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      Before Wimbledon, There’s Practice on Grass at an English Garden Party

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      The Boodles, which draws elite players on their way to the All England Club, is unlike nearly anything else on the tennis calendar — a Gatsby-like few days on an estate outside London.Even for the best tennis players in the world, the days before a Grand Slam can be filled with nerves and stress, especially the time leading up to Wimbledon, the grandest Grand Slam of them all.Days can become a blur of hunting for hitting partners and time on the limited practice courts a tournament has available, or one last try to win some tour-level matches at competitions in Eastbourne or Majorca.A handful of pros, including several clients of Patricio Apey, a longtime agent, end up at a classic English garden party called the Boodles that is unlike nearly anything else on the tennis calendar — a Gatsby-like few days on an estate outside London that makes Wimbledon’s All England Club, supposedly the apotheosis of tennis elegance, feel like a gathering of the masses at the local park.The Boodles tennis exhibition, set on a sprawling estate outside London, is unlike nearly anything else on the sport’s calendar.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesDriving in this morning, I was kind of shocked,” Lorenzo Musetti, the rising star from Italy, said of the 300-acre property, whose owner since 2021 has been Reliance Industries, a company run by the Ambani family of India, which bought it for roughly $70 million. “Not every day you see a property like this.”Or a high-end jewelry show masquerading as a tennis event at a sprawling former country club called Stoke Park.“The best event we do all year,” said Michael Wainwright, the managing director of Boodles, the Liverpool- and London-based jewelry company that his family has owned since 1880.Guests in the outdoor seating area before the matches began.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesStoke Park was bought by Reliance Industries, a company run by India’s Ambani family, for roughly $70 million in 2021.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesWhen he started the Boodles two decades ago, Apey wasn’t thinking about putting on a tennis event that would feel more like a polo match. He just knew that players who won Wimbledon made more money than players who won the other major tournaments. (Wimbledon’s men’s and women’s singles champions will earn nearly $3 million each this year.)He represented a number of players who excelled on clay courts but not on grass. They struggled to acclimate during the few weeks between the French Open and Wimbledon because they often lost early in the few tournaments available during the brief grass court season.“I needed to get them more matches,” Apey said.The only way for him to do that, he reasoned, was to create a grass court exhibition event near London ahead of Wimbledon. Stoke Park, with its some two-dozen-bedroom mansion, a rolling golf course — tennis players love to relax with rounds of golf — and immaculate grass tennis courts provided the perfect location.Through an acquaintance, he landed a meeting with Wainwright and his older brother, Nicholas, who warmed to the idea. It was a soft sell opportunity: Put their jewelry in front of hundreds of their top customers and thousands more in the upper echelon of the tennis demographic (think pocket squares and long, flowery summer dresses) whiling away a summer afternoon drinking champagne and Pimm’s, eating multicourse catered lunches, enjoying high tea, browsing a tented pavilion filled with sparkling baubles and perhaps taking in some tennis in a small stadium under high trees surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens.Who doesn’t love mixing grass court tennis and expensive jewelry?Andrew Testa for The New York TimesBoodles sponsors another high-end sports event, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a well-heeled equestrian race, but women like tennis more, Wainwright said, and horse racing doesn’t offer the same “dwell time” that tennis does.In other words, with all of tennis’s changeovers and the breaks between sets and matches, and the fact that the matches don’t actually matter, the 10,000 patrons who come to the five days of the Boodles tennis event have plenty of time to peruse that $2.9 million diamond ring, or the more affordable $80,000 necklace. There were several cases of Patek Philippe watches on display as well.Boodles also threw an evening gala on the Stoke Park grounds for roughly 40 of its top customers Wednesday night. Wine and champagne flowed, and jewelry was sold, into the small hours of the morning.Andrey Rublev took advantage of the grass courts at Stoke Park to practice before his match.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesBorna Coric worked out after a match.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesCoric, left, and Sebastian Korda answer questions during an interview.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesFor players, the Boodles can offer an appearance fee and — just as valuable — a chance to chill. Sebastian Korda and his coach, Radek Stepanek, joined Wainwright for a round of golf earlier in the week.There is an expansive gym for the growing cohort of lifting obsessives on the tour. Perhaps most important are the moments of calm practice on the Stoke Park grass before the chaos of Wimbledon.“It’s a chance to work on a few things,” said Korda, who played in Eastbourne the week before Wimbledon last year and lost his first match.Borna Coric of Croatia, who was winless in two grass court tournaments this year, said he had arrived at Stoke Park this week harried and worried about his form. He had then climbed into bed in a luxurious room.“I had the best night of sleep I’ve had in weeks,” Coric said. More

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

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      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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      Kyrgios, Under a Hotter Spotlight, Stays Quiet and Wins Again

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      A day after the emergence of allegations that he assaulted a former girlfriend, Kyrgios found a way to advance to a Wimbledon semifinal but declined to address the accusations afterward.WIMBLEDON, England — The tennis career of Nick Kyrgios has long been an exercise in torture and turmoil, featuring battles with tennis officials, rivals, the news media, alcohol and a psyche that never seems at peace, even when he swears it is. Kyrgios said he contemplated suicide in 2019.Given all that, Wednesday afternoon at the All England Club looked to be filled with land mines in every direction. On the surface, Kyrgios’s only task was to beat Cristian Garin, a steady but middling Chilean player known more for his efforts on clay courts. Simple enough, seemingly, for someone whose innate tennis talents appear to be nearly limitless.Kyrgios, though, has often combusted on the biggest stages. He was playing in a Grand Slam quarterfinal match for the first time since 2015 — he has never made a major semifinal — just 24 hours after a former girlfriend had accused him of assaulting her in Australia last December.For all the troubles Kyrgios, a 27-year-old Australian, has faced on and off the court since he first broke into the top ranks of pro tennis as a teenager, this was something else.“I feel like I’m in ‘The Last Dance,’” Kyrgios, a huge N.B.A. fan who often wears Jordan Brand clothing, said to his physiotherapist Tuesday as he left a practice court, referencing the documentary about the melodrama surrounding the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls.That had been all anyone outside of his tight circle had heard Kyrgios say. He left the rest to his legal team, which said he was taking the allegations seriously but declined to address them in any detail until prosecutors decide to formally pursue a charge.Kyrgios is due in court to face the allegations on Aug. 2, a time when under normal circumstances he might be playing the summer hard court season in North America and preparing for the U.S. Open. After the hearing, law enforcement officials will decide whether to pursue a formal charge of common assault.Kyrgios’s former girlfriend, Chiara Passari, told police Kyrgios grabbed her during a domestic dispute in December.On the advice of his lawyers, Kyrgios declined to comment on the allegations in the news conference after his match Wednesday.“I have a lot of thoughts, a lot of things I want to say, kind of my side about it,” he said. “Obviously I’ve been advised by my lawyers that I’m unable to say anything at this time. I understand everyone wants to kind of ask about it and all that, but I can’t give you too much on that right now.”Pierre Johannessen, a lawyer for Kyrgios, said in a statement Tuesday evening that Kyrgios “is committed to addressing any and all allegations once clear, taking the matter seriously does not warrant any misreading of the process Mr. Kyrgios is required to follow.”Kyrgios declined to say when he had learned about the allegations and the summons, which became public when The Canberra Times in Australia broke the news.Also, he notably did not deliver the sort of strenuous denial that Alexander Zverev, another tennis player who has also faced allegations of assaulting a former girlfriend, has at major tournaments.“I understand you want me to give you the answers,” Kyrgios said when asked if he planned to appear in court or if he knew of the accusations before Wimbledon. “I can’t. I can’t speak anymore on the issue.”Kyrgios spat at a fan in the first round and bickered with his opponent in the third.Sebastien Bozon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKyrgios said the 24 hours following the accusations becoming public had been difficult but he did not feel it had affected his play.“Obviously seeing it — I’m only human,” he said. “Obviously I read about it and obviously everyone else was asking questions. It was hard. It was hard to kind of just focus on kind of the mission at hand.”During the past 10 days, Kyrgios had become a fan favorite at Wimbledon, mixing the best of a sublime game packed with power and showboating trick shots with behavior that ran the gamut from boorish and profane to gross.He spat in the direction of a fan during his tense five-set, first-round win. He baited the No. 4 seed, Stefanos Tsitsipas, into losing his cool and the tennis match in their third-round duel, carrying on with the chair umpire until Tsitsipas got so angry hitting Kyrgios with the ball became as important to him as hitting winners.When the matches ended, he took on journalists who questioned his behavior or his violations of Wimbledon’s all-white dress code, and even went after vanquished opponents. After Tsitsipas called him a “bully,” he said the Greek star was “soft” and no one on the tour liked him. Then came the assault allegations.The crowds never left him though, and they were there from before the start of the match until after the end of his win, 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 (5), over Garin, a businesslike, almost anticlimactic affair, considering all that was swirling. It earned Kyrgios a semifinal showdown with the 22-time Grand Slam singles champion Rafael Nadal on Friday.“I didn’t see something weird during the match,” Garin said of Kyrgios.This time around, so far at least, the turmoil hasn’t gotten the better of either his brain or his game. If anything, it has quieted the confrontations, and may be bringing out the best of his tennis. Part of what drives him, Kyrgios has said, is to prevail over all the naysayers and critics who view him as the antithesis of the sport’s mythic gentility.Kyrgios’s three-set win Wednesday was as routine as any on the tournament, a stark contrast to the controversy off the court. In the Kyrgios box, his father, girlfriend, agent, and physiotherapist rose after every point. Ever the iconoclast, Kyrgios plays without a coach.Fans welcomed Kyrgios onto the No. 1 Court with a throaty roar. Throughout the match, wails of “Come on, Nick” echoed through the stands. In the few tense moments, the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oy, Oy, Oy,” cheer sounded, too.Kyrgios will face Rafael Nadal, a 22-time Grand Slam singles tournament champion, in the semifinals. They’ve played nine times, including at Wimbledon in 2014.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressGarin broke Kyrgios’s serve at love in the opening game and won the first nine points of the match, prompting Kyrgios to shrug his shoulders and start the running dialogue with his box that lasted all afternoon. He quickly settled in though, drawing even by the middle of the set, as he stepped up the velocity on his serve and his powerful forehand, running Garin around the court.With Garin serving to stay in the first set, Kyrgios pressured him into a series of errors, to get to triple set point, and then one more to take the early advantage. The second set brought more of the same. An early break of serve, a bump or two to give Garin a chance to get back even, some back and forth with his posse for support, and then ultimately, an ace to take a commanding lead.He and Garin traded service games for the better part of an hour in the third set, but even though Garin had three chances to break Kyrgios’s serve and force him and his tiring legs to play longer, there was never much of a sense that Garin could win a set, much less three. Every time Kyrgios needed a point, he found a big enough serve, or his hard, flat backhand, or a whippy, nasty forehand to get him over the hump.Late in the tiebreaker, Kyrgios came to the middle of the net, and gave Garin three short chances to put the ball past him. He stabbed the first two back then watched Garin hit the third into the middle of the net. A point later, Garin miss-hit a backhand wide and Kyrgios collapsed to his back, a Grand Slam semifinalist for the first time, amid the eeriest and tensest of environments.Next up is Nadal, and with Kyrgios, who knows what else. More

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      Wimbledon, a Longstanding Tradition, Opens with a Flurry of Changes

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      One hundred years after the opening of Centre Court, it’s a season of change at the All England Club, what with the barring of Russian players and a new set of green doors.WIMBLEDON, England — It is about tradition this year at Wimbledon on the 100th anniversary of Centre Court, but as the defending men’s singles champion Novak Djokovic walked back onto the grass on Monday to launch this year’s tournament, it was also about change.There is plenty of it at the All England Club in 2022: large and small; obvious and subtle.The big stuff: Russian and Belarusian players (and journalists) have been barred because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The tournament has been expanded from 13 days of play, with no matches scheduled on the first Sunday, to a full 14 days that will leave no respite for the grass and the leafy neighborhood.The little stuff: The benches and desks in the Centre Court press seats have been replaced with padded chairs. All England Club members with their circular purple badges no longer serve as moderators at news conferences. Now, the stars sit alone at the rostrum, as they do nearly everywhere else in the tennis world.Djokovic passed through a set of green doors to meet Kwon Soon-woo of South Korea in their first-round match.Paul Childs/ReutersAs if to underscore the theme, Djokovic and his first-round opponent, Kwon Soon-woo, arrived on the most celebrated court in tennis in novel fashion.Players have long exited the clubhouse and made a hard left, passing behind a screen with a club member leading the way, before taking a hard right and stepping onto the grass.Beginning this year, they walk straight ahead and unaccompanied out of the clubhouse and onto the court through a new set of green doors that are quickly closed behind them.It seemed unceremoniously abrupt to those used to the old ways and fond of the murmurs from the crowd that used to build into cheers as the players navigated the passageway before coming fully into public view.But the pixie dust was still there, as Djokovic confirmed after his 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory, which seemed even closer than the score.“Childhood dreams were realized here in 2011,” Djokovic said of the first of his six Wimbledon singles titles. “I will never forget that. It will always have a special place in my heart. Of course, every time I step out there on the court, there is this goose bumps type of feeling, butterflies in the stomach.”It happens the first time, too, as Emma Raducanu later confirmed. All in a rush last year, she became a global star and a superstar in Britain by winning the U.S. Open at age 18, becoming the first player to win a Grand Slam singles title as qualifier. Victories have been much harder to come by since then, but she already had fine memories of Wimbledon after reaching the fourth round in her first appearance in the main draw last year.Emma Raducanu of Britain in her match against Alison Van Uytvanck of Belgium.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressMonday, however, was her first match on Centre Court, and though she has barely played on grass this season because of injuries, she managed the moment, and a tricky opponent in Alison Van Uytvanck, to win 6-4, 6-4.Raducanu may not be ready to take over women’s tennis. No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who just turned 21, has taken up that air and space. But Raducanu clearly knows how to rise to an occasion.“From the moment I walked out through those gates, I could really just feel the energy and the support and everyone was behind me from the word ‘go,’” she said. “I just really tried to cherish every single point on there, played every point like it could have been one of my last on that court.”That was imaginative thinking indeed, considering that Raducanu, Britain’s first women’s Grand Slam singles champion since Virginia Wade in the 1970s, is poised to be a Centre Court fixture for a decade or more if she can remain healthy.Andy Murray knows the drill. He, too, became a Centre Court regular in his teens and eventually lived up to the billing by ending a 77-year drought for British men in singles by winning Wimbledon in 2013 and again in 2016.Playing with an artificial hip at age 35, Murray has proved his love of his craft beyond a reasonable doubt. Though he will never bridge the achievement gap that separates him from the Big Three of Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer — each with 20 or more major singles titles — Murray remains a threat on grass on any given afternoon.He demonstrated it with a 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4 victory over James Duckworth that closed play on Centre Court on opening day, almost exactly eight hours after it had begun and almost exactly 100 years after the first opening day on Centre Court.Britain’s Andy Murray celebrated his first-round victory over James Duckworth of Australia.Hannah Mckay/ReutersThat was on June 26, 1922, after the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club moved from its cozier, original home on Worple Road after purchasing land on Church Road to accommodate a new, larger stadium. The main court at Worple Road had been called Centre Court because it was actually at the center of the grounds. The club kept the name even though the new primary court was no longer so central.The new Wimbledon got off to a soggy start with rain and more rain, forcing the 1922 edition to finish on a Wednesday, but it was still a popular success with worthy singles champions: the stylish and long unbeatable Frenchwoman Suzanne Lenglen and the Australian men’s star Gerald Patterson, a two-time Wimbledon champion nicknamed “The Human Catapult” because of his big serve (he could volley, too).Both Lenglen and Patterson would have been in for a few surprises if they had been watching on Monday. Centre Court is now rainproof with its retractable, accordion-style roof that was put to good use for Djokovic’s and Kwon’s duel.The electronic scoreboards and the touch screen operated by the chair umpire would also have caught their eyes, as would the once-unthinkable fact that the chair umpire for Monday’s opening men’s match was a woman: Marija Cicak. More

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      Serena Williams Discusses Her Return to Wimbledon

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      Ahead of her 21st Wimbledon appearance, Serena Williams discussed coming back from a tough injury, but steered away from political discussions.WIMBLEDON, England — At first glance, it certainly looked like business as usual at Wimbledon on Saturday.Two days before the start of this Grand Slam tournament, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal were practicing on adjacent grass courts with the steeple of St. Mary’s Church for a backdrop.As the two longtime rivals trained in the English sunshine, Serena Williams took a seat under the spotlights in the main interview room, as she has scores of times before.But though his will be her 21st Wimbledon, it will be an occasion like no other for Williams. She is returning to the All England Club at 40, having not played a singles match since last year’s Wimbledon, when she tore her right hamstring after slipping during the first set of a first-round match that she was unable to complete on Centre Court.I asked Williams how much she was motivated during her comeback by the desire to give herself a different memory at Wimbledon?“It was always something, since the match ended, that was always on my mind,” she said. “So it was a tremendous amount of motivation.”Centre Court, now 100 years old and still the most atmospheric showplace in the professional game, has been the stage for many a triumph for Williams, who has won seven Wimbledon singles titles.But it was all about pain and disappointment last year. She was in tears as she tried to continue after her injury and was in tears again after being forced to stop the match against Aliaksandra Sasnovich. Though Williams was able to limp off the court, she stumbled as she left the grass and needed assistance to reach the passageway leading to the exit to the clubhouse.Williams left the court in tears last year when she was forced to withdraw from Wimbledon because of a torn right hamstring.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“You never want any match to end like that,” Williams said. “It’s really unfortunate, but it was definitely something that’s always been at the top of my mind.”It has taken a year for her return to the tour, withdrawing from three straight Grand Slam tournaments and sparking understandable speculation about whether she intended to continue playing tennis at all.“I didn’t retire,” she said on Saturday, picking her words with particular care. “I had no plans to be honest. I just didn’t know when I would come back. I didn’t know how I would come back. Obviously, Wimbledon is such a great place to be, and it just kind of worked out.”Since her last appearance at the All England Club, she has hardly been at rest: juggling motherhood — her daughter Olympia is now 4 — and business endeavors, including Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm with an emphasis on investing in companies whose founders come from historically underrepresented backgrounds.“A part of me feels like that is a little bit more of my life now than tournaments,” she said of her interests outside tennis. “When you do have a venture company, you do have to go all in. It definitely takes literally all my extra time. And it’s fun. I’m currently out of office for the next few weeks, so if you email me, you’ll get the nice ‘out of office’ reply. Everyone knows that I’ll be back in a few weeks. But it’s good.”Williams also has split with Patrick Mouratoglou, the high-profile Frenchman who has coached her for the last 10 years. Mouratoglou is now working with Simona Halep, a former No. 1 who produced perhaps the finest performance of her career to defeat Williams in straight sets in the 2019 Wimbledon final.Williams is now coached by Eric Hechtman, a former University of Miami tennis player who is the longtime director of tennis at the Royal Palm Tennis Club in Miami. He has known both Williams and her older sister Venus for nearly 15 years and has been coaching Venus Williams since 2019.Now Hechtman is coaching them both, although Venus Williams, 42, has yet to play a match on tour this year and will miss Wimbledon for the first time since 2013. Hechtman said the decision to begin coaching Serena Williams was made with Venus’s blessing. Though this is his first tournament with Serena, he clearly understands the goal is not simply to make an appearance and improve on last year, no matter how long Serena has gone without competing.Williams, who has been practicing at Wimbledon ahead of the tournament, has won the Grand Slam seven times.Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock“She’s a champion, right? And she’s playing Wimbledon for a reason,” he said. “Just like I think anybody that walks into the tournament, their goal is to win the event. And that’s our goal.”Williams made that clear, as well, when asked what she would consider “a good outcome” at Wimbledon this year?“You know the answer to that,” she said, smiling. “C’mon now.”Still, Williams was vague by design through much of Saturday’s news conference, declining to give a precise date when she decided to play Wimbledon, saying only that she made the decision before the French Open, which began in late May.She also steered away from political topics. Some prominent American women’s athletes, including the soccer star Megan Rapinoe and the track star Allyson Feix, have voiced their opinion on Friday’s Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.Rapinoe has expressed opposition to the court’s decision, which removes the constitutional right to have an abortion, but Williams chose not to offer a viewpoint.“I think that’s a very interesting question,” she said. “I don’t have any thoughts that I’m ready to share right now on that decision.”It was unclear why Williams chose not to respond. She is a Jehovah’s Witness, a religious faith whose members identify as Christians and who believe that the Bible teaches them to remain politically neutral. But Williams did not cite her religion on Saturday as a reason for reserving her opinion.As Coco Gauff has been preparing for Wimbledon she has spoken out on political issues like the overturning of Roe v. Wade.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesHer reticence was in sharp contrast to the American Coco Gauff, 18, who made an appearance in the main interview room later in the day. Gauff, like another of tennis’s young stars, Naomi Osaka, has been eager to use her platform to speak out on social issues and made an appeal to end gun violence during the French Open on her way to the final earlier this month.“I’m obviously disappointed about the decision,” Gauff said of the Supreme Court ruling. “Obviously I feel bad for future women and women now, but I also feel bad for those who protested for this I don’t even know how many years ago, but who protested for this and are alive to see that decision be reversed.”Gauff added: “I feel like we’re almost going backwards.”But she urged activism. “I still want to encourage people to use their voice and not feel too discouraged about this because we can definitely make a change, and hopefully change will happen.”Williams also demurred when asked about Wimbledon’s decision to bar Russian and Belarusian players this year because of the war in Ukraine. The list of those who have been banned includes Sasnovich, the Belarusian who faced Williams last year on Centre Court.“Another heavy subject that involves a tremendous amount of politics, from what I understand, and government,” Williams said. “I’m going to step away from that.”What she will do at Wimbledon is step back into Grand Slam tennis. Her first-round match against 113th-ranked Harmony Tan of France is scheduled for Tuesday, most likely on Centre Court. And though Williams, long No. 1, now has a ranking in the quadruple digits (1204), she will be the favorite on the grass despite her layoff.She is back, no doubt. The question is for how long? Asked if this was her final Wimbledon, Williams remained in tune with her Saturday mood: elusive.“You know, I don’t know,” she said. “I can only tell you that I’m here. Who knows where I’ll pop up next? You’ve just got to be ready.” More

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      Returning to Singles, Serena Williams Will Face an Unseeded Player

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      After a year away from singles, she risked drawing the world’s No. 1, Iga Swiatek, in the first round. Instead, she will face a player ranked 113th.In her first singles match in a year, Serena Williams could have faced one of the new leaders of the game that she once dominated.As an unseeded wild card at Wimbledon, Williams could have been drawn to play No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who has won six tournaments in a row. Or Coco Gauff, the 18-year-old American who is on the verge of breaking into the top 10 and just lost to Swiatek in the French Open final.But when Friday’s draw was done, Williams was spared an established threat in the first round. Instead, she will play Harmony Tan, an unseeded French 24-year-old who is ranked 113th and will be making her main-draw debut at Wimbledon.The match will almost certainly be played on Centre Court, where Williams has won seven Wimbledon singles titles, six women’s doubles titles and two Olympic gold medals when the All England Club staged the tennis event at the 2012 London Games.But though Tan will be stepping on to that famous patch of grass for the first time, Williams will also be in new territory. At age 40, she remains arguably the biggest star in women’s tennis (Naomi Osaka makes it a debate), but Williams has played very little tennis in the last three years and played none at all on tour for nearly a year until returning in Eastbourne this week for two doubles matches with Ons Jabeur.They won them both before Jabeur withdrew with a right knee injury as a precautionary move before Wimbledon, where unlike Williams, Jabeur is one of the leading favorites for the title despite never reaching a Grand Slam final.That is a reflection of Jabeur’s shotmaking talent and recent victory at the grass court tournament in Berlin, but it is also a reminder that the women’s game is in transition. The reigning Wimbledon women’s champion, Ashleigh Barty, sent shock waves through the sport by retiring in March at age 25, weary of the travel far from her home in Australia and lacking the drive to continue pushing for the biggest prizes.Iga Swiatek, celebrating her French Open victory, has won 35 straight matches going into Wimbledon.Thibault Camus/Associated PressSwiatek, a 21-year-old from Poland, has stepped convincingly into the gap, winning 35 straight matches, and she could make it 36 by defeating a Croatian qualifier, Jana Fett, in the first round of Wimbledon. But Swiatek has played little on grass at this early stage in her career and below her, the hierarchy on tour is constantly shifting.In winning her six straight titles, Swiatek beat six different players in the finals. Anett Kontaveit, seeded No. 2 at Wimbledon behind Swiatek, has lost in the first round in three of her last four tournaments and has not played a match on grass this season, attributing her recent struggles to her continuing recovery from Covid-19.This year’s Wimbledon, which begins Monday, will not offer a full-strength field for women or men. Wimbledon barred Russian and Belarusian players from competing, in part because of pressure from the British government after the invasion of Ukraine.The tours responded by stripping Wimbledon of ranking points for the first time, and despite extensive discussions, both sides held firm to their positions.Wimbledon has maintained its prize money at normal levels, and though there was speculation that players might skip the tournament because of the lack of points, that has not materialized. Of the highest ranked players, the only ones who will be absent are either injured, like Alexander Zverev, Leylah Fernandez and Osaka or barred, like Daniil Medvedev and Aryna Sabalenka.Wimbledon is the only major tennis tournament to bar the Russians and Belarusians, and the ban has excluded four of the top 40 men, including No. 1 Medvedev and No. 8 Andrey Rublev, both of Russia. But Novak Djokovic, who has won the last three editions of Wimbledon, and his longtime rival Rafael Nadal are both in the men’s field. So is Andy Murray, now unseeded and trying to recover from an abdominal injury after an encouraging run to the final on grass in Stuttgart.Roger Federer, an eight-time Wimbledon singles champion who is still recovering from knee surgery at age 40, will miss the tournament for the first time since 1997 (he won the boys title in 1998 before playing in the main draw in 1999).Djokovic, who has a good draw, will face Kwon Soon-woo of South Korea in the first round. Nadal, playing Wimbledon for the first time since 2019, will face Francisco Cerundolo of Argentina. Murray, the British star, will face James Duckworth of Australia.Wimbledon’s ban has excluded six of the top 40 women, including No. 6 Sabalenka, a Belarusian who was a Wimbledon semifinalist last year; No. 20 Victoria Azarenka, a former No. 1; and No. 34 Aliaksandra Sasnovich, who was Serena Williams’s most recent opponent at Wimbledon.Sasnovich advanced last year when Williams retired in the opening set of their first-round match after reinjuring her right hamstring in a slip on the fresh grass on Centre Court. Partly in response, Wimbledon, for the first time, allowed players to train on Centre Court before the tournament to wear in the grass and improve the footing during the early rounds.Williams, who has played more at Wimbledon than anyone in the women’s field, already knows her way around the grass, but she has been increasingly prone to injuries and will now have to try to find form in a hurry.Williams will face the unseeded Harmony Tan of France, who is ranked 113th in the world, in the first round at Wimbledon.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockTan, despite her world ranking, has the tools to create some doubt and trouble. She is an effective counterpuncher who likes to change pace with slices and drop shots and could force Williams to dig low and move more than she might like at the beginning of her comeback.Williams, with her first-strike power and deep experience, certainly looks like the favorite, but if she gets past Tan, she will quickly run into clearer threats. She could face No. 32 seed Sara Sorribes Tormo, a tenacious Spaniard, in the second round and could then face No. 6 Karolina Pliskova, who lost to Barty in last year’s Wimbledon final. Williams has never played Tan or Sorribes, and she has split her four previous matches with Pliskova, losing to her in the semifinals of the 2016 U.S. Open and quarterfinals of the 2019 Australian Open.Advance past the third round and Williams could face Gauff for the first time, in a match that would certainly generate major interest. But it seems most premature to start talking about the fourth round when Williams has played no singles at all in a year. This is the second longest break of her remarkable career, ranking only behind the 13-month break she took after winning the 2017 Australian Open when she was already two months pregnant with her daughter, Olympia.She looked understandably rusty and slow off the mark in the early stages of her doubles matches with Jabeur in Eastbourne, but she soon found her timing and came up with some trademark first serves under duress in both victories. Her ball striking when in position was often solid, but the trick will be putting herself in prime position in singles, where there is so much more court to cover and the potential for extended rallies if Williams cannot dominate with her serve and full-cut returns.The new wave of women’s players, led by Swiatek, have adapted to the power and generate plenty of it themselves. A deep Williams run would be quite an achievement, but if there is any Grand Slam where she could achieve it with so little preparation, it would be Wimbledon. More

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      After a Tough Wimbledon Loss, Andy Murray Questions His Future

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      There were strawberries, Champagne and a duchess buoying the mood at Centre Court, until Britain’s beloved son suffered his worst career defeat at the All England Club.WIMBLEDON, England — After a year that saw Wimbledon canceled for the first time since World War II, the brief interruption on Centre Court on Friday afternoon was relatively sparkling. More

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      At Wimbledon, Roger Federer Is Staying Firmly in the Moment

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      A straight-sets victory over Richard Gasquet on Thursday showed the eight-time champion at ease with whatever the tournament brings. And in the moment, anything feels possible.WIMBLEDON, England — Wimbledon runs on nostalgia, from the grass courts and the all-white clothing rule to the neckties in the clubhouse. More