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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. Tsonga looked…
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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 the baseline,…
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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.
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“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.”
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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 the plain audacity,…
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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:
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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.
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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 at the ball. On the…
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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.
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Twenty-one years later, Michael Joyce—the young tennis player who was the subject of David Foster Wallace’s “The String Theory”—has had quite the career of his own. [Longreads]
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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 final, avenging his…
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The last time Jack Sock went between the legs, things went swimmingly—a clean winner.
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Sachia Vickery (ranked No. 135) and Elise Mertens (ranked No. 127) are set to play qualifiers later this week to try and earn slots in the main draw of the Australian Open. That’s a Grand Slam, a far more alluring attraction than the Hobart International, where these two met in the second round yesterday. What do…
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It can’t be totally pleasant to attract premature comparisons to the greatest of all time. Too early in his career, Grigor Dimitrov was saddled with the nickname “Baby Fed,” a comparison that spoke more to aesthetics than to his record of success: He has the same lethal, fluid groundstrokes as the Swiss master, that…
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This hot shot burst out of nowhere during a friendly matchup at the Hopman Cup today in Australia. Nick Kyrgios and Jack Sock are good pals, and were visibly having fun in an exhibition match which Sock won handily, 6-2, 6-2.
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Here’s No. 72 Madison Brengle offering a stand-up routine during a changeover, wondering if she’s going to die after being struck by a Serena Williams serve, and trying to figure out whether her optimal return strategy against the world No. 2 is to play confusingly bad tennis. “Maybe even worse, because I think she’s…
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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.
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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.
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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 medal in Rio by upsetting Djokovic and Nadal, surged into the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open, picked up his first ATP title since 2014, strung together a seven-match win streak, and sealed the Davis Cup victory for Argentina. If you hoped that comeback would continue cleanly right through 2017, you’ll have to wait a little longer: he might not be healthy enough for the first Grand Slam of the year.
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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 hand. She has said she is “fortunate to be alive.”
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