Kyrgios, Nick

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      Nick Kyrgios, a Dream and a Nightmare for Wimbledon, Is Winning

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      The Australian’s matches and news conferences have become irresistible theater — some call them a circus — that is a blessing and a curse for a sport battling for attention.WIMBLEDON, England — All white is the dress code at Wimbledon, the oldest and most traditional of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments. So when Nick Kyrgios wears a black hat for his on-court interview, he is sending a message.And that’s what he did Saturday night on the No. 1 Court, after his emotional, fireworks-filled, 6-7 (2), 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 (7) win over Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece, the No. 4 seed.As Wimbledon enters its second week, the women’s tournament is wide open and there is potential for a men’s final of Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, which looks more inevitable each day. And then there is Kyrgios, a dangerous and disruptive force who has so much pure talent, but is so temperamental and combustible that the sport can neither control him nor ignore him.He plays when he feels like it, then disappears for months, only to return to wreak havoc and provide headline-grabbing theater.“Everywhere I go I’m seeing full stadiums,” he said after his battle with Tsitsipas. “The media loves to write that I am bad for the sport but clearly not.”Kyrgios is an immensely talented Australian who has an ambivalent relationship with the rigors and requirements of professional tennis. He relishes his role as the game’s great outlaw, unafraid to jaw with, spit toward or berate judges and umpires.He badgers the young workers on the court for not keeping the changeover chairs stocked with fresh towels and bananas. He smashes rackets. One ricocheted off the ground and very nearly crashed into the face of a ball boy at a tournament in California this year. His boorish displays regularly garner tens of thousands of dollars in fines.Then he will return to the court and fire one of the most dangerous serves in the game. He puts on the sort of magical shotmaking clinics — shots between the legs, curling forehands, underhanded aces — that other players can only dream about.He is the ticking time bomb who packs stadiums and has hordes of young fans. He is at once the sport’s worst nightmare and its meal ticket: hard to watch but also hard to ignore.When he loses, it’s always someone else’s fault. When he wins, it’s because he has overcome all manner of forces against him: tournament directors, the news media, the tennis establishment, fans who have hurled racial slurs at him.“Unscripted. Unfiltered. Unmissable,” is how the @Wimbledon Twitter feed put it Saturday night as Kyrgios, in all of his brilliance and brattiness, overpowered and outfinessed Tsitsipas over three compelling hours.All evening, Kyrgios went after the chair umpire as well as the tournament referees and supervisors for not defaulting Tsitsipas after he angrily sent a ball into the crowd, coming dangerously close to directly hitting a fan on the fly. Kyrgios claimed the umpire surely would have sent him off had he done the same thing. (He may not be wrong on that one.)The nearly endless complaints and interruptions rattled Tsitsipas. He struggled to maintain his composure, complaining to the chair umpire that only one person on the court was interested in playing tennis, while the other was turning the match into a circus. Then he took matters into his own hands, and started trying to peg Kyrgios with his shots. The crowd of more than 10,000 grew louder with each confrontation.It became only more intense after Kyrgios finished off Tsitsipas in the tiebreaker with three unreturnable shots — a half-volley into the open court; a ripped, backhand winner; and a drop shot from the baseline that died on the turf just beyond Tsitsipas’s reach.The drama was cresting as the Tsitsipas and Kyrgios news conferences descended into a name-calling, insult-filled back and forth about decorum and who had more friends in the locker room.Tsitsipas, certain that Kyrgios had intentionally made a mess of the match — and probably steamed that Kyrgios had beaten him twice in a month’s time — said his fellow players needed to come together and set down rules that would rein in Kyrgios.“It’s constant bullying, that’s what he does,” Tsitsipas said of Kyrgios. “He bullies the opponents. He was probably a bully at school himself. I don’t like bullies. I don’t like people that put other people down. He has some good traits in his character, as well. But when he — he also has a very evil side to him, which if it’s exposed, it can really do a lot of harm and bad to the people around him.”Tsitsipas said he regretted swatting the ball into the crowd, but was less remorseful about another that he smacked across the net and into the scoreboard, earning a point penalty.“I was aiming for the body of my opponent, but I missed by a lot, by a lot,” he said. Then, he added, “When I feel like other people disrespect me and don’t respect what I’m doing from the other side of the court, it’s absolute normal from my side to act and do something about it.”“It’s constant bullying, that’s what he does,” Tsitsipas, above, said of Kyrgios.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKyrgios was watching all of this on a television nearby. Minutes later, he sat down behind the microphone, wearing that black cap and a T-shirt featuring Dennis Rodman, the onetime N.B.A. rebel, and a big grin. Once more, Tsitsipas had created a situation where Kyrgios could get the better of him, even allowing him the rare chance to take the high road and claim to be a kind of innocent.“He was the one hitting balls at me,” he said of Tsitsipas. “He was the one that hit a spectator. He was the one that smacked it out of the stadium.”He called Tsitsipas “soft” for letting Kyrgios’s conversations with tournament officials get to him.“We’re not cut from the same cloth,” he said of Tsitsipas. “I go up against guys who are true competitors. If he’s affected by that today, then that’s what’s holding him back, because someone can just do that and that’s going to throw him off his game like that. I just think it’s soft.”On Sunday, Wimbledon fined Tsitsipas $10,000 and Kyrgios $4,000 for their behavior.Tsitsipas’s mother is a former pro and his father is a tennis coach who reared his sons on the tennis court from an early age. Kyrgios is of Greek and Malay descent, and his father painted houses for a living.“I’m good in the locker room,” Kyrgios, now rolling, went on. “I’ve got many friends, just to let you know. I’m actually one of the most liked. I’m set. He’s not liked.”Then, one last dagger.Kyrgios said that he did not take the court to make a friend, to compliment his opponents on their play, and that he had no idea what he had done to make Tsitsipas so upset that he barely shook his hand at the end of the match.Every time he has lost, Kyrgios said, even when he has been thrown out of matches, he has looked his opponent in the eye and told him he was the better man.“He wasn’t man enough to do that today,” he said.The victory put Kyrgios into the round of 16, where he will play the American Brandon Nakashima on Centre Court on Monday. He is two wins from a possible semifinal showdown with Nadal, assuming the 22-time Grand Slam event champion can keep winning as well. It would be the ultimate hero-villain confrontation, a perfect setting for all manner of potential Kyrgios explosions and boorishness, but also, as that Twitter feed put it, unmissable theater.Nadal is known to be one of the game’s true gentlemen, a keeper of the unspoken codes between players. He has marveled at Kyrgios’s talent and questioned the baggage he brings to the court and the ordeals he often creates with umpires, especially when his chances of winning begin to slip away.On Saturday night, after winning his own match and hearing about the Kyrgios-Tsitsipas fracas, Nadal turned philosophical when asked when a player crossed the line, and whether Kyrgios goes too far. It is, he said, a matter of conscience.“I think everyone has to go to bed with being calm with the things that you have done,” Nadal said. “And if you can’t sleep with calm and being satisfied with yourself, it’s because you did things that probably were not ethical.”How does Kyrgios sleep? Only he knows. More

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      How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Tied Set?

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      On a trial basis, the four major tennis tournaments will begin playing their matches under the same regulations.Nick Kyrgios knew he could be a top tennis player when he won his first main draw match at the French Open in 2013.“It was memorable because I beat Radek Stepanek in three tiebreakers,” said Kyrgios, who has twice reached major quarterfinals and been ranked as high as No. 13 in the world. “To have them all go my way, that’s when I fell in love with tiebreakers. I think they’re pretty special.”When the French Open begins on Sunday, the tournament will feature yet another new tiebreaker rule that will, for the first time, see the four major championships — Wimbledon, and the French, United States and Australian Opens — using the same tiebreaker policies.When a match reaches 6-6 in the final set, which is the fifth set for men’s singles and the third for women’s singles, the players will contest a super-tiebreaker. The first player to win 10 points by a 2-point margin will win the set and the match. The rule change is being used as a trial in the three majors this year and in next year’s Australian Open.“Our challenge is to protect the soul of [the French Open ] while entering a new era,” said Amélie Mauresmo, the tournament’s new director and a former world No. 1. “We’re trying to modernize things on a daily basis.”A 2010 first-round Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes over three days, finally concluding when Isner took a 70-68 fifth-set win. Pool photo by Suzanne PlunkettTiebreakers, or tiebreaks, as they have inexplicably been renamed by many in the sport, were introduced at the 1970 U.S. Open as a way of shortening matches and holding the attention of spectators and television audiences, as well as preserving the health and well-being of players.Back then, tiebreakers — first a 9-point “sudden death” version that ended when a player won 5 points, which was later changed to a “lingering death” alternative that required a player to win 7 points by a margin of 2 — were played in all sets except the final one. Final sets required that play continue until someone won by a two-game margin.The four tournaments that comprise the Grand Slam could never agree on a format for the deciding set, so each event made its own rules. Beginning in 2016, the Australian Open introduced a super-tiebreaker at 6-6, while Wimbledon began playing a traditional tiebreaker at 12-12 in 2019. The rule was immediately put to the test that year when Novak Djokovic defeated Roger Federer 7-6 (7-5), 1-6, 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 13-12 (7-3) for the men’s title.Wimbledon was under pressure to make the change after two defining matches. The first was a 2010 first-round match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut that lasted 11 hours and five minutes over three days, finally concluding when Isner took a 70-68 fifth-set win. Then, in 2018, Isner and Kevin Anderson played a six-hour, 36-minute semifinal that Anderson ultimately won, but that left him so depleted that he lost the final in straight sets to Djokovic.The U.S. Open has been contesting a 12-point tiebreaker (the first to 7 points wins) in all sets since 1975. During that time, only one men’s final has featured a tiebreaker in the final set: In 2020, Dominic Thiem came back from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev 2-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 (8-6) in a made-for-television match in which no fans were allowed in the stands because of the coronavirus pandemic.“I love tiebreakers,” said Hana Mandlikova, 60, who vividly recalled every point of the final tiebreaker against Martina Navratilova at the 1985 U.S. Open. “You have to be risky, and you have to be a little bit lucky.”Bettmann/Getty ImagesTwo women’s finals have gone the distance. Tracy Austin defeated Martina Navratilova 1-6, 7-6 (7-4), 7-6 (7-1) in 1981 and Hana Mandlikova upset Navratilova 7-6 (7-3), 1-6, 7-6 (7-2) in 1985.“I love tiebreakers,” said Mandlikova, 60, who vividly recalled every point of the final tiebreaker against Navratilova, including a diving cross-court backhand volley on match point. “People who play riskier tennis instead of staying along the baseline have a better percentage of winning the tiebreaker,” she continued. “You have to be risky, and you have to be a little bit lucky.”Kyrgios, who beat Stepanek 7-6, (7-4), 7-6 (10-8), 7-6 (13-11) in that 2013 French Open first-rounder, said a tiebreaker was not based on skill. “It obviously favors the bigger serve at times, but it can go either way,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the scoring in tennis. Every point counts.”Until this year, the French Open shunned the final-set tiebreaker. Since the tournament began in 1891, it has featured very few extended final sets, though the slow red clay and never-ending rallies have produced multiple five-hour matches. Only twice in the men’s draw has a final gone the distance: a 1927 match won by René Lacoste over Bill Tilden 11-9 in the fifth set and a 2004 final between Gastón Gaudio and Guillermo Coria, which Gaudio ultimately won 8-6 in the fifth.Jennifer Capriati’s win over Kim Clijsters in the final set of the 2001 French Open was one of the tournament’s most suspenseful endings.Philippe Wojazer/ReutersThe women, on the other hand, have produced some extraordinary final sets in the French Open, including an 8-6 third-set win by Steffi Graf over Navratilova in 1987, a 10-8 third-set win by Monica Seles over Graf in 1992, a 10-8 third-set win by Graf over Arantxa Sánchez Vicario in 1996 and one of the tournament’s all-time highlights, a 1-6, 6-4, 12-10 victory by Jennifer Capriati over Kim Clijsters in the 2001 final.Danielle Collins, one of the top-ranked U.S. pros, remembers honing her tiebreaker skills while competing in junior matches.“If you split sets, you played a 10-point tiebreaker for the third set,” Collins said. “I would get down all the time. One time I was down 9-1 and came back to win. Those 10-point tiebreakers can be really fun.” Stefanos Tsitsipas likes the idea of never-ending matches but understands the need for final-set tiebreakers in today’s increasingly physical matches.“As a kid I liked watching these crazy best-of-five matches that went all the way to 18-16,” he said. “It was just fun to watch and see who was going to break first. On the other hand, you can’t allow players to play until 6 in the morning with that format. It can get quite exhausting.”In the 2020 U.S. Open, Dominic Thiem, of Austria, came back from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev, of Germany.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesStan Wawrinka, who won the French Open in 2015, would prefer that the majors stop tinkering with their tiebreaker formulas.“What I liked before was that they were all a different ending,” said Wawrinka, who is working his way back from knee surgery. “I enjoyed that. But it’s impossible to find one thing that everybody will like. To all be the same now is not my favorite thing, but it is what it is and we don’t have a choice.”Djokovic is proud that he and Federer got to play the first championship match in Wimbledon history to feature a final-set tiebreaker. He also knows it was a one-and-only now that Wimbledon will also play final-set tiebreakers at 6-6 instead of 12-12.“There is history in extended play in most of the Slams,” Djokovic said. “That Isner-Mahut, the longest match ever, it’s written down with golden letters in the history of tennis. Many people remember that match, and it has brought a lot of attention to our sport from the wider audience.” More

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      In Tennis, Racket Smashing Gets Out of Hand

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      Long accepted as an entertaining idiosyncrasy of the sport, the act of hurling one’s racket has led to some close calls, as ball people and chair umpires dodge injury.After blowing a golden opportunity to break his opponent’s serve late in the second set of his match on Monday at the Miami Open, Jenson Brooksby, the rising American star, whacked his foot with his racket several times in frustration.It was progress for Brooksby, who earlier in the tournament had escaped an automatic disqualification that many tennis veterans — and his opponent — thought was justified after he angrily hurled his racket to the court and it skittered into the feet of a ball person standing behind the baseline.Gets away with it. #Brooksby pic.twitter.com/QGRFA5Uy5w— Tennis GIFs 🎾🎥 (@tennis_gifs) March 24, 2022
      A week earlier, Nick Kyrgios, the temperamental Australian, narrowly missed hitting a ball boy in the face when he flung his racket to the ground following a three-set loss in the quarterfinals of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. The ATP punished Kyrgios with a $20,000 fine and another $5,000 for uttering an obscenity on the court, but he was allowed to play a few days later in Miami.Kyrgios was at it again on Tuesday during his fourth-round match against Italy’s Jannik Sinner. He threw his racket to the court on his way to losing a first-set tiebreaker, prompting a warning and a point penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct as he shouted at the umpire, Carlos Bernardes. Then, during the changeover, he battered his racket four times against the ground, earning a game penalty.“Do we have to wait until someone starts bleeding?” an exasperated Patrick McEnroe, the former pro and tennis commentator, said recently when asked about the flying rackets.Racket-smashing tantrums have long been accepted as part of the game. Like hockey fights, they are a way for players to blow off steam. But as the broader culture becomes less tolerant of public displays of anger, and with an increasing number of close calls on the court, racket smashing suddenly no longer seems like an entertaining idiosyncrasy.Mary Carillo, the former player and longtime commentator, said the tantrums have never been worse, especially on the ATP Tour, calling them “the most consistently uncomfortable thing to watch.” But chair umpires still resist meting out the most serious punishment.“The reason for conspicuous leniency is that they have to somehow keep a match alive; there are no substitutions,” Carillo said of the chair umpires. “Tennis players, especially tennis stars, know they have incontestable leverage over the chair.”Alexander Zverev smashed his racket on the umpire’s chair after losing a doubles match at the Mexican Open in February.MexTenis, via Associated PressLike most people in tennis, McEnroe was stunned when the ATP recently handed down a suspended eight-week ban to Alexander Zverev, who repeatedly beat on the umpire’s chair at the end of a doubles match at the Mexican Open in February, coming with inches of cracking his racket into the official’s feet.Psychologists have found that expressing anger physically tends to hurt performance and can encourage subsequent outbursts. In an oft-cited 1959 study by the psychologist R.H. Hornberger, participants listened to insults before being divided into two groups. One group pounded nails. The other sat quietly. The group that pounded nails was far more hostile to those who criticized them.And yet these days, racket smashing feels contagious. There was Naomi Osaka’s display during her third-round loss to Leylah Fernandez at the U.S. Open last year. Novak Djokovic’s during the bronze medal match at the Tokyo Olympics. Even Roger Federer has had his moments. Rafael Nadal, by contrast, is famously gentle with his equipment and has said he never will smash his racket.Even Andy Roddick, the former world No. 1, got cheeky on the subject, taking to Twitter last week with a tongue-in-cheek tutorial on how to safely smash a racket and whack a ball without endangering anyone.Smashing and throwing a racket, not to mention swats of the ball — that hit, or nearly hit, and possibly injure people on the court or in the stadium — fall under equipment abuse in the sport’s rule books. To the frustration of some of the biggest names in tennis, those codes are more gray than black and white.Martina Navratilova, the 18-time Grand Slam singles champion who is covering the Miami Open for Tennis Channel, expressed the sentiments of many after Brooksby’s racket made contact with the ball person.“If it hit the ball boy, they need to disqualify him,” she said.Brooksby and Kyrgios lost in Miami on Tuesday, but Zverev advanced to the quarterfinals and has a good chance of winning one of the top titles on the ATP Tour, even though some in tennis believe he should be on the sidelines serving a suspension.A spokesman for the ATP, which does not publicly discuss individual penalties, said Brooksby received a $15,000 fine, $5,000 less than the maximum $20,000 a player can receive for an incident from tournament officials. That amounted to less than half of the $30,130 he guaranteed himself by winning the match, and the $94,575 he ultimately collected for making it to the fourth round.Kyrgios was fined $20,000 for nearly hitting the ball boy following his loss to Nadal at Indian Wells, where he collected nearly $180,000 for making the quarterfinals. He, too, will earn, $94,575 in Miami, less whatever fines he receives for his behavior on Tuesday.Zverev, who has earned more than $30 million in career prize money, had to forfeit his earnings from the Mexican Open, and the ATP fined him $65,000, but the suspended ban has allowed him — in less than two tournaments — to more than triple in prize money what his outburst cost him.The ATP is considering whether, given recent increases in prize money, an increase in fines could deter players. Fines for racket abuse on the ATP Tour begin at $500, compared with $2,500 on the WTA Tour.Other than that, the codes for men and women are similar: No violently hitting or kicking or throwing a racket — or any piece of equipment for that matter, and no physical abuse or attempted abuse against ball people, umpires, judges or spectators.Still, tennis officials have a somewhat ambiguous understanding of when disqualification is warranted. It goes sort of like this: If you throw a racket, or whack a ball at someone intentionally in an attempt to hit or intimidate them, then you are automatically disqualified, whether you succeed or fail. However, if you throw or smash a racket or whack a ball without consideration of its direction, and it ends up hitting someone, then tournament officials have to assess whether an injury has occurred.If someone is indeed injured, as when Djokovic inadvertently hit a line judge in the throat at the 2020 U.S. Open, the player is automatically disqualified. But if no one is injured, as when Brooksby’s racket skittered into the ball person’s foot, the umpires will assess a penalty and tournament officials will fine the player — no disqualification necessary.Both Brooksby and Zverev quickly posted apologies for their actions on social media and personally apologized to the people involved. “I was grateful to have a second chance,” Brooksby told Tennis Channel on Monday.Kyrgios is a repeat offender. In a news conference following the Indian Wells match, he berated journalists who questioned him about the racket toss that nearly clipped a ball boy’s head, and was unapologetic.“It most definitely wasn’t like Zverev,” he said. “It was complete accident. I didn’t hit him.”Only after an avalanche of criticism on social media did Kyrgios issue an apology. The next day, he posted a video of himself giving the boy a racket.Following his match on Tuesday, Kyrgios played the victim, criticizing Bernardes for speaking to the crowd while Kyrgios was trying to serve. He seemed not to understand why the ATP had come down so hard on him for the incident at Indian Wells, given, he said, that Dennis Shapovalov had inadvertently hit a fan with a ball and received just a $5,000 fine. In fact, Shapovalov hit a chair umpire and was fined $7,000.“I can throw a racket at Indian Wells,” Kyrgios said, “didn’t even hit anyone, and I’m getting 25 grand.” More

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      At Indian Wells, Spain’s Nadal and Alcaraz Meet in Men’s Semifinal

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      One is a champion many times over who is enjoying a late-career revival. The other is a newcomer overflowing with potential who is quickly closing the gap.INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Rafael Nadal, who had just defused Nick Kyrgios in three tense sets to reach the semifinals of the BNP Paribas Open, was trying to focus on the questions.But Nadal kept getting distracted at the news conference on Thursday, looking at the television in the corner of the room that was showing the quarterfinal match between his 18-year-old Spanish compatriot Carlos Alcaraz and the defending champion, Cameron Norrie.“It was a break point,” Nadal explained as he shifted his gaze back to the reporters at hand. “Sorry, about that.”Despite his youth, Alcaraz, born in Murcia and coached by the former No. 1 Juan Carlos Ferrero, has long been considered a potentially great player by tennis cognoscenti inside and outside Spain.But potential and reality are converging quickly. After defeating Norrie, 6-4, 6-3, Alcaraz is into the semifinals for the first time at a Masters 1000 event. He will face Nadal, the ultimate Spanish tennis champion, who holds the men’s record with 21 Grand Slam singles titles and is unbeaten in 2022.Nadal, 35, is nearly twice Alcaraz’s age and defeated him, 6-1, 6-2, last year on clay on Alcaraz’s 18th birthday in the round of 32 at the Madrid Open. Alcaraz needed treatment for an abdominal injury early in that match, but he was also nervous and impatient as he faced one of his idols.But Alcaraz’s second match with Nadal, which will come on a gritty hardcourt on Saturday, could be considerably more compelling. Since their first meeting, Alcaraz has soared into the top 20, reaching the quarterfinals in his first U.S. Open last year, winning the Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan and then recovering from Covid-19 to win 11 of his 12 singles matches so far in 2022.“Carlos is not even the future; he’s the present,” said Paula Badosa, the top-ranked Spanish woman and reigning singles champion in Indian Wells.Saturday should provide an excellent sense of how far Alcaraz has come. Hardcourts should not be his best surface. He grew up, like Nadal, playing primarily on clay in Spain. But he now practices regularly on hardcourts at the academy in Villena where he trains under Ferrero. And as Alcaraz’s deep run at the U.S. Open made clear, he knows how to move, slide and entertain on this surface, too.Win or lose on Saturday, Nadal believes Alcaraz is the real deal.“I think he’s unstoppable in terms of his career,” Nadal said. “He has all the ingredients. He has the passion. He’s humble enough to work hard. He’s a good guy.”That is unusually high praise from Nadal, normally wary of adding to the burden of expectations on emerging stars, but he went further, explaining that Alcaraz reminds him of himself at age 17 or 18.Nadal was a genuine teen prodigy who won the first of his 13 French Open singles titles at age 19 in 2005 and would most likely have won it earlier if injuries had not forced him to skip the tournament in 2003 and 2004.Alcaraz’s smile was as big as his forehand when informed of Nadal’s comments.“It means a lot to hear those kinds of things from Rafa about yourself,” he said in Spanish, which he speaks much more fluently than English. “Rafa’s been through all kinds of things and has been on the top for many years, and for him to make those kinds of comments is really inspiring.”He is the youngest men’s semifinalist at Indian Wells since the American Andre Agassi in 1988 and like Agassi, he is a natural crowd pleaser with a flashy game and quick-strike power. But unlike Agassi, he has blazing speed. On Thursday night, Alcaraz reached shots that would have been winners against most players, and earned a standing ovation from the crowd after one corner-to-corner-to-corner rally.“It’s very cool to see him that focused and engaged and maximizing what he’s got with all the talent that he’s got,” Norrie said. “He was too good today for me.”Carlos Alcaraz after match point against Cameron Norrie. Alcaraz is the youngest men’s semifinalist at Indian Wells since Andre Agassi in 1988.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesBut tennis is a brutally competitive and grueling game. Injuries can change even the most gifted players’ trajectories: See Juan Martin del Potro, the Argentine star with the thunderous forehand whose career appears to be over.But Alcaraz, for now, is an all-court marvel: predatory in the backcourt and forecourt; able to rip airborne groundstrokes or hit feathery forehand drop shots; able to play defense far behind the baseline or move forward to smack second-serve returns on the rise.“He walked all over me, and not because I was tired, but because of his physicality,” Gaël Monfils, the French star, said of his loss, 7-5, 6-1, to Alcaraz on Wednesday. “At some point, you just can’t hang in there anymore.”Nadal is in the midst of a revival: undefeated this season at 19-0 after winning three tournaments, including the Australian Open by rallying from a two-set deficit in the final against Daniil Medvedev.Nadal has worked his way through the draw here despite the chronic foot problem that ruined the end of last season for him and continues to cause him pain. He could have skipped this tournament to rest and prepare for his beloved clay, just as he is skipping next week’s Miami Open. But he enjoys Indian Wells, staying at the home of the tournament owner, Larry Ellison, and playing golf regularly.His tennis matches have been no vacation, however. He came within two points of defeat against the young American Sebastian Korda in his opening round before rallying from two breaks down in the third set. Kyrgios, one of the game’s biggest servers and flashiest shotmakers, pushed him to the wire.They remain quite the contrasts: Nadal the maximizer of potential; Kyrgios the flickering flame. Nadal is deliberate, sometimes ponderous, between serves and points. Kyrgios plays as if he has a plane to catch. Nadal has never thrown a racket in anger in his pro career; Kyrgios threw his twice on Thursday, the second time after losing the match, 7-6 (0), 5-7, 6-4. The racket rebounded off the court and flew toward the head of a ball boy standing near the back wall, who dodged it.Kyrgios, booed as he left the court on Thursday, has already been suspended by the men’s tour once in 2016 and put on probation a second time in 2019 for misbehavior. He risks another sanction after Thursday’s match, and the tour would be wise to crack down more convincingly on player tantrums. Last month, Alexander Zverev took four swings at an umpire’s chair, narrowly missing the umpire, in Acapulco, Mexico, and received no further suspension after being defaulted from the tournament.“When you allow the players to do stuff, then you don’t know when is the line, and it’s a tricky thing,” Nadal said.The Spaniard is now 6-3 against Kyrgios, who, for all his evident gifts, has yet to get past the quarterfinals in a Grand Slam singles tournament or win a Masters 1000 title.Nadal is one of the great champions in any sport and with victory secured and the news conference completed, he took a few more moments in front of the television to watch more of Alcaraz’s match and consider Saturday and beyond.“It’s great, honestly, to have such a star from my country,” Nadal said. “Because for the tennis lovers, we’re going to keep enjoying an amazing player fighting for the most important titles for the next I don’t know how many years. A lot of years.” More

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      Nick Kyrgios Aims for a Men's Doubles Title at the Australian Open

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      Nick Kyrgios lost early in the Australian Open singles tournament, but that has not stopped him from grabbing the spotlight, as he so often does at his homeland Grand Slam.Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis, his close friend and fellow Australian, received a wild-card entry into the doubles draw. They have triumphed through the competition using a mix of skill and showmanship that has turned their matches into raucous celebrations, the furthest thing from the often-sedate affairs usually associated with tennis.They have made their message clear to fans — drink up and make noise. To purists it is sacrilege: an improper, disrespectful display of toxic masculinity and style over substance, like all the between-the-leg half volleys and underhand serves Kyrgios employs. The moves are used both as weapons and to keep himself and the crowd entertained.Entertainment shouldn’t be a problem on Saturday, given the all-Australian men’s doubles final that features Kyrgios and Kokkinakis against compatriots Matthew Ebden and Max Purcell.To Kyrgios, the better the show, the better the tennis. And the louder and more uncomfortable the fans can make it for the opponents, the better a chance he has of prevailing.“Playing for them is more important than tennis success,” Kyrgios, who wears a basketball singlet during his matches, said of his supporters after he and Kokkinakis won their quarterfinal match. During that match, the network televising the Australian Open kept cutting away from Rafael Nadal’s five-set thriller over Denis Shapovalov to cover the Kyrgios-Kokkinakis show.“The level of entertainment is different,” Kyrgios said. With Kyrgios leading the men of Australian tennis, it always is.Kyrgios, right, and Kokkinakis during their quarterfinal win at the 2022 Australian Open last week.Kyrgios during his first-round win at the Open. Kyrgios has said that John Cain Arena is his favorite court to play at, and the tournament schedules many of his matches there.Young fans surrounded Kyrgios as he signed autographs after practice at the National Tennis Centre in Australia last week. While security tried to move him swiftly through the crowd, he paused to joke and take selfies with as many people as he could, and he signed until he was told to move on.Kyrgios greeted his girlfriend, Costeen Hatzi, after his semifinal win with Kokkinakis in men’s doubles.After his semifinals win, Kyrgios met his support team and family for dinner at the restaurant Nobu in Melbourne.Kyrgios and Kokkinakis defeated the top-seeded partners Nikola Mektić and Mate Pavić of Croatia in a straights upset on Day 5 of the Australian Open.Fans were overjoyed at Kyrgios’s first-round match. His opponent, the British qualifier Liam Broady, described the atmosphere as “incredible” in a post-match interview but also said he found the experience “absolutely awful’” after being taunted throughout the match as Kyrgios won, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3.Kyrgios, who is known to draw a younger and more vocal crowd to his matches, vented his frustration to the crowd after someone yelled out before his serve. He subsequently lost the point. More

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      Speed of Courts at Issue in Australian Open

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Australian OpenWhat to Watch TodayHow to WatchThe Players to KnowFans in Virus LockdownAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Fast Are Those Australian Open Courts? Does It Matter?Players are calling this the fastest Grand Slam tennis court they have played on. Technicians say the speed hasn’t changed. Who is right?Australian Open officials said the speed of the Melbourne Park courts hasn’t changed, but Dominic Thiem of Austria said they were the fastest he has played on.Credit…Jaimi Joy/ReutersFeb. 15, 2021Updated 8:35 a.m. ETMELBOURNE, Australia — The chatter about the speed of the tennis courts at the Australian Open this year started innocently enough.It was just before the ATP Cup, the team competition at Melbourne Park that preceded the Australian Open, the year’s first Grand Slam event. Dominic Thiem of Austria, the winner of last year’s United States Open, mentioned he had been practicing at John Cain Arena, and the ball seemed to be coming off the blue hardcourt pretty darn fast.Days later, Novak Djokovic, the world No. 1 and eight-time champion of the Australian Open, said the court at Rod Laver Arena, which he refers to as his second backyard, felt strikingly fast. Then, after his second-round defeat of Frances Tiafoe of the United States, Djokovic said it was playing faster than at any other time since he began playing here 15 years ago, which is not a bad thing for perhaps the game’s most precise and effective ball striker. He said it again after beating Milos Raonic in the fourth round Sunday night. On Friday night, Thiem, the No. 3 seed, came back from two sets down to beat the fan favorite Nick Kyrgios of Australia in the third round, and spoke of all the challenges he had faced — a hostile crowd, Kyrgios’s booming serve and “the fastest Grand Slam Court I have ever played on.”Few players have disagreed.Their comments have caught Tennis Australia, the organizer of the Australian Open and the keeper of the courts at Melbourne Park, a bit off guard. Last year at the Australian Open, some players complained the courts were too slow.Machar Reid, the head of innovation for Tennis Australia, knows the most about the condition of the courts. He said pretournament tests produced results similar to last year, the first year the Australian Open contracted with GreenSet, which supplies the acrylic coating of the courts, essentially the paint.“What we aim for is consistency, year after year, not just here but for all the facilities in the country, so the players are playing on a similar surface no matter where they are,” Reid said in an interview last week. “All our indications are that the courts are the same.”Without getting overly technical in evaluating the tests against the experiences of multimillionaire athletes who have hit countless shots on countless courts and are sensitive to the tiniest changes in conditions, it is worth noting that tennis players consistently suffer from the Goldilocks syndrome.Tennis courts are always either too fast or too slow, too slick or too sticky. Players can shift their opinion midway through a match if the weather changes. They are not an easy lot to please.Men seem to obsess and complain about the speed more than women, perhaps because they hit harder. A serve traveling at 130 miles per hour is plenty difficult to return on a normal court. On a too-fast court it is tough to get the racket on it.The International Tennis Federation, the sport’s world governing body, classifies tennis courts into one of five categories for its Court Pace Rating: slow, medium-slow, medium, medium-fast and fast. A surface receives its classification after various tests that include measuring how high a ball bounces when it hits the surface at different speeds and how easily it slides when it is dragged across it, as well as other factors.The red clay of the French Open is the slowest Grand Slam surface. Playing on the grass of Wimbledon in certain conditions can feel like playing on an ice rink, with the ball skidding and barely rising above a player’s shins. The slightly cushioned hardcourts at the United States Open and the Australian Open are plenty fast, but the ball generally pops up. The speed can be adjusted from year to year depending on the grittiness of the acrylic coating — think of it as adding sand to paint.All the courts at Melbourne Park were polished and given a fresh coat of the GreenSet acrylic before this year’s tournament. Reid said Tennis Australia aims to provide a court that lands right in the middle of the I.T.F. classification scale because the organization believes that kind of court produces the best tennis.A court rated in the fastest category would too heavily favor the big servers and prevent points from developing. A slow court would encourage players to stay back and turn each point into a defensive chess match. A medium court allows tennis to hit that delicate balance between athleticism and strategy.The problem is tennis tournaments don’t take place in a static environment. No matter what the numbers say, how “fast” a tennis court plays is the result of an incalculable and ever-changing interaction of the ball, the surface of the court and the climate.Changes in the weather can have a drastic effect on how a ball moves. Cooler weather can make a tennis ball feel like a rock on the racket and lessen its bounce. When the temperature rises, the ball becomes livelier. There have been a few hot days in the past month, but the weather has been rather cool for the Melbourne summer.Then again, racket and string technologies are always improving, allowing players to hit harder, with more topspin than ever. Also, courts generally speed up with increased play, and the courts at Melbourne Park have experienced significantly more play than normal this year. Players began practicing on the courts three weeks before the Australian Open. Five separate competitions took place the week before the tournament started.And yet it’s a mystery whether the courts are truly faster and how big a factor that will play in the outcome of the tournament.Fifth-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece, whose game is laced with power, described the court at Rod Laver Arena as one of the slowest at Melbourne Park and not that different from the courts at other Grand Slam events.But Diego Schwartzman of Argentina, one of the game’s great baseline defenders, described the courts as “really, really quick.” Schwartzman, the No. 8 seed, lost in the third round to Aslan Karatsev, a hard-hitting Russian ranked 114th in the world and playing in his first Grand Slam singles tournament. Karatsev dispatched Schwartzman in three sets.“He’s a guy who was doing very powerful shots every single time, and the court was not helping,” Schwartzman said. “I prefer it a little bit slower, to have better conditions so you can think a little bit more in the match and you can have choices, different choices, different shots.”Diego Schwartzman of Argentina lost a third-round match to the hard-hitting Russian Aslin Karatsev. The speed of the courts “wasn’t helping,” he said. Credit…Daniel Pockett/Getty ImagesIn the fourth round, Karatsev came back from two sets down to defeat Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada, the No. 20 seed.“I played here before, and it was slower,” Karatsev said. “But for me, it’s good. I think the fast surface for me, it’s always good.”On Sunday, Thiem, the big hitter who started all this chatter, lost badly to Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria at Rod Laver Arena, 6-4, 6-4, 6-0.“It was very, very fast, probably the fastest Grand Slam I’ve played so far,” Thiem said. “But that wasn’t the issue.”After the tournament, Reid said, he will evaluate the reams of data produced by the Hawk-Eye system, which takes hundreds of measurements per second of the ball and the court position of each player. It should provide some insight into whether the courts were faster this year. Or maybe it won’t.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trust Me, Sports Without Fans Is Not Sports

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Australian OpenWhat to Watch TodayHow to WatchThe Players to KnowFans in Virus LockdownFifth seed Stefanos Tsipsipas celebrated facing a cheering crowd after winning his second round match.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesTrust Me, Sports Without Fans Is Not SportsFor five days the Australian Open had cozy stadiums half-filled with fervent fans, and sports once again felt normal. Then a snap lockdown quieted the stands.Fifth seed Stefanos Tsipsipas celebrated facing a cheering crowd after winning his second round match.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 14, 2021Updated 6:05 a.m. ETRemember what sports was like with crowds? Listen.Recorded as Nick Kyrgios took on Dominic Thiem in Melbourne on Friday night.MELBOURNE, Australia — For roughly the past two decades, the analytics crowd has peddled the idea that sports is essentially math, that what unfolds on the field of play is predictable and intelligible if viewed through a proper algorithm. Occasionally that crowd has even been right. And in many ways the pandemic sports environment was an analytics aficionado’s dream, a chance for games to unfold in a laboratory, free of the noise, both literal and figurative, that can turn an expected outcome into a beautiful mess.Now, nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, we really do know the roar of the crowd is as vital to sports as a ball or a net. The artificial crowd noise that Major League Baseball, the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. have piped in, both for those in the stadiums and arenas and for people watching at home, is a terrible facsimile that makes the spectator-free games feel nothing like sports at all. What stage actors refer to as the “fourth wall” — the metaphorical barrier between performers and spectators — doesn’t exist in sports. A crowd’s passion can seemingly help power comebacks. Its scorn can smother one, too. For five glorious days at the 2021 Australian Open, I got to experience that noise again, because government officials allowed up to 30,000 fans, about 50 percent capacity, to attend the tournament each day. It was both a joy and a revelation to rediscover the power of what quantum physicists call the “observer effect” — the fact that any observation, however passive, alters an outcome — even in a half-capacity crowd of tennis fans. Sports felt like Sports once more.Nick Kyrgios and Dominic Thiem in one of the last matches with a crowd before the tournament closed to the public.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesFans left the Australian Open on Friday after it was announced that the tournament would proceed without spectators for the next five days.Credit…Jaimi Joy/ReutersThen on Friday, the coronavirus did what it has done so relentlessly for the past 11 months: It shut down the party. A recent outbreak was what much of the world would consider a nuisance. But in Australia, which has managed the pandemic more effectively than any other major economy, it qualified as a critical mass.The cluster of coronavirus cases grew to more than a dozen, and the state government of Victoria, where Melbourne is, declared a “snap lockdown” of five days, beginning at midnight Friday.Everyone, except those deemed essential workers, must stay home, though two hours of outdoor exercise and one hour to go to the grocery store or pharmacy are permitted. Players and people considered essential in running the Australian Open will be allowed at Melbourne Park. Spectators, sadly, must stay away until perhaps the singles semifinals, scheduled to start Thursday.“The players will compete in a bubble not dissimilar to what they have done throughout the year,” said Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia, which organizes the tournament.No one is happy about it.Fans watched Serena Williams during a practice session at Melbourne Park ahead of her second-round win.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York Times“It’s been really fun to have the crowd back, especially here,” Serena Williams said after she beat Anastasia Potapova in straight sets in the third round Friday. “But, you know what, at the end of the day we have to do what’s best. Hopefully it will be all right.”I am here to tell you it won’t be. After what I witnessed during the first five days, it’s going to be terrible, without the essential dynamics that make sports the ultimate in improvisational theater.Nick Kyrgios, the tennis antihero everywhere except Australia, where he is beloved, rode the fans to a miracle Wednesday night. He saved two match points in the fourth set against Ugo Humbert, the rising 22-year-old Frenchman. Then he edged Humbert in the fifth set in front of an explosive crowd that never gave up on its hometown hero.Kyrgios is the rare tennis player who brings in rugby fans. They screamed their heads off to keep Kyrgios alive and Humbert, the No. 29 seed, on edge until the very last point.“Half-packed and it felt like it was a full stadium,” Kyrgios said. “I got goose bumps toward the end.”Humbert lost those two match points, even though he was serving. He heard the fireworks from the seats a few feet away. As he watched Kyrgios both encourage it and soak it all in, his eyes appeared to fill with fear. There was another set to play, but the crowd was not going to let Humbert get out alive.Fans cheer on Nick Kyrgios of Australia.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesKyrgios has attracted a raucous fan group at the Australian Open.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesIt is not a stretch to say that Humbert wins that match easily on a quiet court.Kyrgios and his crew were back at it Friday night, when he took on Dominic Thiem of Austria, the reigning United States Open champion. The roars started as Kyrgios broke Thiem in the first game. As the crowd bellowed, Kyrgios waved his arms and cupped his ear, signaling to his fans that if he had any chance against the machine-like No. 3 seed, they were it.And so began three-plus hours of interactive drama, with all the seat-banging, taunting and fist-pumping needed for someone who has barely played in a year to stay competitive with one of the best players on the planet. As the match stretched into the fifth set and past 10:30 p.m., a strange clock watching began, because fans were supposed to be home and observing lockdown by midnight.In the end it wasn’t enough, as Thiem prevailed in five sets, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, but it’s hard to believe it would have been close without it. “It’s not the same sport without the crowd,” Kyrgios said.So, here is one big reveal of the past week: All those star athletes who have always insisted they are so locked in that they do not hear the crowd? Well, it seems pretty clear they have been lying.Spectators watched the evening matches outdoors on the big screen at Melbourne Park on the fifth day of the Australian Open.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesHere was Novak Djokovic, who has won this championship eight times. He has described Rod Laver Arena as his backyard. He was getting ready to play a game the other day, when a clump of women with a Serbian flag stood up and serenaded him with the “Ole-Ole” tune, culminating with, “Novak Djokovic is hot, hot, hot!”Djokovic gave up on trying to play cool. He stepped back from the court, started giggling, then shook his head to regain his focus.Here was Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia, trying to serve out the third set for what would have likely been the biggest win of her career, an upset of Simona Halep, the No. 2 seed. She was in front of a hometown crowd that carried her all night but couldn’t will her to victory.“I felt that rush of people just cheering for you,” Tomljanovich said, her voice breaking following the loss. “I’m afraid to say it, but it could be the highlight of the year with the atmosphere and the crowd.”She is not the only one. I do not know what I am dreading more about the end of this assignment — the last freezing month of a winter in the Northeast, or the largely empty version of sports that the pandemic has wrought.It’s something, yes, but it is not sports.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More