Tennis

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Tennis

      Iga Swiatek Falls at Wimbledon, Ending a Long Win Streak

      by

      Frustrated by low bounces on the grass courts that took away her most powerful weapons, the top-seeded women’s singles player lost in straight sets to Alizé Cornet of France.WIMBLEDON, England — Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 and the top seed at Wimbledon, did something she had not done in more than four months Saturday. She lost a tennis match.Swiatek, the 21-year-old two-time Grand Slam champion from Poland, lost in the third round to Alizé Cornet, the veteran Frenchwoman, 6-4, 6-2, ending her winning streak at 37 matches, one of the longest in modern women’s tennis.Swiatek, though, did not lose the match so much as Cornet won it, emphatically even.Playing with strapping on her left thigh, Cornet came out swinging hard, matching Swiatek’s power and taking advantage of the Polish champion’s discomfort on grass.Alizé Cornet celebrated Saturday during her straight-set victory over Swiatek.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAfter losing the first set, Swiatek seemed to right things quickly, and surged to a 2-0 lead. But Cornet reeled off six straight games with Swiatek losing the final point with a forehand into the middle of the net.Swiatek shook hands with her opponent, quickly stowed her rackets and headed for the exit of the No. 1 court, where she had been pushed to three sets by a relative unknown only two days earlier.She waved and gave a thumbs up to the crowd as she walked, then stopped to sign a series of autographs before leaving.The result had a familiar feel for Cornet. In 2014 she beat Serena Williams, then the world No. 1 and the top seed at the tournament, on the same No. 1 court.That was relatively early in her career, though. Eight years later, in just 93 minutes, she pulled off another monumental upset and made the second week of a Grand Slam for the second time this year. Then, fittingly, she compared herself to another French favorite.“Like good wine,” she told the crowd. “It ages well.”The afternoon was really about Swiatek, though.Anyone who has ever picked up a racket knows the most basic adage of the game — it is hard to win a tennis match but incredibly easy to lose one. A few errant shots, a bad quarter-hour of serving, the briefest lapses of concentration, and one set and then another slips away in what feels like minutes. Hopelessness sets in, and getting off the court as quickly as possible can feel like the best and only alternative, even though it isn’t.Hopelessness, however, was not what led to Swiatek’s demise Saturday. It was Cornet. A fearless opponent can be just as fatal.That is just part of what made Swiatek’s accomplishments during the first half of this year, in an era of women’s tennis when the competition is intense from the first round of nearly every tournament, so remarkable.Swiatek lost to Jelena Ostapenko, the free-swinging Latvian, on Feb. 16 in the quarterfinals of the Dubai Tennis Championships. Since then she has won six consecutive singles titles, including her second French Open. She won three tournaments at the Masters 1,000 level, just below the Grand Slams.In March and April she won the so-called Sunshine Double — the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., and the Miami Open. Only three other women had done that before. At the French Open, she lost just one set. Other players talked about just trying to get past the one-hour mark on the court with her. Many failed.During her winning streak, Swiatek won the women’s singles title at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA Today Sports, via ReutersSwiatek, though, always figured the grass court season might spell the end of her streak. She is most comfortable taking balls on the rise and using her topspin and her power to put opponents on the back foot from the very first moments of the match.After she won the French Open in early June, she faced the choice of playing a warm-up tournament or two to get more comfortable on her least favorite surface or taking a break and arriving at Wimbledon feeling refreshed. She chose to rest and hoped that her cresting confidence would help her solve the puzzle of grass. It did not.In practice, her timing was off. In matches, balls skidded along the grass instead of bouncing into her strike zone, taking her most potent weapon, that topspin power, out of her quiver, forcing her to play more conservatively.On Saturday afternoon, she reverted to Plan A, trying to hit Cornet off the court. Unable to control the ball, she dropped the first three games against a player who truly believed she could do the thing that had not been done in a long while.Swiatek rallied her way onto the scoreboard, but Cornet never gave up the advantage and finished off the first set with an emphatic overhead. She then left the court before the start of the second set, leaving Swiatek to sit in her chair and ponder her fate.In the second set, Swiatek went back to Plan A and surged to a 2-0 lead, but before long she had fallen out of her groove once more. On break point in the fifth game, Cornet jumped on a second serve and laced a forehand down the line. Swiatek dropped her chin and walked to her chair for the changeover.From there, the only question was whether Cornet could stay solid enough to get across the finish line. The answer came quickly.Swiatek, bidding farewell to Wimbledon for this year, lost 12 of the last 14 points in the match. “I just didn’t know what to do,” she said.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Usually when I’m coming back, I have some kind of a plan, and I know what to change,” Swiatek said. “Here I didn’t know. I was confused. On grass courts everything happens so quickly.”Cornet won the next three games and 12 of the final 14 points.“I didn’t tank it, but I just didn’t know what to do,” Swiatek said.Swiatek will get a bit more rest now. Before long, though, she will journey to North America for the hard court season. Clay still reigns in her mind, but after she won the Miami Open in April, two weeks after winning Indian Wells, she said hard courts were a very very close second.Another streak could be in the offing. Few would be surprised. And if not, she will always have 37. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Tennis

      Tennis Gets Another Fairy Tale in Tim van Rijthoven, Maybe the Craziest One Yet

      by

      Tim van Rijthoven is a perfect 8-0 in the last month. Before that, and seven years into his professional career, he had yet to win a main-draw match.WIMBLEDON, England — Tennis has had its share of come-out-of-nowhere stories in recent years. A qualifier named Emma Raducanu won the U.S. Open last September. The sport is as deep as it has ever been.But even by those standards, what Tim van Rijthoven of the Netherlands has accomplished during the last month does not just border on the absurd — it is the definition of absurd. And the ludicrousness continued on Friday as van Rijthoven, the 205th-ranked player in the world less than a month ago, played himself into a final-16 showdown with the top-seeded Novak Djokovic.Ah, but that is just the beginning, because van Rijthoven’s journey is even more ridiculous than that.On June 6, van Rijthoven, an injury-prone 25-year-old, and Homer Simpson had the same number of wins in the main draw of ATP Tour events. That would be zero. Unlike Simpson, though, van Rijthoven received a wild-card entry into the Libema Open, a low-level grass-court tournament in the Netherlands.On June 7, he recorded his first main-draw tour win. During the next five days, he reeled off four more wins, including upsets of the top three seeds in the tournament — the fourteenth-ranked Taylor Fritz, the 9th-ranked Felix Auger-Aliassime, and to cap it off in the finals, he drubbed the current world No. 1, Daniil Medvedev.He has since won three more matches, all at Wimbledon, his first Grand Slam tournament. He has beaten two seeded players. He has dropped just one set, in a tiebreaker. Some players can take a year to win a half-dozen matches on the ATP Tour. Van Rijthoven has done it in four weeks.“From the outside, it obviously looks like a fairy tale,” he said Friday after he beat the No. 22 seed Nikoloz Basilashvili of Georgia in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4. Van Rijthoven began just after 11 a.m. He played like someone with a girlfriend waiting to meet him for lunch, finishing Basilashvili off in 102 minutes.When Basilashvili’s last shot sailed out, van Rijthoven calmly raised his arms and strolled to the net to shake hands. He briefly clapped his racket to the crowd, packed his bag and left. Just another day at the office.Van Rijthoven celebrating his win against Nikoloz Basilashvili.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Very difficult to explain,” said his coach, Igor Sijsling, who was still playing tournaments himself last year and only began working with van Rijthoven six months ago. “Our first day here, he had big eyes, but now he’s acting like he’s been here 10 years already.”Late bloomers with triple-digit rankings have had some eyebrow-raising runs at Grand Slam tournaments of late. Van Rijthoven’s countryman Botic van de Zandschulp was ranked 117th before his run to the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open last year. Aslan Karatsev of Russia had been in the tennis wilderness for years and was ranked 114th ahead of his semifinal run at the 2021 Australian Open.“All it takes is a couple of wins against a big player, and then your confidence goes up and you start thinking you’re as good as these guys,” said Marc Lucero, who coaches Steve Johnson, the veteran pro from the United States now ranked No. 93.The grass also helps, said David Witt, a longtime coach. Players rarely practice on it, and they compete on it for just one month each year, making it something of an equalizer for those who are comfortable with the surface when they play against more established professionals who may not be.A watered-down draw missing the barred Russians, including Medvedev, does not hurt either.Still, van de Zandschulp and Karatsev had won top-level tour matches before getting hot on the big stage. Until early June, van Rijthoven was winless in ATP Tour main-draw matches. How is this happening?He was promising enough as a teenager to train at the IMG Academy in Florida in 2015 and said he has struggled with injuries, some tennis-related and one that was just bad luck, for three years. He had surgery on his wrist and battled inflammation of the tendons on the inner, or medial, side of his elbow.“They call it golfer’s elbow, but I got it playing tennis,” he said Friday. (Tennis elbow is inflammation of the tendons on the outer, or lateral, side.)Also, completely unrelated to his elbow problem, he developed thrombosis in the arteries of his arm, which caused the tips of his fingers to become cold and numb. He had to have surgery to remove the blood clots.The biggest problem, he said, was not physical but mental. He is plenty big (6-foot-2, 195 pounds) and strong and fast enough, but when he missed easy shots or made bad decisions he became sullen and embarrassed. He would obsess during matches about what other people were thinking about his level of play, assuming it was not good.Earlier this year, frustrated that his chance at a professional career might be slipping away, he had an epiphany.“I decided I was going to accept my mistakes and grow up and become an adult,” he said as he walked to the first of more than a dozen television interviews, a new part of his schedule. “I told myself, ‘I’m not going to be negative anymore.’ I will tell you that is not a one-day shift that you make. It’s something you have to work on every day.”Igor Sijsling, right, watching Tim van Rijthoven as Maartje Basten, Rijthoven’s girlfriend, cheers.Kieran Galvin/EPA, via ShutterstockHe has also started training with Sijsling, who works for the Dutch tennis federation, which had continued to support van Rijthoven through his struggles. Sijsling told him that he needed to stop playing defensively and use his power to play more aggressively and push forward into the court.“You have to attack with power or else it’s wasted,” Sijsling said. Sijsling has also encouraged van Rijthoven, who likes to work intensely but not for very long, to put in more time on the practice court. “I don’t think you can get to the top without working very hard,” he said.On Sunday, van Rijthoven’s undefeated status this spring will get its stiffest test against Djokovic, the six-time singles champion here and winner of the last three Wimbledon titles. Djokovic said he watched some of van Rijthoven’s matches in recent days in anticipation of their showdown, which will most likely take place on Centre Court, an atmosphere unlike anything van Rijthoven has experienced.Djokovic’s scouting report: van Rijthoven is well suited to the grass, he said. “Big serve, one-handed backhand, uses the slice well. He’s an all-around player. He can play fast; he can also stay in the rally and come to the net.”Djokovic has 20 Grand Slam singles titles, but van Rijthoven said he would walk onto the court with the same thought he has tried to have all year, whether in those backwater challenger tournaments or during the past month on the ATP Tour. He will believe he can win.“It’s basically going into every match thinking I’m the better player,” he said, “even though it’s maybe not always the case.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Tennis

      Iga Swiatek, a World No. 1, Gets Comfortable Using Her Clout

      by

      “It’s a new position that I’m in, and I’m trying to use it the best way possible,” Swiatek said. She announced an exhibition match to help raise money for young Ukrainians.WIMBLEDON, England — Iga Swiatek, cap still pulled low after her latest victory, was sitting in a players café perched high above the All England Club and the grass she is still learning to love.From her table on Thursday evening, there was a sweeping, soothing vista of privileged people enjoying their privileges, but Swiatek’s focus was elsewhere. It was on the war in Ukraine and on the exhibition match that she had announced a day earlier to help raise money for young Ukrainians.It will be held on July 23 in Krakow in Swiatek’s home country of Poland. For Swiatek, ranked No. 1 and on a 37-match winning streak, it is the latest sign that she wants to use her new and rapidly expanding platform to do much more than sell shoes and pile up Instagram followers.“It’s a new position that I’m in, and I’m trying to use it the best way possible,” Swiatek said. “But I still haven’t figured out how to use it the best way, you know? But for sure, I want to show my support.”“I’ve been really emotional about it,” she said of the war.Poland, which borders Ukraine, has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees, but Swiatek, whose job takes her to five continents, is concerned that too much of the rest of the world is moving on, along with some of her fellow players.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, many players began wearing ribbons on court that were blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine’s national flag. At this stage, Swiatek is one of the few non-Ukrainians still wearing the ribbon, which she pins to the side of her cap.“In our country, we are aware that there is war, but when I’m traveling, I can see there is not a lot of news about it,” Swiatek said. “For sure, there was at the beginning, but later there was more and more silence. So basically, I hope I’m going to remind people that the war is out there. Society, we don’t have a long memory. But, I mean, lives are at stake so I think we should remind people.”Swiatek, 21, also used her victory speech at last month’s French Open to offer her support for Ukraine.Swiatek wearing a pin in support of Ukraine.Adam Stoltman for The New York Times“But that’s just talking, I suppose,” she said. “Right now, I’m pretty happy that we are making some action.”The exhibition will feature a match between Swiatek and the retired Polish tennis star Agnieszka Radwanska and raise funds in support of children and teenagers affected by the war in Ukraine. Elina Svitolina, Ukraine’s most successful current player who is pregnant and off the tour for the moment, will serve as a chair umpire. Sergiy Stakhovsky, a former Ukrainian men’s star now in the Ukrainian army, will play doubles with Radwanska against Swiatek and a Polish partner.Wimbledon has, of course, taken action, too, generating great debate in the game as the only Grand Slam tennis tournament to bar Russian and Belarusian players because of the invasion. The All England Club made the move, a wrenching one, under some pressure to act from the British government, but the club stuck by its position despite being stripped of ranking points by the men’s and women’s tours.Swiatek would have liked more consultation between the leaders of the tour and the entire player group on the decision to strip points, although the WTA player council, with its elected representatives, was deeply involved in the process.“I wasn’t really focused on points before, because we should talk about war and people suffering and not about points,” Swiatek said. “But for sure, when I think about that, it seems like right now for the winners, and for people who are winning and really working hard, it’s not going to be fair.”British public opinion polls have reflected support for Wimbledon’s ban even if the other big events in tennis, including the U.S. Open, have not followed Wimbledon’s lead, maintaining that individual athletes should not be punished for the actions of their governments.Swiatek’s counterpart on the men’s tour: the No. 1 ranked Daniil Medvedev, a charismatic and polyglot Russian, is not in London and is instead training (and golfing) at his base in the south of France. Six women’s singles players ranked in the top 40, including No. 6 Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, also have been barred.The ban has been met with mixed reactions on tour, both publicly and privately, but Swiatek, after much deliberation, can see Wimbledon’s perspective.“I think it’s the only way to show that it’s wrong, having war, and their aggression is wrong,” she said.“It’s not fair, for sure, sometimes for these players,” she said of the barred group. “But we are public, and we have impact. That’s why we are making a lot of money also. We are sometimes on TV everywhere, and sports has been in politics. I know people want to separate that, and I also would like to kind of not be involved in every aspect of politics, but in these kind of matters it is, and you can’t help it sometimes.”Wimbledon has not emphasized the Russian and Belarusian ban during the tournament, but it has invited all Ukrainian refugees who have settled in the area near Wimbledon to attend the tournament on Sunday.The most eloquent opponents of the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the tournament have been its players, including Lesia Tsurenko, the last Ukrainian left in singles, who lost in the third round on Friday to Jule Niemeier of Germany.All of the leading Ukrainian players have had to leave the country to continue their careers. Some like Anhelina Kalinina are still living out of suitcases and using tournament sites as training bases, but Tsurenko has finally been able to rent an apartment in Italy and is often training alongside Marta Kostyuk, another talented Ukrainian player, at the tennis center operated by the longtime Italian coach Riccardo Piatti in Bordighera.“A small town by the sea,” Tsurenko said. “And sometimes, when you are just eating great food and having amazing Italian espresso, and you see that you are surrounded by beautiful nature, for some moments you forget and you’re relaxed, and you think, oh, the life is good. But it’s just seconds. It’s very tough for me to explain to you, and I hope the people will never feel this, but it’s just like some part of me is just always so tight. And I think it will be a big release when the war will finish, but not before.”Tsurenko during a break in the third round women’s singles match against Niemeier.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressSwiatek, raised in a family of modest means in the suburbs of Warsaw, cannot fully grasp what the Ukrainians are experiencing, but she can sympathize, and she is increasingly determined to act. She, like Naomi Osaka before her and the 18-year-old American Coco Gauff, are part of a new wave of WTA stars who have made it clear that they do not intend to stick simply to sports. Gauff has been vocal in recent weeks about gun violence and about the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.Martina Navratilova, a former No. 1 who remains an activist on many fronts, has been watching Swiatek and Gauff find their voices.“Socially, the awareness from these two, they could really change the world,” said Navratilova, who vows to block anyone on Twitter who tells her to stick to tennis.Swiatek is not there yet. She is still navigating how and where to use her clout, but she is all in on July 23 in Krakow.“For me, it’s really important,” she said. “It’s like a fifth Grand Slam.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Tennis

      At Wimbledon, American Men Are Putting on a Fourth of July Bash

      by

      Nearly everywhere one looked on Wednesday and Thursday, an American man was slamming or slicing or grinding his way into the final 32, and it feels like the 1990s.Taylor Fritz, left, Francis Tiafoe and Tommy Paul are three of eight American men ranked in the top 50. Shaun Botterill/Getty Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; Justin Setterfield/Getty ImagesWIMBLEDON, England — Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, the American men are throwing a party on British soil.As night fell on Thursday at the All England Club, eight American men were set to qualify for the third round of the prestigious Wimbledon tournament, accounting for 25 percent of the final 32 spots. That is the most American men in the third round at the event since 1995, when nine qualified in the Sampras-Agassi-Courier-Chang heydays. It is also the most in any Grand Slam tournament since the U.S. Open in 1996.Nearly everywhere one looked on Wednesday and Thursday, an American man was slamming or slicing or grinding his way into the final 32, and one more will clinch his spot Friday. The sun has seemingly set on the era when every male American player had a big serve and a forehand and not much else.Some were familiar faces, like John Isner, bashing his way past the hometown favorite Andy Murray. But several were part of the next wave of rising Yanks in their mid-20s — the clique of Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul and Francis Tiafoe that first bonded as teenagers at a national training center in Florida. And then there were a couple from the wave after that (Jenson Brooksby and Brandon Nakashima) who are still a couple years away from needing a daily shave. Two Americans, Maxime Cressy and Jack Sock, one new to the scene, the other a veteran, were dueling for the last available spot until rain interrupted their match on No. 3 Court on Thursday.Brandon Nakashima won his second-round match against Denis Shapovalov of Canada on Thursday.Toby Melville/Reuters“It’s been a long, long progression,” said Martin Blackman, the former pro who is the general manager of player development for the United States Tennis Association.Now before anyone stateside rushes out to the liquor store to get some Pimm’s on ice for a championship celebration, it is worth noting that no one expects any of these players to actually win the men’s singles title, at least not this year. American men’s tennis is deep but light on the top.The U.S. now has eight men in the top 50 and 13 in the top 100, more than any other country. Arguably the most promising of the lot, Sebastian Korda, son of the former world No. 2 Petr Korda, had to withdraw from Wimbledon 10 days ago with shin splints.“Didn’t give me anything to fish for,” Denis Shapovalov of Canada said of Nakashima, who beat him in four sets Thursday.Despite the stampede this week, there are no Americans in the top 10 and just two in the top 20 — Fritz and Reilly Opelka. Russia and Spain each have two players in the top 10. Spain, the best tennis country of the last decade, has four players in the top 20.But for a country whose male talent stock has long been seen as fairly lacking and is without a Grand Slam tournament champion since Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003, depth represents significant progress. It also serves as a kind of motivational tool. A friendly competition has emerged between the Americans in their mid-20s, who are led by Fritz, and the ones who have just reached the legal drinking age in the United States, or are not there yet, to be the first to play into the final rounds of a Grand Slam tournament.“They’re great for us,” Paul, 25, said of Brooksby, Korda, both 21, and Nakashima, 20. “They push us.”“For tennis to grow, we’re going to need some winners on the men’s side,” he added.The U.S.T.A. knows that as well. For years, it has been trying to hone a system to help develop players that will work in a vast country with more than 330 million people and plenty of competition from more popular sports that are cheaper for good young athletes to pursue.Taylor Fritz is the highest-ranked American men’s player at No. 14.Alastair Grant/Associated PressIn Europe, especially Eastern Europe, young teenagers with promise often leave home for academies. The academic and psychological support can be thin. A “Lord of the Flies,” sink-or-swim environment persists. Despite its success there in producing some formidable talent and champions, including Novak Djokovic, that model was never going to work with American parents.Instead, over the last decade the organization has tried to create a trout farm rather than find a unicorn. It developed a three-tiered program of local, regional and national camps that bring together top talent throughout the year but also allow kids to stay home for as long as possible and work with their own coaches. Airfare to the camps isn’t included, but just about everything else is, even some money for private coaches to attend sometimes so they don’t feel squeezed out of the process as a young player gets older and better.There is no one-size-fits-all approach. During the crucial years of development between the ages of 15 and 22, some players choose to work with U.S.T.A. coaches and trainers at their training centers in Orlando, Fla., or Carson, Calif., outside Los Angeles. Fritz was a part of the U.S.T.A. program for six years, Paul for five, Opelka for four and Tiafoe for three, Blackman said.Others, such as Korda, Nakashima and Brooksby, choose to remain largely outside the system, but they still can qualify for financial support and come to the occasional camp or show up at the training center for competition.Blackman also does not want the organization to preach a certain style of play. Cressy’s serve-and-volley game is just as valued as Brooksby’s finesse, Tiafoe’s serve-and-forehand power, and Nakashima’s all-court approach.At one such camp, a national gathering in Boca Raton, Fla., a decade ago, Fritz, Paul, and Tiafoe first bonded.“It was just really boring in those dorms, nothing to do, so we didn’t have much choice,” Fritz said recently.Fritz, with his big feet and mop of hair, and the least advanced game of the group, quickly became the group punching bag, friendly punching of course.“Big, goofy guy like that, you know he was going to end up being the target,” Tiafoe said.Jenson Brooksby beat Benjamin Bonzi of France on Thursday to advance to the third round.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesPaul said Fritz took it well. Fritz also saw that members of his new clique were better at tennis than he was, and he began working harder to catch up. Within a few years, he had pushed ahead. He is now the top-ranked American man at No. 14 and the only one of the younger set to have won a Masters 1000 tournament, the level just below the Grand Slams, emerging at Indian Wells, Calif., earlier this year.They remain close friends and genuinely invested in each other’s success, which helps during a long season filled with travel. Paul has been on the road for nearly 10 weeks.“I’m so homesick I want to throw up,” he said Thursday.Text threads and group dinners, sometimes fancy, sometimes burgers and pizza, and lengthy bull sessions help. Tiafoe made the final at a tournament in Portugal earlier this year. As he came off the court following each win, he would find congratulatory notes on his phone from the posse.A big and extremely difficult task for the next generation and the one right behind them still lies ahead — getting into the top 10 and becoming fixtures in the last matches of the biggest tournaments, the way American women, led by the Williams sisters, have performed for years.It’s getting closer.“I expect us to do well in all of these tournaments now,” Paul said. “It’s all about winning one more match and going one round deeper.”Paul has never made the second week of a Grand Slam. On Friday, on the first day of a third round with plenty of American company, he will get another chance. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Tennis

      At Wimbledon, Maxime Cressy’s Throwback Style Helps Him Charge Forward

      by

      We’re well past the glory days of the serve-and-volley style that took John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Pete Sampras to the Hall of Fame. Maxime Cressy is on a one-man revival mission.WIMBLEDON, England — “My butt is killing me.”That was Maxime Cressy, a little more than an hour after his four hour, 10 minute marathon win over Felix Auger-Aliassime on Tuesday in the fading light of the No. 3 Court, the steeple of St. Mary’s Church in sight just above the tree line. The little-known Cressy, a 25-year-old American who was born and raised in France, only recently cracked the top 50, but he has already achieved something no player ever will, and few aspire to, because, well, as Cressy said, it’s rather painful, and maybe not so smart.To watch Cressy play and win a match on the Wimbledon grass is to take a journey back in time, to the glory years of serve-and-volley tennis, to the days of John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras.It was a time before professional tennis became much more uniform and far friendlier to camping out on the baseline and blasting groundstrokes. Before ever-lighter and more powerful rackets and next-generation polyester strings made passing shots on the run from the deepest corners possible with a wrist-flick. It all turned rushing the net on too many points into a foolish, anachronistic mission, like stuffing 30 wooden rackets in the bag before taking the court.“They don’t really know how to volley that well, so they don’t want to come in even when invited,” Navratilova said this week of the modern generation of players.Even Reilly Opelka, who is nearly 7 feet tall and possesses one of the deadliest serves in the game, won’t consider it, despite having the wingspan of an Andean condor. Too tough to move, he explained, especially on soft grass, and especially for anyone who takes big strides like he does.Maria Sakkari is one of the most aggressive players in the game. But she has long been somewhat allergic to the net, so much so that her coach, Tom Hill, has set a goal for her to go to the net 20 times in a match, though not by serving and volleying, which she rarely practices.“Whether I can do it or not, that’s the goal,” she said.She got there 10 times on Tuesday in her straight-set opening-round win over Zoe Hives of Australia.Carlos Alcaraz is still trying to figure out how to play on grass even though he is the game’s hottest rising star and one of the fastest players. He possesses some deft touch at the net, too.He tried a bit of serve-and-volley early in his opening match against Jan-Lennard Struff of Germany. It was one of the main things he wanted to do in the match.“I lost every time,” he said. “I didn’t want to try again.”And yet, amid all this net-play pessimism, there is Cressy, all 6-foot-6 of him, plus the mop of dirty blond curls that gives him an extra inch or two. He comes in behind his first serve, his second serve and on his opponent’s serve, whenever he senses a chance. He comes in after every shortish ball he sees and even after his opponent passes him on three consecutive points. He believes in serve-and-volley with the fervor of a cult member, even if it is a cult of one.“This style can take me to the top,” he said after a first-round loss at the French Open, and when he says “the top,” he means the No. 1 ranking. After all, that loss was on clay, which has long been kryptonite to serve-and-volleyers.Cressy has been battling conventional wisdom for a decade, trying to master the serve-and-volley since he was a promising junior player in France. France’s tennis federation basically told him to cut it out, as though he were goofing off during practice. If that was the way he was going to play, they didn’t want much to do with him. Cressy would not budge.“I loved it,” he said Tuesday night after knocking off Auger-Aliassime, the sixth-seeded Canadian and a fashionable dark-horse at Wimbledon, 6-7 (5), 6-4, 7-6 (9), 7-6 (5). He will play another American, Jack Sock, in the second round on Thursday. “If it is something I love, I might as well do it and make it as efficient as possible.”Cressy trained at an academy during his last year in high school and was recruited to play at U.C.L.A., where coaches saw some potential for him in doubles. They were correct, and he became a collegiate doubles champion in 2019.But Cressy never stopped believing in the idea that his sport was ignoring a style that could be incredibly efficient for a singles player with a big serve, an ability to move, unflappable confidence and a willingness to sprint, scurry, bend, crouch, squat and stretch for balls before they land. Hence the sore rear end after Tuesday’s match.Lately, something has clicked. In December, Cressy was ranked 112th. He played into the final 16 at the Australian Open in January, had a rough patch in the late winter and early spring, then got on a roll that has sent him up to No. 45, one of the fastest rises in the sport this year.The elevation has come after years of studying film of Sampras and McEnroe and all the other great net hounds. His three years as a professional have been a process of trial and error, especially trying to figure out how to best use his cannon-like serve. At some point, he’s not sure when, there was an epiphany — the most effective and reliable serve was not the perfectly placed, overpowering 140-mile-an-hour ace. Too often, that is a low-percentage shot.Rather, it’s the serve that produces an easy volley. His first serve averaged 123 miles an hour on Tuesday; his second 119. Many players, even the best ones, lose 20 miles per hour or more from their first to second serve. He did not lose a service game.“It’s very difficult playing someone who is basically hitting two first serves,” a frustrated Auger-Aliassime said of Cressy after the match.Cressy has experimented with different serve patterns, trying to spray them across the service box, but he ultimately settled on using just two — one wide and the other down the middle of the court, though he mainly uses the latter just to keep his opponents from focusing fully on his wide serves. Most often, he hits a high, kicking serve out wide. It goes in a lot. If it comes back, it’s often in his volleying strike zone.After the serve, he sprints to the net and instinct takes over. He never has a plan for where the volleys will go. In a split second, he sees the ball, the court and the opponent. A pulse from his brain to his hands says punch, or drive, or cut, or slice or drop volley.The ball crashes into his strings. And it goes from there. So many of his volleys land just inches from the baseline. Even the lost art of the deep volley, something lamented by many, including Dick Gould, the retired Stanford tennis coach who helped turn McEnroe into a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, lives on in Cressy.It is a lonely way to play, Cressy said: so many doubters telling him serve-and-volley is a relic and no one over his shoulder when he looks back to see if anyone will join his cause. There is, though, the joy and cockeyed logic that only the iconoclast understands and figures out how to use for his benefit.“It is a bumpy road to be unique on the tour,” he said Tuesday, “but that helps my confidence.” More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Tennis

      What’s Next for Serena Williams?

      by

      A second consecutive first-round exit at Wimbledon leaves the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion looking human, but suggesting she has more tennis left to play.WIMBLEDON, England — Most likely, it was not truly the end. Chances are there will be some more tennis, maybe even another major tournament at the end of the summer.It is long past the beginning of the end.What happened at Wimbledon though, where Harmony Tan of France beat Serena Williams in a third-set tiebreaker at the tournament she had won seven times, signaled the end of the Serena Williams that the world, both within tennis and outside it, has known.For the better part of two decades, Williams dominated her sport unlike anyone else. She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles — the most recent, the Australian Open in 2017, when she was pregnant — and she has won nearly $100 million in prize money.She transcended tennis as a dominant cultural figure, informing debates on gender, race and celebrity. She became a successful businesswoman and a mother. On Tuesday, she was a player trying to gut out a victory against a relatively unknown competitor a little more than half her age.When people would describe Williams as perhaps the greatest female tennis player ever, she would say, “tennis player,” to suggest that she should be compared to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Few argued with her.The memory of that Serena Williams, now 40 years old and ranked 1,204th in singles, has remained alive for a year and half, ever since she lost definitively, decisively, but still fighting with her signature mix of power, grit and mystique against Naomi Osaka in the semifinals of the 2021 Australian Open. Conventional wisdom held that in the right tournament — say, Wimbledon — with the right draw, she could be that Serena Williams once again.She had struggled with an Achilles’ tendon injury ahead of that tournament anyway. Her fourth-round loss at the French Open to Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan came on the slow, red clay at the French Open, a surface she never cared for much. She had not won a title in Paris since 2015.Then came the hamstring tear five minutes into her opening match at Wimbledon a year ago, a freak injury.Williams had won a Grand Slam tournament during her first trimester of pregnancy. Some of the most dominant tennis anyone has ever played came after she nearly died from a hematoma and pulmonary embolism.Four times she had been a match away from winning a record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title, though she long ago ended any debate about whether she was the greatest ever. That elite serve and forehand, her fist-pumps, her glare, the visceral screams that come out in a way that both inspire and terrify, all of it was still there, wasn’t it, there for her to summon when her health and the planets aligned, even after 11 months away from the game?Williams after winning a point against Harmony Tan.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressPerhaps that Serena Williams will appear once more. But Tuesday did not provide many hints that it would. The Williams that her fellow players, so many of them so much younger, speak of with awe and inspiration, is now more of an idea than an actual opponent.“If I can win one or two games that would be really good,” Tan said of her mind-set before the match, her first at Wimbledon.For certain stretches on Tuesday evening, the Williams of old appeared on Centre Court. She used her forehand to dictate parts of the match, and chased balls with the footwork of yesteryear. A feathery drop shot late in the third set showed the touch that appears infrequently now.But too often Williams looked every bit her 40 years. She had to lean on her racket to catch her breath after so many points. She hunted for the inner assassin she once summoned without notice. Williams was once so clinical against an overmatched, inexperienced opponent like Tan. That Williams is no more.That, of course, is just the tennis side of it.The Serena Williams of the past two decades has been so much more than a gifted athlete who knew what to do with 11 ounces of carbon fiber in her right hand. Even during the long periods when the rankings did not have a the No. 1 next to her name, she defined and set the bar for her sport, and for women’s sports more broadly.She was Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and 1970s, Tiger Woods of the past quarter century, a one-name brand who graced the covers of sports, fashion and newsmagazines with an overall income somewhere in the mid-eight figures.“Changing the game was not something I set out to do, but somehow I did it,” Williams said late Tuesday night.That part of the Williams persona, the trailblazer, trendsetter, the voice that can say so much with few words, will go on, with new wrinkles. In addition to her usual slew of sponsors, Williams announced earlier this year that her early-stage venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, has raised an inaugural fund of $111 million to invest in founders with diverse points of view and backgrounds.Her fund has already financed 60 companies that include Sendwave, a money transfer app; MasterClass, which offers online lessons in several topics; and Daily Harvest, a food delivery service. The fund’s limited partners include some of the biggest names in tech finance. “King Richard,” the movie based on her father that she helped produce, won Will Smith an Oscar for best actor this year.The other side though, the tennis side that started it all, a force as reliable as the heat in Australia and the cool, late summer nights of the U.S. Open, has fallen victim to what eventually overtakes all of the greatest. Ted Williams and Michael Jordan ultimately fell to the relentlessness of time, and the power of rising youth. Williams must, too, just as she did against Tan, a part of a deeper-than-ever WTA Tour where anyone can beat, or lose, to anyone else.Williams once summoned power without notice, but must now settle for flashes of it.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFew want to see Williams decline, even those who have lost to her more than they have won.“I think it’s great that we have her back,” said Maria Sakkari of Greece, who called Williams a great role model. “For me she’s the best female athlete — not tennis player — athlete in the Open era.”“Great that she’s trying to come back,” said Nadal, who has 22 Grand Slam singles titles, one fewer than Williams.Like Williams, he has battled back from potentially career-ending injuries of late. He is nearly five years younger than Williams, but is one of the few people who can understand what is going through Williams’s heart and mind.“The only thing that shows is passion and love for the game,” Nadal said of her comeback attempt. “Just being here shows that she has a lot of love for her work and for this game. And I think that’s a great example.”There were flashbacks on Tuesday. Williams surged to an early lead in the deciding set, then minutes later, she was fighting, down a game, though on serve, against the 115th-ranked player in the world, a 24-year-old who grew up watching her on television. Williams even served for the match after more than two and a half hours on the court, at 5-4. Serving comes from the legs, and Williams’s legs had lost their power. She sprayed errors wide and into the net, suddenly unable to handle Tan’s slicing strokes.She would save a match point on her serve two games later with a classic swinging forehand volley as she charged the net. But in the tiebreaker, she frittered away prosperity once more, allowing a 4-0 lead to become a 9-7 deficit. Then came one last forehand into the net at the 3-hour, 11-minute mark.Williams packed up her bags, waved to the crowd, and then, in an interview room a little while later, said the idea of playing in New York at the U.S. Open later in the summer, after some time on the practice courts, carried plenty of appeal. She, at least, still believes. Retirement, for now, did not come up.“It’s actually kind of like, ‘OK, Serena, you can do this if you want,’” she said. “Lots of motivation to get better and to play at home.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Tennis

      Who Is Harmony Tan, Who Beat Serena Williams at Wimbledon?

      by

      Tan, 24, had merely hoped to take a game or two off Williams, a seven-time Wimbledon singles champion. Instead, she won and has a chance to reach the third round of a major for the first time.The matchup seemed lopsided on paper. Serena Williams, possibly the greatest tennis player ever and the winner of the most Grand Slam singles titles in the Open Era, matched up with Harmony Tan, No. 115 in the world, in the first round of Wimbledon. Tan, playing in her first Wimbledon, had not advanced further than the second round in any of her six previous appearances at a major. Even Tan admitted in her on-court interview that she was “really scared” upon seeing that she was scheduled to face Williams and had hoped she could win one or two games Tuesday.Williams was asked in a news conference ahead of the match if she was disappointed that she didn’t draw a more challenging opponent.“Every match is hard; every match,” said Williams, who was competing in her first singles match on tour since tearing a hamstring in last year’s opening round of Wimbledon and retiring from the match. “You can’t underestimate anyone or any match.”Tan, 24, proved Williams’s words true, spoiling her return to tennis and quest for a record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title. Tan defeated Williams, 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (10-7). For Williams, 40, the loss was the second of her career in the first round of Wimbledon.Tan, a Paris native with Cambodian and Vietnamese parents, said she watched Williams often while growing up. Tan turned professional when she was just 14, but this was her first matchup against Williams, and she had never faced a player with career accomplishments even approaching those of Williams.The highest-ranked player she has faced is Elina Svitolina of Ukraine, who was No. 17 in the world at the time of their matchup at this year’s Australian Open. Tan retired in the third set of the match after suffering an injury.For this matchup with Williams, Tan had a slight advantage in the form of her coach, Nathalie Tauziat.Tauziat, the 1998 Wimbledon women’s singles runner-up, who was ranked as high as No. 3 in the world, faced Williams three times, beating her once at the Paris Open final in 2000. Tan didn’t mention in her post-match interview whether or not Tauziat gave her specific pointers based on her experience against Williams. Still, she thanked Tauziat for supporting her after the win.“I’m really surprised today,” Tan said of her win in the on-court interview.She will have the opportunity to advance past the second round in a Grand Slam tournament for the first time in her career when she faces Sara Sorribes Tormo, a Spaniard seeded 32nd. The two faced each other earlier this year in Monterrey, Mexico, with Tan losing, 6-2, 6-2. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Tennis

      Serena Williams Exits Wimbledon in the First Round, Again

      by

      Williams, who had not competed in singles on tour since withdrawing from Wimbledon last year with an injury, lost in three sets to Harmony Tan of France.WIMBLEDON, England — It was the 21st time that Serena Williams has played Wimbledon. It was Harmony Tan’s first time, but Tan will be the player heading to the second round at the All England Club.Tan, a Frenchwoman ranked 115th who is little-known even in her country, defeated Williams, the greatest women’s tennis champion of her era, 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (10-7). Williams had not played a singles match on tour since retiring in the first round of last year’s Wimbledon in tears with a hamstring injury, but she got to play plenty of tennis on Tuesday evening on the Centre Court where she had won seven Wimbledon singles titles. Her grueling duel with Tan was a stylistic contrast that lasted 3 hours and 11 minutes. What was missing for Williams was the upbeat, reaffirming finish, and she did not hesitate when asked if she was OK with this being her final Wimbledon memory if that was the way it turned out.“Obviously not. You know me. Definitely not,” Williams, 40, said. “But today I gave all I could do, you know, today. Maybe tomorrow I could have gave more. Maybe a week ago I could have gave more. But today was what I could do. At some point you have to be able to be OK with that. And that’s all I can do. I can’t change time or anything.” She did succeed in changing the momentum on Tuesday in a match that was played under open skies for the first set and then under cover the rest of the way after the roof was closed to provide the stadium lighting necessary to continue. Williams dominated the second set but Tan fought back in the third while Williams’s level and energy dipped even if her fighting spirit did not. Though she saved a match point on her serve late in the final set and jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the super tiebreaker, which is new at Wimbledon this year, she could not hold on, missing too many crucial shots, including a forehand into the net on Tan’s second match point.“I think physically I did pretty good,” Williams said. “I think the last couple points, I was really suffering there, but I feel like in just those key points, winning some of those points, is always something mentally that you have to have, that you kind of need. I did pretty good on maybe one or two of them, but obviously not enough.”Tan’s clear-thinking poise under big-match pressure was remarkable for a player with so little experience and who was making her first appearance on Centre Court. But she said she had to struggle within herself to believe that she really could defeat Williams.“When I saw the draw I was really scared, because it’s Serena,” said Tan, 24. “She’s a legend, and yeah, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how can I play?’ If I can win one or two games, it was really good for me.”She won two sets instead, turning what could have been a feel-good story for Williams into a narrow defeat that will repose the question of how much more professional tennis Williams intends to play. She will turn 41 in September, and her quest for a record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title seems increasingly far-fetched. A longtime No. 1, she is now ranked 1,204th and will soon have no ranking at all. But she provided no definitive answer to whether this was her final Wimbledon appearance. “That’s a question I can’t answer,” she said. “I don’t know. Who knows where I’ll pop up?”But at least she can leave the All England Club with a less painful memory than what she took from last year’s Wimbledon, when she tore a hamstring after slipping in the first set of her first-round match with Aliaksandra Sasnovich, hobbling off Centre Court in great distress. She did not play competitively again until last week when she returned to play doubles in Eastbourne, England, with Ons Jabeur. Tuesday’s match against Tan was Williams’s first singles match in a year, and to her credit, she scrapped and hustled through the peaks and valleys.“It was definitely long, a very long battle and fight and definitely better than last year,” Williams said.It was a ragged but ultimately admirable performance as she tried to shake off the rust and solve the myriad riddles posed by Tan, who had watched Williams only from afar until their duel. “Seeing her next to me before we walked out on court was really intimidating, because she’s so imposing,” Tan said in French. “It was difficult and even at the end, when we shook hands, she was still imposing.”“When I was young I was watching her so many times on the TV,” she said in her on-court interview. “My first Wimbledon is wow!”Harmony Tan, a Frenchwoman ranked 115th, lacks pure power but understands tennis geometry.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressThat Williams came close to victory was more a tribute to her willpower than her power as she failed to dominate with her first serve or full-cut returns and instead battled her way through extended rallies and compromised situations in the third set, digging low for Tan’s crisply sliced shots and hustling into the corners. Williams served for the match at 5-4 and was two points from victory at 30-15 only to lose the next three points and her serve when she hit an unconvincing forehand approach shot that Tan slapped past her for a backhand winner. Williams and her player box full of family, friends and team members, including her new coach Eric Hechtman, were not able to celebrate. She fought off a match point when serving at 5-6, 30-40 with a forehand volley winner. She then had to navigate the tiebreaker despite the weariness in her legs and the tension in her gaze. She jumped out to a 4-0 lead before Tan reeled off the next five points by keeping Williams off balance. Tan, coached by the 1998 Wimbledon finalist Nathalie Tauziat, lacks pure power and has a puffball second serve, but she understands tennis geometry and has an unconventional tool set that is well suited to grass. She also had a good scouting report: Tauziat is 54 and long retired but she faced Williams three times in singles, defeating her in the final of an indoor tournament in Paris in 2000 on a fast, low-bouncing surface. Tauziat understood the importance of keeping Williams out of her prime hitting zones and of keeping her on the move.“Thank you, Nathalie,” Tan said in her on-court interview, looking toward Tauziat in the player box.From the start, Tan had Williams guessing and stretching, mixing often-exquisite drop shots with forays to the net; towering lobs with counterpunched backhand passing shots; sideswiping forehand slices with looped topspin.“Any other opponent probably would have suited my game better,” said Williams, who was rarely able to settle into power-baseline duels or any particular pattern of play for long.No one but Tan knew what was coming. Williams, who has lost to such variety-loving players even in her prime, often looked befuddled in the early going. She also looked as tight as piano wire, struggling to let her natural power flow and missing swing volleys and approach shots by the bunch while laboring to move laterally.That was certainly understandable in light of her long layoff, and the crowd reacted with awkward silence at first. The grand tennis theater where Williams has experienced so many highs and a few lows through the decades was nearly half empty at the start but as the match turned into a marathon, it was filled with support and emotion as Williams tried to avoid only the third first-round exit of her career in a Grand Slam tournament.She could not quite manage it, despite all her evident desire, and there may not be many more major tournaments to come, although Williams did not rule out a return to the U.S. Open, where she won her first Grand Slam singles title in 1999 at age 17.“Your first time is always special,” she said, speaking slowly and softly. “There’s definitely, you know, lots of motivation to get better and to play at home.” More