“It’s amazing I’m going to get to go play just a really fun event that I enjoy with all of my friends,” he said.
After playing at home and hearing the roars as he reached his first Grand Slam final at the U.S. Open, Taylor Fritz is back on the road after a trans-Atlantic journey.
The tennis world moves on very quickly.
“I mean it’s one week off and then right after it again,” said Michael Russell, one of Fritz’s coaches. “There’s just not a lot of time off.”
The risk of a letdown is real, but this is a road trip to Berlin that Fritz has been looking forward to. He fell hard for the Laver Cup when he made his debut in 2019, and the team event, dreamed up by Roger Federer and his agent, Tony Godsick, remains one of Fritz’s favorite events, even in an overstuffed Olympic season like 2024.
“Being so mentally locked in for these two weeks, it would be really tough to go play an individual tournament that’s not going to have the same, like, just energy,” Fritz said at the U.S. Open earlier this month. “So it’s amazing I’m going to get to go play a really fun event that I enjoy with all of my friends. Because it’s pretty impossible for me to not be fired up playing a match when I have all these guys on the bench kind of going crazy for me.”
The Laver Cup, running Friday through Sunday, is an annual men’s competition between six-player all-star teams, inspired by golf’s Ryder Cup. In that tournament, it is Europe against the United States. In the Laver Cup, it is Team Europe against Team World. It is not the most natural rivalry. Who instinctively roots for “the world minus Europe?”
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Source: Tennis - nytimes.com
