Evelyn Reynolds

With the No. 1 ranking, two Grand Slam tennis tournament titles and an Olympic gold medal, Victoria Azarenka is one of the most famous Belarusian athletes of the past decade.But despite reaching her first Grand Slam quarterfinal in more than four years at the United States Open this week, Azarenka is an afterthought at home, in a country normally enamored with sports but currently rapt by mass protests against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the autocratic president known often as “Europe’s last dictator.”Lukashenko, in office since 1994, has been clinging to power and brutally suppressing demonstrations in the weeks since he claimed a landslide victory in the Aug. 9 election. Lukashenko said he earned 80 percent of the vote, but many Western governments have called the election a farce.At the U.S. Open, where five Belarusian women and one man won at least one match in the main singles draws, the unrest has become a topic of repeated, if halting, conversation.With some exceptions, the players have largely resisted the substance of what is happening in Belarus, with many refusing to say directly whether they support Lukashenko or his opposition.But they have said they think their run at the first major tennis tournament since the coronavirus pandemic has been a footnote at home, despite state media normally closely following the performances of Belarusian athletes and Lukashenko often an active promoter of athletics and fitness. (As he downplayed the threat of the coronavirus earlier this year, Lukashenko promoted hockey, vodka, saunas and farm work as potential cures.)Belarus has long had a connection to tennis, with a handful of consistently competitive players since the 1990s as part of an influx of Eastern Europeans into the sport, especially on the women’s side of the game.Yet Olga Govortsova, who reached the second round, said, “Sport is not important right now.”Govortsova primarily lives and trains in Sunrise, Fla., but she has stayed in close touch with family in Belarus and said they are staying out of the current unrest.“But they see a lot of people going to protest, and sometimes it’s scary to walk outside,” Govortsova said. “It’s crazy for Belarus.”Aryna Sabalenka, who was seeded fifth in singles but lost in the second round to Azarenka, said she was preoccupied by her family’s safety after arriving in the United States to play in several tournaments. During her first tournament here, in Lexington, Ky., a restless Sabalenka “couldn’t sleep,” growing increasingly frantic as she waited for her mother to answer her message.“I was really worried about her and she didn’t respond to me,” Sabalenka said. “I forgot the internet there wasn’t working and I just called her and as soon as I heard her voice I felt a little bit better and I could sleep.” She added that it was difficult for several weeks, but that “hopefully everything will be calm.”Both Govortsova and Sabalenka posted a meme titled “Belarusians Lives Matter” on Instagram last month. Sabalenka included a caption that said: “I can’t look at cruelty to people who are defenseless; please stop the violence.”The most politically outspoken Belarusian player has been the youngest: Vera Lapko, 21, attended a protest in Minsk, the Belarus capital, before reaching the second round of the U.S. Open.“There were a lot of people,” Lapko said. “They all were peaceful. They all were happy that they can show their opinions, show their emotions, about all that is happening right now. It was really nice to be there next to them.”While playing, Lapko wore red and white, evoking the flags that have become symbolic for opposition to Lukashenko.“I decided to keep that to show that I’m with the people,” she said.Had she won one more round in New York, Lapko would have faced another Belarusian, Aliaksandra Sasnovich, in the third round. After her first-round match, Sasnovich immediately said “no comments” when the subject of Belarus was broached.Sasnovich, who along with Sabalenka led Belarus to the 2017 Fed Cup final against the United States, has spoken of the pep talks she and her teammates had received from Lukashenko before the matches, which were held in Minsk.“He said ‘Come on girls, you can do it, Belarus is better than America,’” Sasnovich said in a 2018 interview.Belarus narrowly lost that final and Lukashenko expressed his disappointment while praising the team’s “spirit.”“We men are nothing at all: we play very badly in tennis, football and hockey. Therefore, all hope fell on these delicate girls’ shoulders,” Lukashenko said. “We can just say that they played very well — but they could have won.”In 2010, Lukashenko attended an exhibition in Minsk between Azarenka and Caroline Wozniacki, and enthusiastically accepted Azarenka’s invitation to come down on the court and play.In an interview with The New York Times in 2017, Azarenka, who won a gold medal in mixed doubles at the 2012 London Olympics, said she was once invited to meet Lukashenko and wound up talking about tennis with him for “seven hours straight.”“My mom thought I was, I don’t know, kidnapped,” Azarenka joked then.Azarenka’s tone about Belarus and Lukashenko has been considerably more serious and hesitant this year, calling it a “very difficult topic to speak on.”“That’s breaking my heart to see what’s happening, because not being able to be there and understand the whole situation, it’s really sad,” Azarenka said last month. “It’s really sad, and it’s really difficult to speak on that. But I just hope that all the violence stops immediately, really does, because it’s really heartbreaking. I can’t even speak without tears in my eyes when I think about it.”After beating Sabalenka last week, Azarenka said she hoped people in Belarus were watching.“Obviously what’s happening in Belarus is very dear to my heart,” she said. “At this point, what is it going to do? I feel like sport has always been a celebration in our country.”“There was no sport for a really long time,” she added. “Having two Belarusian women playing on the biggest stages, I think it’s really important. I hope people have enjoyed our matches and will continue to watch.” More

Down a set and a break to the unseeded Tsvetana Pironkova in the quarterfinals of the United States Open, Serena Williams was in danger of succumbing to a story line even better than her own.Pironkova is not only unseeded. She is unranked and was playing in her first tour event in more than three years.Not even Williams, a 38-year-old master of the comeback, has taken it to that extreme.Pironkova, 32, is a tall Bulgarian veteran with an iconoclastic game who changes rhythm more often than “Bohemian Rhapsody.” She gave birth to a son, Alexander, in April 2018 and was uncertain whether she wanted to return to the tour at all. She clearly made a sound career move, and on Wednesday was in range, if not quite on the brink, of her biggest victory before Williams came back to prevail, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.“It just shows me how tough moms are,” said Williams, who has a 3-year-old daughter, Olympia. “Whenever you can give birth to a baby, honestly you can do anything. And I think we saw that with Tsvetana today.”But only one working mother could win this match, and after Williams’s strong finish, she will meet another in Thursday’s semifinals, Victoria Azarenka.Williams and Azarenka met in consecutive U.S. Open finals, in 2012 and 2013. Williams prevailed both times in three sets and leads their series, 18-4.Williams and her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, once viewed Azarenka, who was ranked No. 1 for most of 2012 and part of 2013, as Williams’s biggest and most talented threat. Azarenka looked ready to climb back to the top when she beat Williams in the final of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., in 2016, and then won the Miami Open, completing the so-called Sunshine Double.But Azarenka was soon pregnant and off the tour, and she frequently struggled when she returned in 2017 after getting involved in a long-running custody dispute over her son, Leo, who is now 3.She and Williams, who are friendly, exchanged visits and notes in 2017, shortly after Williams became pregnant and then left the tour herself. “I do hope she is coming back, and we can have some more of our battles,” Azarenka said in an interview that year. “Because she’s one of the people I can’t imagine the tour without.”They have played each other only once since both returned to action, in a high-velocity duel in the second round at Indian Wells last year that Williams won, 7-5, 6-3. Azarenka remains convinced that Williams reserves her best tennis for their matches, but Azarenka has looked closer to her peak at this U.S. Open than Williams has, and she swept past the 16th-seeded Elise Mertens, 6-1, 6-0, on Wednesday night.“Can it get any better? For me, it can’t,” Azarenka said of the upcoming semifinal. “I’m so excited about it. An amazing opportunity to play against a champion, someone I respect a lot who is my friend.”Williams still has a chance to chase her dreams to the end of this U.S. Open, a tournament where the end has been bitter since she won her sixth singles title here way back in 2014.The following year, she was tantalizingly close to a rare calendar-year Grand Slam only to be ambushed in the semifinals by Roberta Vinci, an Italian outsider who, like Pironkova, relied on guile more than pure power.In 2018, Williams lost her cool with the chair umpire Carlos Ramos during a tumultuous defeat against Naomi Osaka in the final. Last year, Williams was again beaten in the final by a prodigiously talented newcomer, the Canadian teenager Bianca Andreescu.But to her considerable credit, Williams has continued to rebound from such deflating moments and to fight her way back to form and through major draws. This one has been rather kind so far, with no top 20 opponents: Quite a few of them were missing to begin with in this strange, pandemic-interrupted season. But Williams has still had to struggle, needing three sets to defeat Sloane Stephens, Maria Sakkari and now Pironkova.Such tussles have become the rule. Since the tour restarted last month, eight of Williams’s 10 singles matches have gone the full, three-set distance. She is no longer as intimidating to the opposition or as unusual, with more women accustomed to big-power tennis.But Williams is still here, just two rounds away from matching Margaret Court’s elusive record of 24 major singles titles.“People always say you’re not to do something at a certain age, but with technology and time, we can kind of make that age a little longer,” she said.Williams is 0-4 in Slam finals since returning to the tour in early 2018, several months after childbirth. To get a fifth opportunity, she will need to get past Azarenka. Williams, with her formidable serve clicking and a big head-to-head edge, will be the favorite, but she has not played consistently well enough to be the favorite in the tournament. Osaka, who will face the American newcomer Jennifer Brady in the semifinals, deserves that label as long as her hamstring injury does not resurface.Williams’s victory over Pironkova did not appear to be as draining as some of her previous matches this summer, but it came at a dangerous time. Williams has had a day off between each of her matches at this U.S. Open, but she will not get that luxury for the semifinals.Recovery will be critical. Her U.S. Open loss in 2016 came in a semifinal without a day of rest.At least Williams played the early match on Wednesday, starting slowly as Pironkova sliced forehands, punched flat backhands, hit perfectly disguised lob winners and hustled into the corners to extend rallies and sow seeds of doubt in her more accomplished opponent.“Definitely, I was feeling it a little in my legs,” Williams said. “For whatever reason, an hour in, I get more energy.”But Williams, even without the same range or aura she has had in previous years, remains a supreme competitor and unmatched server. She smacked 20 aces on Wednesday, but she also got gritty and countered Pironkova’s unorthodox methods with some of her own. After getting bamboozled by Pironkova’s hard-to-read serve, Williams was twice forced to return with her non-dominant left hand, and twice won the point.Williams got out of trouble repeatedly with big serves but, as the match progressed, also improved in how she coped with Pironkova’s unusual sliced forehand and low-bouncing shots. Williams needed to win several extended rallies to wrest control of the match, including a 24-shot exchange to break serve to 5-3 in the second set.It was a sotto voce performance by Williams’s operatic standards. She was unusually restrained for much of the match, but she did find a way to tap into her reserves and turn up her inner fire. She is now 44-42 in Grand Slam singles matches when she loses the first set, an extraordinary history that makes her the only woman with more than 25 major matches to have a winning record in such instances.”I’m happy to be standing here talking to you,” she said in an ESPN interview on court after the finish. “Because I think at one point I was pretty close to not being here. I keep fighting, and that’s something I’m super excited about. I never give up, and I have to keep going.”She has told herself that before, in this latest phase of her brilliant career, and then faltered. Another chance looms this year, on a court without fans, a place where her memories are decidedly mixed. More

Tsvetana Pironkova could see the surprise on the faces of the other players as she entered the locker room at the United States Open after being off the tennis tour for more than three years, since Wimbledon in 2017.With the women’s singles field down to eight players, from 128, the locker room is emptier now. But she is still there, having reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for the fourth time in her career.Pironkova, 32, once thought her playing days were behind her after giving birth to a boy, Alexander, in April 2018.“I was feeling pretty comfortable being a full-time mom — a little bit too comfortable, maybe,” Pironkova said in an interview. “I said, OK, I have to take this challenge, to get out of my comfort zone.”Pironkova, who reached a career-high ranking of No. 31 in 2010 and has beaten Venus Williams three times in Grand Slam events, said she missed the physical and mental challenges of tennis.“Sometimes a person just needs to push herself,” she said.Though an individual sport like tennis can require a degree of self-centeredness, Pironkova said she felt better about her career in the context of her new family.“Before I became a mother, I was the baby in the family; my parents, my family, everyone was taking care of me because I am the performer, and I need to feel well to do well,” she said. “I had all the attention. But now it’s different. Now all the attention is with my son, and I kind of find it relieving in some way. I know that whatever happens, I have my family, and that’s the most important thing now.”Pironkova was one of nine mothers in the women’s singles draw this year. Three of them made it to the quarterfinals, which is a first for a Grand Slam tournament, according to the U.S. Open. Pironkova will face another mother, Serena Williams, on Wednesday afternoon, and the winner could face yet another, Victoria Azarenka, in the semifinals.While Williams and Azarenka were considered contenders in New York, Pironkova’s surge was unexpected. Unranked, she was able to enter the main draw using her protected ranking after several players dropped out of the tournament because of the pandemic.She has justified her spot. After beating Liudmila Samsonova, 6-2, 6-3, in the first round, she beat 10th-seeded Garbiñe Muguruza, a two-time Grand Slam champion, in the second round, and 18th-seeded Donna Vekic in the third. In the fourth round, she appeared fatigued after squandering a match point in the second set, but hung on for a 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-3 win over Alizé Cornet.“I’m glad I keep winning,” she said. “I cannot hide it: I’m really proud of what I’m doing.”Pironkova had planned to return to tennis in late March, but was delayed by the pandemic. She has benefited from WTA rules that expanded the number of tournaments a returning mother could play with a protected ranking to 12, up from eight, including two Grand Slam tournaments. The window for a return was also expanded to three years, up from two. The rules were introduced at the end of the 2018 season, after Williams’s high-profile return from maternity leave.“At that time I really didn’t care about that information because I was in a new place in my life,” Pironkova said of the rule changes. “But that was one of the motivations to come back; if I had to start from scratch, I’m not sure I would take that challenge, really. But when you know that you have your old place, it makes all the difference.”Azarenka, who returned to tour in 2017, six months after giving birth to a boy, Leo, also advanced to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal since becoming a mother, having struggled to refind her game and focus amid a custody battle. She said that she would not have done anything different in her return, but that she was happy about the rule changes.“We are more protected and feel more comfortable because it’s such a life-changing experience that you have,” Azarenka said of motherhood. “To find that balance to be able to go out there ready to play, physically be ready, mentally be ready, I think it’s just a better opportunity for players to take that break if they want to, if that’s their choice.”The success is slightly double-edged, however. By winning, Pironkova has been away from her son for more than two weeks.“It’s very hard because up until now it’s the longest I’ve been away from him,” Pironkova said. “I’m used to sleeping with him, to cuddling with him, to waking up with him, to receiving a kiss in the morning. Now all this stuff, I really miss it. But I know it’s for good.”Pironkova’s husband, Mihail Mirchev, has been sending her videos of Alexander watching her matches.“I called my husband after the match,” Pironkova said. “He said Alexander watched the whole match. He didn’t want to go to bed until the match was finished. He was cheering, rooting, screaming and he was superhappy. But it’s true, I really miss him.”After her fourth-round win on Monday over Cornet, Pironkova became emotional when asked by the on-court interviewer, Blair Henley, about being away from her son, whom she felt uncomfortable bringing to New York because of the pandemic.“It’s very tough, and it gets tougher every day,” she said, her eyes welling with tears above her masked face. “But I know he’s watching me. I know he’s proud of me. And it’s worth it.” More

Phase 1 of the weirdest United States Open was full of tennis lessons we never expected we would have to learn.Don’t pull a ball out of your pocket and smack it without looking.Don’t play cards with Benoît Paire.Don’t sign a new protocol and stay in a Long Island hotel. You still might not be allowed to cross a county line to play your match in Queens.Don’t argue line calls on the outside courts. With automated calls, there is no one to argue with.But there was another revelation, too. You don’t need a crowd to have a classic U.S. Open night match.Until now, the players and the spectators seemed to be essential ingredients: feeding off one another, inspiring one another.But Borna Coric and Stefanos Tsitsipas did it on their own in Louis Armstrong Stadium, forging a mutual masterpiece as they exchanged shouts, dirty looks and all manner of shots: bold, subtle, cocksure and humanizingly shaky in the third round.Tsitsipas, a prodigiously talented Greek full of hunger and swagger, seemed to have the match under control at 5-1 in the fourth set and seemed to have it under lock and key serving at 5-4, 40-0. But Coric, who has a tattoo that reads “There is nothing worse in life than being ordinary,” stayed true to his body art.One of the best movers in the men’s game, the young, bristle-haired Croatian kept grinding and swinging. He saved six match points and leveled the match at two sets apiece as Friday night turned into Saturday.Tsitsipas could have been excused for curling up into a ball on the baseline at that stage. But he stayed upright and even went up a break in the fifth set before Coric leveled.Tsitsipas had four more break-point chances down the stretch. But Coric held phenomenally firm and Tsitsipas cracked again, double faulting twice in the fifth-set tiebreaker as Coric prevailed 6-7 (2), 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (4).“I have to be honest, and say I was really lucky,” said Coric, who is now in the quarterfinals. “In the third and fourth set, he was playing unbelievable tennis, and I felt like I had no chance.”It was not the first tennis pandemic epic (a pandepic, perhaps?): Andy Murray and his bionic hip won a five-setter of their own in the first round against Yoshihito Nishioka. Earlier on Friday, Denis Shapovalov came back from a break down in the fifth to defeat Taylor Fritz.Although Novak Djokovic’s fourth-round default was certainly the most dramatic moment of the first week, he and Pablo Carreño Busta did not even finish the first set. For long-form quality, relentless intensity and midnight madness timing, there was no topping Coric and Tsitsipas.“This is probably the saddest and funniest at the same time thing that has ever happened in my career,” tweeted Tsitsipas, in new-generation fashion, just minutes after it happened.It would have been the match of just about any tournament — this one, coronavirus willing, still has matches through Sunday — and that it could happen in a fan-free environment in an individual sport was both reaffirming and unsettling.How much do the roars and the jeers really matter?The thought is, of course, not unique to tennis at the moment. Sport after sport is discovering what it means to play behind closed doors.But there were moments on Friday night when the lack of outside buzz and external distraction actually seemed to elevate the duel, making it possible to hear every sneaker squeak, every grunt and mutter.The court-level camera angles helped, too, bringing viewers into the players’ space and avoiding the wider shots that would have made clear that hardly anyone was watching in person.It was intimate, even meditative at times, as the two rivals took turns being brilliant under pressure to the sounds of the passing trains and a few shouts from their entourages.“Look, it would have been an amazing atmosphere to have fans in there — cheering a guy on as he makes this amazing comeback,” said Brad Gilbert, who called the match for ESPN. “But I do think that the players start getting locked in, and that it’s just about you and the opponent. I don’t think they even were noticing there was no crowd.”Call it their own bubble within a bubble.“You could see everything develop with clarity because you had no distractions,” Gilbert said. “But listen, I’m just so grateful we have a chance to do the tennis and just see the tennis. Obviously, this model without a crowd is not sustainable for the rest of tennis ever, but for the moment, it’s a lot better than no tennis.”The problem in New York during Week 1 was that not everyone who crossed the Atlantic to play tennis was allowed to do so, and that in Djokovic’s case, the biggest star in the men’s game essentially eliminated himself.Staging this tournament at all has been an immense undertaking, and the U.S.T.A. does not have the same financial means as the N.B.A. with its locked-down campus at Walt Disney World in Florida. Nor did it have the wherewithal to quarantine an international field of players for two full weeks before the first ball was struck.There were bound to be issues. For now, Paire is the only player known to have tested positive for the coronavirus in the controlled environment set up for the Western & Southern Open and the U.S. Open. But the devil has been in the details of the contact tracing, which forced seven players who had been in close contact with Paire to sign a new, more restrictive agreement in order to keep playing.When Nassau County health officials learned that those in contact with Paire were being allowed to compete instead of remaining in full quarantine, they effectively voided the new agreement. On Saturday, the French star Kristina Mladenovic, one of those in contact with Paire, was not permitted to travel to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center from the player hotel.She and her Hungarian doubles partner, Timea Babos, the No. 1 seeds, were forced to withdraw before their second-round match, after Adrian Mannarino of France had been allowed to play singles on Friday after great debate. He ended up losing to Alexander Zverev.This moving of the goal posts is not the way this situation should have been handled. Inconsistency undermines the rules, and that Mannarino was allowed to play because he was not at the hotel in Nassau County when the new edict was issued is not a good enough excuse.Every probable scenario should have been talked through and made clear with all the potentially relevant health authorities before the tournament began.Failing to do so undermines the U.S.T.A.’s remarkable efforts and certainly does not play well internationally.“US Open 2020: un tournoi amateur” (an amateur tournament) wrote L’Équipe in a headline over the weekend, bemoaning the lack of consistency and the lack of agreement among health officials within the same state. “The show has sadly moved outside the tennis courts,” L’Équipe wrote. “Even in the midst of a health crisis, that is not worthy of a Grand Slam tournament.”Babos, already back in Europe, echoed those sentiments in an Instagram post on Sunday.“I’m sitting in my kitchen crying,” she said. “It’s terribly unfair. I see no reasonable reason why it had to be like this.”Clearly, watching Mannarino play on Friday, it did not have to be like this. But that does not mean the 2020 U.S. Open, even tarnished and having lost its biggest men’s star, has not had its shining moments.Most of the players seem to appreciate the opportunity (and the paycheck), and they have paid it back with tennis worthy of the occasion, worthy of a Grand Slam tournament.Coric versus Tsitsipas was only the best of many examples: a late-night classic no doubt, even without the customary soundtrack. More

Arthur Ashe Stadium was nearly empty, but it was not quiet at the United States Open on a day which would have normally been a hectic Labor Day holiday.Serena Williams, who has been bolstered by the support of thousands of boisterous fans here over the years, was her own chorus on Monday as she pushed herself to a victory over Maria Sakkari, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3 in the fourth round of the U.S. Open.“I’m always going to bring that fire and that passion and that Serena to the court,” said Williams, who has been referring to herself in the third person perhaps more than ever during this tournament.She screamed when she lost points; she screamed when she won points. At one crucial moment, she even made a loud noise when one of Sakkari’s first serves landed in the net.“I don’t feel like I’m super different without a crowd, but I’m super passionate,” Williams said after the match. “This is my job. This is what I wake up to do. This is what I train to do 365 days of the year.”Though her intensity was the same, Williams said in an on-court interview after the match that she felt “less pressure” without thousands of fans there desperate for her to win.“It’s also different because breaks are longer when the fans are here, the clapping is longer — I could have used a little bit of this in this match,” she said, laughing.The win was Williams’s 100th career victory in the stadium; Roger Federer is a distant second on the career list, with 77 victories in Ashe.The win put her into the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament for the 53rd time.Sakkari, one of the fittest and most athletic players in the sport, was a rare opponent to best Williams in several service categories: she hit 13 aces to Williams’s 12, and she won more points on her first serve. But Williams was more effective at aggressively returning second serves, which proved pivotal as she broke Sakkari’s serve three times and dropped her own just once.The 13th-seeded Sakkari had defeated the third-seeded Williams two weeks ago in the Western & Southern Open, which was also held on the U.S. Open grounds instead of its usual home in Mason, Ohio, near Cincinnati.“I was confident. I said to myself ‘I did it once, I can do it again,’” Sakkari said. “That was my mentality up until the end. She just came up with some better tennis when she had to. More experienced, she took her chances when I didn’t.”Sakkari gained an early edge in the final set by breaking Williams’s serve. Williams all but threw in the towel at a similar juncture in their last match, but with a Grand Slam title on the line, she steeled herself and rallied.“If you don’t get the chances with the good Serena against you, it’s done, you know?” Sakkari said. “I didn’t get my chances, got broken again. I was ahead, I was a break up, I had to somehow hold serves. One bad game and the match went the other way.”After a win and a loss against Williams in New York, Sakkari said she was encouraged by her own ability to summon her best tennis without a crowd on hand.“It’s not easy for everyone to compete without a crowd,” Sakkari said. “Many players were feeling a little bit turned off playing without fans.”Williams had been turned off by her own effort in her previous match against Sakkari. After squandering a lead against Sakkari in the lead-up tournament, Williams compared her propensity for elongating matches to “dating a guy that you know sucks.”“It’s like I have got to get rid of this guy. It just makes no sense,” Williams added.On Monday, Williams laughed when reminded of the analogy.“I feel this whole tournament I have been doing better with that,” she said. “Thank God I got rid of that guy. I never want to see him again — he was the worst.” More

Jennifer Brady did not want to become complacent about a career that was hovering stagnant in the singles rankings, so she sought discomfort.The choice has brought Brady, 25, to new heights: on Tuesday she will play in the first Grand Slam quarterfinal of her career, against Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan.In an interview, Brady said she had been looking last year for something “outside of the U.S.T.A.” and “outside of the box” to pull herself out of a rut.“I wanted more,” Brady said, adding: “I just felt kind of stuck, and I wasn’t happy with where I was. I thought if I changed something, maybe something good could happen out of it.“And it definitely did,” she said.Going against the currents in tennis, Brady left the traditional tennis training turf of Florida last winter for the cold of Regensburg, Germany, working with the coach Michael Geserer and fitness trainer Daniel Pohl. She lived in a small rented apartment in Regensburg, training six days a week and resting on Sundays, quickly learning that nearly everything in Regensburg is closed on Sundays.Geserer was immediately impressed by Brady’s mind-set. “Every day she steps on court or does exercises, she gives 100 percent,” Geserer said. “That made her stronger.”Brady, who prides herself on being receptive to coaching, worked harder than ever to get herself into the best shape of her life.“The training is different, the mentality is different,” Brady said of training in Germany. “It’s a totally different vibe. I really like it. It’s really structured, really intense. Every practice that I’ve had, I’m improving and getting better at something but I think not many American players would enjoy or thrive in that atmosphere.”The unconventional choice quickly paid dividends once the season began. At the first tournament of the year in Brisbane, Australia, Brady won three matches in qualifying to reach the main draw, where she beat Maria Sharapova in the opening round in what would be the penultimate match of Sharapova’s career. In her next match, Brady defeated Ashleigh Barty, the No. 1 ranked singles player and a clear fan favorite playing in her home country.“I have a lot of confidence in my legs, in my strength,” Brady said that week. “I think that I’m stepping on the court with a different mentality, a different sort of belief in myself and, just kind of changed. I feel like a different person, a better person; fresh, mentally, physically.”When the tour resumed after a five-month stoppage prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, Brady had not missed a beat.“She had the discipline and she had the goals,” said Geserer, who was giving her instructions from Germany while she was training in Orlando, Fla. “She wanted to get stronger, and she was working a lot. That paid off, but we are still at the beginning.”She won the first WTA tournament that returned in North America, taking the title at the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., out of a field that had included stars like Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Victoria Azarenka.Brady did not drop a set in her five matches in Kentucky, and she didn’t lose more than four games in any set.Through four matches at the U.S. Open, Brady, seeded 28th here, has the same streak intact, including a dominant win Sunday over the 2016 United States Open champion, the 17th-seeded Angelique Kerber, 6-1, 6-4, to reach the quarterfinals at Flushing Meadows.“She’s serving very well, and the next shot after her serve is really fast,” Kerber said. “She’s dominating with her game, especially on her forehand side. I tried everything, but in the end, in the important moments, she played better.”Born in Harrisburg, Pa., where few other girls played tennis, Brady practiced mostly with boys. Seeing the success they had with their hard, heavy forehands, she developed a game that could compete with the same weapons. Those weapons still stand out, even in the professional ranks.“If you watch Dominic Thiem and Naomi Osaka, the way the ball comes off the racket is totally different,” Brady said. “Growing up a lot of people said I played like a guy. They thought it was an insult, but I was like, ‘That’s fine, I don’t care.’”As an adolescent, Brady trained at the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., alongside players like Madison Keys. But while Keys turned professional early, Brady instead opted to play in college at U.C.L.A.“I definitely wasn’t ready to perform or compete with any of these other players,” Brady said. “For me, college was a big learning experience on and off the court, just growing as a person, becoming more mature.”Though the path from college tennis to the elite professional levels has been well-trodden in men’s tennis, including recent examples like John Isner and Kevin Anderson, it is less common in women’s tennis, where promising young prospects often turn professional as teenagers.Brady is the first woman who played collegiate tennis to reach the U.S. Open quarterfinals since Gigi Fernandez in 1994.Brady will face Putintseva, seeded 23rd, for a spot in the semifinals. Brady said she is now driven by seeing just how much better she can get.“It’s not really about winning or losing or how much money I make or things like that — I just want to go out there and compete and have fun doing it,” she said. “It’s something that I love, so every single day I’m just happy to be out here competing.” More

Since its opening in 1997, Arthur Ashe Stadium has been the site of some of the most thrilling tennis in the history of the game, matches that have gone into the small hours of the night, in front of raucous and often unruly crowds, by tennis standards.It has also been the site of some of the strangest, most controversial moments in the sport.On Sunday, in what has already been a strange tournament — the first Grand Slam of the Open era to be played without spectators — Ashe added another spectacle to the list, even though only a handful of people were there to see it: tournament officials defaulting the world No. 1, Novak Djokovic, from his fourth-round match for hitting a ball into the throat of a line judge.Officials did not release the name of the judge, who was treated at the tennis center after crumpling to the ground upon being struck by the ball.Although the episode was unintentional, the rules required that Djokovic, who had just lost his serve to go down, 5-6, in the first set to Pablo Carreño Busta, be eliminated from the tournament.Because he was defaulted, he lost all of the ranking points he earned from his first three matches in the tournament. He will also be fined the money he earned at the Open, which was $250,000, and is likely to receive an additional fine for the episode.“The referee and the supervisor do the right thing, but is not easy to do it,” Carreño Busta said.No one had a stranger experience of the event than Carreño Busta, who was on the other side of the net when it happened, and then waited to see if the judge was OK and whether he was going to win the match without having to hit another ball.“I was looking to my coach, celebrating the break,” Carreño Busta said. “When I turned back again, the line umpire was on the floor. I’m very apprehensive with these kinds of things, so I was a little bit in shock.”Kim Clijsters and Naomi Osaka probably know the feeling.They were in Carreño Busta’s position in 2009 and 2018 for two other notorious episodes at Ashe.In 2009, in her semifinal match against Serena Williams, Clijsters was ahead by a set and leading, 6-5, in the second as Williams served at 15-30. A line judge called Williams for a foot fault on her second serve.Williams erupted and threatened her. The chair umpire then penalized Williams a point, ending the match, sending Williams storming off the court and Clijsters unable to celebrate an unlikely victory in her first major tournament back from the birth of her first child.Then, two years ago, Williams was at the center of another officiating controversy when she received a code violation for receiving coaching during the second set of the final against Osaka. She thought the warning had been rescinded and then erupted when she was docked a point for slamming her racket, and then a game for calling the chair umpire a thief, demanding an apology from him in front of 22,000 fans and a worldwide television audience.The apology never came and Williams lost the match, 6-2, 6-4.Even before he hit the ball that hit the line judge in the throat, Djokovic had lost his temper and smashed another ball in anger into the side of the court after losing a point.Is it something in the water at Ashe that makes players lose their composure, forcing referees and umpires to insert themselves into the outcome of the match in ways they never expected?For several minutes after the episode, Djokovic pleaded his case to tournament officials, Soeren Friemel, the U.S. Open tournament referee; Andreas Egli, the Grand Slam supervisor; and Aurélie Tourte, the chair umpire.“His point was he didn’t hit the umpire intentionally,” Friemel said. “He said, I hit the ball, I hit the umpire, but it was not my intent.”A funereal anticipation descended upon the stadium. The rule, however, left no room for debate. It was only a matter of time, just a few minutes more, until Djokovic was defaulted.“The two factors are the action and the result,” Friemel said. “The result of hitting the line umpire and her being hurt is the essential factor.”Djokovic sped out of the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in his car minutes later without making any public statements.“I need to go back within and work on my disappointment and turn this all into a lesson in my growth and evolution as a player and a human being,” he posted on his Instagram account.“I think he’s going to be a little bit upset about it,” said Alexander Zverev of Germany, who is now one of the favorites to win the tournament. “If he would have hit it anywhere else, if it would have landed anywhere else, we are talking about a few inches, he would have been fine.”Then he used the words that others who are witness to strange episodes on this court have said before.“I don’t know what to say,” Zverev said. “I’m a little bit in shock right now, to be honest.” More

Novak Djokovic’s default from the United States Open after hitting a line judge in the neck with a ball that he struck toward the back of the court in frustration is perhaps the most costly one in tennis history.It fell under the Grand Slam rule book’s definition of “physical abuse,” which states that players “shall not at any time physically abuse any official, opponent, spectator or other person within the precincts of the tournament site.”The rules subject a player to a fine of up to $20,000 for each violation of this rule, with the possibility of escalation if it is deemed a “major offense.”“In circumstances that are flagrant and particularly injurious to the success of a tournament, or are singularly egregious, a single violation of this section shall also constitute the major offense of ‘Aggravated Behavior’ and shall be subject to the additional penalties hereinafter set forth,” the rule book says.At its harshest, “aggravated behavior” can trigger “a fine of up to $250,000 or the amount of prize money won at the tournament, whichever is greater, and a maximum penalty of permanent suspension from play in all Grand Slam tournaments.”Djokovic had earned exactly $250,000 for reaching the fourth round of the U.S. Open.In a statement, the United States Tennis Association said: “In accordance with the Grand Slam rule book, following his actions of intentionally hitting a ball dangerously or recklessly within the court or hitting a ball with negligent disregard of the consequences, the U.S. Open tournament referee defaulted Novak Djokovic from the 2020 U.S. Open. Because he was defaulted, Djokovic will lose all ranking points earned at the U.S. Open and will be fined the prize money won at the tournament in addition to any or all fines levied with respect to the offending incident.”Despite the clarity of the rules, Djokovic pleaded his case for several minutes, saying that the line judge would not need to go to a hospital. A tournament official on court responded to him that the consequences might have been different had the line judge not collapsed to the ground and stayed there for a prolonged time in clear distress.Incidents of tennis players striking officials are rare, but not unprecedented. There were two high-profile incidents of similar defaults in men’s tennis, though none as significant as the disqualification of a top-seeded player at a Grand Slam.In a 2017 Davis Cup match in Ottawa, Denis Shapovalov, then 17, whacked a ball in anger that struck the chair umpire Arnaud Gabas in the eye and left his vision temporarily damaged.In the 2012 final of the Queen’s Club tournament in London, the Argentine David Nalbandian kicked a wooden box that was sitting in front of a seated line judge into his shin, bloodying the man’s leg.With Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer not competing, and Marin Cilic and Andy Murray having lost in the first week, Djokovic’s exit leaves the tournament without any men who have previously won a Grand Slam title. There will be a first-time Grand Slam singles champion in men’s tennis for the first time since Cilic at the 2014 U.S. Open.Djokovic is not the first decorated champion to have a tournament end in controversy. At the 2009 U.S. Open, Serena Williams was given a point penalty while down match point, ending the match, after threatening to shove a ball down the throat of a line judge who had called her for a foot fault.At the 1990 Australian Open, John McEnroe was defaulted from his fourth-round match for profane verbal abuse of officials. More