since-deleted snap. After winning the Australian Open at the end of January, Williams hasn’t played a single match, pulling out of Indian Wells and the Miami Open, citing a…
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A tennis match today between Frances Tiafoe and Mitchell Krueger at the Sarasota Open was temporarily interrupted by the sounds of some fucking.
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Taking the full view of 2017—the year of his supposed decline—it would have been perfectly on-brand for Novak Djokovic to lose his first match on clay. When Gilles Simon took the second set here at Monte Carlo, that outcome seemed plausible. When Simon, hitting some astonishingly clean groundstrokes, managed to break…
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As if to prove that Roger Federer isn’t the only 35-year-old holding onto his gifts, French veteran Nicolas Mahut is still looking spry on the doubles court, doing the incredible.
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