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The last time these two matched up, last August at the Rio Olympics, they delivered the best tennis storyline of 2016: Juan Martin del Potro, rising from the dead after two years of surgeries to both wrists, upsets a Novak Djokovic who’d then had a vice grip on the No. 1 spot for two whole years. This time around, the…
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Roger Federer had a bad day. In his three-set loss to Russian qualifier Evgeny Donskoy in the second round of the Dubai Tennis Championships, he blew three match points in the second set, was up 5-2 in the third, somehow let Donskoy tie the set at six games apiece, was up 5-1 in the tiebreak, and then he lost.
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Frances Tiafoe, the best American teen in the men’s game, hasn’t taken down any giants yet, but every few months he gets quite close. Back at the U.S. Open, he took literal giant John Isner to a fifth-set tiebreak, and last night in Acapulco, the 19-year-old took Juan Martin del Potro to a third-set tiebreak before…
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Taylor Fritz’s match against Adrian Mannarino tonight in Acapulco suffered a brief delay as the 112th-ranked American tried to humanely shoo a bothersome moth from the court during a second-set tiebreaker. A nearby ball girl took matters into her own hands…er, feet. Er, foot.
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Gael Monfils is content to camp out eight feet behind the baseline and beat back whatever you send his way; it’s how the world No. 12 has made his living. He’s springy and long-limbed and you’re probably going to get tired before he does. But Mohamed Safwat, ranked No. 199, played Monfils’s game today and somehow came…
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Dominic Thiem breezily dismissed Diego Schwartzman in today’s 6-2, 6-3 quarterfinal at the Rio Open, and the highlight was this tweener that he slapped down the line for a winner:
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Kei Nishikori is the fifth-best tennis player in the world and even his practice sessions get mobbed in his native Japan. His trademark shot is the down-the-line backhand, a smoothly flicked frozen rope. You might have last seen him in January taking Roger Federer to five sets in the quarters of the Australian Open.…
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Bernard Tomic is the second-best prospect from Australia and now, miraculously, the first-best at not giving a shit. That’s quite an accomplishment given the oeuvre of his close friend and compatriot Nick Kyrgios, who tanked his way to a $25,000 fine and hit a tweener at the climax of a fifth-set collapse at the…
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One complaint lobbed at today’s game is that everyone is content to play the same style of tennis: Just stand at the back of the court and hit hard topspin groundstrokes over and over until your opponent, who’s attempting the same, can’t keep up. We live in a “power baseline” era, and it didn’t use to be that way, the…
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The saner Roger Federer fans treated his Australian Open title as a late-night dessert—one they really didn’t expect or deserve!—snuck in before the long sleep. The more delusional might have seen it as the beginning of a late-career resurgence, promising fresh titles to come. I sat somewhere in between, high off the…
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World No. 14 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga won two tiebreaks against World No. 7 and tournament top seed Marin Cilic on Friday to advance to the semifinals of the Rotterdam Open, where he’ll face a familiar foe: Tomas Berdych.
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This afternoon I burped and realized Grigor Dimitrov is playing tennis as well as anyone alive. Lesser players come at him and might startle him for a little—like Mischa Zverev did in the first round here at Rotterdam—but after the opening set, he remembers that he can swarm the whole entire court, can spike winners…
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Second seeds are supposed to feast on easy prey in the first round of tournaments. But easy doesn’t describe Alexander Zverev, the best young prospect in the world, just a few days removed from an ATP title. (And just a few weeks removed from a five-set test of Rafael Nadal’s mettle in the quarters of the Australian…
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Rafael Nadal will split ways with his longtime coach, Uncle Toni, at the end of the 2017 season, according to an interview Toni Nadal gave to the website Il Tennis Italiano over the weekend. Instead of traveling with his nephew, Toni Nadal said he will spend next season overseeing the Nadals’ tennis academy in…
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The seventh-ranked player in the world, Marin Cilic, has shambled through some smelly losses to start the new year.
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Tennis broadcaster Doug Adler, who didn’t return to ESPN’s Australian Open broadcast after commenting on Venus Williams’s “gorilla” or “guerrilla” style of play—that’s the big question here—has sued ESPN and two ESPN executives in charge of tennis broadcasts in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging wrongful…
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The USTA has apologized to Germany for performing the antiquated first verse of that country’s national anthem—the “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” one, last used by the Nazis—before yesterday’s Fed Cup match between German Andrea Petkovic and American Alison Riske.
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Last fall, tennis’s rowdiest underperformer Nick Kyrgios said he was pulling out of the Rotterdam Open, an ATP 500 tournament that begins in four days, so he could compete in the NBA’s Celebrity Game during All-Star Weekend. This struck me as wise for a few reasons. First, late in last year’s season, when Kyrgios…
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Gael Monfils, the best living tennis player from France, was curiously not chosen to play the first round of the Davis Cup, the most important international tournament in the sport. He can blame his long-simmering beef with team coach Yannick Noah, national tennis legend—and father of Knicks sharpshooter Joakim—who…
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Canada lost its Davis Cup tie to Great Britain 3-2 after Denis Shapovalov accidentally drilled the chair umpire in the face with a ball in reaction to losing a point.
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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 data-poor, but…
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“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 decade, you might end…
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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.
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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.
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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 majors in sight. Then…
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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 points were injury…
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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. And she’s pretty damn excited about that win.
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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’s got the regal…
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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.
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