Aligning the Top 8 players outside their private locker rooms might have been the easiest part of pulling off the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals mannequin challenge on Thursday night. The hardest part: Getting them to stand still and stop telling jokes. The always entertaining Gael Monfils was his usual self, sharing laughs in French with Stan Wawrinka. The Swiss was improvising as well, playing director and changing how he'd hold his racquet. [ALSO LIKE] New World No. 1 Andy Murray might have had the toughest job. The Scot had to hold his arm steady for about a minute, long enough for the mannequin challenge and the Top 8 selfie. “Can't. Stop. Shaking,” he said. All told, it took about...
Suited and booted ready for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals Official Launch, the top eight singles players take on the latest viral craze - the Mannequin Challenge - before they leave The O2.
The world's eight best singles players and doubles teams, along with 2016 ATP World Tour Awards winners, gather at London's historic Cutty Sark for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals Official Launch presented by Moët and Chandon.
This has been a good year for the man who styles himself “the CEO of Milos Raonic Tennis” (for those who aren’t aware, that’s the Wimbledon finalist himself). In addition to a wicked serve and blistering forehand, this chief executive officer has also brought some idiosyncrasies to the task. That was most evident with the sleeve he had on his right arm for a couple of years – he first wore that at the ATP World Tour Masters 1000 tournament in Indian Wells in 2014 to protect a heat rash, and he then didn’t take it off until this season’s European clay-court swing. And he has since appeared to be just fine without it. Something new that he believes could be...
Tennis has always calculated first serves in and first-serve points won separately, but what would happen if we blended those two metrics together? This would essentially create a “first-serve efficiency” rating, specifically focused on discovering how many first serves you get in multiplied by the percentage won. The blended metric looks like this: First-serve efficiency = first serves in percentage x first-serve points won percentage. [ALSO LIKE] Some players don’t manage to get as many first serves in, but when they do, they win the point a lot. Conversely, other players make a lot of first serves, trading off power for consistency as they try to find the right balance for their game style and physical attributes. An Infosys ATP...