Evelyn Reynolds

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    When and Where to Watch Serena Williams Play Before She Retires

    Those interested in watching Serena Williams on her road to retirement will have opportunities to do so in at least three tournaments.“I don’t know if I will be ready to win New York,” Williams said in a Vogue cover story announcing her retirement, referring to the U.S. Open. “But I’m going to try. And the lead-up tournaments will be fun.”Her next match is set for Wednesday in the round of 32 of the National Bank Open in Toronto against Belinda Bencic, a Swiss player ranked 12th who defeated Tereza Martincova on Tuesday. Williams will be scheduled for a night match, the tournament said on its website. Bencic, 25, last faced Williams at the 2017 Australian Open.National Bank Open matches are televised by its official broadcasters Sportsnet and TVA Sports. In the United States, the Tennis Channel is broadcasting the Canadian tournament, and some matches are available on Bally Sports.After the National Bank Open, which ends on Sunday, Williams is expected to play in Mason, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, at the Western & Southern Open, which runs Aug. 13-21. The tournament said on Twitter that it was “honored to be a small part of” Williams’s career.“We’re so excited to watch her at our tournament this year,” the tournament said.Williams is expected to play outside Cincinnati with a protected ranking that has yet to be determined. The tournament, which has tickets available online, is set to feature a number of formidable players, including Iga Swiatek, the No. 1-ranked player on the women’s tour, and Emma Raducanu, the reigning U.S. Open champion.After the Western & Southern Open, there are two more tournaments before the U.S. Open — Tennis in the Land in Cleveland and the National Bank Championships in Granby, Quebec. Player lists for the tournaments, which run concurrently Aug. 21-27, have not yet been released, and it was unclear whether Williams will play in either.The U.S. Open, the last Grand Slam tournament of the year, begins Aug. 29 and runs through Sept. 11. The tournament will be televised by ESPN, and has tickets available online. The women’s final is scheduled for Sept. 10.While the U.S. Open draw has not been set, the first chance for fans to see Williams would be during the first round of the tournament on Aug. 29 or 30, a match that would most likely be played inside Arthur Ashe Stadium.“I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment,” Williams told Vogue. “I’m terrible at goodbyes, the world’s worst. But please know that I am more grateful for you than I can ever express in words. You have carried me to so many wins and so many trophies. I’m going to miss that version of me, that girl who played tennis. And I’m going to miss you.”Williams was vague about her plans after the U.S. Open, and did not pinpoint exactly when she would wind down her time in the sport. More

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    Serena Williams Forced Her Way Into the Tennis History Books

    With her dominant strokes and smart moves off the court, Williams helped redefine how to be a superstar athlete.Serena Williams’s fellow tennis professionals already know what their sport is like without her.She has played very little in the past two years and has played just two singles matches in the past 13 months.But as Williams, now 40 years old, made plain in announcing her impending retirement on Tuesday, it will very soon be time for the wider world to become accustomed to her absence from the courts, as well.Tennis is a global game, which is a big part of its charm, and despite Williams’s part-time status of late, if you ask anyone on just about any street to start naming women’s tennis players, the first name most would produce would still be Serena Williams.With her technically sound and forceful serve, she possessed perhaps the most decisive shot in the long history of the women’s game. But there has been much more to her tennis: powerful, open-stance groundstrokes; exceptional and explosive court coverage; and a ferocious, territorial competitive drive that helped her overcome deficits and adversity throughout a professional career that has lasted a quarter century.At her peaks — and there were several — she was one of the most dominant figures in any sport: able to overwhelm and intimidate the opposition with full-force blows and full-throated roars, often timed for maximum effect.With her technically sound and forceful serve, Williams possessed perhaps the most decisive shot in the long history of the women’s game.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York TimesBy force of serve and personality and long-running achievement, she has become synonymous with tennis while managing to transcend it as a Black champion with symbolic reach even if she long eschewed political or social commentary, in part because of her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. Years after Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe blazed trails for Black champions, Williams created new paths for modern athletes balancing competition and outside pursuits.Her off-court world — including acting, fashion design, venture capital, family life and motherhood — most likely allowed her to remain fresh and competitive far longer than expected. And we are not just talking about the public’s expectations. Her father and longtime coach, Richard Williams, clearly had vision: He dreamed up a far-fetched and ultimately right-on-target family plan for Serena and her older sister Venus to dominate women’s tennis. But he also predicted that both would retire early to devote themselves to other endeavors.Father did not know best in this instance. Both sisters have played into their 40s, displaying an undeniable love of the game that is rather surprising considering that they were given no choice in whether they would play it.“I got pushed hard by my parents,” Serena Williams wrote in the Vogue essay released on Tuesday announcing her impending retirement. “Nowadays so many parents say, ‘Let your kids do what they want!’ Well, that’s not what got me where I am. I didn’t rebel as a kid. I worked hard, and I followed the rules.”She then talked about her 4-year-old daughter, Olympia. “I do want to push Olympia — not in tennis, but in whatever captures her interest,” Williams said. “But I don’t want to push too hard. I’m still trying to figure out that balance.”Richard Williams, left, clearly had vision: He dreamed up a far-fetched and ultimately right-on-target family plan for Serena and her older sister Venus to dominate women’s tennis. Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesIt is a delicate dance, and my suspicion is that many a tennis family has run aground trying to follow the Williams template, which included a cradle-to-tour focus on greatness but also — extraordinarily — no junior tournaments after age 12.“Thousands of lives probably went down the wrong path trying to follow that,” said Rick Macci, the fast-talking coach who shaped the games of both Serena and Venus Williams in their youth under Richard’s watchful gaze. “That playbook only worked for the sisters because they were both so amazingly competitive that they maybe did not need to play junior tennis. Other kids need to compete to learn how to win and how to lose.Though the sisters will always be, in some manner, packaged together in the collective consciousness, it was Serena who grew up, as her father correctly predicted, to be the greater player.Serena would go on to win 23 Grand Slam singles titles (for now) to Venus’s seven, and to spend 319 weeks at No. 1 to Venus’s 11 weeks. Serena says she takes no joy in that disparity, emphasizing that she would never have scaled such heights without her sister’s high-flying example.Serena, right, and Venus Williams each reached the No. 1 ranking, Serena for 319 weeks and Venus for 11.Raymond McCrea Jones/The New York Times“Without Venus, there would be no Serena,” Serena once said.It would come as no surprise if Venus, 42, soon joined Serena in retirement at some stage after the U.S. Open or if they decided to call it a career together in New York. But for now, only Serena has made it plain that the end is truly nigh and that — to deploy her own rather endearing sneaker-dragging code for retirement — she is “evolving away from tennis.”She has certainly helped tennis evolve with point-winning power from all areas of the court; she has certainly helped society evolve with her willingness to change the dialogue about body image and strong women ferociously pursuing their goals. She has had the confidence to take risks, sometimes sartorial, like her French Open catsuit, and sometimes more profound, such as her decision to boycott the tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., after she was booed and her father said he heard racial slurs in 2001. Fourteen years later, she returned in the interest of bridging the divide and sending a message about second chances.But it is her tennis that has spoken loudest the longest. The sport, like many sports, remains fixated on the debate about the greatest of all time, and Williams certainly belongs in the heart of the conversation. It is easy to believe that she, at her best with the same equipment, would have beaten any woman at their best.But she was not nearly as consistent a winner in regular tour events as past women’s champions like Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Steffi Graf.Williams picked her spots, and her 73 tour singles titles rank her fifth on the Open Era career list. Navratilova won 167 singles titles and 177 doubles titles at a time when doubles was much more prestigious and widely played by the stars. Evert won 157 singles titles. Graf, who retired at 30 years old, won 107 and remained No. 1 for a record total of 377 weeks.Serena Williams joined Martina Navratilova, left, and Chris Evert in winning 18 Grand Slam singles titles after she won the 2014 U.S. Open.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesBut Serena, who has amassed a women’s record of $94.5 million in prize money, played at a time when the Grand Slam tournaments have become evermore the measuring stick of greatness and the focus of global interest and attention.To her evident frustration, she remains one short of the record of 24 major singles titles, held by Margaret Court, a net-charging Australian who played when Grand Slam tournament fields were smaller and the women’s game lacked the depth it possesses today.But comparing across eras remains a particularly tricky task in tennis (non-Australian greats of the past often skipped the Australian Open altogether). Perhaps it is wisest not to seek a definitive answer.“She’s the greatest player of her generation, no doubt,” Navratilova said.That brooks no argument, and though tennis generations have a way of getting compacted to just a few years, Williams’s greatness was genuinely true to the term. She is the only player to have won singles titles in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Ten of her Grand Slam singles titles came after age 30: more than any other player. She also reached four major singles finals after giving birth to Olympia.“She was fresh at 30, a lot fresher than other players and champions in the past,” Navratilova said. “We would have played a lot more matches at that point. But the physical issues meant that she had taken a lot of breaks.”That enduring excellence — a tribute to Williams’s deep drive, phenomenal talent and innate belief in her own powers — will be a huge part of her legacy, no matter how far she advances in what is surely her final U.S. Open. More

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    Coco Gauff vs. Naomi Osaka Could Be a Rivalry in the Making

    Gauff, 18, and Osaka, 24, played a cracker of a match Thursday night in San Jose, Calif., as they prepared for the U.S. Open.Maybe, some years in the future, if Coco Gauff goes on to fulfill the destiny that some have predicted for her, her win over Naomi Osaka, 6-4, 6-4, on Thursday night will serve as a torch-passing moment.Or maybe it will just be Chapter 4 in a rivalry that will stretch for decades. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova played 80 matches during the 1970s and 1980s, 60 times in finals. Plenty of tennis fans are hoping for something like that from Gauff and Osaka, especially after Gauff’s nervy win in San Jose, Calif., at the Silicon Valley Classic, one of several tuneup tournaments for the U.S. Open.Gauff, who is still just 18 even though she seems like she has been around for a while now — because, well, she has been — surged to the lead, pounding her powerful serve, especially as she sealed the final game of the first set. She looked like she would cruise to the victory, building a 5-1 second-set lead. Osaka was serving at 0-40.But then Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion who is coming back from an Achilles injury she suffered in the spring, came alive. She saved four match points in that game and then three more over the next two as she closed the deficit to 5-4 before Gauff finally put the match away.“You know certain players, no matter what the score is, it’s going to be tough,” Gauff said afterward. “It’s Naomi. She could have easily threw in the towel, but she didn’t.”Gauff, 18, is still seeking a Grand Slam title.Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated PressAfter it was over, Osaka said she had a realization during the match that for a long while now she has been letting people call her “mentally weak.”“I forgot who I was,” said Osaka, who is 24 and took several months off last year to address her mental health. “I feel like the pressure doesn’t beat me. I am the pressure.”There are plenty of professional tennis tournaments during the year that are eminently skippable for any number of reasons — low stakes, a lack of star power, not much money on the line. But this year’s Silicon Valley Classic has punched far above its weight. A stacked draw — top women could choose to play this week in steamy Washington, D.C., or temperate Northern California — has delivered matchups worthy of the later rounds of Grand Slam tournaments from the start.Gauff vs. Osaka was a round-of-16 match. Gauff, ranked 11th, was scheduled to play Friday night in the quarterfinals against the fourth-ranked Paula Badosa of Spain, the winner of last year’s BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. It was a matchup Gauff was relishing for a number of reasons.“Tough players and playing high seeds like this in warm-up tournaments for the U.S. Open is what I ask for,” she said Thursday night.Gauff said she and Osaka felt the love from the fans in San Jose, Calif.Carmen Mandato/Getty ImagesBecause Gauff is still so young, her every match is both a singular sporting event and part of a larger process. She reached her first Grand Slam singles final at the French Open in June, where she lost to the world No. 1, Iga Swiatek of Poland. She fell in the third round at Wimbledon in a tough battle against Amanda Anisimova, another young rising American.Gauff said Thursday night that she had learned from the loss to Anisimova that even against a powerful baseliner she needed to remain aggressive and not assume the role of the counterpuncher. She spent the past three weeks training as long as eight hours a day in Florida to get ready for the summer hardcourt swing in North America. She said she felt the work paying off against Osaka, one of the game’s greatest baseliners.“I was winning the rallies more than she was,” she said of Osaka. “A lot more to go before the U.S. Open, but this is a good start for me.”At the same time, there were several moments on Thursday night when Gauff said she got a healthy reminder that she is about more than just wins and losses. Gauff and Osaka both regularly speak out on social issues, including human rights, gun violence and abortion rights. As they walked onto the court, the players saw a fan holding a sign that showed pictures of both of them and the words “Thanks for being you.”“Those kinds of messages are really important to us,” Gauff said. “It shows that people are not just supporting us because of our career but because of what we do off the court as well.”And for what it’s worth, Gauff and Osaka are now all even at two wins apiece. More

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    With Tennis Style, It’s Hard to Ace the Classics

    While Grand Slam season often forecasts men’s wear innovations, the elegance of a crisp white look is tough to beat.For at least some watching Novak Djokovic win his seventh Wimbledon title and 21st Grand Slam crown on Sunday (surprising almost no one), there was one largely unacknowledged pleasure in the experience.Sure, there were his bulletproof defensive skills and wizardly return of serve. Add to that the eye-candy thrill of watching Mr. Djokovic, a 6-foot-2 Serb, flaunt his Gumby-like flexibility and shredded physique (achieved with a no-gluten diet and a state-of-the-art training regimen) in a three-hour, four-set final. Yet for those who care about these things — fashion critics, for instance — the elegance of Mr. Djokovic’s play benefited from an anachronism dating to the tournament’s beginning in 1877. That is, the strict white dress code still enforced by the storied All England Club.Modern players tend to bristle at the tennis whites that were originally conceived to curb or conceal evidence of perspiration — considered unseemly among the society sorts who long had the lock on this sport — and that are required to be worn by players at Wimbledon from the moment they enter the court area. Andre Agassi famously so disliked the Wimbledon dress code (“Why must I wear white? I don’t want to wear white,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir) that he refused to play in the tournaments from 1988 to 1990, holding out for his preferred raucous, colorful sportswear before caving and then going on to win his first and only Wimbledon title in 1992.Far from obscuring players on camera, regulation whites outline their moves more crisply, as Novak Djokovic proves in the Wimbledon final on July 10.Alastair Grant/Associated PressRule creep is common. A degree of pushback is understandable in light of a rigid dress code that forbids nonwhite elements except in trim on outseams, necklines and shorts legs, as well as in logos that are wider than a centimeter. Even cream or ivory is considered beyond the pale, and orange-soled sneakers landed Roger Federer in trouble when he wore a pair to the 2013 tournament.Tradition trumps comfort at Wimbledon. Look to the controversy that greeted Rafael Nadal when he wore one of his trademark sleeveless white quarter-zip tops in 2005. Gentlemen, the thinking goes, don’t show off their guns. (For present purposes, it is the male athletes who are the focus.)Still, what fascinates this observer is the question of why — aside from paid branding opportunities or a dubious assertion that took hold in the late 20th century that color reads better on TV — an athlete would want to deviate from a uniform that is simultaneously practical and sartorially foolproof, one with a rich history of influence on style outside the sport.Even a cursory survey of its 20th-century history demonstrates how potent an effect tennis has had on fashion. From the 19th century on, the courts have been both a laboratory for innovation and, more often than you might imagine, a mirror of social change. Take the elegance of players like René Lacoste, the French tennis player of the 1920s nicknamed the Crocodile, who replaced the woven or woolen tennis whites that were then customary with cooler and more efficient long-tailed, short-sleeved cotton polo shirts with the ubiquitous crocodile monogram. The shirts would become a popped-collar staple of preppy wear.Fred Perry, left, looking runway ready in a signature polo, in 1935. Popperfoto/Getty ImagesRafael Nadal flexes his big guns in a controversial sleeveless top at Wimbledon in 2005.Phil Cole/Getty ImagesConsider, too, the unfortunate case of Fred Perry. A stylish former world No. 1-ranked player, Mr. Perry won eight Grand Slam singles titles in the 1930s, including three consecutive Wimbledon titles from 1934 to 1936. He went on to found a brand best known for white polo shirts trimmed with a yellow and black band, and the company came perilously close to foundering in 2020 when its polos were co-opted as a militia uniform by the far-right Proud Boys and it was forced to withdraw sales of its polo shirts in the United States and Canada.Paragons of tennis elegance appear in every era. At one end of the 20th century, there is, for example, an International Tennis Hall of Fame fixture like Budge Patty — one of only three Americans to win the French Open and Wimbledon men’s singles championships in the same year (1950) — and a sophisticate renowned for his easy tailored style both on and off court. Further along the arc stands Arthur Ashe, the only Black man to have won the singles titles at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Australian Open, and a canny image manipulator who underscored his cerebral style of play with a Black Ivy cool — tailored shorts, snug polos, horn-rimmed glasses or oversize shades — intentionally engineered to counter racial stereotypes that still plagued the sport in the ’70s.Always restrained, Arthur Ashe brought graphic flourish to his tennis white at the U.S. Open, circa 1978.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesStyle in that bad old era tends to get an unfair rap. And yet, while it is true we’re unlikely to see the lawn-trousered, Fred Astaire elegance of an athlete like Bill Tilden — an American champion whom The Associated Press once voted the greatest player of the first half of the 20th century — that is no reason to forget or dismiss the contributions of players as well remembered for their sex appeal or wild antics as for their sartorial savvy.We are talking here about John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, rivals both on center court and in the ’80s fashion arena. With his bum-hugging short shorts and banded track tops, Mr. McEnroe became a poster boy for the Italian sports apparel maker Sergio Tacchini; Bjorn Borg, the sexy Swedish longhair in a headband, helped put another Italian heritage label, Fila, on the map. And suddenly, those retro looks and those brands — with their taut proportions and overtly sexy celebration of the athletic male anatomy — look fresh again both for sports aficionados and for those who wouldn’t know an ace from an alley.Once deemed the greatest player of the early 20th century, Bill Tilden is style personified at the Davis Cup in 1927. Bettmann/Getty ImagesBjorn Borg, here defeating Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in July 1978, snuck color onto center court in wristbands striped like the Swedish flag.Leo Mason/Popperfoto – Getty ImagesAt other Grand Slam events, Messrs. McEnroe and Borg both pushed their Fila-Tacchini looks to the limits, with banded sleeves, tone-on-tone jackets, pinstriped patterns, colored tab waistbands, terry wristbands in national colors or details that may never have passed official muster at the All England Club.The truth is, though, that nothing additive was really needed. Whether on clay, grass, synthetic or cracked urban concrete, it is largely pointless trying to improve on tennis whites. More

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    Wimbledon Needs More Arthur Ashe Moments, On and Off the Court

    Nick Kyrgios and Ons Jabeur brought a fresh diversity to the men’s and women’s singles finals.WIMBLEDON, England — For the first time in nearly a half-century, a weekend at Wimbledon felt, and looked, different.Nick Kyrgios and Ons Jabeur brought a fresh diversity to the men’s and women’s singles finals. Jabeur, of Tunisia, became the first North African player to make it to a singles final. Kyrgios, an Australian with Malaysian roots and a well-documented swagger that marks him as something wholly different from his peers, was playing in his first Grand Slam final. Jabeur and Kyrgios each ended up losing, but that is beside the point.Not since 1975, when Arthur Ashe and Evonne Goolagong made it to their finals, had both championship matches combined to be as diverse. Tennis evolves in fits and starts, and nowhere does that feel more true than at Wimbledon.To look at the Centre Court crowd these past two weeks was to see how hard change is to pull off, especially when it comes to race.In the stands, an all-too-familiar homogeneity. Aside from a dappling of color here and there, a sea of whiteness. To me, a Black guy who played the game in the minor leagues and always hopes to see it move past its old ways — to see a lack of color always feels like a gut punch, particularly at Wimbledon in London.After Saturday’s women’s final, I stood beside a pillar near one of the Centre Court exits. Hundreds walked by. Then a few thousand. I counted roughly a dozen Black faces. This grand event plays out in one of the most diverse metropolises in the world, a hub for immigrants from across the globe. You wouldn’t know that by looking at the spectators. There were some Asian faces. A few Muslims in hijabs. The Sikh community is huge in London. I saw only one of the traditional Sikh turbans at the court.When I pulled a few of the Black fans aside and asked them if they felt aware of how rare they were in the crowd, the reply was always as swift as a Jabeur forehand volley or a Kyrgios serve. “How could I not?” said James Smith, a London resident. “I saw a guy in a section just above me. We smiled at each other. I don’t know the man, but there was a bond. We knew we were few and far between.”The fans see it.And the players, too.“I definitely notice,” said Coco Gauff, the American teen star, when we spoke last week. She said she is so focused when she plays that she barely notices the crowd. But afterward, when she looks at photographs of herself at Wimbledon, the images startle. “Not a lot of Black faces in the crowd.”Gauff compared Wimbledon with the U.S. Open, which has a more down-to-earth feel, like the world’s greatest public parks tournament, and a far more varied crowd.“It’s definitely weird here because London is supposed to be such a big melting pot,” Gauff added, pondering for a while, wondering why.Going to Wimbledon, like going to big-time sporting events across North America and far beyond, requires a massive commitment. Tried and traditional Wimbledon pushes that commitment to its limits. You can’t go online to buy tickets. There’s a lottery system for many of the seats. Some fans line up in a nearby park, camping overnight to attend. The cost isn’t exactly cheap.“They say it is open for all, but the ticket system is designed with so many hurdles that it’s almost as if it’s meant to exclude people of a certain persuasion,” said Densel Frith, a Black building contractor who lives in London.He told me he’d paid about 100 pounds for his ticket, about $120. That’s a lot of money for a guy who described himself as strictly blue collar. “Not coming back tomorrow,” he added. “Who can afford that? People from our community cannot afford that. No way. No way. No way.”There’s more to it than access and cost. Something deeper. The prestige and tradition of Wimbledon are its greatest assets, and an Achilles’ heel. The place feels wonderful — tennis in an English garden is not hyperbole — but also stuffy and stodgy and stuck on itself.“Think about what Wimbledon represents for so many of us,” said Lorraine Sebata, 38, who grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.“To us it represents the system,” she added. “The colonial system. The hierarchy” that still sits at the foundation of English society. You look at the royal box, as white as the Victorian era all-white dress code at this tournament, and you cannot miss it.Sebata described herself as a passionate fan. She has loved tennis since the days of Pete Sampras, though she does not play. Her friend Dianah Kazazi, a social worker who came to England from Uganda and the Netherlands, has an equal passion for the game. As we spoke, they looked around — up and down a corridor just outside the majestic, ivy-lined Centre Court — and could not find anyone who appeared to have the African heritage they shared. They said they had many Black friends who enjoyed tennis but did not feel they could be a part of Wimbledon, situated in a luxurious suburb that feels exclusive and so far from the everyday.“There is an establishment and a history behind this tournament that keeps things status quo,” Kazazi said. “You have to step outside of the box as a fan to get around that.” She continued: “It is the history that appeals to us as fans, but that history says something to people who don’t feel comfortable to come.” For many people of color in England, tennis is simply not seen as “something for us.”I understood. I know exactly where these fans were coming from. I felt their dismay and bitterness and doubt about whether things would change. Honesty, it hurt.Maybe it helps to know what Wimbledon means to me.I get goose bumps whenever I enter the gates, off leafy, two-lane Church Road. On July 5, 1975, when Arthur Ashe defeated Jimmy Connors, becoming the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title and the only Black man to win a Grand Slam tournament title except Yannick Noah at the French Open in 1983, I was a 9-year-old whose sports love was the Seattle SuperSonics.Seeing Ashe with his graceful game and keen intelligence, his Afro and skin that looked like mine, persuaded me to make tennis my sport.Wimbledon didn’t alter the trajectory of my life, but it did change the direction.I became a nationally ranked junior and collegiate player. I spent a little over a year in the minor leagues of the professional game, reaching No. 448 on the ATP rankings list. Nonwhite players were nearly as rare in my time as in Arthur’s.Today, as we just witnessed this weekend, there is a budding new crop of talent. Serena and Venus Williams combine as their North Star. And yet there’s a lot of work to be done. Not only on the court, but in drawing fans to the game and getting them into the stands at a monument to tennis like Wimbledon. A whole lot of work that will take a whole lot of time. More

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    Tennis Is Done With Covid-19, but the Virus Isn’t Done With Tennis

    With testing, quarantine and isolation requirements all but gone, tennis finally seems to have entered a stage of pandemic apathy, much like a lot of society.WIMBLEDON, England — With the final match looming, this year’s edition of Wimbledon has already proven many points.Rafael Nadal can play top-level tennis with a zombie foot and a tear in an abdominal muscle, but only for so long. Iga Swiatek is beatable, at least on grass. With the Moscow-born, Kazakhstan-representing Elena Rybakina making the women’s singles final, barring Russian players does not necessarily make a competition free of Russian players.But perhaps most surprisingly, after 27 months of tournament cancellations, spectator-free events, constant testing and bubblelike environments, tennis may have finally moved past Covid-19.For nearly two years, longer than just about every other major sport, tennis struggled to coexist with the pandemic.Last November, when the N.F.L. the N.B.A., the Premier League and most other sports organizations had resumed a life that largely resembled 2019, tennis players were still living with restrictions on their movements, conducting online video news conferences, and having cotton swabs stuck up their noses at tournaments.A month later Novak Djokovic, then the No. 1 men’s singles player, contracted a second case of Covid just in time to secure, he thought, special entry into Australia to play the Australian Open, even though he was unvaccinated against Covid-19 and the country was still largely restricted to people who had been vaccinated. Australian officials ended up deporting him because they said he might encourage other people not to get vaccinated, a drama that dominated the run-up to the tournament and its first days.The episode crystallized how tennis, with its kinetic international schedule, had been subjected to the will and whims of local governments, with rules and restrictions shifting sometimes weekly. The frequent travel and communal locker rooms made the players something like sitting ducks, always one nasal swab away from being locked in a hotel room for 10 days, sometimes far from home, regardless of how careful they might have been.Tennis, unlike other sports that surged ahead of health and medical guidelines to keep their coffers filled, has had to reflect where society at large has been at every stage of the pandemic. Its major organizers canceled or postponed everything in the spring and early summer of 2020, though Djokovic held an exhibition tournament that ended up being something of a superspreader event.The 2020 U.S. Open took place on schedule in late summer without spectators. To be at the usually bustling Billie Jean King National Tennis Center those weeks in New York was something like being on the surface of the moon. A rescheduled French Open followed in the chill of a Paris fall with just a few hundred fans allowed. Australia largely subjected players to a 14-day quarantine before they could take part in the 2021 Australian Open.As vaccinations proliferated later in the year, crowds returned but players usually had to live in bubbles, unable to move about the cities they inhabited until the summer events in the U.S. But as the delta variant spread, the bubbles returned. Then came Australia and Djokovic’s vaccine confrontation, just as disputes over mandates were heating up elsewhere.In recent months though, as public attitudes toward the pandemic shifted, mask mandates were lifted and travel restrictions were eased, even tennis has seemingly moved on, even if the virus has not done the same.Matteo Berrettini wearing a mask after his quarterfinals match at Wimbledon in 2021.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressThere was no mandatory testing for Wimbledon or the French Open. People are confused about what they must do if they get the sniffles or a sore throat, and tennis players are no different. Many players said they were not sure exactly what the rules were from tournament to tournament for those who started not to feel well. While two widely known players, Matteo Berrettini and Marin Cilic, withdrew after testing positive, without a requirement to take a test, they, and any other player, could have opted not to take a test and played through whatever symptoms they were experiencing.“So many rules,” Rafael Nadal said. “For some people some rules are fine; for the others rules are not fine. If there are some rules, we need to follow the rules. If not, the world is a mess.”After nearly two years of bubble life though, hard-edge complaints about a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach and safety mandates were virtually nonexistent.Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia, whose country had some of the strictest pandemic-related policies, said she remained cautious, especially at the bigger events, but she had reached the point where she needed to find a balance between safety and sanity.“I just try to take care of myself as much as I can where I’m still not completely isolating myself, where it’s not fun to live,” said Tomljanovic, who lost to Rybakina in the quarterfinals.Paula Badosa, the Spanish star, said she has stopped worrying about the virus.“I had all type of Covids possible,” said Badosa, who first tested positive in Australia in January 2021 and has had it twice more. “I had vaccination, as well. So in my case, if I have it again, it will be very bad luck.”Officials with the men’s and women’s tours said regardless of infection levels, their organizations had no intention of resuming regular testing or restricting player movements. They said they will follow the lead of local officials.With testing, quarantine and isolation requirements having all but disappeared, or merely existing as recommendations, tennis finally seems to have entered stage of pandemic apathy, much like a lot of society, Omicron and its subvariants be damned.There is, of course, one major exception to all of this, and that is Djokovic, whose refusal to be vaccinated — unique among the top 100 players on the men’s tour — will seemingly prevent him from playing in the U.S. Open.U.S. rules require all foreigners entering the country to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Djokovic has said he believes that individuals should be allowed to choose whether to do so without pressure from governments.Also, because he was deported from Australia, Djokovic would need a special exemption to return to the country to compete in the Australian Open in January. He has won the men’s singles title there a record nine times.Unless the rules change, he may not play in another Grand Slam tournament until the French Open next May, something he said he was well aware of but would not shift his thinking about whether to take the vaccine.In other words, Covid really isn’t done playing games with tennis. More

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    Djokovic vs. Kyrgios: How to Watch the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final

    Djokovic, a six-time Wimbledon champion, plays Nick Kyrgios, who is appearing in his first Grand Slam singles final.Sunday, the final day of Wimbledon, features the men’s singles championship at 9 a.m. Eastern between Novak Djokovic, a six-time Wimbledon champion, and Nick Kyrgios, who is playing in his first Grand Slam singles final.Kyrgios earned a spot in the final with some ease, after Rafael Nadal pulled out of the tournament with an abdominal injury the day before their scheduled semifinal.How to watch: In the United States, on ESPN with the pre-match show beginning at 8 a.m. and streaming on ESPN.com and the ESPN app. In Canada, on TSN1 and TSN4, with the pre-match show beginning at 8 a.m. More