Luciano Darderi: The Quiet Italian Who Accidentally Became Tennis’s Newest Metaphor for Global Chaos By Matteo “No One Invited Me To The G7” Rossi If you blinked somewhere between the war in Gaza and the latest crypto-bro meltdown, you might have missed the moment an unseeded 22-year-old from Tandil, Argentina—who grew up speaking Italian at…
Copenhagen, Wednesday night: while most of Europe argued about gas prices that rise faster than a teenager’s heart-rate on TikTok, Clara Tauson was quietly dismantling another seeded opponent in Linz. If you blinked, you missed it—much like the continent’s once-vaunted welfare states, the match was gone before the espresso cooled. For the uninitiated, Tauson is…
Daria Kasatkina is not the tennis story most broadcasters lead with. She doesn’t smash rackets, date pop stars, or hire an entourage the size of a NATO battalion. Instead, the 26-year-old Russian has spent the last year turning press conferences into miniature Nuremberg trials—minus the dramatic lighting—while still finding time to dispatch top-ten opponents with…
Gael Monfils, the human highlight reel currently moon-walking his way through what polite society still calls “the twilight of his career,” is tennis’s last living reminder that the sport was once supposed to be fun. While the rest of the men’s tour has been busy cloning 6-foot-6 Balkan metronomes who hit the ball as if…
PARIS—The third-round draw at Roland-Garros was supposed to be a formality: some fresh-faced prodigy versus a 33-year-old Romanian best remembered for a 2009 quarter-final run when TikTok was still just the sound a clock made. Instead, Sorana Cîrstea spent two hours reminding the planet that the tennis narrative is written in erasable ink. She won…
Matteo Berrettini and the Glorious Futility of National Hope By Our Correspondent in Rome, where even the espresso is beginning to question its purpose If you squint hard enough from the cheap seats of the Foro Italico, Berrettini’s serve looks like a surface-to-air missile launched on behalf of an entire peninsula that hasn’t felt collectively…
**The Accidental Australian: How Rinky Hijikata Became the World’s Most Unlikely Tennis Diplomat** In the grand theater of professional tennis, where Russian oligarchs’ yachts jostle for dock space at Monte Carlo and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund whispers promises of unlimited prize money, Rinky Hijikata represents something refreshingly absurd: a 22-year-old Sydney-sider who still looks…
Ekaterina Alexandrova and the Fine Art of Being Russian While Winning By the time Ekaterina Alexandrova cracked the Top 20 last season, the Kremlin had already annexed a chunk of Ukraine, Wimbledon had politely asked Russian players to compete as neutrals, and several European governments were debating whether a tennis ball could be considered a…
The last time a Romanian woman made global headlines for racket work, it involved a certain Dracula and a wooden stake. This week it’s Jaqueline Cristian—no fangs, just a forehand that slices through hope like an IMF austerity package. While most of the planet was doom-scrolling about submarine implosions and the price of eggs, Cristian…
Cameron Norrie: The Quiet Englishman Quietly Redrawing the Global Map of Tennis Mediocrity By Dave’s International Desk of Slightly Bruised Hopes PARIS—In a world where geopolitics is mostly played by men who can’t find their own car keys, it’s refreshing—if mildly disorienting—to watch a soft-spoken left-hander from Johannesburg via Auckland via London via Texas calmly…
**Marcos Giron: The Accidental Diplomat of Tennis in an Era of Existential Chaos** In a world where nations weaponize everything from natural gas to TikTok, it’s almost quaint that a 30-year-old Californian with a one-handed backhand has become an unlikely envoy of soft power. Marcos Giron—ranked 49th, owns one ATP title, and looks like the…
SEOUL—Somewhere between the DMZ’s razor wire and Gangnam’s Botox, the 2024 Korea Open unfolded this week like a geopolitical fever dream sponsored by a credit-card conglomerate that promises “borderless rewards.” Tennis balls flew, K-pop idols waved from corporate suites, and delegates from 47 countries pretended not to notice that the stadium Wi-Fi still routes through…
