Serena Williams described her desire to be “perfect.” “I know perfect doesn’t exist,” she wrote in Vogue earlier this month, announcing her plans to leave professional tennis. “But whatever my perfect was, I never wanted to stop until I got it right.” Williams’s serve — the most elementally sound component of her game — might […]
The impending retirements of Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal — winners of a combined 65 major singles titles — have some worried about the end of the glory days of tennis. But a bigger existential crisis is facing the sport: climate change. All sports, if they haven’t already, are expected to suffer in […]
Great Britain’s Emma Raducanu stunned the world when she won the 2021 U.S. Open. At 18, she became the first singles qualifier since the Open Era began in 1968 to win a major championship. But less than two weeks later, Raducanu fired her coach. The teenager, who had played in only four tour-level events, said […]
Spare a thought for the younger contenders trying to stop Novak Djokovic from winning the men’s calendar-year Grand Slam at the U.S. Open, which started Monday in New York. The 34-year-old Serbian is one of the greatest tennis players ever to grip a racket. By winning this year’s tournament in Flushing Meadows, Queens, he would […]
For the first time since 1945, there will be no Wimbledon this year. And there’s no guarantee that the coronavirus pandemic won’t yet cancel the U.S. Open, scheduled to start in late August, and the French Open, which was postponed from May to September. If the rest of the 2020 tennis season is abandoned altogether, […]