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      Nick Kyrgios’s U.S. Open Run Ends One Match After Beating the Top Seed

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      Karen Khachanov of Russia needed five sets to put Kyrgios away, 7-5, 4-6, 7-5, 6-7, 6-4. He will play Casper Ruud of Norway in the semifinals on Friday.For the third consecutive day, one of the top-seeded men or a heavy favorite exited the 2022 U.S. Open.In a match that began Tuesday night and ended in the small hours Wednesday morning, Nick Kyrgios lost to Karen Khachanov of Russia in five sets in a duel between two of the hardest hitters in the game, but also two players whose minds have often gotten in the way of the success that so many predicted for them when they were teenagers.The loss, punctuated with him smashing rackets on the court as he has often done, left Kyrgios as sad as he has been in a long while, sadder than after he lost the Wimbledon final earlier this summer.“I feel like I’ve let so many people down,” he said. “It’s just devastating. Like, it’s heartbreaking. Not just for me, but for everyone that I know that wants me to win.”Khachanov won the three-hour, 39-minute scrap, 7-5, 4-6, 7-5, 6-7, 6-4. Kyrgios looked to have the momentum after taking the fourth-set tiebreaker, but he lost his serve in the opening game of the fifth set and never recovered.“Crazy match,” Khachanov, the No. 27 seed, said in his on-court interview. He will face Casper Ruud of Norway, the No. 5 seed, in the semifinals.For Kyrgios, the talented but temperamental Australian, the loss came two nights after he eliminated the top seed and the defending champion, Daniil Medvedev, another Russian. On Monday, Rafael Nadal, the 22-time Grand Slam singles champion, lost in fourth sets to Frances Tiafoe, a rising American.Nadal’s loss was less of a surprise than Medvedev’s, especially because few would have been shocked if the two had met in the finals had they landed on opposite sides of the draw. The surprise was how efficiently the 23rd-seeded Kyrgios had steam-rolled Medvedev, who is widely recognized as the world’s top hardcourt player, in the third and fourth sets.The performance was among the best matches Kyrgios, 27, has ever played at a Grand Slam tournament, if not the best. In those final two sets, in game after game, Kyrgios all but hit Medvedev off the court, except when he was confusing and frustrating Medvedev with his drop shots and touch volleys. There was little doubt when the match ended that if Kyrgios could continue playing at that level, it was unlikely anyone in the field would be capable of stopping him from winning his first Grand Slam singles title in a career marked by wild swings of brilliance and blowups.The only consistencies in Kyrgios’s game and the mind that rules it though are their unpredictability, and how irresistible tennis fans find it.Khachanov reached his first Grand Slam semifinal.Elsa/Getty ImagesGoran Ivanisevic, the 2001 Wimbledon champion who now coaches Novak Djokovic, has described Kyrgios as a “tennis genius.” But just when it appears that Kyrgios has everything locked in — his massive serve, his blistering forehand, his deceptively quick movement, his breathtaking touch, his combustible temper — something goes awry.Against Khachanov, the inability to find anything close to the near-perfection he had reached against Medvedev doomed him. Kyrgios was just slightly off, and against a far inferior opponent. Shots that normally burn the lines drifted beyond them. Shots that usually zip over the net on a wire slammed into the tape, or even the middle of the net in the lesser moments. He struggled all night to crack the code of Khachanov’s serve, especially on his rare chances to break it.At one point, he got so frustrated with his inability to get off a quality return that he swatted at the balls as though he was trying to kill a fly with a swatter. After losing two golden chances to break Khachanov’s serve late in the third set, he smashed his racket on the ground and later smacked a television camera with his hand.The tide appeared to turn three games later, when Kyrgios stroked a series of easy rally balls into the middle of the net, giving the crucial third set to Khachanov. Kyrgios went up a break in the fourth set, gave it back, then prevailed in the tiebreaker, but that brief stumble early in the fifth set cost him the match.Khachanov, 26, was not perfect, but he was as good as he needed to be, serving hard, working enough points around to his smooth and powerful forehand, and attacking as soon as he could find an opening. He also kept his emotions in check, even as the crowd rallied behind Kyrgios — New York has always loved a showman — and heckled the Russian. He waited for Kyrgios to grow frustrated enough to want to get off the court and get home to Australia.Kyrgios never got there, though he had ample opportunity. Instead he fought to the bitter end, whipping forehands and pounding serves, moaning as he chased down shots against a stubborn player who managed to come up with his own big serves when needed, including on the final point, one last bomb down the middle of the court. Moments later, Kyrgios smashed two rackets on the side of the court.Kyrgios’s immediate future is uncertain. He loathes the time away from his home and his family that the sport requires. His mother has been ailing. A court hearing has also been scheduled in early October for Kyrgios to face a charge of assaulting his former girlfriend in Canberra last December. Kyrgios has not commented on the charges. He could face prison if convicted.He has long had an ambivalent relationship with tennis. He played little during the early days of the pandemic, choosing not to travel the world to play in empty stadiums. Then, in January, he won the Australian Open doubles title with his longtime friend Thanasi Kokkinakis.The victory both lit a fire in Kyrgios and also taught him how much commitment and energy playing a Grand Slam to the finish over two weeks required. He skipped the clay court season because he hates playing on the surface, then took over Wimbledon, becoming the talk of the tournament with his sublime play and his antics, which included fights with officials and taunting Stefanos Tsitsipas into submission. In the finals he lost in four sets to Djokovic, who won his 21st Grand Slam singles title.Kyrgios said if he had won Wimbledon, he might have struggled to find a reason to keep playing tennis. The sport, and the expectations that had been placed on him when he burst onto the scene as a 19-year-old, have tortured him, and driven him to alcohol abuse.This U.S. Open offered him the best opportunity of his career to win a Grand Slam singles title. Djokovic’s refusal to receive a vaccination for Covid-19 prevented him from entering the country to participate, and then Nadal had been eliminated in the fourth round.As Kyrgios took the court Tuesday night, no one who had won a Grand Slam title was left in the draw, and he was playing some of the best tennis of his life, until he wasn’t any longer. More

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      Coco Gauff Drops U.S. Open Quarterfinals Match to Caroline Garcia

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      Garcia, the No. 17 seed from France, beat the 18-year-old American, who was playing her first quarterfinal at the U.S. Open, in straight sets.So how do you say steamroller in French?It is a fine time to find out because nothing has been able to stop Caroline Garcia of late: Not even the rising American Coco Gauff and a packed partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium.Garcia, a 28-year-old from the French city of Lyon, did not appear unsettled in the least on Tuesday.In her first night-session appearance in the biggest stadium in tennis, Garcia swept the first four games of this U.S. Open quarterfinal in just 17 minutes to take quick command and then rumbled to a 6-3, 6-4 victory with timely serving, deft volleys and big baseline hitting that routinely paid dividends.“It was super important to get a quick start,” said Garcia, concerned about keeping the latest sellout crowd of 23,859 at Ashe from making her life more difficult.“That was the goal,” she said. “That crowd can get fired up very quickly.”Garcia subdued them by playing the same brand of aggressive, attacking tennis that had carried her to 12 straight victories this summer.Make it 13.“I just go for my shots, even when I’m stressed and don’t feel it,” she said in her on-court interview after the match. “The way to improve for me is to move forward, and I just try to flow that way.”While Gauff, 18, did manage to narrow the gap after Garcia’s opening salvo, she could never manage to stop Garcia’s momentum. A Gauff run to the title here this year would have had powerful narrative arc. Gauff, a Black prodigy from Florida, was inspired to take up the game by the success of the Williams sisters, and Serena Williams, soon to celebrate her 41st birthday, played what was likely her final official match last week in a third-round defeat in Queens.This would have been quite the time for a torch passing, and Gauff may well run with it someday. But despite reaching the French Open final in June, she still needs to shore up some aspects of her big game. She remains prone to double faults and had six more on Tuesday as she won just 27 percent of her second-serve points.Ranked No. 1 in doubles, Gauff has a terrific net game but is still learning to make the right choices on when to push forward. She also made too many unforced errors from the baseline, leaning back as she tried to counter Garcia’s percussive strokes and often getting unsettled by the pace.Gauff had beaten Garcia in their previous two singles matches, but Garcia and her doubles partner, the Frenchwoman Kristina Mladenovic, defeated Gauff and Jessica Pegula in the French Open women’s doubles final in June: a victory that helped relaunch Garcia. Ranked outside the top 70 in singles after Roland Garros, she has simplified her approach with great success under the coach Bertrand Perret. It is grip-it-and-rip-it tennis, designed to overwhelm the opposition, but there is also great technical skill and timing involved as she stands sometimes three steps inside the baseline to smack returns.“I would say she’s definitely striking the ball much better,” Gauff said. “Kudos to her, and her team because I think she’s gotten a lot better since the last time I played her.”It was the first U.S. Open quarterfinal in singles for both players, and now Garcia, seeded 17th but playing much better than that, will face Perret’s former pupil Ons Jabeur in her first Grand Slam semifinal on Thursday.“Of course he knows her well, but that goes back a few years now,” Garcia said. “Everybody knows everybody on tour. I’m not sure he is a secret weapon. I think our main goal will be to see how I can put my game in place.”Jabeur, a Tunisian seeded fifth, advanced earlier on Tuesday by stopping Ajla Tomljanovic’s run in the quarterfinals by 6-4, 7-6 (4).Tomljanovic, an unseeded Australian who is based in Florida, recorded the biggest victory of her career when she defeated Williams in a gripping, emotional three-setter on Friday night.She then, to her credit, backed that up by defeating Liudmila Samsonova of Russia in the fourth round, but in her return to Ashe Stadium she could not win a set against Jabeur, who reached the Wimbledon final in July, delighting the Centre Court crowd along the way with her acrobatic footwork and taste for drop shots.Jabeur, like Garcia, is 28, and they have known each other since their junior days, some of which Jabeur spent based in France. They are on friendly terms and speak French together, but they have never faced each other in a match of this import.“It’s a big challenge in front of me,” Garcia said. “We go back a long way, and she has a special game that you don’t often see on the tour. She has had a solid year and has that experience now in these big matches like Wimbledon. So it’s going to be very interesting to see how we can find a solution to counter her.”Caroline Garcia continued playing the aggressive, attacking tennis that has now carried her to 13 straight victories this summer.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesMichelle V. Agins/The New York TimesGarcia, long considered a promising junior in France, put herself on a bigger map early at age 17 by going up a set and 4-1 on the Russian superstar Maria Sharapova in the second round of the 2011 French Open. The British star Andy Murray, who follows women’s tennis closely, tweeted during the match that “the girl Sharapova is playing is going to be No. 1 in the world one day.”That was quite a leap of faith, and Sharapova eventually came back to win. Garcia, flattered by Murray’s comment but not remotely ready to start living up to it, needed more time. She reached No. 4 in the world in 2018 before fading. But she has roared back this summer and now has six straight victories over top-20 players after losing the previous 12.She was asked on Tuesday night if Murray, despite his good intentions, had hurt her with his grand prediction.“Yes,” she said with a grin. “I’m very happy that he thought that at the time, but I was 17 and ranked 150 or 200, and I was capable of producing this level for a match but not capable to produce it other weeks. At first, I put pressure on myself, saying I wanted to play like that, and that’s when things went wrong.”Not much has gone awry in New York. It is no easy task to overpower Gauff, one of the best defenders and quickest movers on the women’s tour. Gauff will break into the top 10 in singles next week for the first time.“She is of course very fast,” Garcia said of Gauff in an interview on the eve of the match. “But my game can negate that, because I am not looking to get in too many long rallies.”So it turned out. The average rally length was 3.53 shots. After winning the title as a qualifier at the Western and Southern Open in Mason, Ohio, last month, Garcia has not come close to dropping a set in five matches at the U.S. Open.And in case you’re still curious, steamroller in French is rouleau compresseur. More

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      Frances Tiafoe Has Them Talking About Tennis in Freetown, Sierra Leone

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      Tiafoe, whose parents emigrated from the war-torn country before he was born, is the youngest American man to reach a U.S. Open quarterfinal in 16 years, and he has enough talent for two nations.In the stadiums and sports clubs of Freetown, Sierra Leone, soccer is the favorite topic. But on Tuesday, several hours after Frances Tiafoe, a son of two Sierra Leonean émigrés, beat Rafael Nadal to reach the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, tennis has nudged itself into the conversation.“Oh, yeah, there is a lot of talk about Tiafoe right now,” Abdulai Kamara, a sports blogger and the owner of the Hereford Sierra Leone Football Academy, said in a telephone interview from Freetown. “We don’t really follow tennis closely here, but now there is some interest. Some people are curious about Frances, and they want to know more.”While the tennis community in the United States is excited that Tiafoe, who was born in Hyattsville, Md., has become the youngest American man to reach the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open in 16 years, some in Sierra Leone are proudly claiming the young tennis star as their own, too.The gregarious and talented Tiafoe, 24, has enough magnetism and dynamic tennis skills for two nations.The Sierraloaded publication referred to “Sierra Leone’s Tiafoe,” in a flash update on the historic win, and Kei Kamara, a soccer star from Sierra Leone playing for Montreal in Major League Soccer, wrote on Twitter, “One of us,” after Tiafoe’s win, calling it a “massive achievement.”Tiafoe’s uplifting story began when his parents — who had not yet met — left Sierra Leone for the United States in the 1990s to escape a civil war. They each moved to the United States and, after they met, settled down in Maryland and had twin boys, Franklin and Frances.The boys’ father, Constant Tiafoe, found work on the construction site for the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md. Constant Tiafoe was so industrious, he was offered the job of the maintenance director of the facility. He was given an office, where sometimes the twins slept, the better to, as they grew big enough to hold rackets, spend time on the courts.They both played, but Frances displayed a unique passion, watching the lessons given to the older boys at the center and mimicking their every move, then hitting balls off walls and serving to ghosts on outer courts until dark.Tiafoe combines speed, power and court savvy.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times“All the stories are true,” said Mark Ein, an entrepreneur and chairman of the Citi Open in Washington, D.C., one of the premier events on the tennis calendar. “Frances was obsessed with tennis.”Ein has known the Tiafoes since the boys were five and has become a friend, adviser and mentor. His own mentor was Ken Brody, an investment banker and tennis enthusiast who built the Junior Tennis Champions Center to enact a vision that Tiafoe might one day fulfill.“Ken used to say, ‘If the Czech Republic can develop champions in a country that size, then we can do it here in D.C.,’” Ein said.It was not long before Frances began to display a unique athletic agility — speed, power and court savvy — combined with a nearly unquenchable thirst for the game. He was paired with Misha Kouznetsov, a junior coach from Russia who pushed and pulled Frances through the early stages of his tennis development, which at times were remarkable.At first, the Tiafoes saw tennis as a vehicle for the boys to secure a university education, which only seemed attainable with a scholarship. Constant left his job at the training center to start his own business, but he ended up working at a carwash while the boys’ mother, Alphina, worked as a nurse. Money was scarce.“It wasn’t anything supposed to be like this,” Tiafoe said Monday after defeating Nadal. “Once we got in the game of tennis, it was like my dad was like, ‘It would be awesome if you guys can use this as a full scholarship to school.’ I mean, we couldn’t afford a university. So, use the game of tennis.”But Tiafoe shone so brilliantly at such an early age, that college was relegated to an afterthought as a lucrative professional career burst into view. When he was 14, in 2012, Frances won the prestigious Petits As tournament in France, around the same time that sports publications got wind of his humble and fortuitous upbringing at the J.T.C.C. The following year, Tiafoe won the Orange Bowl, a top tournament near Miami for the world’s best juniors. He was on his way, it felt.American tennis coaches, administrators, agents and the most knowledgeable fans began to see that Tiafoe might be the next great American player, which for so long had been a searing void in the game.But the development of professional players in today’s game often comes slowly, and Tiafoe has, at times, struggled. He turned professional in 2015, and for the next four years he reached the third round of a major tournament only once, at Wimbledon in 2018.He ended last year ranked No. 38 and is currently No. 26. That will improve after his breakthrough performance in the U.S. Open, no matter what happens Wednesday against the No. 9 seed, Andrey Rublev.Now Tiafoe’s popularity is rising fast, not only among Sierra Leonean soccer stars, but also from basketball megastars, including LeBron James, who congratulated Tiafoe on Twitter.“I mean, that’s my guy,” Tiafoe said of James, one of his sports idols. “To see him post that, I was like, ‘Do I retweet it as soon as he sent it? I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to be cool and act like I didn’t see it and then retweet it three hours later.’”Tiafoe’s career has been defined by high expectations, plateaus, self-analysis and improvement.“There were such huge expectations for him at such an early age,” Ein said. “He achieved so many firsts, and he was considered the future, the hope of American tennis. That’s a lot for a teenager, and he handled it really well. He knows success is not always a straight line, but he also knows that if you are always headed towards true north, you can achieve your goals.”Ein and Tiafoe regularly swat an adage back and forth: that everyone wants to be a star like Beyoncé, but no one wants to put in the work to get there.During one of his plateaus, after the 2018 season, Tiafoe began to hear from people around him that he needed to train more, eat better, study film and improve his preparation — anything that might push him into the top 5 in the world.During the winter, over lunch in Georgetown, Tiafoe explained to Ein what he had been hearing and revealed his response to the well-intentioned pressure.“He told them, ‘Don’t worry,’” Ein recalled, “‘I got this.’ A few days later, he was on his way to Australia, where he reaches the quarterfinals of a Slam for the first time. That’s the Frances Tiafoe story.”Many people in the tennis world also know the story of Tiafoe’s early life in Maryland. But much of his tennis story is still heading north. Some of it is being written at the U.S. Open, and some of it is being written in Sierra Leone, where the legend of Frances Tiafoe is just taking hold. More

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      WTA Finals Set for Texas This Year, but a Return to China Is Uncertain

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      The year-end event is due to return to China in 2023, but the tour said its suspension of tournaments there after Peng Shuai accused a former government official of sexual assault remained in place.The WTA announced Tuesday that Fort Worth would host its annual season-ending WTA Finals this year.The tournament, which will begin Oct. 31, said it had a one-year agreement to play in Fort Worth, “with the event thereafter due to return to Shenzhen, China.” But the WTA said the suspension of its tournaments in China remained in place, leaving the WTA Finals’ return to China in 2023 uncertain.WTA tournaments in China have been suspended since December, when Steve Simon, the tour’s chairman and chief executive, announced the decision, after the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai shared in a post online an allegation of sexual assault against a former top Chinese government official.In the following weeks, Peng, 36, was not seen publicly, and it was unclear whether she was safe or able to speak freely without interference from the Chinese government. She later deleted her post.In November, the editor of a state-run newspaper shared clips said to be of the Chinese tennis star on Twitter. But they were unverified, and Simon called them “insufficient.” The WTA had called for Chinese authorities to investigate the accusation and end censorship on the subject before suspending tournaments.After Peng went public with her allegations, tennis fans were spotted at tournaments, including this year’s Australian Open, with signs and T-shirts reading “Where is Peng Shuai?” Others, including Serena Williams, took to social media to express concerns about Peng’s safety.“If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback,” Simon said in a statement in December, announcing an effective boycott of tennis in China. “I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”In February, around the time Peng met with the International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach at the Beijing Games, Simon called for a chance to have a private meeting with Peng, adding in a statement that “we continue to hold firm on our position and our thoughts remain with Peng Shuai.”In an email on Tuesday, a WTA spokeswoman said that the organization “continues to work towards a resolution in China and are hopeful we will be in a position to operate events in the region in 2023 and beyond but will not compromise our founding principles in order to do so.”The WTA’s stance has not come without a cost. China had been a fundamental source of financial stability for the WTA, with 10 events that accounted for about one-third of the tour’s annual revenue in 2019. The most profitable and recognized of those events was the WTA Finals, which offered record prize money of $14 million in 2019.The WTA gained some relief from that loss of revenue in March, when, after more than a decade without a title sponsor, it agreed to a multiyear deal with Hologic, a leading global medical device and diagnostics company focused on women’s health.The WTA Finals have been roaming the world for a home since 2019, which was the first year of what was supposed to be a 10-year deal that would have kept the tournament in Shenzhen, a city of more than 17 million.But the following year, the WTA Finals were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2021, the tournament scrambled at the last minute to find a host and ended up in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Garbiñe Muguruza of Spain won the final against Anett Kontaveit of Estonia.Having the tournament in Texas this year brings the WTA Finals, which has had different names over the years, back to the United States for the first time since 2005, and it adds to the tour’s presence in the United States to end the year. After the U.S. Open, the WTA will have a 500-level tournament in San Diego in October and a 125-level tournament in Midland, Mich., about 130 miles northwest of Detroit.The tournament in Fort Worth, about 30 miles west of Dallas, will be played at Dickies Arena, a 14,000-seat multipurpose venue that opened in 2019. The venue has hosted a rodeo, concerts, the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, and the first and second rounds of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. More

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      The Great U.S. Open Ball Debate of 2022

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      The Open is the only Grand Slam tournament where women use different balls than men, and the Wilson ‘regular-duty’ ball has gotten into some players’ heads.Tennis players are the Goldilocks characters of sports.The balls are too big, or too small. The courts are too fast, or too slow. It’s too cold, or too hot, or too sticky, or too sunny.“Some weeks you don’t play well, and you got to blame it on something,” joked David Witt, who coaches Jessica Pegula, the American who reached the quarterfinals on Monday with a win over Petra Kvitova.And so it has been at the U.S. Open this year as the women — well, some of them — have waged a rebellion over the Wilson balls they have used for years at the tournament. This is the only Grand Slam event where the women and the men use different balls.These yellow spheres are loved and loathed.Pegula, who has lost just one set in four matches, and that one in a tiebreaker, happens to love the balls. Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 from Poland, has called them “horrible.” That is so tennis. Rarely is there any consensus. Players often make contradictory complaints in the same tournament, or even the same day, about the same thing.You are officially forgiven if you have lived your life thinking all tennis balls are created equal but with different names and numbers stamped on them. But now, a quick tutorial in tennis ball technology.The men at the U.S. Open use what is known as an “extra-duty” ball, which means the felt on the outside of the ball is woven slightly more loosely than the “regular-duty” ball the women use.Iga Swiatek and her sports psychologist have talked about the challenges posed by the regular-duty balls.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesEverything else about the balls is the same — their core construction, their size and weight, how they rebound and how quickly they deform, according to Jason Collins, the senior product director for racket sports at Wilson Sporting Goods.However, the regular-duty balls “play faster,” Collins said through a spokeswoman for the company. Felt that is woven more tightly doesn’t fluff up as much and can wear away, so there is not as much friction when those balls make contact with the ground or the strings of a racket.The additional friction of a fluffy ball allows players to create maximum spin. Those who rely heavily on that spin can struggle to make a regular-duty ball travel the way they want it to, especially after a few games, when the ball begins to lose whatever fluff it had right out of the can and gets smaller.Players who hit a flatter ball, like Coco Gauff, or Pegula or Madison Keys, don’t have this problem as much. But some still do. Paula Badosa, who was seeded fourth and lost in the second round, hits as flat as anyone. She said she hated the balls.“You feel more like you’re playing Ping-Pong sometimes,” Badosa said after her first-round win. Two days later, she was out of the tournament.Another point of complication and confusion: Regular-duty balls are always used on clay courts and other surfaces that are moist because they don’t collect the moisture the way the looser felt of the extra-duty balls do. Extra-duty balls are the balls of choice for outdoor hardcourts, like those at the U.S. Open, except when they are not.And then there is one more complicating factor: Tennis is run by seven separate organizations, with tournaments all over the world, many of which have different companies that pay for the right to supply the balls. That means players can end up playing with a different ball from a different manufacturer from one week to the next. And every ball is just a little bit different, and behaves differently depending on heat and humidity and air pressure.According to the United States Tennis Association, which owns and organizes the U.S. Open, the women have played with a different ball than the men for as long as anyone can remember; the WTA Tour has always wanted it that way, and the tournament abides by the tour’s preference.Stacey Allaster, who is the U.S. Open director and was the chief executive of the WTA from 2009 to 2015, said the sports science experts on the women’s tour have long felt that the faster, more aerodynamic ball helps limit arm and shoulder injuries.Every year, Allaster said, the U.S.T.A. asks the WTA what balls it wants to use, and the answer has always been the same. “As far as we know, a majority likes it, so we could end up trading one problem for another.”Amy Binder, the chief spokeswoman for the WTA, confirmed that the players and the sports science teams have favored the faster regular-duty balls, but executives have heard from “a select number of our athletes that they would like to consider a change.”The WTA will continue to monitor and discuss the matter, Binder said, though she said the decision on the ball ultimately rested with the U.S.T.A.The ball controversy has had previous iterations. After Ashleigh Barty won the Australian Open in January, her coach, Craig Tyzzer, said she would never win the U.S. Open as long as the tournament used the Wilson regular-duty balls. (Barty retired in March at age 25, while ranked as the world No. 1.) The latest gripes started earlier this summer, when the players began playing with these balls in the lead-up to the U.S. Open.Tennis, though, is all about making adjustments and finding solutions as the conditions change throughout a match, and a tournament, and a season. The challenge can be as much mental as it is physical.A tennis umpire examined one of the tennis balls during a fourth-round match.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesPegula kept switching rackets in her match against Kvitova on Monday, experimenting with different string tensions in search of one that felt just right as the humidity and the condition of the balls changed. Looser strings hold the ball for longer (think of a trampoline) and provide more time to spin the ball.“Something feels off, you have to make a change,” Pegula said “It’s important not to let it frustrate you too much.”That has been the challenge for Swiatek, who travels with her sports psychologist, Daria Abramowicz. They have talked plenty about all the challenges created by these balls that Swiatek so despises.Abramowicz does not tell Swiatek not to think about the balls because then the first thing she will think about is the balls.“It’s like I would tell you right now not to think about a blue elephant for a minute, and literally the first thing popping into your mind is this blue elephant,” Abramowicz said. “You accept the thought, because it’s already there, and move on, refocus, find anchor in something else.”Pegula and Swiatek will meet Wednesday in the quarterfinals, a match that could become a test between Pegula’s flexibility and Swiatek’s ability to think about other things besides the balls. Or maybe the balls will have nothing to do with the outcome.What will happen with the balls next year is anyone’s guess, but Allaster said the WTA would need to decide what to do soon. Wilson has already been asking which balls the U.S.T.A. needs in 2023.Someone is not going to be happy. More

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      John McEnroe Gets His Revenge

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      John McEnroe was sitting on a couch 43 stories above Manhattan, his gray curls and sleepy, crinkled eyes betraying every one of his 63 years, some of them hard ones, regaling an awe-struck podcaster with stories of his glory years. His rivalry with Bjorn Borg, his battles with chair umpires and his own demons.The awe-struck podcaster was Kevin Garnett, the N.B.A. champion, Olympic gold medalist and 15-time N.B.A. All-Star who is 17 years younger than McEnroe. Garnett was 8 years old when McEnroe won his last Grand Slam singles title in 1984.Somehow, that does not matter, not even a little bit.Thirty years after McEnroe played his last match at the U.S. Open, the irascible kid from Queens, the notorious hothead who griped and cussed and kicked his way across the hallowed grass of Wimbledon and every other tennis court, possesses a star power that has barely faded. It is especially bright during the U.S. Open. He is the leading voice of the tournament on ESPN, the subject of a new documentary, even the narrator and superego of a lovesick and unathletic teenage Indian American girl with a hot temper on Mindy Kaling’s comedy “Never Have I Ever.”The staying power is sweet revenge for the man whom much of tennis officialdom once viewed as toxic to their genteel game.“Maybe I wasn’t so bad after all,” McEnroe said during a recent interview at the end of a day that began with an early-morning appearance on “CBS Mornings” and then was jam-packed with chats with journalists, including from N.P.R.’s “Fresh Air.” “These guys who were trying to run me out of the game, maybe they should have been trying to help me instead of hanging me out to dry back in the ’80s.”‘The Weight of the Name’McEnroe won seven Grand Slam singles titles, plenty no doubt, but not as many as Jimmy Connors or Andre Agassi or Ivan Lendl, who each won eight, to say nothing of Borg’s 11, Pete Sampras’s 14 or Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, who have tripled his tally.Yet, McEnroe still looms over his contemporaries, as well as Sampras, who dominated the era just after McEnroe’s. When he walks the grounds of the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, he is still the quarterback of the varsity football team in the high school cafeteria.“Johnny Mac!” fans yell to him as he passes.If they can get a word with him, they often tell him how they liked how he thumbed his nose at authority, in a way that perhaps they have never felt empowered to.Word got back to Nadal last week that McEnroe was griping on television that the Spanish champion was violating the time limit between serves. “I’m going to have a chat with him,” Nadal said with a wry smile.He has written two memoirs and been the subject of multiple books. There was a feature film in 2017 about his rivalry with Borg, the Swedish great he vanquished into retirement. The next year came a documentary about him focusing on his brush with perfection in 1984. He has hosted a game show.John McEnroe and Coco Gauff during Tennis Plays for Peace, an exhibition to benefit Ukraine.Jamie Squire/Getty ImagesWhen the United States Tennis Association wanted to hold an exhibition to raise money for relief efforts in Ukraine, McEnroe was among its first calls. In that exhibition he played doubles with Nadal, Coco Gauff and Iga Swiatek. All are younger than his oldest child. He’d love a chance to coach Denis Shapovalov of Canada, the flashy and talented, but temperamental, lefty — sound familiar? — but has yet to get the call.Showtime released the latest documentary last week. The 100-minute film — McEnroe’s longtime agent, Gary Swain, is among the executive producers — is an exploration of his tortured psyche and the seemingly unfulfilled promise of someone who was, for a brief few years a long time ago, both the greatest player who ever lived and perhaps the most miserable.“The weight of the name ‘McEnroe,’ it’s heavy all across the globe,” said Barney Douglas, who directed the latest documentary.But why?McEnroe’s younger brother, Patrick, who also played professional tennis and now commentates (and squabbles) with him on ESPN, thinks he knows the main reason.“He’s authentic,” Patrick McEnroe said.Mellowing, Just a Little, With AgeDuring his playing days, John McEnroe may have been a bit too authentic. Tennis officials and some of their comrades in the news media viewed McEnroe as a menace to the sport. They fined and penalized him and threatened him with suspensions. They derided his penchants for hopping on concert stages to jam with rock stars and indulging in their late-night habits. The British press and the paparazzi hounded him so intensely, especially after his marriage to the actress Tatum O’Neal, that he skipped Wimbledon at the height of his career.As it turned out, McEnroe was already where tennis was headed long before it arrived, in good ways and bad.His game, which was all serve-and-volley all the time, may be completely out of step with nearly every top pro these days. But McEnroe possessed in spades something that continues to separate the best from the merely great — that magical and unteachable touch and creativity that allow a player to blast one shot and feather the next one. He could hit an opponent off the court on one point, then practically catch a 100-mile-per-hour forehand rocket on his racket on the next one.John McEnroe won the 1981 U.S. Open after defeating his rival Bjorn Borg in the final. He finished his career with seven Grand Slam singles titles.Photo by Professional Sport/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesHe also brought to the court the petulance and nastiness, the relentless attacks on chair umpires and equipment that have become so integral to the modern game, whether it was Serena Williams threatening to shove a ball down a linesman’s throat during her 2009 U.S. Open semifinal against Kim Clijsters or Nick Kyrgios’s tireless tirades at Wimbledon this year.The tennis gods blessed him with limitless talent. But they also saddled him with a mind prone to the anguish of tennis in a way that many top professionals now openly discuss. There have been therapists who have tried to help McEnroe explore that struggle, sometimes by his own choosing, sometimes at the direction of the legal system, with varying degrees of success, he said.And it all played out when television cameras first began treating tennis players like the reality television stars they are today. (Stay tuned for Netflix’s tennis version of “Drive to Survive,” the Formula 1 series, that is now in production.) That made McEnroe that rare character remembered, even lionized, not just for how he won but also for how he stumbled and fell short, a narrative of triumph and also a cautionary tale.“I was a little shy, and it was all a little overwhelming, and then somehow it all started to become magical,” McEnroe said of his journey.Like so many other modern stars of the game, though, he struggled to enjoy it.The tennis commentator Mary Carillo, a fellow New York native and his mixed doubles partner for their win at the French Open in 1977, recalled an 18-year-old McEnroe losing his temper with a waiter at a Paris cafe that spring. McEnroe spent several minutes yelling, “omelet du fromage,” which was the only French he spoke, at a waiter who ignored him. The waiter finally wandered over and quietly, but dismissively, told McEnroe, “The omelet is closed.”“To this day, when we’re arguing about something and I’m done with it, I just say, ‘The omelet is closed,’” Carillo said.John McEnroe argues with the chair umpire during Wimbledon in 1981.Bettmann / ContributorLooking back, McEnroe acknowledges a lot of what he sees in himself still angers him. Long before Djokovic and Kyrgios and plenty of others started using the coaches and family members in the player boxes to vent their frustrations, McEnroe directed an expletive at his father as he clapped for him during a match at Wimbledon.McEnroe later told him he was yelling at someone else in the crowd. His father accepted the explanation, though McEnroe is pretty sure his father knew he was lying.“It gave us both plausible deniability,” he said.Even his mother landed in the line of fire sometimes. He was still living at home when he won his first U.S. Open, sleeping in his childhood bedroom each night, eating his mother’s food, which he would impolitely order her to provide at a specific time before his matches.Fed up with his behavior, she asked him why he couldn’t behave more like his friend Peter Rennert, the tour pro who was his constant sidekick.“That made me feel like I was an inch tall,” McEnroe said.Age has mellowed him, though not entirely. His second marriage, 25 years and counting, to Patty Smyth, the lead singer of the rock band Scandal (“I am the warrior. …”), and six children have given him some perspective, as well as a few talking-tos when he gets out of line.But when he hears people saying his serve-and-volley game would not have a prayer against the likes of Djokovic, Nadal and Roger Federer, his voice rises to resemble that unmistakable ranting of the man who made chair umpires’ lives deeply unpleasant.Dial back time to the peak of his powers, put him on a grass court at maximum intensity, and McEnroe is comfortable in his belief that every so often he could have beaten the modern greats.“I would have gotten under the skin and made them think,” he said. “Would not have had a winning record, but I would have gotten to them a few times.”Sounds plausible. In his own way, McEnroe has gotten to all of us — and still does. More

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      Rafael Nadal Defeated at U.S. Open by an American, Frances Tiafoe

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      The next generation of top American players has struggled heavily against Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer in Grand Slams. Tiafoe broke through by winning, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3.It happens at just about every Grand Slam. One of the American men of the so-called next generation begins to look dangerous, raising hopes for a breakthrough.Then one of those familiar foes who have hogged the biggest trophies in the sport dashes the dream.Lately the Americans have been getting closer, which has made the failures more difficult to swallow. Taylor Fritz said he wanted to cry on his chair beside the court when he lost to Rafael Nadal in a fifth-set tiebreaker in the Wimbledon quarterfinals this summer.No one has to dream anymore.Frances Tiafoe emerged on Monday at the U.S. Open in a way that went beyond the other top Americans of his generation, beating Nadal in four sets to knock one of the sport’s so-called Big Three — who also include Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer — out of a Grand Slam tournament.Tiafoe beat Nadal, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, with an intense, joyous effort on an electric afternoon at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. He grabbed his head and crouched to his knees when Nadal hit the final backhand into the net.“I don’t even know what happened,” Tiafoe said, moments later. “Unbelievable day.”

      Men’s Singles Fourth RoundFinal22 Frances Tiafoe64662 Rafael Nadal4643 .spt-live-blog-width { max-width: 600px; margin: auto; } .spt-grid-item { font-family: nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; padding: 5px 0; width: 100%; border: none; } table.spt-scoreboard { font-family: nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: 300; font-size: 15px; border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; } tr.spt-scoreboard { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; } tr.spt-scoreboard:last-of-type { border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; } td.spt-scoreboard { padding: 13px 0 12px; text-align: left; /* vertical-align: top; */ } .spt-black { color: #121212; } .spt-athleteName { word-wrap: break-word; word-break: break-word; hyphens: auto; margin: 0 !important; } .spt-score { padding: 13px 0 12px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; width: 30px; } .win { font-weight: 700; } .spt-score sup { position: absolute; top: 7px; text-indent: 2px; font-size: 12.5px; } .spt-winner-mark { width: 1em; margin-left: 5px; height: 1em; display: none; } .spt-winner-mark.win { display: block; } .spt-container { display: flex; align-items: center; } .spt-medal-wrapper { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; } .serve { display: inline-block; border-radius: 10px; width: 10px; height: 10px; background-color: #ffe532; margin-left: 5px; } .spt-seed { font-size: 12.5px; color: #666; font-weight: 300; width: 21px; text-align: right; display: inline-block; } .spt-flag { transform: scale(.9); margin-top: 1px; margin-bottom: -1px; } .spt-meta { margin-bottom: 5px; } div.spt-title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-weight: 700; } div.spt-status { font-weight: 400; } @media (min-width: 600px) { .spt-grid-item { /*text-align: center;*/ } .spt-score { width: 50px; } .spt-meta { text-align: center; margin-bottom: 10px; } } The victory represented the next step for the American men, who have not won a Grand Slam singles title in 19 years. Tiafoe and his fellow 20-somethings have become solid members of the top 30 this year, but have yet to crack the next level.For Tiafoe, a strong and talented 24-year-old from Hyattsville, Md., who is one of the fastest players in the game and built like an N.F.L. defensive back, the win was the biggest of his career. It came in his home-country slam in a stadium packed to the rafters with the sound bellowing off the roof after nearly every point, with raucous cheers for both an American underdog and a beloved champion.Tennis for Tiafoe, who is the child of immigrants from Sierra Leone, was simply a means to gain a scholarship to college. Then it became far more that.Tiafoe rode the crowd for all it was worth, pumping his fists and asking for more noise on his best shots. After a key winner gave him a decisive break of Nadal’s serve in the third set, he sprinted to his chair, revving up the crowd even more and letting the roars fall over him.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Tennis After Serena: Tennis has long thrived on singular stars, no one bigger than Williams. But perhaps women’s tennis doesn’t need one big name to be interesting.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.The loss for Nadal, who was seeded second, came less than 24 hours after Daniil Medvedev, the top seed and defending champion, lost to Nick Kyrgios. It blew the men’s tournament wide open and nearly guaranteed that there will be a first-time Grand Slam champion for the third consecutive year.Tiafoe said ahead of the match that he needed to somehow equal Nadal’s intensity from the first point to the last, and that is exactly what he did. He stumbled briefly in the fourth set, when he was forced to serve as the roof was closing because of a rainy forecast. Noticeably shaken, he complained to the chair umpire, missed an easy volley and got sloppy with his groundstrokes, letting Nadal break him.But he quickly came back to break Nadal’s serve in the next game, and then began hammering away and scampering across the court to chase down every ball he could reach and many he couldn’t. A serve that regularly hits 130 miles per hour on the radar gun was plenty helpful, too. A 134-m.p.h. rocket brought him to within one game of the finish line.Nadal will not get a chance at a 23rd Grand Slam title in New York.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesHe also took advantage of the fact that Nadal, a 22-time Grand Slam champion, was not playing at his best.Nadal is still finding his form at the end of a strange, injury-plagued year that somehow could still end up being one of his best.He could barely walk on his chronically injured left foot six weeks before the Australian Open and thought he might have to retire. Then he started to feel better, played one tournament before the year’s first Grand Slam, and then won it, coming back from two sets down in the final against Medvedev, the world No. 1.He cracked a rib ahead of the final of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., and then the pain in his foot returned just a few weeks before the French Open. He received injections to numb his foot before each match and still won his 14th French Open title. He also left Paris on crutches.Playing on the Wimbledon grass for the first time in three years, he got better with each match and appeared destined for a showdown in the finals against Djokovic. But he tore an abdominal muscle during his match against Fritz. He withdrew from the tournament the next day.Rehabilitation from that injury took longer than expected. Nadal arrived in New York having played just one hardcourt match, which he lost to Borna Coric of Croatia in Ohio. In Queens, Rinky Hijikata, a wild-card entrant from Australia ranked 198th in the world, took the first set off him in the first round. Nadal struggled to find the court for much of the first two sets of his second-round match against Fabio Fognini of Italy.On Monday against Tiafoe, Nadal had to consult with a physiotherapist after the first set. He double-faulted at key moments and could not produce the torque that has always been so essential for his power but also makes him prone to injuries.“I don’t even know what happened,” Tiafoe said. “Unbelievable day.”Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesAfter the match, Nadal was philosophical as always, saying that complaining about his spate of injuries or wondering what might have been had he not gotten hurt, or if possible distractions had not developed — his wife, who is pregnant, was hospitalized while he was in New York — would not change the outcome. After all, sometimes he has been terribly hurt and somehow managed to come out on top — just not this time.“We can’t find excuses,” he said. He continued: “I have been practicing well the week before, honestly. But then when the competition started, my level went down. That’s the truth. For some reason, I don’t know, mental issues in terms of a lot of things happened the last couple of months. Doesn’t matter. At the end the only thing that happened is we went to the fourth round of the U.S. Open and I faced a player that was better than me. And that’s why I am having a plane back home.”Tiafoe is headed back to a Grand Slam quarterfinal for the first time since the Australian Open in 2019, the last time he played Nadal — and lost — in a Grand Slam.That performance, when he was 21, announced him as a potential force. Suddenly people in the game started looking to him as a savior for American men’s tennis, which has struggled for several years to find its next big star.Tiafoe has said it was all a bit too much too soon, and it happened before he really understood the dedication and commitment required to climb to the highest echelon of the sport.After shooting into the top 30 he slumped. He has steadily climbed the world rankings since the middle of last year. He also made the final 16 at the U.S. Open in 2020 and 2021, and did so at Wimbledon this year. Coming into Monday’s match, he had won all nine sets in New York this year, and had been especially tough in the crucial moments, winning four tiebreakers. But he was battling Nadal and history at the same time.Tiafoe had been winless in six tries against Federer, Djokovic and Nadal, though he had given Djokovic all he could handle in four tight, physical sets at the Australian Open last year.He spoke of being more mentally prepared to take on Nadal than he had been three years ago.“I’m not going to have that ‘first time playing him, excited to play,’” he said of Nadal after his third-round win against Diego Schwartzman, the 14th seed, eight spots higher than him. “Now I believe I can beat him.”Tiafoe is part of a promising and talented group of American players that also includes Fritz, Tommy Paul and Reilly Opelka. They essentially grew up together at junior tournaments and training at the United States Tennis Association centers in Florida.They were born within 12 months of each other in 1997 and 1998 and have been jockeying with and supporting one another since they were 14 years old. Tiafoe has always been the alpha of the group, always looking to rib his mates, especially Fritz.Fritz was once the worst of the foursome but he has had the most success and is the highest ranked. He got the groups’s first win against the Big Three earlier this year, when he overcame an ankle injury during his warm-up and beat Nadal in the final in Indian Wells.Martin Blackman, who as director of player development for the U.S.T.A. has watched Tiafoe and the others in his age group and played a role in the federation’s investment in them, said on Sunday he was confident Tiafoe could break through that Grand Slam barrier against Nadal.“It takes 100 percent focus and intensity from start to finish,” Blackman said.That is exactly what Tiafoe delivered. More

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      The Void Serena Williams Left in Tennis Doesn’t Need to Be Filled

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      Tennis has long thrived on singular stars, no one bigger than Serena Williams. But perhaps women’s tennis doesn’t need one big name to be interesting.Serena Williams is gone from the game; at least, we think so. Given the sharp, competitive way she played at the U.S. Open last week, maybe, just maybe, she’ll end up coming back for an encore.Let’s take her at her word, despite the malaise that settled on the grounds at Flushing Meadows in the days following her defeat to Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia. Their three-hour match Friday night featured some of the most thrilling tennis played at this tournament in years.Now what? That was the question fans were asking over the Labor Day weekend, many of whom had bought their tickets just before the tournament began, gambling that Williams would keep playing and that they could watch her last great run. With her gone, not even the players who are left in the tournament have a firm grasp of who will take her place in women’s tennis.“I don’t know,” said Jessica Pegula last week, echoing a typical locker room sentiment. Pegula, an American barely known outside of tennis even though she is currently ranked No. 8, made note of the remarkable explosion of talent on the women’s tour, which features its deepest-ever bench, but lamented that nobody has been up for filling the Serena void.“It’s open for someone to step up,” she said. “That’s why you look at someone like Serena, dominant over several eras, and it’s pretty crazy.”Of course, tennis, like most sports, thrives on big names. On the women’s side, in the modern era of professionalization, the racket passed from Billie Jean King to Chris Evert to Martina Navratilova to Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. Then it was Venus Williams’s turn, and finally, Serena, who not only pushed the game in popularity and reach, she helped changed the way the game was played.“It’s hard to picture tennis without her,” Pegula added, dolefully.Steffi Graf with the U.S. Open trophy in 1988 the year she won the Grand Slam.Peter Morgan/Associated PressDoes women’s tennis need such a dominating figure to be interesting?Maybe it’s a matter of perspective. Rivalries and dynasties are great things. Many fans seem content to follow a small handful players or, in other sports, teams. The few players who win big and win consistently — like Williams and Novak Djokovic — are the ones whose stories take up most of the oxygen.But is there another more satisfying way of looking at sports?Is the N.B.A. at its best when the Golden State Warriors are in the finals, year after year, and winning the league title, in four out of eight seasons?Did we only care about the N.F.L. when the New England Patriots were bullying everyone in sight?Simone Biles had her well-documented struggles at the Tokyo Olympics, but how cool was it to watch Sunisa Lee emerge from relative obscurity and win gold in the all-around event?Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.In men’s tennis, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Djokovic are pure genius. Bless the Big Three. But after reigning over the game for nearly two decades, each one of this trio feels past his due date.Despite Monday’s stunning loss to Frances Tiafoe, Nadal may play for at least another year. Djokovic looks like he has no plans to slow down until he is 70. Federer says he will give it one last hurrah when he can return from yet another knee injury.All to the good, unless, like me, you want some spice and variety and you like not knowing with near 100 percent certainty who is going to dominate every big tournament.Over the last several days, I spent time in Manhattan, randomly asking strangers what they knew about Iga Swiatek, the top women’s seed at the U.S. Open. The standard response was a quizzical, dumbfounded look. “Who?”Swiatek, a 21-year-old from Poland, won her second French Open in June. She also won 37 straight matches this year, the longest such streak in the 21st century.She has a compelling, all-court game. She is intelligent, contemplative, and engaging.But let’s face it, outside of tennis fans, in America, arguably the most critical market in tennis because of its size and spending power, Swiatek isn’t well known. She does not seem poised to fill the void left by Serena Williams. But that’s fine. No player will. The game, with its drama, athleticism and skill, should be able to attract fans.Iga Swiatek is the top seed at the U.S. Open. Will she be the next player to dominate tennis?Mike Segar/ReutersIt’s been interesting to watch the matches at Flushing this week, not only on the big courts but on the outskirts of this glammed-up tennis mecca — which, unlike, say, lush and intimate Wimbledon, has the look and feel of public tennis courts on steroids, with a looming football stadium stuck in the middle.Serena’s influence is everywhere. Remember how she spoke of “evolving” away from tennis? What a perfect word, because that is what she has done for tennis. She’s been the prime force in its evolution.You can see her fingerprints in every women’s match. The powerful, percussive groundstrokes hit from every corner. The biting serves. The aggressive, swinging volleys. The strength and speed. Virtually every player looks like they could be competing in the Olympic Heptathlon.Women’s tennis has never contained this much depth. Yes, you can watch the young and talented Coco Gauff, 18, ranked 12th, now into her first U.S. Open quarterfinals on Tuesday, and make the obvious comparison to a young Serena Williams because of their race — and because Gauff has steadily pointed to Serena and Venus for laying down the path for her tennis journey.It helps that Gauff also has the same sort of ambitious grit. As she came from behind in each set of her Sunday match against China’s Zhang Shuai, Gauff channeled Serena’s moxie, giving a Dikembe Mutombo finger wag, pumping her fists, flying from corner to corner to hit groundstrokes that echoed with a boom across Arthur Ashe Stadium.But throughout this tournament the grounds have been filled with competitors like the 86th ranked player in the world, Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska — who, like so many other, credits Serena Williams for sparking her love for tennis as a girl. The shots that fly off Yastremska’s racket, no surprise, look like they’re ripping out of a cannon.Serena isn’t truly gone from the sport. She left a lot behind and remains part of tennis in a profound way. Her influence is all over the grounds.But that the void she left can’t be filled and doesn’t need to be. More