Evelyn Reynolds

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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

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    Elena Rybakina Wins Wimbledon and Her First Grand Slam Title

    Rybakina, who was born and raised in Russia, started representing Kazakhstan after the Russian tennis federation gave up on her. She beat Ons Jabeur in three sets to win the women’s singles title.WIMBLEDON, England — There was no way anyone could have known four years ago, when the Russian-born-and-raised Elena Rybakina decided to play tennis for Kazakhstan that the move would pay off as fortuitously as it did in the summer of 2022.Rybakina beat Ons Jabeur to win the Wimbledon singles title Saturday, 3-6, 6-2, 6-2, giving the native Russian the sport’s most prestigious championship a little more than two months after tournament organizers barred players representing Russia from participating.Rybakina, who began representing Kazakhstan four years ago after the former Soviet republic agreed to fund her career, overpowered Jabeur, who faltered and succumbed to inconsistency after taking an early lead.Rybakina, 23, was nervous and shaky early on, missing seemingly easy rally balls long and struggling to get her dangerous first serve into the court, but she settled down as the match stretched on. Once she found her rhythm, Jabeur had few answers. She had a chance to draw even in the third set as Rybakina fell behind 0-40 serving at 3-2, but Jabeur couldn’t finish the game and Rybakina cruised over the finish line from there.On the final point, Rybakina watched Jabeur, the No. 2-ranked player in the world, send one last backhand return wide and strutted to the net with barely a celebration. A few minutes later she climbed the stairs to her box to embrace her team.It was Rybakina’s first Grand Slam title and the first for a singles player representing Kazakhstan, which has recruited several men and women from Russia to represent it in tennis in the last 15 years, financing their development as part of an effort to make the country more appealing to the West.It was a match that was never going to lack for a story no matter who won.Jabeur, a 27-year-old from Tunisia, was the first Arab and the first African woman to reach the Wimbledon final, and the first Arab woman to make any Grand Slam final. She is Muslim and the match fell on, Eid al-Adha — the feast of the sacrifice. The holiday commemorates the story of Allah asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, as a sign of faith.There was a time when it seemed like every year an American would play for this championship on July 4. But the sport and its calendar have shifted. The Wimbledon final happens a week later, and American players, and those from every other country that dominated tennis for most of the last 100 years, face far more competition from places where the sport has only recently taken hold.“I feel really sad, but it’s tennis. There is only one winner,” Jabeur said while holding the runner-up trophy. “I’m trying to inspire many generations for my country.”The ease Jabeur showed early in the match disappeared in the second set.Alastair Grant/Associated PressRybakina told the Centre Court crowd that it had been an honor to play in front of the royal box. She also thanked Bulat Utemuratov, the billionaire who is the president of the Kazakhstan Tennis federation for believing in her.“I never felt anything like this,” she said, with Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, standing a few feet away. Prince William did not attend the match. Kate was accompanied onto the court by Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club, and the man in charge of explaining the decision to bar Russian and Belarusian players back in April.Rybakina, the 23rd-ranked player in the world, had never before this week advanced past the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament. Tall and long and powerful with one of the most dangerous serves in the game, she was born in Russia and lived there until she became an adult. Her parents still live in Russia.After turning 18, she accepted an opportunity to receive funding for her tennis career from Kazakhstan. She represented Kazakhstan at the Olympics in Tokyo last year.Her run to the final made for an awkward tournament, bringing politics into the fray after tournament organizers had tried to keep them at bay by barring Russian and Belarusian player because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Organizers made the move at the behest of the British government and the royal family. The Duchess of Cambridge traditionally hands the trophy to the winner of Wimbledon. Few in Britain wanted to see her giving it to a Russian while Britain has been among the leaders in providing aid and weapons to Ukraine.Asked about her feelings on the war at her post-match news conference, Rybakina said her English was not good enough to understand the question, the only time during 30 minutes of questioning she made that claim.Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, left, giving the Venus Rosewater Dish trophy to Rybakina.Sebastien Bozon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn the court, Jabeur and Rybakina also promised one of the sport’s ultimate contrasts in styles. Jabeur’s name rarely is mentioned without “crafty” following it a few words later. Her game is filled with just about every kind of tennis shot there is.At any moment, she can cut the ball on an angle and with a spin that makes it knuckle as it clears the net and finds the unguarded area of the court or smack a forehand down the line. Tennis, for her, is a profession and a sport but also a game and a means to express her innate creativity.The question was whether Rybakina would give Jabeur the chance to hit her shots or whether the power of her serve and her slingshot strokes would hit Jabeur off the court.Early on, finesse prevailed over power. Jabeur drew first blood, forcing a nervy Rybakina to hit from deep in the court. Rybakina struggled with her forehand as Jabeur danced across the grass showing off the array of her arsenal. In the fourth game, she cut one of her signature slicing backhands past Rybakina, who had closed in at the net. A game later, she jumped on a second serve and sent a searing forehand that had Rybakina backpedaling.Jabeur is not a fist-pumper, but when she likes a winner she has just hit, especially one on the move, she jogs across the grass like a basketball player who has just sunk a three pointer. She did a lot of jogging in the first set, which she won when Rybakina sent a forehand into the middle of the net.“I was going to fight to the end,” Rybakina said after the match. Gerald Herbert/Associated PressJabeur rarely plays complete matches, though, even when she appears headed for a quick afternoon. Especially in pressure situations, there is often a wobble, sometimes a fatal one, and it arrived early in the second set on Saturday.Whether the idea of being a set away from becoming Wimbledon champion suddenly seemed too big only she knows. She focused on this tournament since January, even putting a picture of the Wimbledon winner’s trophy on the lock screen of her phone. But in an instant, the ease and steadiness that she had displayed in the first set disappeared.“I told myself, ‘Don’t lose the second set,’” Jabeur said after the match.She didn’t get the message.Rybakina broke Jabeur’s serve in the first game of the second set, and Jabeur never truly recovered. She tried to lighten the atmosphere, heading one errant ball to a ball boy at the end of a game and trying a between-the-legs shot while chasing a lob, but she grew more erratic as the set wore on.Rybakina, meanwhile, shook off her early jitters, telling herself something different from what Jabeur did.“I was going to fight to the end,” she said.She began to fire her first serve. Forehands that had sailed long at the beginning began diving into the corners and hitting the edges of the lines. She charged the net to close out points, running as she had never before in a match and sealed the set with an ace that Jabeur could only stare at.The third set brought more of the same, even as the crowd roared each time she began a service game, and when she got three chances to even the set midway through, desperately trying to lift her and keep the Duchess sitting in the front row of the royal box in the brightest yellow dress in all of Centre Court from her starring role in the oddest of post-match trophy ceremonies.“She was super nice,” Rybakina said of the Duchess.Nothing was going to stop Rybakina this year at Wimbledon: not Jabeur, not the crowd and not even an edict from the government to keep players from Russia from participating. More

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    Novak Djokovic Defeats Cameron Norrie to Get to Wimbledon Final

    Kyrgios is playing in his first Grand Slam singles final, and Djokovic may be playing in his last until next year’s French Open.WIMBLEDON, England — In the last year, Novak Djokovic has experienced the highest of tennis highs, coming within one match of winning a rare calendar-year Grand Slam and the lowest of lows, including detainment and deportation after he arrived in Melbourne in January to try to defend his Australian Open title.On Sunday, he will get a chance to win a seventh Wimbledon singles title against an opponent, Nick Kyrgios of Australia, that few, including Kyrgios himself, thought would ever find the mental strength required to arrive at the biggest stage in the sport.Djokovic earned his spot in the final with a four-set win over Cameron Norrie of Britain on Friday afternoon, overcoming some early-match inconsistency that is becoming a bit of a habit. He withstood both a strong start from Norrie and a raucous hometown crowd on Centre Court to win the semifinal, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4.It was the only men’s semifinal played Friday.On Thursday, Rafael Nadal withdrew from the tournament with a tear in his abdominal muscle. Nadal’s decision not to play after he aggravated the tear in his five-set, quarterfinal victory over Taylor Fritz, allowed Kyrgios to advance without effort into his first Grand Slam singles final. It also ended the hope for a coveted showdown between Djokovic and Nadal, who have won a combined 42 Grand Slam titles but have played each other for the trophy at Wimbledon only once, in 2011. Djokovic won.What the matchup with Kyrgios in the final might lack in terms of historical value — no one, not even Kyrgios, expects him to evolve, at 27, into an all-time great — it may well make up for with drama. It is a duel between two players that many in and around the sport view as villains.Djokovic’s impetuous and contrarian behavior, especially compared with his chief rivals, the gentlemanly Nadal and Roger Federer, has long made him more feared than loved, a crasher of the binary tennis rivalry that Federer and Nadal first created more than 15 years ago.Kyrgios, a temperamental and explosive talent who has spent his career battling the tennis establishment and his own demons, is an uncontrollable and disruptive force who has put himself in the heat of the Wimbledon spotlight since the first days of this tournament.He can explode at any moment, and he has repeatedly in the past two weeks, at chair umpires, opponents, fans or anyone he views as treating him unjustly. Sometimes it is genuine, other times it is merely to shake up and distract his opponent. He has earned $14,000 in fines this tournament but has played to packed stadiums, with fans lusting for his booming serve, or the occasional underhanded one, and his through-the-legs trick shots.On Tuesday, news broke that Kyrgios was due in court on Aug. 2 to face allegations of assaulting a former girlfriend. Chiara Passari told police Kyrgios grabbed her during a domestic dispute in December. On the advice of his lawyers, Kyrgios has declined to comment on the allegations.“There’s going to be a lot of fireworks emotionally,” said Djokovic, a favorite in the match even though he has never beaten or even won a set against Kyrgios.Djokovic and Kyrgios have not played since 2017, and they have never played in a Grand Slam event. But the two sparred verbally at the Australian Open in 2021, a tournament that took place during the height of the pandemic.Djokovic criticized tournament organizers for the restrictions they placed on players arriving in Australia for the tournament. Most players were under a limited two-week quarantine, but many ended up confined to their rooms for 14 days after a handful of people on their special flights into the country tested positive for Covid-19.Kyrgios had remained in Australia for most of the first year of the pandemic, dedicating time to delivering food and other supplies to people who struggled to get them during the country’s strict lockdowns. Djokovic, who has refused to get vaccinated, has been skeptical of the public health community’s management of the pandemic.Long before officials began to give the green light to public gatherings, he staged a tennis exhibition that turned into a superspreader event. Then, shortly after arriving in Australia, he criticized the rules.“Djokovic is a tool,” Kyrgios wrote on Twitter.Djokovic then said in a news conference that he respected Kyrgios’s tennis talents but had no respect for him off the court.Kyrgios hit back, saying he could not take Djokovic’s criticism seriously, given Djokovic’s behavior.“He’s a very strange cat, Novak is,” he said. “A heck of a tennis player but unfortunately someone who’s partying with his shirt off during a global pandemic, I don’t know if I can take any slack from that man.”They have since reached a détente of sorts. It began earlier this year, when Kyrgios spoke up on Djokovic’s behalf after Djokovic was detained in Australia during the controversy over his vaccination status, which ultimately led to his deportation.Kyrgios even described it Friday as a kind of “bromance.” Djokovic would not go that far.“I think everyone knows there was no love lost for a while there,” Kyrgios said. “I think it was healthy for the sport. I think every time we played each other, there was hype around it.”Djokovic said relations were far better than they had been.“When it was really tough for me in Australia, he was one of the very few players that came out publicly and supported me and stood by me,” he said. “That’s something I truly appreciate.”Djokovic remains unvaccinated, and unless the United States and Australia change their rules, Sunday’s final may be his last Grand Slam match for nearly 11 months, and he does not expect it to be easy.“He plays lights-out every time he steps out onto the court,” Djokovic said of Kyrgios. “Just a lot of power in his serve and his game. So I’m sure he’s going to go for it.”Djokovic struggled to go for it initially Friday on a sun-splashed, 80-degree day that meteorologists in London were calling a heat wave. Norrie, a steady, never-say-die lefty, was the better player early and into the first games of the second set, going toe-to-toe and trying to out-rally the best rallier in the world.Djokovic struggled with his serve and to find his trademark precision on his groundstrokes. He also doesn’t much care for playing in the heat. Midway through the first set, with Norrie pushing ahead, Djokovic settled into his chair and draped a towel over his head as the packed Centre Court crowd roared for a countryman with a home just up the road.Norrie, who lives so close to the All England Club that he cycled to the grounds earlier in the tournament, smacked an ace to win the set, pumped his fist and basked in the sound. In addition to the crowd inside the stadium, there were thousands more picnicking and downing beers and Pimm’s on Henman Hill as they watched the match on a big screen.But Djokovic is so good at taking an opponent’s best — and the chiding of a crowd — and biding his time for an opening to appear. He did so when he dropped a set in the fourth round to the hot, Dutch unknown, Tim van Rijthoven, and in the quarterfinals when he dropped the first two sets to Jannik Sinner of Italy, one of the world’s great young players.Djokovic put a baseball cap on to protect himself from the heat of the sun, and midway through the set he stopped giving free points to Norrie. Suddenly, Norrie found himself fighting off break points every time he served. In the eighth game of the set, Norrie sent a forehand long to give Djokovic a 5-3 lead. Djokovic turned to his box and clinched his fist, as if to say, “Don’t worry, I got this.”There was never any doubt. Djokovic sprinted through the third set as Norrie’s game slipped, and he grabbed an early service break in the fourth. Norrie battled to keep it close, but ultimately that was all he could do. A small victory but not the one he wanted.On the final point, Djokovic, who has played 68 Grand Slam tournaments and made the finals 32 times, crushed a serve down the middle, then turned to bait a fan who had yelled to try to disrupt his last stroke. He later claimed with a smile that he was blowing kisses to one that had supported him.Now he faces Kyrgios, a player he said he and others had long seen as among the most dangerous in the world if he could ever get control of his emotions and be committed to the sport, which he has, at least for now.“For the quality player that he is,” Djokovic said of Kyrgios, “this is where he needs to be, and he deserves to be.” More

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    For Sunday’s Wimbledon Final, ‘Fireworks’ and a Contrast in Style

    Despite their previously contentious relationship, Nick Kyrgios and Novak Djokovic have developed “a bit of a bromance,” Kyrgios said. They meet for the Wimbledon men’s singles title on Sunday.WIMBLEDON, England — With the Wimbledon title at stake, it will be the maximizer versus the man who seemingly makes it up as he goes along.Both Novak Djokovic and Nick Kyrgios were identified early as players of surpassing talent and great potential. But while Djokovic, long the No. 1 player in the world, has turned over stones and sifted through the gravel in his restless quest for enduring excellence, Kyrgios has struggled to find the motivation, equanimity and clarity of purpose to challenge for the game’s biggest prizes.But on Sunday, they will share, however briefly, the same objective as they clash — the verb seems just right — on the grass of the All England Club.“Well, one thing is for sure, there are going to be a lot of fireworks emotionally from both guys,” Djokovic said on Friday.This final, the capstone to one of the weirdest of Wimbledons, will be a contrast in styles.Kyrgios, with his huge and hard-to-read serve, can undoubtedly bring the heat. Djokovic, the premier returner in the game, is an expert at extinguishing such flames.Kyrgios can make any shot look spectacular, turning routine strokes into between-the-legs performance art. Djokovic has long been underappreciated because he can make an excruciatingly difficult shot look routine and smooth.But the starker contrast is in their résumés. This will be Djokovic’s 32nd appearance in a Grand Slam singles final, breaking his tie for the men’s record with his longtime rival Roger Federer.It will be Kyrgios’s first, which he said was a big reason he had a nearly sleepless night on Thursday after Rafael Nadal, his would-be opponent, withdrew from the tournament with an abdominal tear. That allowed Kyrgios to skip the semifinal phase altogether on a journey to uncharted territory for him.Kyrgios beat Djokovic in their two previous matches.Ryan Pierse/Getty Images“I was just restless, so many thoughts in my head about a Wimbledon final; that’s all I was thinking about,” Kyrgios said, estimating that he got just one hour of sleep. “That’s where Djokovic has the advantage from the get-go. He can draw from experience. He’s done it so many more times. He knows the emotions he’s going to be feeling. I don’t know that. I don’t know anything like that.”Kyrgios does know what it is like to defeat Djokovic, however. They faced off twice in 2017 in back-to-back tournaments on hard courts, and Kyrgios, serve and big game clicking, won both matches without dropping a set: He prevailed, 7-6 (9), 7-5, in the quarterfinals in Acapulco, Mexico, and won, 6-4, 7-6 (3), in the round of 16 in Indian Wells, Calif.Djokovic was in a slump at that time, falling back because of an elbow injury and personal problems after a long period of dominance. Kyrgios was just 21 and seemingly on an upward trajectory.But the past five years have been full of surprises, and while Djokovic, 35, recovered his mojo and resumed piling up major titles before his vaccination standoff in Melbourne, Kyrgios continued to bedevil his elders on court, including chair umpires. Yet he has failed to get past even the quarterfinals in a Grand Slam singles draw until now.He has faced, by his own account, mental health challenges, including self-harm, suicidal thoughts and abuse of alcohol and drugs. But his upside was never in doubt for the champions who had faced him.“I think, between us players, we always know how dangerous he is, on grass particularly, because of his game, because of his attitude on the court being so confident, just going for it, being a very complete player,” Djokovic said.Djokovic joked that he would start by trying to win a set, and said that he was well aware that this final, despite the yawning gap in achievement, had the potential to be something spectacular.“Honestly, as a tennis fan, I’m glad that he’s in the finals, because he’s got so much talent,” Djokovic said. “Everyone was praising him when he came on the tour, expecting great things from him. Of course, then we know what was happening throughout many years with him mentally, emotionally. On and off the court, a lot of different things were distracting him, and he was not being able to get this consistency.”Djokovic then finished the thought on a welcoming note.“For the quality player that he is, this is where he needs to be and he deserves to be,” he said.The Djokovic-Kyrgios relationship was once publicly tense, but it sounded more like a mutual-admiration society on Friday, and Djokovic made it clear that he appreciated that Kyrgios, an Australian, offered him support in January when he was deported from Australia before the Australian Open. He had arrived in Melbourne convinced that he would be given a waiver to enter because he had recently recovered from the coronavirus — even though he hadn’t been vaccinated.“We definitely have a bit of a bromance now, which is weird,” Kyrgios said. “I think everyone knows there was no love lost for a while there.”Though Djokovic was not quite prepared to second the bromance, Kyrgios said they had begun exchanging Instagram direct messages. “Earlier in the week, he was like, ‘Hopefully, I’ll see you Sunday,’” Kyrgios said.So it has turned out, but win or lose, Kyrgios’s ranking will not reflect the breakthrough. Kyrgios arrived at Wimbledon ranked 40th in the world, and his ranking will actually drop next week because of the ATP Tour’s decision to strip Wimbledon of ranking points this year in response to the tournament’s ban on Russian and Belarusian players because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.On Monday, the points from last year’s Wimbledon will also fall off players’ rankings, dropping Kyrgios to about 45. Djokovic, who has won 27 straight matches at Wimbledon and is on the verge of a fourth straight title here, will also drop back: from No. 3 to No. 7.It is unprecedented and, frankly, unjust. Though the men’s and women’s tours made their move to mark their territory and try to discourage future bans over political issues, the point stripping has clearly been more of a short-term hit to the players than to Wimbledon, which has been bustling with full crowds after a lighter-than-usual first few days and has continued to generate global buzz. (Kyrgios vs. Djokovic won’t hurt there.)But it also has been a Wimbledon full of odd twists and big letdowns, with three leading men’s players, including Matteo Berrettini, withdrawing after testing positive for the coronavirus, and with Nadal unable to play his semifinal against Kyrgios and continue his quest for the calendar-year Grand Slam. One of the twists: Elena Rybakina, born and raised in Russia and often still training there, is in the women’s final and now representing Kazakhstan. Even the British government was unable to finish the tournament, with British ministers resigning en masse before Prime Minister Boris Johnson took the hint.Djokovic did have to play his semifinal, however, and the suspense did not last much more than a set and a half on Friday before he found his flow against Cameron Norrie of Britain and accelerated to the finish with a victory, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4.It was, as it so often is with Djokovic involved, two against one: Norrie and a partisan Centre Court crowd versus Djokovic.It was loud, often thunderously loud, in the early stages as Norrie took the lead, but it is much less clear which way the crowd will blow on Sunday. Kyrgios’s often-confrontational approach and foul-mouthed dialogues (and monologues) run counter to the codes that are typically embraced at the All England Club, whose crowd trends older, particularly on Centre Court.Kyrgios, who leads the tournament in fines, is also facing legal trouble, having been summoned to appear in court in Australia on Aug. 2 in relation to an assault allegation from his former girlfriend. He has declined to address the allegations at Wimbledon, and on Friday, when his name was mentioned in Djokovic’s on-court interview, there was a brief flurry of cheers followed by a much louder round of boos.“I believe that the crowd are going to support Novak in the final,” said Mark Petchey, a British coach, television analyst and former player. “It will be interesting to see how that affects Novak, who is so used to being the underdog.”Sunday’s duel will be interesting indeed and just maybe transcendent. Kyrgios, after three full days of waiting, could either rise to the most significant opportunity of his career or fall flat after too many restless nights of anticipation.“It’s definitely a shock to the system because I’ve been playing so many matches,” he said of his unexpected break.But it certainly appears that Kyrgios has a game and a temperament made for the sport’s biggest occasions. We already know that Djokovic does. More