Evelyn Reynolds

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    It’s Tennis vs. Pickleball vs. Padel. Or Is It?

    SAN DIEGO — The official name of the facility is the Barnes Tennis Center, but once through the front doors, it quickly becomes apparent that it might want to consider expanding its branding.“What are you playing today?” a receptionist at the front desk asked of a father and his adult daughter dressed in what could pass for traditional tennis clothes.“Pickleball,” answered the daughter.“Have you tried padel yet?” asked the receptionist.“No, but it’s on the list,” she said. “I hear it’s addictive.”Such conversations and choices, which have been standard in other parts of the world for several years, remain rare in the United States. But they will become more common soon. The Barnes Center, with its menu of racket-sport offerings, looks like a template for the future as private clubs and public facilities strive to be more things to more people, protecting themselves economically from shifting tastes while trying to defuse some of the rising tension between the grand old game of tennis and fast-growing newcomers like pickleball.“I have a good friend who calls this the Disneyland of racket sports,” said Ryan Redondo, chief executive and general manager of the Barnes Center.The coronavirus pandemic, by increasing demand for outdoor activities, gave some racket sports a boost. But that unexpected surge seems to have staying power, which is giving some in the industry hope.The new arrival is padel, a fast-paced hybrid of tennis and squash contested on a glass-walled court that already has an estimated 20 million players worldwide.Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times“People get fearful, but I do think overall, we will find that this is good for the industry and will lift all racket sports,” said Joe Dudy, president and chief executive of Wilson Sporting Goods. “I’m not saying people won’t be worried, but I don’t think they should be. There was a big battle between tennis and pickle when pickle started the growth momentum, and there are more tennis players now than when that momentum started.”Tennis participation has indeed continued to grow in the United States after years of stagnation and was up to 23.6 million players over the age of 6 in 2022, according to a report by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Pickleball, once a regional oddity with a quirky name, is booming and not just among the gray-haired set as it continues to expand its reach into schools. It had 8.9 million players in 2022 according to the organization — way up from 4.8 million in 2021 — with other studies showing significantly higher numbers.The new arrival is padel, a fast-paced hybrid of tennis and squash contested on a glass-walled court that already has an estimated 20 million players worldwide, according to figures provided by Wilson.Developed in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Mexico, padel has much in common with platform tennis, which was invented in Scarsdale, N.Y., in 1928. Both use perforated paddles and are generally doubles games, but platform tennis is primarily a cold-weather game played on a gritty, elevated surface that can be heated from below to melt snow and ice.Jacob Langston for The New York TimesPickleball, once a regional oddity with a quirky name, is booming, and not just among the gray-haired set.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesPadel first became popular in Spain and Argentina and is now growing quickly in other parts of Europe, including traditional tennis strongholds like France, Italy and Britain.Though there are only about 200 padel courts in the United States — most of them in private residences — the sport has begun to attract significant investment, and the pace of court construction has accelerated with facilities opening in Florida, California and the New York area. Redondo projects that there could be as many as 40,000 courts in the country in 10 years.“It’s a rackets world,” said Dan Santorum, chief executive of the Professional Tennis Registry, which certifies teaching professionals, who are increasingly seeking certification in multiple racket sports. “A lot of the search firms are looking for triple threats when they are looking for teaching pros for clubs. It’s no longer just a director of tennis. It’s a director of rackets.“I think what’s going to happen is the triple threat in the North is going to be tennis, pickleball and platform tennis, and in the South, it’s going to be tennis, pickleball and padel, although you will see some indoor padel as well in the North.”Both padel and platform tennis use perforated paddles and are generally doubles games played in spaces considerably smaller than tennis courts.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesSome major projects are in the works: none bigger than Swing Racquet + Paddle in Raleigh, N.C., which is set to build 28 tennis courts, 25 pickleball courts, 16 padel courts and three beach tennis courts on a 45-acre plot of land with a 100-year lease from the city. Swing has signed deals with Wilson and Sweden’s Good to Great Tennis Academy, which will provide instruction on the Swing campus and whose leadership includes Magnus Norman, a former No. 2 in the ATP rankings who has coached leading players Robin Soderling and Stan Wawrinka.Rob Autry, Swing’s founder and chief executive, said ground has been broken on the campus, which is set to open to the public next year to a projected one million visitors annually for tournaments and other events, including concerts.“The idea is to bring in all these racket and paddle sports under one roof and really democratize all these sports and lean into their differences and their own cultures and give them their own little neighborhood,” Autry said in a telephone interview.If it works, the plan is to open more modest multisport Swing facilities in other locations, primarily in the Sun Belt to start.In the meantime, the Barnes Center is running on 16 acres in San Diego. A public facility, it is still tennis-centric with 25 courts and is a hub for juniors. Last year it was the site of an ATP 250 tournament and a WTA 500 event that attracted a top-tier field.“I have a good friend who calls this the Disneyland of racket sports,” said Ryan Redondo, chief executive and general manager of the Barnes Center.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesBut the center also has four new lighted pickleball courts and seven new padel courts built on the edge of the property that was not suitable for tennis courts.That is a best-case scenario at a moment when tensions elsewhere over the use of available space continue to rise between tennis and pickleball players. Similar turf battles have been waged in Spain in urban areas between tennis and padel. Though pickleball and tennis can coexist on the same courts with blended lines, that often leaves both communities dissatisfied. But the alternative, for tennis, often means losing ground, particularly when clubs can fit four pickleball courts on one tennis court and often generate more revenue.The United States Tennis Association, under its former executive director, Gordon Smith, showed no interest in an entente cordiale.“Back when Gordon was there, pickleball was Satan,” said Stu Upson, the outgoing chief executive of USA Pickleball, in a 2021 interview.Smith said he had only one issue with pickleball. “Losing real estate,” he said. “If someone wants to build pickleball courts, great, but if someone has four tennis courts and wants to make them into pickleball courts, that’s different.”Since Smith’s 12-year tenure ended in late 2019, the U.S.T.A. has softened its approach, building bridges with USA Pickleball and, more symbolically, building eight pickleball courts and four padel courts at its sprawling national campus in Orlando, Fla.Jacob Langston for The New York TimesJacob Langston for The New York Times“The pressures that tennis facilities are under to be able to diversify their offerings to generate more revenue are, I think, very real,” said Craig Morris, the U.S.T.A.’s chief executive for community tennis.Morris, like Autry, is convinced that this is not a zero-sum game: that one racket sport can lead to another as long as there is ample court space available for all the options. But Morris said the U.S.T.A. was involved in research on skill acquisition with Michigan State University to see if pickleball or padel, with their shorter swing arcs, were effective pathways to tennis.Redondo, a former all-American tennis player at San Diego State who now plays much more padel than tennis, is seeing crossover and is also invested in padel as a part owner of the San Diego Stingrays, a franchise in the new Pro Padel League set to start play this month.“Our padel players are often on the tennis courts right before or right after they play padel, so there’s a really good mix and synergy there,” he said. “My belief is that pickleball and padel will start doing that as well and then you will start to have this circulation of these racket sports that can thrive together without taking tennis courts away.”To test out the vision, Redondo and I played all three sports in 90 minutes last month: starting with padel, continuing with pickleball and finishing with tennis, by far the best suited to singles.Tennis participation has continued to grow after years of stagnation and was up to 23.6 million players over the age of 6 in 2022.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesThe sounds are distinct:from the high pitch of a lightweight paddle meeting a plastic whiffle ball in pickleball to the percussive pop of a denser paddle meeting a decompressed tennis ball in padel to the more familiar thwock of strings driving a ball in tennis.The swing lengths, like the court lengths, vary. A tennis swing is more rotational: loading the legs and then turning the hips with the shoulders following. Padel is routinely more acrobatic, with 360-degree turns and the need to adjust to the different spins off the glass. Pickleball feels more static with compact swings but also more manic at times with its abrupt changes of pace that demand both deft, considered touches and fast-twitch reactions near the net.“But the contact point, the pure sweet spot, felt pretty much the same in all three sports,” Redondo said.Tennis, the oldest of the three, does have one major element the others do not allow: an overhead serve. I finished our 90-minute tour with an ace, which was more down to Redondo being a good host than to my power and precision but, in a world of racket-sports change, felt reassuring just the same. More

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    The Same Work but a Lot Less Pay for Women. Welcome to Tennis in 2023.

    At the Italian Open, women will compete for less than half as much money as the men. Organizers say they intend to fix that, but not for two years.The best tennis players in the world descend this week on Rome, where men and women will play in the same best-of-three-sets format, on the same courts and in the same tournament, which sells one same-price ticket for both men’s matches and women’s matches.There is one massive difference between the two competitions, however: Men will compete for $8.5 million while the women will compete for $3.9 million.The huge pay discrepancy comes after two months of tennis that included three similarly significant tournaments in California, Florida and Madrid that featured men and women competing for the same amount of prize money. Men and women also get paid the same at the four Grand Slam tournaments, where men play best-of-five sets and the women play best of three.But not in Rome at the Italian Open. And not yet in the Cincinnati suburbs at the Western & Southern Open. Or in Canada, at the National Bank Open, where the men and women alternate between Toronto and Montreal each year.Angelo Binaghi, the chief executive of Italy’s tennis federation, announced recently that the Italian Open was committed to achieving pay equity by 2025 “to align itself with other major events on the circuit,” even though an expanded format will bring in additional money this year. For the next two editions of the tournament, women will have to do the same work for a lot less pay, which makes them feel, well, not great.“I don’t know why it’s not equal right now,” said Paula Badosa, a 25-year-old from Spain who is among the leaders of a nascent player organization, the Professional Tennis Players Association. “They don’t inform us. They say this is what you get and you have to play.”A spokesman for the Italian federation did not make Binaghi available for an interview.“It’s really frustrating,” Ons Jabeur, who made two Grand Slam finals last year and is seeded fourth in Rome, said during an interview Tuesday. “It’s time for change. It’s time for the tournament to do better.”Steve Simon, the chairman and chief executive of the WTA Tour, which organizes the women’s circuit on behalf of the tournament owners and players, said the disparate prize money was a reflection of a market that values men’s sports more highly than women’s, especially for sponsorships and media rights. He said the organization was working toward a solution that would strive to achieve pay equity at all of tennis’ biggest events in the coming years.“There is still a long way to go but we are seeing progress,” Simon said in an interview Monday.The explanations — and blame — for women in tennis continuing to be so shortchanged include ingrained chauvinism, bad agreements with tournament owners and the eat-what-you-kill nature of the sports business, where owners, officials and organizers often blame the athletes (rather than their incompetence) for not generating enough revenue. Then they use it as an excuse not to invest in the sport and keep athlete pay and prize money low.In tennis, women often receive second billing in mixed tournaments — less-desirable schedules on smaller courts, sometimes even lesser hotels. In Madrid last week, the participants in the women’s doubles final did not get a chance to speak during the awards ceremony. The men did.Organizers often tell the women they lack the star power of the men. At the French Open last year, Amélie Mauresmo, the tournament director and a former world No. 1 in singles, scheduled just one women’s match in the featured nighttime slot, compared to nine men’s matches, then explained that the men’s game had “more attraction” and appeal than the women’s game. She later apologized, but when second-billing can make it harder for women to achieve stardom, this self-fulfilling prophecy can lead to lower pay.In March, Denis Shapovalov of Canada, currently ranked 27th, published an essay in The Players’ Tribune criticizing the sport’s leaders for not being more unified.“I think some people might think of gender equality as mere political correctness,” wrote Shapovalov, whose mother has coached him and whose girlfriend, Mirjam Bjorklund of Sweden, plays on the women’s tour. “Deep down they don’t feel that women deserve as much.”The WTA has committed some unforced errors. At the most important mixed tournaments, attendance is mandatory for women and men. The WTA only requires participation at tournaments in Indian Wells, Calif.; Miami Gardens, Fla.; Madrid and Beijing, but not in Rome, Canada or Ohio, even though those events rank just behind the Grand Slams in importance. Also, the WTA awards slightly fewer ranking points than the men’s tour does in Rome, Canada and Ohio, where the women’s champion receives 900 points compared with 1,000 for the men.These minor differences have given tournament officials an excuse for paying women so much less, even though nearly all of the top women play the big optional events, unless they are injured. Organizers, however, say that without mandatory participation they can’t market the tournament as effectively, so local sponsors and media companies will not pay as much.“It’s time for change. It’s time for the tournament to do better,” said Ons Jabeur, who is seeded fourth in Rome.Marijan Murat/DPA, via Associated PressMarc-Antoine Farly, a spokesman for Tennis Canada, cited that difference when asked recently why the National Bank Open offered men $5.9 million last year, compared with $2.53 million for the women. Despite that difference, Farly said, “Gender equity is very important for our organization.” He pointed to Tennis Canada’s recently released plan to seek gender equity at all levels during the next five years and to offer equal prize money at the National Bank Open by 2027. “Over the next few years, Tennis Canada fully intends to be a leading voice with the WTA on a development plan to close the WTA/ATP prize money gap.”Like most aspects of the tennis business, the formula for prize money requires a somewhat complicated explanation. Tournament owners guarantee a portion of revenues from tickets, domestic media rights and sponsorship sales for prize money. The tours contribute a portion using money from their own media rights and sponsorship deals as well as the fees the tournament owners pay the tours to acquire the licenses for the events. Simon said the WTA brings in substantially less money than the men’s circuit, the ATP Tour, which means it has substantially less money to contribute to prize money.That said, if equal prize money is important to tournament owners, they can choose to pay it. That is what the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, owned by the computer technology billionaire Larry Ellison, has agreed to do for more than a decade under his contract with the WTA.“The tournament views the event as a single product,” said Matt Van Tuinen, a spokesman for the tournament. “Paying them equally is the right thing to do.”Same goes for IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns both the Miami Open and the Madrid Open. Both pay equally.In addition to Italy’s and Canada’s tennis federations, the United States Tennis Association, which has long bragged about its leadership in pay equity, did not award equal prize money at the Western & Southern Open, the main tuneup for the U.S. Open. Last year, men competed in Mason, Ohio, for $6.28 million. Women competed for $2.53 million. The U.S. Open became the first of the Grand Slam tournaments to offer equal prize money, in 1973, and will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event in grand fashion this summer. The U.S.T.A. ran the Cincinnati-area tournament for more than a decade.Chris Widmaier, a spokesman for the organization, said the prize money was “dictated by the commensurate level of the competition as determined by each Tour.”In other words, since the Western & Southern was not a mandatory WTA event and the women competed for 10 percent less rankings points, paying them roughly 40 cents for each dollar the men received was justified.The U.S.T.A. last summer announced it was selling the tournament to Ben Navarro, the South Carolina financier and tennis enthusiast. Through a spokesman, he declined to be interviewed for this article.Help may be on the way.Earlier this year, CVC Capital Partners, the private equity firm, bought 20 percent of a WTA commercial subsidiary for $150 million. The investment, which will be used to enhance sales and marketing efforts, combined with a strategic plan being finalized that would eliminate the discrepancies between the men’s and women’s competitions at the mixed events, is supposed to help the WTA grow its revenues. That will allow the tour to contribute more to prize money and hopefully get tournament organizers to commit to pay equity in the coming years.The plan requires some patience, which is running thin among the players.“I don’t see why we have to wait,” Jabeur said. More

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    Serena Williams Reveals She Is Pregnant At The Met Gala

    Williams said last year that she was stepping back from competing on the women’s tennis tour because she wanted to grow her family.Serena Williams has resisted saying publicly that she has retired from tennis and the finality that would bring, but now she has another reason to stay away from competition in the near future.Amid the costume-themed glitz of the Met Gala on Monday night Williams announced, both on the red carpet and on social media, that she was pregnant with her second child.She attended the event with her husband, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, and said in a post on Instagram that she “was so excited when Anna Wintour invited the 3 of us to the Met Gala.”On the red carpet before the event, Ohanian put his hand on his wife’s stomach in a gesture indicating a pregnancy. Williams also posted a series of portraits that included an image of her cradling her stomach with both hands.Williams was not the only pregnant celebrity at the gala. The singer Rihanna, who wore a white Valentino gown on Monday night, made her pregnancy public during her halftime performance at the Super Bowl in February.Williams and Ohanian had their first child, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in 2017. Williams had won the Australian Open that year while roughly two months pregnant.She returned to tennis and made four more Grand Slam finals in 2018 and 2019, although she did not add to her total of 23 Grand Slam singles titles.In August, Williams said she would step away from tennis after the U.S. Open. But last October she said she was “not retired” and that the chance she would come back at some point was “very high.” Officially, she is on the retired list.In an essay in Vogue at the time of her retirement, she wrote: “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity.” Brady, the star N.F.L. quarterback, played until he was 45 and announced his retirement in February.Williams, 41, has won 23 Grand Slam singles events, starting in 1999, when she was 17: seven Australian Opens, three French Opens, seven Wimbledons, and six U.S. Opens. The total is one short of the record of 24, set by Margaret Court, although about half of Court’s wins came in the pre-1968 amateur era. More

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    Rafael Nadal May Miss the French Open

    The so-called King of Clay continues to battle the injury he suffered in January at the Australian Open, the latest in a string of ailments to have plagued the twilight of his career.Hopes for Rafael Nadal to compete for a 15th French Open singles title this spring took a major hit on Thursday.Nadal, 36, of Spain, announced that the injury to the psoas muscle in his lower abdomen and upper right leg that he sustained at the Australian Open in January had not healed as he and his doctors and trainers had expected. In his statement that he would miss his third clay-court tournament — the Madrid Open, which begins next week — Nadal said he did not have a timetable for when he might be able to play competitive tennis again.“The injury still hasn’t healed, and I can’t work out what I need to do to compete,” Nadal said in video released Thursday on social media. “I was training, but now a few days ago we decided to change course a bit, do another treatment and see if things improve to try to get to what comes next.”Losing Nadal for the French Open would be a major blow to the sport and the tournament, where he has long been a top attraction. There is a statue of him outside the main stadium.It would give Novak Djokovic a major opportunity to move ahead of Nadal in the race to win the most Grand Slam singles titles. Both players have won 22, with Djokovic winning Wimbledon last year and the Australian Open in January. Djokovic is the last player to beat Nadal in Paris, which is among the rarest of feats in tennis. He defeated him in 2021 in the semifinals. Nadal’s record at Roland Garros is 112-3.Nadal’s injury occurred during his loss in the second round of the Australian Open to Mackenzie McDonald. Nadal pulled up lame as he chased a shot deep in the corner of the court. He immediately turned to his coaches seated courtside at Rod Laver Arena and then crouched in the corner to catch his breath. He completed the match but struggled with his movement for the rest of the afternoon and said later that his disappointment was indescribable.“I can’t say that I am not destroyed mentally this time because I would be lying,” he said at the time.Within days, though, Nadal’s team said he would be able to compete in six to eight weeks, a time frame that suggested he would most likely miss the hardcourt swing in the United States in March and early April but would be ready to play when the tour began its clay-court segment in Europe in the spring.But as those tournaments began, Nadal’s name was missing from the draw, despite images he had posted on social media of his practice sessions. He pulled out of tournaments in Monte Carlo and Barcelona, and on Thursday announced that he would not be able to play next week in Madrid. That leaves the Italian Open in Rome, which begins May 8, as the only major tuneup available ahead of the French Open. But that tournament also now seems in doubt.“The reality is that the situation is not what we would have expected,” Nadal said. “All medical indications have been followed, but somehow the evolution has not been what they initially told us, and we find ourselves in a difficult situation.”Nadal’s current struggles are the latest in an 18-month battle with injuries that have plagued the twilight of his career. Initially he was able to overcome them and play some of his most startling tennis.He returned from a flare-up of his chronic foot injury in late 2021 to win the Australian Open last year, then recovered from a cracked rib in time to win his 14th French Open.At Wimbledon, though, an abdominal muscle tear forced him to default his semifinal match against Nick Kyrgios and to miss much of the summer. He returned for the U.S. Open, but was far from 100 percent and lost to Frances Tiafoe in the fourth round. Then came the tear to the psoas muscle in Australia.Injuries to the psoas, even mild strains and less severe tears of the muscle fibers, can send pain through the buttocks or shooting down the leg and groin, or even make it difficult to shift from sitting to standing upright. Competing in tennis at the highest level is something else altogether.Even if Nadal misses the French Open, Djokovic’s quest for his third singles championship there will be plenty difficult. Winning is likely to require getting past Carlos Alcaraz, the 19-year-old Spanish sensation who won the U.S. Open last year to become the youngest man to achieve the No. 1 ranking in the sport. Like Nadal, Alcaraz grew up playing on red clay in Spain. More

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    WTA Lifts Suspension on Tournaments in China

    The tour had paused events there after concerns about the Chinese star Peng Shuai went unresolved, but Steve Simon, its chief executive, said a different approach was needed.The WTA will resume operating tournaments in China later this year after having suspended events there in late 2021 because of concerns about the Chinese player Peng Shuai.The return, announced Thursday, is also a retreat.When Peng, one of China’s biggest tennis stars, accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault in a social media post in November 2021, the WTA and Steve Simon, its chairman and chief executive, took a strong stance.The WTA called for a “full and transparent” inquiry into Peng’s allegations, which were quickly censored online in China, and requested an opportunity to speak with her directly. The following month, the WTA suspended its Chinese tournaments and announced that the tour would not return until its demands were met.Sixteen months later, faced with a stalemate, the WTA has effectively blinked.“We’re currently convinced that the requests that we put forth are not going to be met,” Simon said in an interview this week. “And, with that, to continue with the same strategy doesn’t seem to make sense, and we need a different approach. Our members believe it’s time to resume our mission in China, where we believe we can continue to make a positive difference, as I think we have over the last 20 years when we’ve been there, while at the same time making sure that Peng is not forgotten and that we can, by returning, make some progress.”The WTA’s suspension of Chinese tournaments was more symbolic than substantive. China canceled nearly all international sports events in 2021 and in 2022 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Even without the WTA suspension, there almost certainly would have been no tour events in the country in 2022.But in a landscape in which global sports leaders have often kowtowed to China and its economic clout, the WTA’s move in 2021 still sent a strong message and made the tour an outlier. The men’s tennis tour, the ATP, did not follow suit and never suspended any of its Chinese events, including the Masters 1000 tournament in Shanghai. With Chinese authorities lifting their pandemic-related restrictions, it is scheduled to be played this year for the first time since 2019.Through the years, China has become a more important market for the WTA than for the ATP. The women’s tour held nine events in China in 2019, accounting for approximately one-third of the WTA’s annual revenue. The most significant of those tournaments was the season-ending WTA Finals in Shenzhen, which awarded a record $14 million in prize money in 2019, the first year of a lucrative 10-year deal.The tour, which has long relied heavily on revenue from the WTA Finals, took big financial hits when the event was canceled in 2020 and then moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2021 and to Fort Worth in 2022. In Guadalajara and Fort Worth, the WTA had to pay the significantly lower prize money figure, $5 million, itself.Simon said the tour will resume play in China in September. Though the schedule is not yet complete, he said he expected to hold eight tournaments there this year: regular tour events in Zhengzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanchang, Hong Kong and Wuhan; the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai; and the Finals, which Simon indicated would be staged in Shenzhen through 2031 to fulfill the original 10-year commitment.Simon said several of the events outside China that filled the late-season gap in 2022 will remain on the tour’s fall schedule this year, including tournaments in San Diego, Guadalajara and also in Tunisia.Last year’s WTA Finals was held in Fort Worth. The tournament will return to Shenzhen, China, this year, Steve Simon, the WTA chief executive, said.Cj Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockThe WTA has faced major financial headwinds since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, with its overall prize money falling even further behind the men’s tour. Last month, the WTA announced a commercial partnership with CVC Capital Partners, a global private equity firm, which will make a $150 million investment in the tour.The return to China will further bolster the WTA’s finances, but Simon rejected the suggestion that the decision was all about the bottom line.“This decision wasn’t made based upon the Finals deal in any way, shape or form,” Simon said. “It was based upon what was in the best interest of the organization, and we felt this was in that best interest. Will it be good for our balance sheet and those types of things, yes it will, but that wasn’t the basis for the decision.”Simon said it was also important to women’s sports that women’s tennis have a presence in China, where the game has grown since the success of the women’s star Li Na, the first Grand Slam singles champion from China.Peng, who disappeared from public view for several weeks after posting her initial allegations in 2021, has since reappeared, including a meeting with the International Olympic Committee’s president, Thomas Bach, during the Beijing Games in February 2022. She has also given interviews to international media, claiming that she had been misunderstood and had not actually made sexual assault allegations.But the WTA has continued to question whether she is able to speak freely. Though Simon said the WTA has remained unable to establish direct contact with Peng, he said the tour has received assurances from “people close to Peng in the area that she is safe and living with her family in Beijing.”Despite the public standoff between the WTA and the Chinese government, Simon said that officials from the sport’s national governing body had provided the WTA with assurances that “our athletes and staff will be safe when they are in China.”The move back to China comes at a moment of rising political tension between China and the West, but other international events, including track and field’s Diamond League and the Asian Games, a multisport competition, are also returning to the country this year. Simon said the WTA had polled its players ahead of the decision.“We obviously had some players who were not supportive of a return, but the majority said it’s time to go back,” Simon said.Some tennis officials believed that Simon and the WTA had overreached by demanding a Chinese investigation into Peng’s accusations as a condition of lifting the suspension. However, the WTA also received widespread plaudits for its strong stance from human rights organizations and others. Last week, Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher with Human Rights Watch, urged the WTA to hold firm on its suspension.“If it’s reversed, the message really is the WTA eventually succumbed to business and to profit and the WTA is no different to other businesses,” Wang told Reuters.Does Simon feel the WTA is now letting people down?“We’re proud of the position we took,” he said. “If I had to make the decision over again, I would have made the same one, no question about it. We do think that people understand we took on a very difficult issue. We’ve done our best to get the results fulfilled, but unfortunately we have not been able to accomplish everything we wanted to. But we’ve also been able to make sure Peng is safe and secure, and she isn’t being forgotten or left behind. Things have to evolve. You can’t keep doing the same thing if it’s not working.” More

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    Once the Prince of Tennis and a Prison Inmate, Boris Becker Starts Again

    Becker, who is featured in a new documentary, is beginning a third act after serving eight months in prison. “I’m sort of in late summer, fall of my life,” he said.There is something about athletes achieving a level of greatness as teenagers that makes watching them progress into middle age especially jarring.The toll of life replaces the exuberance of youth. Paunch overtakes once-chiseled physiques. In the most unfortunate cases, bad decisions from the triumphant years, the years after, or both, lead to an existence that seemed unimaginable back when life brought the glory of championship after championship and the attendant glamour.This is what comes to mind when Boris Becker — a Wimbledon singles champion at 17, an inmate in a British prison at 54 and now a free man at 55 — appears on a laptop screen in his first interview with The New York Times since he was released from prison late last year. Becker served eight months of a two-and-a-half year sentence for hiding and transferring money and assets during a bankruptcy proceeding. He was previously convicted of tax evasion in Germany in 2002.Now, he hopes, all that is behind him, and he can begin to reclaim the better parts of his pre-incarceration life, doing what retired tennis greats of a certain age generally do — commentating on television and picking up work as an occasional coach and adviser for younger players. Becker, a six-time Grand Slam champion, has a sadly unique but valuable perspective on the perils and pitfalls of life as a modern tennis star.“I have now a little bit of wisdom of what to do and certainly what not to do,” he said.The prison uniform is gone, replaced with a neatly tailored blue suit. Sitting in front of a camera in Dubai, where he had traveled for business meetings and interviews, Becker was noticeably thinner than before his incarceration, though his blue eyes were once again bright and hopeful, compared with his sagging, heavy-lidded demeanor of a year ago.Becker at Wimbledon in 1990.Dave Caulkin/Associated PressBecker’s rise and crash are portrayed in a new two-part documentary, “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker,” by the filmmakers Alex Gibney and John Battsek. Becker participated in and is promoting the film, which premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, but unlike many celebrity documentaries these days, “Boom Boom” is not a vanity project in which the subjects or members of their management teams serve as executive producers, craft the narrative and gain from the film’s financial success.That is not how Gibney (“Enron,” “The Armstrong Lie,” “Going Clear”) and Battsek (“Searching for Sugar Man,” “One Day In September”) work. It’s also not what Becker, who has always gone his own way, both on and off the tennis court, with occasionally calamitous results, was interested in.“If you are a co-producer, you’re going to cut the corners, you’re not going to show yourself the way that maybe the outside world sees you,” Becker said. “It shows a you in a much better light than you truly are. And for me, you know, honesty was always important.”The result is a bare-knuckles portrait of a player who as a teenager rose to the pinnacle of his sport and peak celebrity in Germany, his home country. His seemingly perfect marriage to Barbara Feltus, a Black woman, served as an inflection point for race relations in Germany (after eight years, the marriage ended in divorce).But in retirement, Becker’s life degenerated into a sordid story of philandering, failed business ventures, bankruptcies, tabloid scandals and prison time. Along the way, there was also a nearly three-year stint coaching the world No. 1 Novak Djokovic through one of the most successful periods of his career.Gibney, the writer and director who is a self-described “tennis freak,” said he had been drawn to footage from a 1991 documentary in which Becker said he enjoyed falling behind by a set or two in matches. That would focus his mind, Becker said, and then he would roar back.“Not such a good plan in real life, and not a really great plan for tennis, either,” Gibney said.Battsek, the producer, said he initially approached Becker about making a documentary in 2018, before Becker’s bankruptcy cascaded into a criminal conviction. Gibney interviewed him extensively in 2019, and again last year after his conviction and just days before his sentencing, when an overweight and scared Becker tried to have his say for what he anticipated could be the last time for several years.Becker and his partner, Lilian de Carvalho, in London before Becker’s sentencing in 2022.Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock“His biggest mistake was to mistakenly think the swagger that carried him through everything would carry him through tricky ground when it came to his financials,” Battsek said of Becker. “You’ve got to be smart enough to know, ‘I can’t swagger through this.’”Becker was released from prison early under a fast-track deportation program for foreign nationals, but not before what he described as eight challenging months in two prisons.“Very difficult, especially from the life that I came from,” he said.During his first weeks of incarceration, the man who once had ruled hallowed Center Court at Wimbledon was locked inside his cell for 22 hours a day, let out only for lunch and dinner, a shower and a brief period outdoors.In Becker’s early 20s, when he nearly retired from tennis on multiple occasions, he would spend hours at night in his hotel room writing in his journals. Similarly, the isolation in prison gave him plenty of time to reflect on where his life had gone wrong, he said. He remembered plenty of poor choices — putting too much trust in managers and advisers, impregnating a woman in the back room at a Nobu restaurant in London, making a series of poor investments. He also thought about the good times, though, the great moments of his career and all the high-flying luxuries his success afforded him.He said he feared for his safety in prison, but that he checked his ego and fell in with a group that protected him. He declined to provide details.“There’s a code of honor that you don’t speak about prison on the outside,” he said. “I have too much respect for the inmates.”He knows his life did not have to go the way it did and that he should have spent more time during his playing days locked in an office, familiarizing himself with all those documents he signed, instead of on a beach or a tennis court.He also was not mentally prepared when he retired, he said, for the shock of being called old at 35 and of having to start a second career from scratch.But now he is starting over once more. Eurosport hired him to commentate on the Australian Open. He is hopeful that some of his other partners and employers will return as wellFor the first time, he is keeping his goals small.“I’m sort of in late summer, fall of my life, so I want to really work on the next 25 years,” he said. “You look back on your life incarcerated, you look back on your professional life as a player, as a coach, as a commentator. You want to learn from the experience, you want to improve on some of the things that you started. And so that’s my goal.” More

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    After Indian Wells and Miami, Intrigue Awaits at the Top of Tennis

    Daniil Medvedev, Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Elena Rybakina had a rousing month in the United States. With Europe, red clay and the return of the biggest stars on the horizon, this could get very interesting.MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — It doesn’t take an expert in code cracking to figure out the pattern that has emerged in professional tennis in the past month as the tours descended on the United States for the winter-spring swing in California and Florida.Over four weeks, and two of the most important tournaments other than the Grand Slam events, a small group at the top of the sport became a little more crowded, especially with some members injured (Iga Swiatek, Rafael Nadal) or sidelined because the United States still prohibits foreigners not vaccinated against Covid-19 from entering (Novak Djokovic).Carlos Alcaraz, the 19-year-old Spanish marvel fast becoming the biggest draw in the sport, was already in the group. But make room once more for Daniil Medvedev. A magically idiosyncratic Russian who dropped out of the top tier last year, Medvedev won the Miami Open for the first time on Sunday, beating Jannik Sinner, 7-5, 6-3, after making the final at Indian Wells two weeks ago.Elena Rybakina is now officially there, too. A fluid and powerful Kazakh, she nearly pulled off the so-called Sunshine Double, losing to the Czech veteran Petra Kvitova in the Miami final on Saturday after winning at Indian Wells.Then there is Sinner, the smooth Italian who lost to Medvedev on Sunday and made the semis in Indian Wells and who solidified his position as the most reliable contemporary rival for an otherwise nearly unstoppable Alcaraz. Sinner matched Alcaraz bang for bang and beat him in their semifinal match Friday night to knot their head-to-head record at 3-3. Rybakina, by the way, has managed the same trick with Swiatek, becoming her Kryptonite in a way no one else has lately.“Best start of the season I have ever had,” said Medvedev, who has won 24 of his last 25 matches and four of his last five tournaments since losing in the third round of the Australian Open in January.Every March and April at Indian Wells and Miami, trophies and big checks are handed out, but this time the top of the sport’s tectonic plates shifted just enough to create new intrigue as tennis moves to Europe for the clay-court season and then onto the grass.Nadal, the so-called King of Clay, the winner of 14 French Open titles, posted on Instagram a picture of himself stretching for a shot in practice last week, an unsubtle hint that he plans to be ready. The prognosis is good for Swiatek, who was undefeated on clay last spring. Djokovic has endured forced layoffs because he is unvaccinated before and has come back stronger. No one doubts he will not do the same this time.Carlos Alcaraz, who won the men’s singles title at Indian Wells last month, met his match against Jannick Sinner in the semifinal at the Miami Open.Al Bello/Getty ImagesThose three may be poised to strike, but they also know the ever-evolving challenges that await them. Even though he exited a round short of the final here in Florida, Alcaraz, with his jaw-dropping display of shotmaking, left behind another slew of victims, solidifying his stature as the most disruptively powerful force in the game.Taylor Fritz, the top American, relished the chance to face Alcaraz for the first time in the quarterfinals here on Thursday. He came away from the straight-sets beating wondering what had hit him. Fritz came out pounding 110-miles-per-hour second serves that the Spaniard turned into clean winners. Fritz crushed backhands across the court that Alcaraz banged back with impossible backhands down the line. He said Alcaraz inflicted a level of suffocation he had not experienced the first time he played Djokovic, Nadal or Roger Federer.“I definitely felt like I had more breathing room against those guys than in this match,” Fritz said.Medvedev, safe from Alcaraz on the other side of the draw, watched on television — Medvedev watches a lot of tennis on television when he remains alive in a tournament — and saw that Alcaraz was hitting forehands at blazing speed. He shook his head.“People are like, Why cannot other people play against Carlos?” Medvedev said. “Well, I cannot hit 110-miles forehand. Yeah, that’s an advantage.”But Medvedev, who lost to Alcaraz in the men’s singles final at Indian Wells and is almost as good a pundit as he is a player, offered some counterintuitive analysis. Conventional wisdom would suggest that trying to outhit Alcaraz would be a fool’s errand, since that is how Alcaraz prefers to play.Medvedev though, said that is most likely why Sinner has been more successful than anyone else against Alcaraz. Alcaraz is more consistent, and possesses crisp volleys, the most deceptive drop shots and relentless defense. But, Medvedev said: “Jannik can hit the ball very strong. I think that’s where they have this kind of Ping-Pong tennis. That’s where he can bring him trouble.”And then Sinner did, coming back from a set down against Alcaraz, running him into leg cramps in yet another of their highlight reel displays.“You have to go for shots where usually you don’t go for it” against Alcaraz, Sinner said.Medvedev, who has now won all of their matches, presented a different challenge for Sinner, who said he woke up feeling under the weather. Medvedev is a human backboard, whose flat power did not pop into Sinner’s strike zone the way Alcaraz’s powerful topspin did on this slick hardcourt that was a near-perfect fit for Medvedev’s game.Early on, Medvedev lulled Sinner into long rallies. Sinner shifted to a more aggressive tack, which helped. But feeling less than 100 percent and with a three-hour battle with Alcaraz still in his legs, he wilted in the 86-degree heat, unable to find the next gear he needed to win his first Masters 1000 title.“I’m getting closer and closer,” Sinner said of his lopsided record against Medvedev. “Every player has a player or two they are not comfortable with.”Another pattern worth noting: It has been said that an unkempt Medvedev is the best Medvedev. When he has showed up to play clean-shaven with his hair nearly groomed, as though he had just stepped out of a fashion shoot for Lacoste, his game has been flat. But when he takes the court with a scraggly beard, with his hair flying in four directions and his shirt a size or two too big, his inner artist and assassin seem to become fully realized.No surprise then, that Medvedev has been properly unkempt for the past month. He has been working with a new mental coach as well, though he won’t reveal the name, after a year without one that did not go well.“I always try to do my best, always try to work hard,” Medvedev said. “You never know when it is going to pay.”“Happy with the run and super proud of myself,” Elena Rybakina said after losing the women’s singles final at the Miami Open to Petra Kvitova.Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports via Reuters ConEven after losing in Saturday’s final to snap a 13-match winning streak, Rybakina will head into the clay-court season as a force who grows more fearsome every month. She won her first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon last year, but her ranking remained artificially low because after Wimbledon prohibited Russians and Belarusians from competing, the tours withheld rankings points for the event. She spent all summer and fall trying to make up for that, but arrived in Australia rested. She cruised into the final, where she lost to Aryna Sabalenka in three tight sets.She has barely let up since, using her powerful serve and rolling backhand to overwhelm her opponents. She finally ran out of gas on Saturday after a mesmerizing first-set tiebreaker. Kvitova, who won her ninth Masters 1000 title, saved six set points before winning, 7-6 (14), 6-2.“Happy with the run and super proud of myself,” Rybakina said when it was over.And what to make of Kvitova? She is 33 and a two-time Wimbledon champion who just won her first Masters 1000 title since 2018, to say nothing of the 2016 attack in her home that left her dominant left hand bloodied and with torn ligaments. Not even Kvitova could answer that as she sat next to the glass trophy early Saturday evening.“I have no idea what this will do,” she said. “The clay is waiting and then it’s grass. The tennis world is just very fast, and I can’t really stand there and be watching this trophy.”Neither can Medvedev nor any of the others who excelled in the last month. Novak and Rafa and Iga await. More

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    Wimbledon Drops Ban on Players From Russia and Belarus

    Tennis players from Russia and Belarus will be allowed to compete at Wimbledon this summer after tournament officials reversed a policy that had barred them last year in the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The decision to bar the players had drawn criticism at the time, even inside tennis, and the reversal of it had been expected. Wimbledon officials justified their decision in a statement in which they said keeping the policy in place would be “damaging” to the tournament, which is the most prestigious in the sport, and to tennis itself.The biggest beneficiaries of the move will be Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, who won the Australian Open in January and is ranked second in the world, and Daniil Medvedev, the 2021 U.S. Open champion, who is fifth in the men’s rankings.To be eligible under Wimbledon’s new rules, any players from Russia and Belarus must compete as “neutral athletes,” without anthems, flags and other nationalist trappings, and must not express support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sponsorship from state-owned companies also will be forbidden.Aryna Sabalenka, the newly crowned Australian Open champion, was banned from Wimbledon last year because she is from Belarus.Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via ShutterstockMany sports moved quickly to make Russia and Belarus sporting pariahs as punishment for their countries’ roles in the invasion of Ukraine, but Wimbledon was the only tennis Grand Slam event last year to bar players without conditions. While support for Ukraine is widespread in tennis, Wimbledon’s ban — a joint move with Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association, which controls the sport there — was roundly criticized throughout the sport as a troubling precedent.In a statement released Friday, Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club, said the organization continued to condemn the invasion and to support the people of Ukraine.“This was an incredibly difficult decision, not taken lightly or without a great deal of consideration for those who will be impacted,” Hewitt said. “It is our view that, considering all factors, these are the most appropriate arrangements for The Championships for this year.”Hewitt said the club would reconsider the position if circumstances shifted before the tournament, which is scheduled to begin on July 3.Like most Olympic sports, tennis united to ban the national symbols of Russia and Belarus and to prohibit those countries from playing in team competitions.However, only Wimbledon and the L.T.A. prohibited the players from competing in their events, a move that Britain’s Parliament backed strongly.The men’s and women’s professional tours, the ATP and the WTA, punished Wimbledon by electing not to award rankings points for victories in the tournament. The move was an effort to turn the event into something of an exhibition, but it also served to hurt the tours and several top players, including Novak Djokovic and Elena Rybakina, because the rankings have not accurately reflected performance during the past 12 months, as they are supposed to.In addition, a native Russian ended up winning the tournament anyway, as Rybakina, who was born and raised in Russia but began playing for Kazakhstan when she was 18, won the women’s singles title.Players from Russia and Belarus expressed disappointment in the decision last year but did not challenge it in the Court of Arbitration for Sport.In recent months, many top players, including Djokovic, both condemned the war but also said players from Russia and Belarus should be allowed to play, though Daria Kasatkina of Russia has been the only player from Russia or Belarus to openly criticize the war in a video posted lasted summer. Andrey Rublev, another Russian, appeared in the video and said he agreed with her statements but was not openly critical himself.Sabalenka said in Australia that if there was anything she could do to change what was happening in Ukraine she would. Victoria Azarenka, who is also from Belarus and is a member of the WTA Tour’s Player Council, offered to participate in a fund-raising exhibition for victims of the war in Ukraine before the U.S. Open, though players from Ukraine ultimately asked that she not participate.Many players from Ukraine have moved out of their country. Several, including Lesia Tsurenko and Dayana Yastremska, have lobbied to have players from Russia and Belarus prohibited from competing in any professional tournaments unless they express opposition to the war.There has been little contact between players from Ukraine and Russia and Belarus during the past year, though Kasatkina said she did receive multiple messages of thanks from players from Ukraine after she posted her video.Wimbledon’s move came just days after the International Olympic Committee announced that it would push to have athletes from Russia and Belarus compete at the Summer Games in Paris in 2024. In explaining the decision, Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., cited tennis as having shown how players from those countries could compete even against players from Ukraine without disturbance.Players from Russia have continued to excel in the game. On Friday afternoon, Medvedev will play his countryman, Karen Khachanov, in the semifinals of the Miami Open, one of the biggest tournaments of the year outside the Grand Slams. Rybakina will play in the finals on Saturday. More