Tennis is one of the loneliest, most difficult sports in the world. Players travel week-in and week-out to a bevy of different countries and sets of conditions; the very best are as adept at sliding on hard concrete as on soft clay. The scoring system demands that players win the last point of the match to emerge victorious — you can play better than your opponent for 99% of the match, but if you freeze up, there’s no clock to save you. The format has invited chokes time and again. Roger Federer has snatched wins after being match point down more than 20 times…but lost from match point up just as often, sometimes to enormous historical consequence. The season covers the vast majority of the calendar, leaving players exhausted, injured, or both by year’s end. The players who do not win big titles have little to show for their efforts, often not even financial stability. Psychologically, it is probably not healthy to play at a high level.
But the enchanting moments it can produce. Two evenly matched players can push each other to places that, in all likelihood, no one except fighters could understand. A journeyman’s improbable victory in a low-level tournament can be validation for decades of hard work. Fans share in the players’ pleasure and pain — without teams to distract from the individuality and helmets to hide their faces, players feel like real people. They are practically naked on court. There are no substitutes, no time-outs, no bells or whistles to stop a backwards slide. Watching someone play an entire tennis match can feel, rightly or wrongly, like a reveal of their character. It is all the more rewarding, then, when a player rises to the occasion.
The sport, though, can be difficult to market effectively. The recent Netflix series Break Point focused more on the players holding the tennis rackets than the sport they were playing. (And was rightfully canceled after its second season.) So what is the essence of tennis; why do athletes play this sport despite its exhausting nature and why do fans watch despite the time zones shifting constantly? In this oral history, 13 writers in and around tennis talked about their relationship to the sport and thoughts on the ins and outs of this weird, wonderful game that, when it clicks, has the capacity to render everything else temporarily irrelevant.
I: “I had insomnia. So I just sat up and watched the Australian Open.”
Brian Phillips (staff writer, The Ringer): I got into tennis in 1996, when I was a freshman in college. I was home for winter break, and my high school girlfriend dumped me on my second day in town. I was obliterated. I was just so sad, so crushed. And I couldn’t sleep. That winter break, the Australian Open was on at all hours of the night, and I had insomnia. So I just sat up and watched the Australian Open. It was the year that Monica Seles came back from her stabbing and won. I got super into following her, and from then on, I loved tennis.
Louisa Thomas (staff writer, The New Yorker): I was quite a big sports fan growing up, but mostly Olympics, baseball, basketball, some football, and not tennis as much. But tennis was what I played. I wasn’t a competitive junior player, although I did train with a bunch of pretty competitive junior players. But I was #2 in singles on my high school team. I loved it. I just loved playing.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips (author, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. Answers via email): I loved stories and it was clear to me from early on that in tennis each point was a story unto itself, in the same way each game was, and each set was. At its best, tennis was a puzzle of stories with possible alternate endings if one little thing or call went one way instead of the other. And also the fact that so much passion could erupt from polite silence, like live music––I found all of this very appealing.
Juan José Vallejo (co-founder, The Changeover; former tennis contributor, Rolling Stone): I got into tennis at an interesting time in my life, when I think my brain was expanding. I was going to film school in Argentina, in a different country, on my own. The internet was just hitting then, in a communal sense. The way I started seeing the sport and being curious about it has a lot to do with my initial experience of being on [the Tennis.com blog] TennisWorld and reading Pete Bodo and Steve Tignor and talking with a group of 30, 35 people. Being able to say dumb stuff is important. And being able to learn. There were a lot of posters there that were really smart, and would tell you things, and tell stories. That’s what you don’t get on Twitter.
Rembert Browne (former staff writer, Grantland; New York Magazine): I started playing tennis when I was six. There’s a lot of black tennis in Atlanta. It’s a very large parks and recreation system. My mom played tennis, I played tennis. I went to summer camp.
Matthew Willis (founder and writer, The Racquet. Answers via email): I was lucky enough to play here and there on family holidays, my parents and older sisters frustrating five-year-old me with befuddling forehand slices while I still had the spatial skills of a cucumber.
Jay Caspian Kang (staff writer, The New Yorker): Two or three years ago, I started directing this documentary about Michael Chang. I was watching so much old tennis footage, and talking to people like Brad Gilbert or even Federer about the nuances of different types of players, and it became super interesting to me in an intellectual sense. I just wanted to get out and play a little bit. I got some of my friends together and we started setting up times to play, and within a week I was desperately texting them every morning, “let’s go play, let’s go play.”
Courtney Nguyen (senior writer, WTA): It was the preeminent and most accessible women’s sport. I was a three-sport athlete in high school and super into women’s sports even then, but back then, which would’ve been in the 90s, to watch women’s sports was to watch either tennis or, for me, being in the Bay Area, driving to Stanford to watch women’s volleyball or basketball.
Browne: I don’t know if I’ll ever love tennis as much as I did when I was nine years old. It was the center of my universe in a way that I don’t think a sport can be anymore.
Steve Tignor (senior writer, Tennis.com): Those early [Bjorn] Borg Wimbledon wins were a big deal for me. And I tried to play like him. I still have a Western grip and play with a lot of topspin and play from the baseline. Not everybody did that then. I’m left-handed, I probably would’ve been better off playing like [John] McEnroe, but I already had the Borg style. Two-handed backhand, too.
Giri Nathan (staff writer, Defector): I specifically remember watching Goran [Ivanisevic]’s run at Wimbledon as a wild card on a super-busted TV at my grandparents’ house in India that summer.
Nguyen: One thing about tennis, it is always on. Regardless of time zone, there is always a tennis match happening. I just started illegally streaming tennis matches in my office at three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning.
Browne: For years, my tennis coach—William “Wink” Fulton, may he rest in peace, he passed [in 2023]—had been wanting to take our camp to the U.S. Open. Since I was a kid, it had been a thing. But the finances of that are very hard, especially when you’re talking about a camp where he’s not even charging all the parents to send their kids to camp. I haven’t lived [in Atlanta] in quite some time, so it’s like, “how do I give back to the city that made me even though I’m in a different state?” I’m like, “a 24-hour podcast sounds insane. No one else would do that, so I should probably do that. If I can actually pull off this shtick and get the people, maybe we’ll do a fundraiser!” Everyone that I reached out to said yes, everyone was really excited. And we raised, like, 26k and sent the whole camp to the Open! It felt really good. It was exciting for me. They were coming to the city I was living in, so being able to greet all these kids, some of whom knew me, others were young, some people were campers that had become counselors or chaperones. It will always be one of my career highlights… The intended result happened, which was that it began a tradition of this camp going to the U.S. Open. It’s still happening.
II: “The Federer-Nadal rivalry is what got me to really start paying attention.”
Nathan: I think in all the common experiences people have with [Federer], there’s kind of this sense that it’s a very beautiful style of play. Feels very creative and spontaneous. I think people respond to that instinctively, and they’re kind of responding to it again now with Carlos [Alcaraz], so you know it’s not a one-off phenomenon. Although it can be hard to characterize, you just kind of know it when you see it.
Brian Phillips: My brain is going to the world of visual art for some reason. It’s the same with certain museum experiences that you could have. You kind of roll your eyes at all the stuff people say about Michelangelo, but when you’re actually standing under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it’s like, “oh, fuck! Everything people have ever said about this is true.” I think with Federer, it’s just that those qualities, as marketed to death as they are, and as hackneyed as so much of the discourse around them can quickly become, they just feel so real and so pure when you’re watching him that the rest of that stuff seems kind of insignificant.
Nathan: I remember a couple of my friends were also fans. It’s so funny, but at the time, I think when Rafa first came on the scene, we called him a pusher.
Caira Conner (tennis contributor, New York Magazine): I’m a couple years younger than Federer. A couple of years older than Nadal and Djokovic, which is crazy to think about. I was growing up literally as the Big Three were coming onto the stage, and I was in high school at the same time that Venus and Serena were making their mark. I grew up in the most unbelievable era I think that the sport has had, on both sides.
Browne: We think of dynasties in the team setting, but the Big Three was like a dynasty.
Nguyen: I liked losers. I liked mess. I appreciate when somebody makes something look hard, but they overcome it. I wasn’t a big Federer person. I couldn’t stand it. I was like, “he makes it look way too easy, and it’s not.” So at the time I gravitated towards Andy [Murray], who made it look so hard, and at the time Novak as well.
Willis: The Federer-Nadal rivalry is what got me to really start paying attention when I was about 14. Completely by accident, I stumbled on the next-day-replay of their first meeting in Miami in 2004, when I was flipping through channels on Sky Sports. The way that match seemed to play out looked very new and original to me at the time. It didn’t really look like most other tennis matches I’d seen, with their very different strokes and point patterns contrasting each other so harshly. I watched a lot more tennis from that point on, even clipping older rivalries like Borg and McEnroe and Graf and Seles so I could watch them later.
Nathan: I think it took having two worthy rivals to put [Federer’s] greatness into perspective. Because in the beginning, you’re like, “okay, maybe this is just a weak generation.” But as enough time passes, it’s, “no, these are the three best players ever, and they happened to coincide and make each other better.”
Tignor: There’s definitely some incredible Federer highlight reels from certain tournaments in his prime. I watched a half-hour one from the 2007 Australian Open. It cuts out all the errors and sticks with the winners, but I don’t think you’ll find a better example of just playing tennis than that.
Jon Wertheim (executive editor and senior writer, Sports Illustrated): In I think ‘07, a publisher asked if I could do a Roger Federer book. I go to the Federer camp, I approach them, and they essentially said, “knock yourself out. We’re not gonna stand in your way. Roger isn’t ready to write his own book.” And then Federer lost in Australia in 2008, and he got absolutely crushed by Nadal at the French Open. I think he lost in Indian Wells along the way. It was a rough year. I sort of said, “Uh-oh, I don’t know what’s going on with this book. No one’s gonna want a Federer book if this is the end. He’s on this two-major losing streak!” Which, at the time, was, “holy cow!” And then all of a sudden [Federer and Nadal] had the magical match at Wimbledon, and I sort of said, “a-ha, I think I may have a way to salvage this project.”
Nathan: I had really been tuning into tennis during the prime monopoly years of Roger, and I’d seen him close down so many other players’ careers. So I found it really interesting to watch what I saw to be his enormous empire slowly being encroached upon by [Nadal]. Surface by surface, he’s figuring it out here, he’s figuring it out there. He’s coming to grass now, which we thought was the last holdout for Roger, and he’s beating him in the Wimbledon final.
Conner: Tennis was those characters. To be able to count on the predictability of Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer on the men’s side: they’re always going to get to the quarterfinals, semifinals, finals. That is so outrageous! And that was the case for, like, 20 years!
Willis: I think each of the three are borderline crazy, and that their usually light and breezy demeanor in interviews or media for the most part successfully conceals three of the most driven, weird, obsessive, competitive human beings on the planet.
Thomas: These athletes are super-competitive. That’s just not a way to be. We admire it, for sure, and we pretend that’s the way we should be, but it’s not. The better way to be is to learn to accept your faults, and learn from them, and not base your entire existence on domination. But that’s what we celebrate in an athlete. It’s probably unhealthy.
Nguyen: For me, it was personalities. And then along with that was the psychology behind tennis. That’s the one thing that has never wavered in terms of my interest in the sport, what I like about it, what I dislike about it, or what pisses me off. The one thing I’ve always remained fascinated about is just how they do this. Once you truly understand the rigors of the sport —the schedule, the flying, the loneliness—and you talk to particularly the women, the obstacles they have to manage on a daily basis from when they were eight years old to however old they are now…There was this empathy that I had for them in trying to understand why they do it. It remains a mystery to me.
Tignor: There’s a whole tradition of legendary women’s players. You get to see women competing against each other, which you don’t see in baseball, football, even pro basketball until recently. I think the women bring something different personality-wise to the sport. Sometimes when I watch the men, an average men’s match, it can look like two guys doing their job. It’s a job, we’re gonna do it. But I never really feel that much with the women. Their personality, their emotions, what they have at stake in the match is a little more on the surface.
Nguyen: [Tennis] became my soap opera. The players became my stories. This person got a W! Not in a literal sense, but it was a good day for her! And then three days later, it was a bad day for her! It’s like watching Days of Our Lives. It’s just emotional whiplash all the time.
III: “Imagine if you had a combat sport in which you actually had to win by knockout. That’s kind of what tennis is.”
Nguyen: Your doubt is reflected, physically, in what you do out there.
Conner: I was such a recreational player that mostly what I felt [while playing] was joy. But certainly, in high school I remember stressful moments when I would completely freeze and then double fault an entire game. That’s all mental, that kind of paralysis that comes in at a high-stakes moment, and you just totally choke.
Tignor: Hitting a ball into a court and hitting it well is a very fine-tuned thing. Anything that gets in the way like nerves or too many thoughts throws you off. I play squash, and one of the things I like about squash is that it’s hard to hit the ball out. You’re hitting a ball against the wall. And even if you get nervous, at least when I play, there’s never nerves to the point that I’m going to miss a shot. Whereas in tennis, nerves really affect every shot, every swing you take. It’s easy to hit the ball out.
Thomas: I was the kind of player who became tight very easily. I was sort of notorious for my upright collapses. I would be playing first-to-ten-points, and I would go up 6-0, and then lose 10-7. In fact, I didn’t even like to compete later on, because I became so tight.
Browne: I remember being a junior tennis player, and being really good…[pauses] but often losing. To people I shouldn’t lose to. This is a real scenario: I was up at some country club in Georgia. Only black kid. It was giving some not-great, kind of classist, racist vibes at this tournament. Me and my mom were there. I was playing against these kids, this white kid, and I was beating the brakes off him. At some point in the second set, this kid looked so sad. There were a bunch of people, his family looked pissed, and all this shit. I remember my mind completely leaving the tennis match, and I was like, “damn, man. I’m about to fuck up his whole life.” I wanted to win. I obviously always wanted to win. But I would start to have this compassion for the other person that worked directly against having a killer instinct. Next thing I know, it wasn’t like I was ever trying to miss, but I would take my foot off the gas. And not in the complacent way of, “I’m killing him, I’m gonna win.” It’s just that the overall intensity of the match would decrease as I got closer to the finish line, which would often result in a comeback, and then instead of being like, “okay, time to come back,” then I’d just get mad at myself. And then, I’m like, “Rem! Why’d you spend so much time worrying about this kid? Now you lost! Now he’s happy, and fuck that kid!”
Thomas: Tennis is a sport in which you actually can talk about psychology, because when a player gets tight, it really affects their game in a very visible way. A real way. Whereas in basketball, things like the hot hand are, if not a myth, then marginal things. Slumps are not quite due to moments of tightness in quite the same way that they are in tennis. So there’s a freedom to talk about how human beings respond under pressure. You can do it in a looser way than you can if you’re talking about Antetokounmpo.
Vallejo: Whenever someone doesn’t double fault on a second serve on break point, set point, match point, I’m amazed. I would double fault all the time.
Christopher Clarey (former tennis writer, The New York Times; founder and writer, Tennis and Beyond): I remember Agassi telling us—I’m sure other people had good lines about this beforehand, but I was there when he said this—you just can’t run out the clock. You can’t run out the clock in tennis.
Nguyen: The scoring system plays into all the hopes and dreams that you could possibly have, because it’s never over, and you always have to win the last point, and there’s no clock to run out. There’s no target other than having to win that last point. So in that way, it gives every underdog the belief that anything is possible in any given moment. Even right down to, it’s match point: 6-0, 5-0, 40-love. I’m about to get Golden Match-ed. And that dude might blow out his knee, and I might win. Anything can happen. But at the same time, that’s a two-sided coin. And the flip side is that anything can happen. You can be up 6-0, 5-0, 40-love, and you can blow out your knee.
Kang: Every time I win anything, I’m never happy after the last point, I just feel this immense sense of relief that I didn’t choke it away. And I think there are a lot of players like that on the pro tour. Yeah, they’re happy, but they’re also like, “thank God I didn’t screw that up!” [laughs]
Vallejo: I always tell people who don’t know tennis, tennis is unique in that you can’t just play well for 30 minutes and then wait it out. In soccer, you can do that. If you’re up 3-0, you can change the way you play and not go for much. But in tennis, you have to get to that point. And until you get to that point, nothing you did before matters.
Wertheim: Even in boxing, even in brutal combat sports, you can change your tactics to stall for the final bell, or the final horn in MMA. Imagine if you had a combat sport and you had to actually win by knockout. You couldn’t downshift. That’s kind of what tennis is.
Nathan: After one of those matches that [Andrey] Rublev had, when he had match points for and against him, he talked about how playing tennis matches like that is like having a gun to your head.
Browne: Your arm becomes Jell-O. You’ve done this thing, serve a ball into the opposite side, ten million times. And then suddenly, you forget how to toss the tennis ball. And you forget how to strike it cleanly. Then after you get it in, you forget to move your feet and be in the point because you’re so happy that the serve went in. It’s just a great game. It’s so beautifully maddening.
Clarey: There’s a lot of time to think. It’s a complete test. You have to be thinking through, but if you don’t let your reactions come naturally, I think you suffer. You want to be physically hyper-fit, but also somehow flowing and relaxed to play your best.
Nguyen: I remember Petra [Kvitova] saying this about [Caroline] Garcia last year, when she was playing really well, “I love Caroline’s game. And I have such admiration for her because you don’t understand how hard it is for players like us to do that. To commit without blinking to this high-risk, high-reward game.” Because when you play that way — Ostapenko is different, because I don’t think Ostapenko questions herself ever — but with Petra and Caroline and Madi [Keys] at times, they have the wherewithal when their insecurity taps in, like, “oh, maybe I shouldn’t do it this way.” They start to pull back a little bit, and then everything falls apart. So Petra was like, “to be able to play pedal-to-the-metal tennis is so hard, and I respect it so much.” I was like, oh, okay. Never thought of it that way. I almost thought it was easier to blind-faith bash the ball. Petra was like, “no, it’s actually really hard.”
Tignor: That doubt, it comes back, it just always comes back. I guess the good players just remember that. McEnroe has said he, at some stage in every match he played, he felt he choked. Even in the matches he won. That’s involved in the sport and you just have to accept that. I’ve had trouble accepting that. It’s not so much that you have a fear of losing — at least for me, it’s a fear of choking. That’s the stigma, that’s the thing that really bothers people, or really bothers me: the idea that you could’ve won but you just choked. You don’t want to think that you got so nervous that you blew it. It’s okay to lose — maybe the other person is better — but you don’t want to choke.
Nguyen: What is the point? What is the point of all this? What is the point of a lead? Who cares anymore? All of the pressures of the scoring system are made up! It’s all in your own head. Okay, I’m down triple break point. Is that a big deal? We are told that it’s a big deal. But is it? It doesn’t have to be, right?
Tignor: When you think of love-40, I guess the idea is to just play the next point without what we typically put on love-40: “oh, the game’s over.” Just ignore that. I liked Nadal’s ability to be down love-40 and win a point and really rev himself up in a way that I had never seen before. Normally, you’re down love-40 and you win a point and you still feel like you’re gonna lose [the game]. But he would almost put some pressure on himself—okay, I can come back, I should come back in this game—instead of being resigned.
Conner: Obviously their bodies know what to do, they’ve been training and playing for decades. So it really does come down to a mindset. Even in my dinky matches that I played in high school, I remember: you start losing, and you get so down on yourself, and it really does come down to a shift of, can you just change and be like, “okay, just start over, this one point, and then the next point, and then the next point.”
Browne: There’s a reason people break their rackets. You’re mad at yourself. You’re like, “I’m better than this. I know how to do this.” Because you do know how to do this. If you’ve been playing tennis, you have the right fundamentals. You know that you should be moving your feet, you know you should split-step. You know all these things, but when you get into match play, there’s a really good chance that it all falls apart. And then you’re like, “I know how to do this. Why can’t I?”
Tignor: [Laslo] Djere [at the U.S. Open against Novak Djokovic] went up two sets and then immediately lost a game early in the third and knew he was done. If he’d kept going into the third, maybe Djokovic gets a little more rattled. But that’s the downside. We say the person who’s lower ranked has nothing to lose. But they really have nothing to lose until they get that kind of lead. People tell themselves, “oh, I have nothing to lose,” but you have nothing to lose until you have a lead that you can lose, you know?
Thomas: People recoil from losing. It’s painful! I have a toddler, and she hates to lose. Physically, she will do anything to deny the fact that she lost, short of cheating. She will try to immediately play again so that she can escape that feeling of having lost. Part of life is coming to terms with it. It’s part of growing up. Some people never do, and those are our champions. That’s why they are not healthy individuals, actually. I’m joking, but also not.
Willis: Tennis is one of the most pure sports on earth because the best players actually do win nearly all the time, and it doesn’t suffer from time management/wasting strategies that clock-based sports do.
Brian Phillips: If you are Djokovic living in Djokovic’s subjective experience, you’re aware of the billion moments in any match when things can go wrong, and you’re aware of how hard you have to work to stay on top, and you’re aware of all the pitfalls and perils and chances to fail that you have to overcome daily, weekly, monthly in every match. As a spectator, it doesn’t feel that way at all. He’s so good, and he’s been so good for so long, he’s been a fait accompli for so long, that it always feels to me like a done deal that he’s going to win. He’s had some experiences recently where he hasn’t actually won, against Alcaraz [at Wimbledon] he hasn’t actually won the match we assumed he was gonna win, but Alcaraz can be up two sets to love, 5-love in the third and have three match points, and I’m still convinced Djokovic is going to turn it around.
Wertheim: What Djokovic does when a match tightens is hard to quantify, it’s hard to describe. It probably means more to his success than any breakdown of his ability to return serve, or his flexibility.
Tignor: He seems to be nervous at the beginning of these big matches. When he starts to get tired in the first set of the French Open, that has to be from nerves. But then when he relaxes, he doesn’t seem to have the same trouble closing. I’m sure he does, I’m sure he gets nervous, but it’s a different kind of thing than with Rafa, it seems.
Brian Phillips: He’s so good at weathering the best punch anybody can throw at him, and looking like he’s hurt, looking like he’s finished, and then somehow you realize, oh, he actually barely lost any ground during that whole period when the other guy was playing out of his mind… With Nadal, who’s the other great player of this generation for battling back, Nadal looks like he’s battling back. With Nadal, it’s like he has to battle back for, like, an hour and a half before you can say, “okay, he’s battled back.” Somehow, with Djokovic, it seems like there’s a 45-second exchange, and at the end, you’re like, “wait a second! How is he back?”
Vallejo: This is the guy who won a match hitting 100 unforced errors, all over the court. It’s only those extremely resourceful players who can win even though stuff goes wrong. And stuff goes wrong for them all the time. One debate that I hate is, “at his best, x would beat y.” What is that? This theoretical, platonic ideal of a player. How does that matter? At their best, anyone beats anyone. The point is to win on this day, at this time, when you have to play this match.
Nathan: It’s not scripted entertainment. There’s no one who went through and designed the narrative beats. You just have to pray that the two players match up in a way that produces something compelling. That in itself is kind of the magic of it. There’s no grand design. People are just determining their fate, shot by shot.
IV: “It is entirely on you, all the time.”
Brian Phillips: The season is never-ending, or at least it’s really long. There are these hard context resets where maybe you have to go from playing on your best surface to playing on your worst surface.
Tignor: It’s a lot of hotels, airports and locker rooms. There’s not a lot of variety, it’s very enclosed. Even though you’re traveling, you don’t have the luxury of doing much besides focusing on your tennis. I guess it depends on the level. If you’re ranked 100th, I would feel like it’s very much…[pauses] I’m trying to think of words other than “lonely.”
Pete Bodo (senior writer, Tennis.com): You’re really an island. It’s all on you, every day. That’s a fact. I tend to look at the flip side of some of these things, when people talk about how tough tennis is, I’m like, “well, yeah, but on the other hand…” But that’s one area where you can’t really argue. It is entirely on you, all the time.
Kang: The injuries, the loneliness of just flying around all the time and lugging these tennis bags around, going to different cities—you’ve been there like six times before, but you haven’t really seen the city at all because you’re just there to play this tennis tournament—always being around the same people that you must get sick of, like your team. And these are the players who can actually afford that.
Conner: Apart from the upper, upper echelon, it’s so expensive and difficult to even be on tour.
Vallejo: I think tennis is just such a hard, hard sport. And it’s not surprising that it might be losing ground to other sports globally. Because, even Djokovic was saying it, it’s just such an expensive sport for anybody. If you’ve never played and you want to play, you have to sink in, what, 200 bucks, at least, to get a decent racket, some strings, some shoes? And then good luck finding a court.
Wertheim: I remember when I started covering the sport — I’m dating myself — in the 90s, and I saw players putting food in backpacks from the players’ lounge, bananas and bagels in their backpacks from the players’ lounge. Pete Sampras, this wasn’t his life, and Andre Agassi, this wasn’t his life. But you didn’t have to go that far down. This wasn’t the Yankees vs. a beer league softball game. This was Andre Agassi vs. the guy he played: One of them got there in a private jet, and the other one was putting bagels in his backpack so he wouldn’t have to pay for breakfast the next morning. It’s brutal.
Brian Phillips: That great David Foster Wallace essay about Michael Joyce, about being one of the 150 best in the world at something but still barely being good enough to scrape by as a pro, is the paradigmatic example, I think.
Conner: You’re one of the 100 best in the world at something that you do! And it’s not really sustainable to make a living.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips: I wish everyone knew the accommodations made for the top players at tournaments so they had a sense of just how much the lower-ranked players at these tournaments are at a disadvantage when they play them.
Tignor: I think it’s the one sport where you’re left to your own devices a lot. If you’re a bench player in the NBA or baseball, you’re still with the team. All of your travel details are taken care of. Tennis, not really. There’s no team there to back you up. You find your own coach, you pay your own coach. Then you have to do your own flights, you have to do your own hotels, you’re very scheduled. You have to find a person to practice with. But you also have to find the right time to eat, the right thing to eat, in a new city.
Brian Phillips: You’re not famous, and you’re not even going to make really big money unless you’re in that top three or four in the world. The drop-off is astonishing in tennis between the income tiers.
Tignor: Every single player in the top 20, and maybe even in the top 100, thought at one point that they were going to be number one. They were sure. And they continued almost to get there — to make the top 20 is incredible — but then they’re not quite that person. It’s Alcaraz instead of [Stefanos] Tsitsipas. Tsitsipas, I’m sure, thought he was gonna be winning grand slams and becoming the next great player. But it turns out to be Alcaraz, and he can’t seem to beat Alcaraz. I hope they have the perspective to know that there’s only one #1 player. Being in the top 20, getting as far as they have, is pretty amazing. Especially from the perspective of somebody like me, who played. I never thought I was gonna be number one in the world, but when I was younger, I thought, “maybe I could become a pro.” But I wasn’t even close. There are so many thousands of people below Tsitsipas; I hope he has that perspective and isn’t like, “well, I’m not Alcaraz, so I’m not anybody, I’m not anything.” But I’m sure it’s especially hard for somebody who thought he could be the best and may still think he can be the best to just get beaten.
Vallejo: The hard thing in tennis is to get somebody to improve on something. That is the thing. I don’t even know how you do it, I don’t know how it’s done. Sometimes it’s even temporary. People are saying that Coco’s forehand is saved… I didn’t think so. Djokovic is a good example of this. In 2009, he switches to [racket brand] HEAD. And all of a sudden, the forehand’s gone. And then he gets hurt in 2010, and his serve is gone. How you overcome that, how you actually manage to get better, these guys have made us think that getting better is a given. Or that if they work hard, they can get better. But I’m pretty sure Andy Murray practiced that second serve a lot. And tried many things to make it better. And it doesn’t! Sometimes it doesn’t. These guys actually got better because they’re aliens.
Nguyen: I love that you just get to paint your own picture. Ultimately, yes, maybe Andy [Murray] banging the ball would get him 15% more wins and ease some of the strain on his body. Maybe. But one, can you do it, can you physically do it? I don’t know. And two, does he even want to play that way? Does that bring him joy? You think about somebody like a Kyrgios—if you had a disciplined Nick Kyrgios, is this somebody I want to watch? Is this something that makes that person special? Andy bashing would be weird.
Browne: If you exist at the same time as a [Michael] Jordan, or pop up in a Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era, it’s just like, “how is there any room for me?” If Serena doesn’t exist, 13, 14 other people have Grand Slams.
Kang: To know that you can’t beat someone is crazy. Brad Gilbert lost to Ivan Lendl 17 times in a row. Brad Gilbert was a pretty good tennis player. When you lose to this guy 17 times in a row, I can’t even imagine getting ready for the match! [laughs]
Vallejo: In tennis, as has been proven repeatedly, when there’s blood in the water, they go at you. They want it. And they try. But, you know, those guys just…For example, when Tsitsipas came up, he beat [Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic] early on. I was thinking he was a real problem for Djokovic. And look what happened. How many times straight is it that [Djokovic] has beaten him now, eight or nine times? These guys just have too many tools. They can overcome any initial setbacks. Because they play the long game. They lose to one of those [younger players] now, they shake their hands, and they study. They think. And they eventually overcome them. That’s rare. That’s not supposed to happen, especially with young versus old.
Bodo: Everyone says they want to be #1, they want to be in the top 10. But nobody really means it. They mean it in the sense that they’re willing to do the work and probably do the work every day, and that’s admirable. But surely there’s a reason why there are guys ranked 40th and guys ranked #1. I think we are tempted to over-emphasize the psychic nature of things, the mental challenges and things like that. The other side is that it’s a pretty nice way of life. There are satisfactions. You win two rounds, you feel pretty good about yourself.
Thomas: When you’re young, you kind of assume you’ll have more chances. You probably will, if you’re really good. But maybe not. When you have more experience, you know how hard it is, and you know how rare it is to have these chances. You think, “oh my god, this is my best chance. This could be my only chance.” Whereas I think that feeling of, “this could be my only chance” is not something that enters the mind of the inexperienced in quite the same way.
Bodo: There’s only so far you can run from reality before it catches you. And as you get older, it catches up more and more.
Willis: Tennis, and most sports but tennis especially, is incredibly fucked up in that once a player realises that the gap isn’t so big between them and the very very best, i.e. they are at 98% and the truly elite are at 100%, it suddenly dawns on them how differently weighted the final 2% is. This realization is almost completely invisible before reaching that 98% point, like a concealed wall. Work ethic, privilege, resources, luck—both randomness and injury—et cetera combine to make that last 2% unbelievably elusive.
Vallejo: I remember asking Steve Johnson about that in Houston. It wasn’t a presser question, the presser had ended and I kind of tagged along and walked out with the guy. I said, “what is it like to be with those monsters?” He said, “oh, man, it’s just so tough.” They feel it. That’s the thing—you play these guys, and they make you feel it.
Thomas: What you want from someone is to have a happy attitude about losing. You want someone to really believe that it’s the process that matters, not the outcome. But, of course, we’re obsessed with outcome! And so are tennis players! But the goal would be to not be obsessed with outcome. The goal would be to really believe that process matters. I don’t think that tour life is particularly healthy for anyone.
Brian Phillips: You’re always thinking about your ranking points, and how many points do I need to qualify for X tournament, and how much money do I need to make to pay my team? You’re kind of like a traveling small business. It feels in a way less like being a pretty good NBA player or a pretty good NFL player and more like being in a not-very-famous band that can just about make a living touring. You’re in a van every day, schlepping your own gear but also having to pay people, and dealing with new venues every night. You look at bands like that, and you’re like, “how do you guys still love music so much?”
Wertheim: It is so brutal, even at the tippy-tippy-top level. And I also think we just don’t understand what it takes to be good at this sport. You can be very good, not great, at basketball, and it’s a great life. You have a guaranteed contract, and if you get hurt you still get paid. If you’re not all that good or you’re aging, the coach can find a role for you. I’m watching Venus Williams out there, and you don’t bring her in off the bench, you don’t change her role, you don’t say, “oh, you’re gonna be the designated hitter.” She’s out there, she’s 43 years old, she’s won seven majors, and she’s still vulnerable! She’s still on the big stage, and there’s nowhere to go, and there’s no one to blame, and the amount of courage that takes I don’t think we always properly respect.
Bodo: You have to have the drive and determination to be [a champion]. I think that’s a form of greed. It may not express itself in monetary terms, although eventually it often does. But it’s a form of greed, it’s a form of hunger, it’s an insatiable hunger for attention and glory. It’s obviously manifested sometimes in very positive and quiet ways, but don’t for a minute think that Roger Federer doesn’t just love every minute of being Roger Federer.
Tignor: Tommy Paul doesn’t seem to have any problem being number 15. That’s why he’ll never be number one. He doesn’t care that much. He doesn’t base his whole life on being number one. I think Medvedev would not be happy being number five. He wants to be number one. Tommy Paul seems satisfied where he is. Taylor Fritz does seem to want more, to do more. So I think it depends on the person as to how fulfilled they are. I would like to think that Tommy Paul’s attitude is not a terrible one. It’s not what we want from athletes, you want the athlete to hate losing every time and to want to be number one. But somebody like Tommy Paul, that’s not a bad way to live, just being satisfied being number 15 to 12.
Kang: You start to realize that there’s a depth of ability that is, for lack of a better word, God-given. It’s a very humbling thought. With Michael [Chang], for example, his brother Carl was a very good tennis player too. Great junior career, beat a lot of the same guys that Michael beat. Agassi, Sampras, he played them too. But what’s the difference between the two? Michael’s five-foot-seven, five-foot-eight. He’s tiny. Why is he the one who ends up being the pro, who wins the French Open at the age of 17 and winning Kalamazoo at the age of 15 or 16? Why is he the prodigy? There’s no real explanation for it except that there’s something kind of special about him where he never loses. Every instinct that he has is the correct one. You can’t really teach that type of stuff.
Bodo: You need a little bit of luck. Maybe a lot of luck. You just can’t afford to blow out a knee. If you come to a match that is potentially crucial to your confidence without even knowing it—just extrapolating here, maybe a final of a 14-and-under-tournament. That could potentially have a devastating effect on you, winning or losing that match. If you happen to win that match, maybe the other guy had a bad hamburger that afternoon, and he played poorly. It’s kind of like those one-armed bandit machines: you’ve gotta pull three cherries. And somebody always pulls three cherries, right? Doesn’t somebody always hit the jackpot? Well, there he is. There’s your tennis champion.
Brian Phillips: It really does seem like it would require a kind of dogged determination and a willingness to grind it out constantly, and I do feel like it would be hard to preserve your love for the sport under those circumstances.
Tignor: I think it would be a fun thing to do for a while. I’m sometimes surprised to see people keeping at it into their 30s.
Conner: I’m sure it’s not the case for all of them, but some of the [players] I’ve profiled love to compete. Did you read Agassi’s Open memoir? He didn’t love it! But assuming they love it, they love the competition, the pros outweigh the many, many cons of being on tour.
Thomas: Caroline Wozniacki talked about the high she gets from playing tennis. A physical high with the endorphins. Competition is a drug, adrenaline is a drug. And you can’t replicate that anywhere else. You just can’t. Part of it is also that this is what they know. This is what they love. And they don’t know other things. Most of them did not go to college. Most of them don’t have too much outside interest. This is what they do, what they’ve always done. It’s their identity. Of course it’s hard to give that up.
Wertheim: Imagine someone saying, “you can retire, but just know, you are never going to be as good at anything again as you are at this.” I would hang around as long as I could too.
V: “What don’t we know about what happens behind the scenes, or off-court, or what your life is like?”
Conner: Right before the U.S. Open, I interviewed Ons Jabeur, and she’s been really open and candid about how difficult it is for women really having to pick between having a family or to keep competing because of the much more limited options available to them. There’s many more complicated things behind the scenes that go into it besides just showing up on court and being able to play.
Nguyen: I remember when Roger had his kids, I was with Sports Illustrated, so I’d go to his press conferences. And all these men would ask him, “oh, do you think your kids are gonna play tennis?” And he’s like, “oh, yeah, that’d be great!” And I just remember looking around the room and going, are you guys crazy? You should not want your child to be in this! I guess if they’re a dude, sure, because if you’re gonna be a male athlete, this is one of the male athlete sports. But for the girls, I don’t know. I don’t know why anybody would have chosen this life knowing what it would actually entail from a week-to-week basis.
Vallejo: If [women] want to have kids, they can’t really play. You can’t pull a Federer, have two sets of twins and still tour the world.
Nguyen: I had a conversation with Dmitry Tursunov when he was still coaching [Aryna] Sabalenka. Dmitry was getting success with Aryna, she had incorporated more variety into her game, more spin, more angle, better hands, all that. I asked him, “why now? Why is this being incorporated? Was it hard to get her on board?” I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’ve said this to Aryna, and she agrees with this. But [Tursunov] said, “when she was growing up, her coaches basically told her, ‘you’re too stupid to play real tennis. So just see the ball, hit the ball.’ And that was what she was taught.” And it wasn’t until she got coaches in place as an adult that she has now rounded out her game. I was thinking about that a lot, and it led me to this other hypothesis that I have, which is: If you’re a tennis coach — and let’s set aside the brand-name, well-proven, top-line coaches — but if you’re just a mid-level tennis coach, if you’re good, chances are you got picked up by an ATP player. Because there’s more money there, and you would take that job. That’s where the more prestigious jobs are, not because they’re more meaningful, but because those guys have more money. So if you think about that and trickle it down all the way to junior-level, recreation-level, club-level, when these girls are just starting to play tennis, the question is: Who are these coaches that are teaching these girls from a fundamental basis when they’re six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, just coming through the ranks? Probably not the best coaches. Just generally speaking, I’m going to guess that they’re also coaches who probably don’t have a ton of respect for these girls.
Willis: Tennis is also a bit weird in that there really aren’t that many good coaches in the sport. They’re gold dust. So getting the right team around a player from a formative age can be brutally difficult, circumstance based, and hugely influential early on.
Clarey: A lot of people who start the game start in very precarious situations. It’s a super expensive sport, highly technical sport, helps to start very young. That creates a pretty unhealthy set of circumstances for a lot of young players where they become dependent on coaches and put themselves in some vulnerable spots.
Nguyen: Ash Barty was a unicorn, because Ash Barty had a coach who was like, “you’re tiny, and you’re absolutely capable of serving big, of playing a well-rounded, throwback game.” He believed in her, that she could do it. But you take an Ash Barty and you put her in another coach’s hands, and it’s like, “you’re small, you can only run.” Again, if you’re a good coach, a guy’s gonna pluck you. And you’re probably gonna be able to make 3-4 times more than what a woman can pay you. Maybe less. At least double, probably. So what is the quality base that you have from a coaching perspective? What are these players hearing about what they need to do, how to play their games? It’s no surprise that the top players have coaches who are willing to round out their games. Sometimes down lower in the ranks, it’s a lot more, “ugh, you’re not good enough. Maybe just focus on this.” I think, foundationally, there is an issue coming up.
Clarey: Jelena Dokic is talking openly now as an adult and a prominent commentator in Australia about the abuse that she suffered and hiding out in the Wimbledon players’ lounge, afraid of her own father and afraid of abuse. All that was kind of happening in plain sight. We were covering her, and we knew her father was kind of a loose cannon, but no one was really able to stop that from happening. I feel regret about that as a journalist, not having uncovered some of those stories along the way, especially at that time when there were probably fewer safeguards in place.
Conner: “What do you wish people knew about tennis?” That’s a question that I would want to know [the answer to] from more players. What do you wish people understood more about this life? Or about what [the players] go through? That’s not a question for you or for me, but that’s something I’m always wanting to know. What don’t we know about what happens behind the scenes, or off-court, or what your life is like?
VI: “I just want you to be happy.”
Wertheim: The question I get most often now is, “what’s the future?” We don’t have Federer, who knows about Nadal, we don’t have Serena. I think it’s gonna be a lot different. I think it’s naive to say, “nothing to see here, everything’s fine.” But this U.S. Open gives you a lot of hope. You had record ratings, record crowds, and I don’t know if anyone said, “boy, this isn’t the same sport now that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal and Serena Williams aren’t here.” It’s gonna be a lot different, you’re not gonna have three guys win 20-plus majors in the same generation, I don’t think, but I think the sport will be just fine.
Nathan: I was lucky to have a good seat to the women’s [U.S. Open] final and a lot of Coco’s matches this year. Her movement is pretty phenomenal, and the balls she puts back into play are truly comical. I’m really excited to watch her play the great offensive players that are piling up on the WTA right now.
Browne: I was on the New Balance website yesterday looking at which Coco shoes I’m gonna get to play in and lose some tennis matches in. I was like, “actually, maybe I won’t get Coco shoes yet until I get better, because I don’t want to lose in her shoes. I’ll keep wearing my K-Swisses until the game gets a little bit better.” Coco’s awesome.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips: In one sense tennis is doing fine in that there are truly wonderful players on tour, young and old. On the other hand, the backstage curtain is being raised on several infrastructural problems affecting the game in general and players in particular: unplayable surfaces at the Challenger level, to problems resulting from gambling, to online harassment, to performance enhancement, to the spate of wrist injuries in the game. There’s certainly room for improvement.
Vallejo: Tennis demands a lot. It is probably the most demanding sport there is by the nature of how tournaments are arranged. All those matches during the week whittle down to the big final, and always the possibility of it could be special, it could be mediocre, it could not happen, or it could just be downright terrible. I feel like we’re in an age when we like things to work, we like things to be predictable, we like things to deliver — at least on some semblance of a level — and the problem tennis has, I think, is that it just can’t guarantee you anything. I mean, until recently, it could barely guarantee you that a match was going to happen because of rain. Rain! [pauses] Rain.
Nguyen: I always say, if I were to write a book, it would be, How Tennis Explains the World. So much of what I know about the world at large—politically, financially, economically, sociologically, anthropologically, psychologically, everything—all of it, I see in tennis. It’s all right there. In the cultures within each country, how they play their tennis, how tennis grew or did not grow in countries. In women’s tennis, it’s even more stark to me. Because within men’s tennis, there is a framework for the male professional athlete. Regardless of sport. There are pathways. Whereas for women, every single one of them has a pretty individualized way that they were able to problem solve and cobble together a career, and make it. And it’s all different, because they all come from different families, different countries, different cultures, different resource havens. It’s not hard to make it compelling. You just have to sit down and try.
Nathan: You get to do a mini-profile every time you’re writing about a tennis match. You’re watching an athlete go through something emotionally intense, and respond to it, and bark at their box or at themselves, and make whatever tactical adjustments, or fail to adjust. It all happens in this little crucible.
Vallejo: Tennis has the ability to take you into a different dimension, where time works differently. Whatever your life is is far away. You’re just synced into this situation that’s happening. And it’s enthralling. At its best, you can’t look away. Because you’re thinking that something special is happening.
Conner: “That is one of the best matches I’ve ever seen!” I’ve said that, like, 500 times. But yeah, it has the ability, if you watch a good match, it does, it becomes the best match you’ve ever seen. Until the next one.
Clarey: There are a lot of contrasting requirements in tennis, and I think that makes it something you can never master, despite the name of my book. I think things you can’t ever master hold your interest both from the outside and from the inside. I think those are the best things in life in a lot of ways. Because you never quite get there. Very Rafa-like. You’re always chasing. You’re always chasing it.
Willis: Tennis is an amazing canvas, I think the best in all of sport, for stories.
Tignor: There’s the simplicity. Two people. One person vs. one person. You see all of their emotions. They’re doing it themselves, so you feel like you have a different relationship with the player than you do in an NBA game. You see all the vulnerabilities as the person tries to do all these things by themselves. I think that’s compelling.
Wertheim: I would say, “ask yourself what you like in a sport.” It is physical, it is spiritual. You are vulnerable and exposed. The glory of victory is yours and defeat falls on your shoulders. It is men and it is women. We think nothing of celebrating a teenager who wins a tournament one day and a 36-year-old father whose kids are closer in age to the aforementioned teenager than they are to him the next day. This is a sport that accommodates a vast diversity of body types. It’s played all over the world. Make a list of the attributes you want in a sport and see how many of those are met with tennis.
Nguyen: I remember telling the Netflix people this. The sport sells itself. The sport. The personalities don’t always sell themselves, but the sport does. You get people to sit at a tennis match, and they will find it riveting.
Vallejo: I’m gonna quote my friend Brodie, who we used to do a podcast with at The Changeover. He said, “tennis is the best sport for people with addictive tendencies.” And it’s true, because it just offers you a continuous supply of the drug.
Conner: I don’t really watch any other sports. I watch the Super Bowl, or playoffs. But there’s nothing that brings me both the comfort and joy all year long that tennis does.
Thomas: I have kids, so I barely ever play anymore. But when I was playing regularly, I loved it. I would get off the court and I would look forward to the next time I would play.
Brian Phillips: The thing I always want to talk about when I talk about tennis is how silly it is. We tend to talk about tennis in this very serious way, and it’s all true, but the only reason why tennis gets to be so serious is because we’ve all collectively decided to take what is fundamentally a really ridiculous thing to do—like, we’re gonna go run around on a lawn and bat a ball back and forth with some sticks! And millions of people around the world have collectively agreed to invest it with this meaning. Sometimes when we’re so inside it, it feels like you’re in The Iliad or something. I’ve literally written pieces where I treat it as The Iliad. But to me, it’s always important to zoom out and realize that it’s the goofiest Iliad you could possibly imagine. To me, that says something kind of lovely about human beings and their imaginations, and our capacity to take something so wonderfully random and make it into this life-or-death epic experience.
Clarey: I really believe that tennis is one of the very toughest sports in the world as a complete test of an athlete.
Nathan: I think it’s just really satisfying to feel the ball on your strings. As frustrating as it can be, because it’s such a technical game, the one good backhand you hit out of, like, 50 that day will make your whole endeavor worth it.
Browne: I find it to be the thing I’m mindlessly best at. Writing isn’t mindless, it’s very mindful. Tennis feels like a very pure physical thing that I do. When I’m really playing, my brain’s off. It’s like when you do a puzzle or something — you’re not thinking about anything else. I’m just out here. I love tennis.
Vallejo: I’ve watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of basketball. And I can’t see what the writers I admire in basketball can see. I’ve tried. I’ve read so much. But for some reason, I can’t, so I just enjoy. But in tennis, I can see. I have no idea why. I can see it. I can see it. And it has generated me very little money and a lot of entertainment. I don’t regret anything. It’s been fun. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I got rewarded for the experience. Life, man. It doesn’t make any sense. Just have fun. Be happy, have fun.
Nguyen: I might’ve tuned in because I liked a certain shot, or I liked a personality, or I saw an interview that I liked. But my favorite players have always been ones who I root for like they’re my friends. I’m like, “I just want you to be happy. Whether that’s wins or losses, I don’t know. But I just want you to be happy. And I hope you find your happiness.”
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
Popcorn Tennis 