Eubanks, Christopher (1996- )

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    In Tennis, Bookends of Drama in 2023

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    The year was full of unlikely winners and exciting team competitions.There was no champagne courtside. So, as Matteo Berrettini embraced Jannik Sinner after Sinner’s victory over Alex de Minaur last month to clinch Italy’s first Davis Cup title in 47 years, their teammate, Matteo Arnaldi, did the next best thing: He shook a water bottle and poured it over Sinner and Berrettini.Sinner, 22, ended the season with his 20th win in his last 23 matches. This year, he had a 64-15 record, won four tournaments, reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and was runner-up at the ATP Finals in Turin, Italy. He had wins over the three top-ranked players — Novak Djokovic, whom he beat twice in two weeks, Carlos Alcaraz and Daniil Medvedev. Starting 2023 at No. 15, he ended it at No. 4.Djokovic sorely wanted to lead Serbia to just its second Davis Cup title. But in the semifinals, he fell to Sinner after squandering three match points and then teamed with Miomir Kecmanovic to lose the deciding doubles match to Sinner and Lorenzo Sonego. The loss sent Italy into the final, where it beat Australia.Jannik Sinner helped clinch Italy’s first Davis Cup title in 47 years this year. He also had a 64-15 record and won four tournaments.Jorge Guerrero/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDjokovic was devastated by the defeat.“For me, personally, it’s a huge disappointment because I take the responsibility, obviously having three match points, being so close to win it,” he said after the match. “When you lose for your country, you know, the bitter feeling is even greater.”It is ironic that the season began and ended with exciting conclusions at the men’s and women’s team competitions. The Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup have been under siege in recent years as many of the game’s top players, including Alcaraz, Taylor Fritz, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, shunned the historically heart-thumping, pride-producing finals because of scheduling conflicts. The U.S. women lost early in the finals, and the U.S. men didn’t even qualify as one of the top eight teams.Still, despite the player defections and a merry-go-round of format changes, both competitions provided some of the most striking moments of the year.Leylah Fernandez’s five wins helped lead Canada to its first-ever Billie Jean King Cup.Raul Caro/EPA, via ShutterstockLeylah Fernandez rode a wave of patriotic passion, winning five matches to lead Canada to its first Billie Jean King Cup. Her teammate, then-18-year-old Marina Stakusic, who had never won a WTA Tour match, became an overnight star when she won three matches against opponents ranked in the top 70.If 2022 was billed as the season of King Carlos when Alcaraz went from No. 32 to No. 1 on the strength of his U.S. Open championship, then this season mostly belonged to Djokovic.He is considered by many in the game as the greatest player ever. The statistics prove it.At 36, Djokovic had one of the best seasons of his career. For the third time since 2015, he reached the finals at all four majors, falling just shy of attaining the Grand Slam.In January, a year after being removed from Australia because of his refusal to be vaccinated against Covid-19, Djokovic returned to Melbourne Park and captured a record 10th Australian Open title by defeating Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final. With the 14-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal injured for most of the season, Djokovic won his third French Open in June by beating Alcaraz and Casper Ruud.After falling to Alcaraz in a scintillating five-set Wimbledon final, Djokovic bounced back and beat Medvedev at the U.S. Open to earn his 24th major, surpassing Serena Williams. He is now just one win away from breaking the men’s and women’s major record held by Margaret Court for 50 years.Djokovic captured his record 10th Australian Open by defeating Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final.Quinn Rooney/Getty ImagesIn all, Djokovic played just 12 tournaments in 2023 and he won seven of them. He did not lose from mid-July until mid-November, when he fell to Sinner during the round-robin portion of the ATP Finals. He then beat Sinner in the final after assuring the year-end No. 1 ranking for a record-extending eighth time.Alcaraz, who won six titles in 2023 on three different surfaces and reached the semifinals at the French and U.S. Opens, in addition to his Wimbledon win, ended the year ranked No. 2. But he was candid after he lost to Djokovic in the semifinals in Turin.“I am not at his level on an indoor court,” Alcaraz, 20, said in November. “He has shown why he is the best player in the world. I have to practice more to be a better player.”With his 66 wins, Medvedev led the ATP in match victories. He won 19 straight, and reached the finals at Indian Wells and the Miami Open, which he won. He also won at Rome and reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and was runner-up to Djokovic at the U.S. Open. He ended the year ranked No. 3.Two upstart players — the Americans Ben Shelton and Chris Eubanks — used their wide grins and whopping forehands to envelop the sport in a giant bear hug. Shelton, about two years away from leading the University of Florida to an N.C.A.A. championship, reached the quarterfinals at the Australian Open. He then reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open before falling to Djokovic. Eubanks, another former collegian, upset Cameron Norrie and Tsitsipas to reach the quarterfinals at Wimbledon.There was no shortage of compelling story lines among the women. Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka spent the season battling for tour supremacy.Sabalenka, only a year removed from serving woes so severe that she resorted to serving underhand during matches, won her first major at the Australian Open, a day she called the “best of my life.” She grabbed the No. 1 ranking after reaching the U.S. Open final.“It was amazing to see Sabalenka, who was basically laughed off that same court a year earlier, confront those demons and take responsibility,” Lindsay Davenport, three-time major winner and former No. 1, said by telephone last month.Swiatek took her third French Open and won six titles. But she faltered at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open before regrouping by the WTA Finals, snatching the year-end No. 1 from Sabalenka by beating her and Pegula to take the title. Pegula, for her part, was one of just two players, along with No. 4 Elena Rybakina, to notch multiple wins over Swiatek this season.Marketa Vondrousova, who endured long stretches away from the game because of two wrist surgeries, became the first unseeded women’s Wimbledon winner when she beat Ons Jabeur in the final.Coco Gauff, 19, beat Aryna Sabalenka in three sets to win the U.S. Open.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBut it was Gauff and her wise-beyond-her-years attitude who transcended the sport in a way that only Williams has done. When Gauff, 19, beat Sabalenka in three sets to win the U.S. Open, the nontennis world, including the former first lady Michelle Obama, went wild. In her acceptance speech, Gauff, who had struggled early in the season, addressed her doubters.“Thank you to the people who didn’t believe in me,” Gauff said. “To those who thought they were putting water on my fire, you were really adding gas to it.”It was the kind of bold statement that left even former major winners stunned. One of them was Davenport, who admitted to having tears run down her face while she did match commentary on television.“To me, the story of the year was Coco,” Davenport said. “Players come along once in a generation. When you have all the expectations on you at 12 and 15 years old and you are able to handle everything and then elevate your game to win, then you really are truly something special.” More

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      The One-Handed Backhand Is on the Way to Extinction

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      How can something so beautiful to watch, a stroke so etched into tennis history, be so exploitable — and why have a dwindling handful of players remained loyal to it?Behold the beautiful and beloved one-handed backhand, but do it quickly, because time is running short for tennis’s lustiest shot.Yes, the shot that made Roger Federer famous, the signature stroke of Rod Laver, a favorite of John McEnroe, and Pete Sampras and Martina Navratilova is fast going the way of the wooden rackets of the early 1980s, a relic that generates joy and nostalgia when a tennis aesthete lays eyes upon it, but one whose days may be numbered.Even those who play with a one-hander have their regrets. Just ask Chris Eubanks, the late-blooming breakout star of American tennis this year, whose one-handed backhand is as smooth as they come. Eubanks said he was about 13 years old when he fell hard for the Federer backhand and decided to switch from the two-hander he had played with since he first picked up a tennis racket.“If I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have,” Eubanks said as he sat in the lounge of his Midtown Manhattan hotel in the days leading up to the U.S. Open.Stefanos Tsitsipas is the lone man ranked in the top 10 using a one-handed backhand. He lost in the second round to Dominic Stricker, a Swiss qualifier.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesNot so long ago, the top ranks of the sport, especially the men’s game, had no shortage of one-handed backhands. In addition to Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem won Grand Slam titles with the shot. Among the top 10 men now, only Stefanos Tsitsipas plays with a one-handed backhand. Tatiana Maria, No. 47 in the world, is the highest-ranked woman to rely mostly on her one-hander.In more immediate terms, it has been a mostly terrible first week for one-handed backhands in the singles competitions at the U.S. Open. As the second round wound down on Thursday afternoon, Wawrinka, who at 38 years old still rips his one-hander as hard and as clean as anyone ever has, Grigor Dimitrov and Daniel Evans were the top one-handed backhand standard-bearers remaining.“I’m not hitting as well as when I was winning Grand Slams, that’s for sure,” Wawrinka said after beating Tomas Etcheverry of Argentina on Thursday in four sets despite uncharacteristically hitting a handful of wayward backhands. But Tsitsipas, Thiem, Eubanks and Maria all lost in the first days of the tournament.So did Lorenzo Musetti, the rising Italian whose silky one-handed backhand can make tennis cognoscenti drool. His stroke starts low, sweeps up and forward practically from knee level, then flies up with a high-stretching finish. Somewhere along the way, it makes easy, pure contact, and that fuzzy yellow ball flies off his racket. Musetti, 21, is supposed to be a rival for Carlos Alcaraz, the 20-year-old world No. 1, during the next decade. Musetti is ranked 18th, but he has yet to make a Grand Slam quarterfinal.In January, Tsitsipas faced Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final. Tsitsipas’s backhand is another of the prettiest, smoothest strokes in the sport.“My signature shot,” Tsitsipas said earlier this week. “It kind of defines me.”Yet it took about three games to figure out Djokovic’s strategy that evening — pound ball after ball deep onto the Tsitsipas backhand. Djokovic won in straight sets.And therein lies the great contradiction of the one-handed backhand. How can something so beautiful to watch, a stroke that is so etched into tennis history, be so exploitable, and why have a dwindling handful of players remained so loyal to it?The answer to the first question, experts say, is mostly a function of the increasing role of power and velocity in the sport. Even clay courts, historically the slowest surface, play hard and fast these days. Players, who spend more and more time in the gym, keep getting bigger and stronger, and now hit forehands at more than 100 miles per hour. Rackets and strings allow for so much topspin that rally balls from even average players are bouncing up to eye level, making it hard for even the 6-foot-7 Eubanks to get on top of the ball on some backhands.David Nainkin, who leads player development for men for the United States Tennis Association, has advice for any young talent he sees wielding a one-handed backhand — get rid of it. The two-handed backhand is far more stable, he said, and the motion is shorter and simpler.“It’s almost impossible to make it with a one-handed backhand now,” he said. “I think you’ll see less of it maybe in the next 10 years.”Martina Navratilova during the 1986 French Open final. She credited her mastery of the one-handed topspin backhand for her rise.Trevor Jones/Allsport, via Getty ImagesNavratilova, who credits her mastery of a one-handed topspin backhand for her rise to near invincibility in the early 1980s (thank you, Renee Richards, her coach at the time) is a little less draconian, but not that much. Navratilova said she would encourage young players to keep two hands on the racket — most of the time.“Work on the one-handed slice and volley,” she said, though she added that trying to use it to keep up with modern pace and spin likely wouldn’t work.Given all that, how to explain the ongoing devotion to the one-hander among a dwindling few?In a word, Federer.As much as the Swiss master has done for the sport, he may be more responsible for the current generation of one-handed backhand devotees — and their shortcomings — than anyone.Why does Denis Shapovalov, the talented 24-year-old Canadian who missed the U.S. Open with a knee injury, love to hit the one-hander with both feet off the ground?Federer.Eubanks?Federer.Tsitsipas?Federer. And Sampras.Watching Roger Federer inspired many of the current generation of one-handed backhand users.Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesTsitsipas said he remembers the day when he made the commitment to the one-handed backhand. He was 8 years old. The previous day, he had played a two-hander, and his coach had made fun of him for going back and forth, asking Tsitsipas if he was going to commit. That day, Tsitsipas did.Tsitsipas knows the advantages of the two-handed backhand. Safer shot, easier to control. But he isn’t about to quit the one-hander. He wants to be like Federer, in every way, and Sampras, too.“I’m here to kind of not have it die,” Tsitsipas said of the shot. “It kind of sits in my heart deeply because I really want to be like them.”Eubanks, too found it irresistible, and still does. “I just love it,” he said. “It just looked so good.”He took one hand off the racket one day at practice and tried not to pay attention to the coaches who might have been looking at him side-eyed, or making comments to his father, who was his primary coach. He told himself this shot was going to work for him, and he was stubborn about making sure it did.With the wisdom of age and a half-dozen years climbing his way into the top 100, plus time spent working as an analyst for the Tennis Channel, Eubanks is familiar with the shot’s drawbacks, especially the timing it requires, but he isn’t about to switch. “It’s a little too far gone,” he said. “Can’t quite do that now, not and win.” More

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      Chris Eubanks Keeps Winning at Wimbledon and Plays Stefanos Tsitsipas Monday

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      The former Georgia Tech star took a long and meandering road to the round of 16 at Wimbledon. He’s OK with that, and looks more than ready.Something strange started happening to Chris Eubanks earlier this year.As he walked the grounds of the Miami Open, people kept stopping him, asking for selfies and autographs. He took time during an off day to visit a sponsor’s suite and glad-hand some executives and their guests.It’s not the sort of thing that a player in his position — a month away from his 27th birthday, having drawn little attention during his first five seasons in professional tennis — generally experiences. But just days before, a video of Eubanks choking back tears after being told that he had finally broken into the top 100 after an early-round win had gone viral in the tennis world. Now he was into the Miami quarterfinals, and seemingly everyone wanted a piece of him.“Definitely didn’t foresee this,” he said at the time, as he walked through the bowels of Hard Rock Stadium, his eyes glazed from all the attention.Four months later, Eubanks is getting used to it in a hurry.A day after beating Cameron Norrie, the top British player, in front of a packed crowd on the No. 1 court, Eubanks was at it again on Saturday, knocking out Chris O’Connell of Australia in a throwback-style Wimbledon match filled with big serves, short rallies and three tiebreak sets that all went Eubanks’s way.On Friday, the thrill came from overcoming a Wimbledon semifinalist and Norrie’s hometown crowd. During the warm-up on Saturday, Eubanks looked up at the stands and suddenly realized he was playing on the court where the 11-hour-5-minute match played by John Isner and Nicolas Mahut over three days in 2010 ended at 70-68 in the fifth set.“That was kind of cool,” said Eubanks, who allowed himself a moment to take it all in. Then he turned his mind to nailing serves, playing aggressively and ending points whenever the chance arose. “I’ve done a pretty good job of focusing in on each match individually and not really focusing on the magnitude of what’s going on.”Eubanks played a forehand shot against O’Connell. His opponents have called Eubanks’s powerful style “big game” tennis.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesAnd 23 aces later, Eubanks had a round-of-16 date set for Monday with Stefanos Tsitsipas, the world’s fifth-ranked player.“The whole match was on his racket and I couldn’t do anything,” a dazed O’Connell said of Eubanks when it was over. O’Connell had played Eubanks once before, at a tournament in the tennis minor leagues in South Korea last year. His opponent on Saturday was nothing like the error-prone player he faced a year ago.“He didn’t miss,” O’Connell said. “He’s riding on confidence and he’s playing some unbelievable tennis.”Eubanks’s Journey Stands OutIt can happen at Grand Slams. A journeyman catches fire and plays himself into the deep end of the tournament, just months after toiling in the minor leagues. Even by those standards, Eubanks’s journey stands out, both in its unlikelihood and, now that it has happened, in the reason it did.Go back to his teenage years, growing up in Georgia in the early 2010s. His tennis-loving father was a baptist minister, so his mother had to accompany him to most of his Sunday matches. Back then, Eubanks didn’t rate high enough with the United States Tennis Association to merit much in the way of support. That would come after college, when he received a $100,000 grant from the U.S.T.A. to help fund his pro career.The Covid-19 pandemic arrived as Eubanks felt he was beginning to figure out his game. He had qualified for the Australian Open and picked up some wins on the second-tier Challenger Tour to gain some confidence. When the tour resumed after the pandemic disruption, he felt he had to start all over.Eubanks and his agent had a heart-to-heart.“I said, ‘Listen, if I’m still 200 by next year and injuries haven’t played a part, I can do something else with my time,’” Eubanks recalled after his win over Norrie. “It’s not that glamorous if you’re ranked around 200.”That’s how Eubanks, who studied business at the Georgia Institute of Technology after starting out as an engineering major, ended up making occasional appearances in the Tennis Channel commentary booth, something he believes has helped him better analyze his own matches while he is playing them.‘Doing All the Little Things’Last year, Eubanks, who is 6-foot-7 and whose powerful style is described by opponents as a “big game,” decided to make some changes. After years of cutting corners and trying to build a tennis career on the cheap, he committed to a consistent routine, and he spent money on a full-time coach.Every practice and gym session had a plan, and mostly happened on a schedule. He started to focus on his rest and was more careful about what he ate. Even if his body felt fine after a training session or a match, he let a physiotherapist work on him.“Just making sure I was doing all the little things,” he said.The wins, sometimes four or five a week at small tournaments, started to come.Martin Blackman, the general manager for player development at the U.S.T.A., said following that routine was at once the easiest and the hardest thing for a player to learn. Anyone can focus for a week or a month, but not seeing quick results can make a player question whether diligence makes any difference.Blackman, who has known Eubanks since he was a teenager, said his upside was plainly apparent given his physical attributes and talent.“That he has been able to rise up this quickly is a surprise,” Blackman said.Eubanks is scheduled to face Stefanos Tsitsipas in the round of 16 on Monday.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEubanks had to win two qualifying rounds just to get into the Miami Open in March. Making the quarterfinals, on the hardcourts that American players are raised on, is one thing. Making the round of 16 at Wimbledon, where he has never played in the main draw and where he was so unfamiliar with the grounds he had to ask where he could find the practice courts when he arrived a week ago, is quite another.After Miami, with a ranking that would get him into the biggest tournaments and provide some financial security, Eubanks returned to the minor leagues to see if he could translate those solid few months into the life of a consistent professional. He played a series of hardcourt events in South Korea, where he continued to pick up wins and rankings points. Then he headed to Europe for a hard week of training and a clay-court tuneup for the French Open, where the slow surface did not play to his strengths and he lost in the first round. Then it was off to play on grass.He hated it. A month ago, Eubanks was telling his friend Kim Clijsters, a former world No. 1, that it was a “stupid” playing surface.She told him that someone who can serve the way he can should not fret. Bend your knees and focus on the movement. Stop planting your foot to change direction and take a few extra small steps so you’re not slipping everywhere. His coach had given him similar advice. Hearing it from Clijsters felt different.Week by week, Eubanks said, he became more comfortable and confident, especially after he captured the ATP Tour title at the grass-court tournament in Majorca the week before Wimbledon. The next day he was asking for directions to the practice courts at the All England Club.“I think it’s slowly, slowly growing on me,” Eubanks said with a grin after his win over O’Connell. “At this point I think borderline I might say it’s my favorite surface.” More