Aleksandar Vukic: The Tennis Everyman Holding Up a Mirror to Our Elite-Obsessed World By Our Correspondent, still recovering from another Grand Slam hangover Paris—While the planet’s cameras were busy zooming in on the usual pantheon—your Djokovics, your Alcarazes, your carefully branded unicorns—Aleksandar Vukic slipped into the French Open draw like an uninvited plus-one who ends…
**The Gentle Existential Crisis of Ugo Humbert, or How France Accidentally Exported a Metaphor** PARIS—While the planet busied itself with the usual apocalyptic buffet—proxy wars, algorithmic tyranny, record-breaking heat that makes your shoes melt to asphalt—France’s 25-year-old tennis understudy Ugo Humbert has been quietly staging the most Gallic of rebellions: losing spectacularly, winning accidentally, and…
PARIS — Let us now praise famous backhands. Serena Williams, the only American export more durable than Boeing jets and twice as likely to leave smoking craters in her wake, has ostensibly exited the arena. The official line is “evolving away from tennis,” a euphemism so Silicon-Valley it practically comes with stock options and a…
Frances Tiafoe: The Last American Standing on a Planet That’s Forgotten How to Stand Still By Dave’s Foreign Bureau of Existential Scoreboards PARIS, AUGUST—Somewhere between the 13th arrondissement’s overpriced croissants and the clay-stained baseline of Court Philippe-Chatrier, Frances Tiafoe reminded the world that the United States still exports something other than inflation and Marvel spin-offs:…
Lucia Bronzetti and the Beautiful Futility of Chasing Yellow Balls By our man in the cheap seats, Rome–Madrid–Melbourne circuit The planet is busy immolating itself—Arctic on clearance, democracies running end-of-season sales—yet for two hours on a Thursday afternoon in Rome, 3,000 otherwise sane Italians squeezed into Campo Centrale to watch 23-year-old Lucia Bronzetti swipe a…
McCartney Kessler and the Quiet Collapse of Global Relevance By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic The name McCartney Kessler sounds, at first blush, like an indie-film protagonist who discovers the cure for ennui in a Reykjavik basement and then forgets it in an Uber. Instead, she is a 23-year-old American tennis player who, last…
Chengdu Open: A Tennis Tournament, a Power Cable, and the World’s Slow-Motion Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, Nursing a Hangzhou Hangover The Chengdu Open—an ATP 250 event played 1,600 kilometres from the nearest ocean and zero kilometres from the next Sichuan hotpot—kicked off this week in a city best known for pandas who refuse…
Alexandra Eala’s Left-Handed Apocalypse: How a 19-Year-Old From Manila Is Quietly Redrawing the World Map By the time Alexandra “Alex” Eala toppled the world No. 2 clay-court sphinx in Madrid last month, the geopolitical implications were already ricocheting through the global press like a mis-hit ball off a carbon-fiber frame. In Beijing, sports bureaucrats ran…
Andre Agassi: The Bald Prophet Who Sold Reeboks to Beijing While Teaching Us How to Lose Gracefully on a Global Scale By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from a rooftop bar in Dubai, the arc of Andre Agassi’s career looks less like a tennis parabola and more like a geopolitical fever…
Mensik: The Czech Kid Who Just Made Wimbledon a Global Gladiator Ring Again By our man in the cheap seats, nursing a warm beer and existential dread PARIS—When 17-year-old Jakub “Menšík” (pronounced “men-sheek,” rhymes with “oblique”) crashed the Madrid Open party last month, beating two Top-20 players before politely asking the ball kids for a…
Alex de Minaur and the Great Southern Hemisphere Bluff By “Gravedigger” Garcia, International Sports Correspondent SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 17th time-zone change and my third airline meal that tasted like laminated regret, I realized the planet has conspired to make us care deeply about a 5-foot-9 Australian who hits a yellow ball for a living. Alex…
Alejandro Tabilo: The Chilean Who’s Making Tennis Care About South America Again By “International” Correspondent, still jet-lagged from the duty-free perfume counter SANTIAGO—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through the latest global heatwave and quietly calculating how many bottles of Malbec constitute “emergency rations,” a 26-year-old lefty from the wrong side of the equator…
