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      At The U.S. Open, Arthur Fils Of France Keeps On Winning

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      At the U.S. Open, Arthur Fils, a 19-year-old Frenchman, is surpassing expectations. Britain’s Jack Draper, 21, has been there. It’s all good.It happens every year in tennis. Actually, four times a year.A young, bright-eyed player with fistfuls of skill and promise wins a match or two at a Grand Slam, and all of a sudden, the next big thing has arrived. There were U.S. Opens past when the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center were buzzing with the names Donald Young and Ryan Harrison, or any number of other quick hits who had their moments but never lived up to those first-week spectacles, or their own expectations.And here we are once more, just a few days into the year’s final Grand Slam, with no shortage of chatter about Arthur Fils, the gallant, 19-year-old Frenchman, who a year ago was battling to get within sniffing distance of the top 300. Now he is ranked 48th in the world and won his first match at a Grand Slam — on his third try — on Tuesday.On a field court in front of bleachers teeming with in-the-know spectators desperate for a glimpse of the future, Fils outlasted Tallon Griekspoor, the 24th seed, in five sets. Fils battled through cramps in the fourth set, hung with Griekspoor through the fifth, then overpowered him in the final two games, swinging his racket without fear, like only a player who has almost zero professional experience with failure and heartbreak can.Fils greeted Griekspoor after beating him on Tuesday.Mike Stobe/Getty ImagesOn Thursday, Fils has a golden opportunity to reach the third round when he faces Matteo Arnaldi of Italy, a 22-year-old ranked 61st in the world. In the span of three days, Fils went from a teenager who was winless in his two previous matches at a Grand Slam to a favorite to make the final 32. The crowds will no doubt be there once more.“I really trust in myself,” Fils said an hour after his win over Griekspoor. “I think that I can win against anybody.”Between mouthfuls of salmon and rice, Fils spoke of his journey from a boy who picked up a racket on a family vacation in the south of France when he was 5 years old, to hitting once a week with his father at their home near Paris, to developing his game with coaches at France’s tennis federation beginning when he was 13.Until that point, he had competed in swimming, track and field, judo, and soccer — his true passion — but he was better at tennis than the other sports, so tennis became his thing. He is so young that when he was asked about the matches he watched during his childhood that made early impressions on him, he mentioned Roger Federer’s win over Rafael Nadal in the 2017 Australian Open final. Since he won his first ATP tournament in Lyon in May, he has been shouldering the hopes of a nation desperate for its first male Grand Slam champion since Yannick Noah in 1983.“That’s my dream since I’m 10,” Fils said. “Dreams now sometimes can help in the real life.”Maybe, but professional career arcs in tennis rarely follow an ever-upward trajectory during the early years. On Tuesday, Fils did not have to look far for the cautionary tale.Shortly after he was done for the day, Jack Draper, a 21-year-old from Britain, was sitting around a high table, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head, fresh off a much-needed first-round win over Radu Albot of Moldova.Jack Draper against Felix Auger-Aliassime at the 2022 U.S. Open.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesA year ago, Draper was where Fils is now, the buzz of the tournament and the guy his compatriot Andy Murray touted as a future top player, vanquishing sixth-seeded Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada in the second round before losing to Karen Khachanov of Russia in the third.Since then, Draper has battled pain all over his body — there were abdominal and hip injuries during the first months of this year and a shoulder injury in the spring that caused him to miss the grass court season.“There’s people who are now in a better position than I am who I hadn’t heard of for a while last year,” Draper said. “So everyone’s on their different journey.”He shares an apartment near the Lawn Tennis Association’s Roehampton headquarters with Paul Jubb, his close friend and another rising British pro who caught his own buzz last year when he pushed Nick Kyrgios to five sets in the opening round of Wimbledon. Jubb has been battling an ankle injury for much of the year. On many days, hitting sessions have been replaced by physical therapy as together they have tried to come to terms with their immediate tennis lives not going exactly they way they hoped.“We’ve been keeping each other’s spirits up,” Draper said. “Just try and keep going and know that my time will come.”Draper celebrated match point against Radu Albot of Moldova during their first-round match on Tuesday.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesThe challenge for players in the Fils and Draper cohort is that the time for one of their own has already come. Carlos Alcaraz is just 20 and is already the world No. 1.Alcaraz’s breakthrough came years after conventional wisdom in men’s tennis held that the game had grown too physical for teenagers to excel. Then Alcaraz came along and set a new standard for Gen Z, likely raising the volume of the buzz when a fresh face has a good day or two at a Grand Slam.That suits Fils just fine. He is on his maiden voyage to New York.“Really nice,” he said. “Big city.”Noisy, too, which he doesn’t mind, especially when fans are buzzing about him, something he — and Draper, too — will try to use to their advantage on Thursday.“The New York City crowd is amazing,” Fils said. “They pushed me.” More

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      At 19, Coco Gauff Is the Veteran Player in Her U.S. Open Matchup

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      Coco Gauff, at 19, was three years older than her latest opponent in the tournament, Mirra Andreeva, who turned professional last year.As Coco Gauff and Mirra Andreeva faced off at the U.S. Open on Wednesday, fans in the stands remarked about how old — really how young — they were while competing at the top of their sport.Gauff, who at 19 is not much older than the 16-year-old Andreeva, has for several years been a household name in tennis, ever since she made a run to the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2019. Her growing stardom means that she often finds herself playing in featured matches at the U.S. Open, in front of the most fans in person and in choice television slots.On Wednesday, that was in a 6-3, 6-2 win over Andreeva at Arthur Ashe Stadium, playing ahead of Novak Djokovic. It was a matchup, and a moment, that Gauff, a sixth-seeded American, controlled with ease while keeping a breezy but brisk pace.Some of her confidence, Gauff acknowledged, comes with experience. When asked on the court what she had learned in the past three years, Gauff said that when she was 16, she played every match as if it were “life or death.”“You still have to allow yourself time to make mistakes,” she said. “And the losses, as long as you learn from them, are OK.”Andreeva, an unseeded Russian, said after the match that she hadn’t gotten much advice from older players on tour yet, but that she was eager for their wisdom: “I will always listen to them.”Andreeva, left, congratulated Gauff after their match.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAndreeva played in her first tour event this year and has shown some youthful struggles in maintaining her composure on the court. In her last match against Gauff, at the French Open in the round of 32, she hit a ball into the stands, striking a spectator. She received a code violation and acknowledged that she could have been disqualified, calling it a “really stupid move.” She was also fined $8,000 at Wimbledon for unsportsmanlike conduct after throwing a racket, arguing and refusing to shake hands with the chair umpire.Andreeva has defended herself by saying that Roger Federer had outbursts when he was young, too, echoing an argument that other players, like Serena Williams, have made about whether women’s players and men’s players receive similar scrutiny for their conduct.Gauff, who has often been complimented for her composure, said this week that she debated whether to complain during her opening-round match against Laura Siegemund about the pace of play, with Siegemund often pushing the serve clock to its limits.“I really don’t like confrontation all that much,” Gauff said in her postmatch media interview on Monday. She said she had been thinking about the delays the whole match. “I wasn’t sure if I was in the right or not until it happened multiple times,” she said, but she reached a point of frustration and felt the need to speak up to the chair umpire.“I try my best not to let my emotions to take over myself,” she said.Gauff pledged ahead of her second-round match not to be flustered by her opponent this time, and to ignore age — her own and Andreeva’s. “She has her ranking, and that’s all that matters,” Gauff said ahead of their match.Instead, their youthfulness played out in the form of athleticism, as they traded long, sprinting rallies from the baseline and as Gauff found openings to inch forward and finish points.One rally in the second set lasted 30 shots, and ended with Gauff expertly handling a drop shot from Andreeva with a backhand approach shot for a winner. She celebrated that point by urging the crowd to cheer, a request fans quickly obliged.By then, it was clear that Gauff and Andreeva have had no trouble reaching young fans.“It’s amazing that they are so young and they have this amazing skill and talent to just be here and play on that court,” said David Keating, 10, as his father applied sunscreen to him and his twin brother, Michael.Gauff says she has been trying to ignore age as a factor in her matches.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesEve Maulshagen, who started playing tennis three years ago and just made her high school team in Central New Jersey, said in the main plaza at Billie Jean King National Tennis Center that she liked the idea that someone at 16 could be playing in front of so many people on TV. “That’ll be me in a year when I’m 16 — but not like a pro,” she said with a laugh.Gauff has been trying to ignore age as a factor during her matches. On Friday, she will play Elise Mertens, a 27-year-old from Belgium, in the third round. They have played twice, and Gauff won both matches, most recently during the French Open in 2022 in the round of 16.“I want to maintain a long career,” Gauff said during her on-court interview on Wednesday. “I have to really have fun on the court and I think I’m having fun with the wins and losses.” More

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      Morgan Riddle Is the Most Famous Woman in Men’s Tennis

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      Morgan Riddle was being watched.Outside the grandstand, while she idled beneath the summer sun, a passer-by stopped, turned and pointed a phone at her, then wordlessly walked away. Ms. Riddle just adjusted her black oval Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-style sunglasses.Once inside the tennis match, while she and more than 1,000 other spectators found their seats, people were more direct. “Are you Morgan?” “I recognize you!” “Can we get a photo?” She said yes at least a dozen times that afternoon.“You’re so tiny!” said Sue McDonald, who had come to the National Bank Open in Toronto with her 19-year-old daughter, Jaiden. She had never been able to get her children interested in the sport, Ms. McDonald told Ms. Riddle, until last summer, when one player on TV caught her daughter’s eye.“I’m sitting there watching Wimbledon, and I’m like, ‘Come and see this guy,’” she said. “‘Come and see this tall, dark, handsome guy.’ She comes walking in, and she’s like, ‘Oh, who’s this?’”It was Taylor Fritz, a player from Southern California recognizable for his height (a lean 6-foot-5) and his center-parted, cartoon-prince waves, which he restrains during matches with a Nike headband. Mr. Fritz, 25, is the top American player in men’s tennis, currently ranked ninth in the world.But he wasn’t the only person the McDonalds were watching during that match.“I have this theory about viral content,” said Ms. Riddle, who has gone viral for suggesting tennis isn’t widely considered cool. “It has to be either enviable, relatable or controversial.”Julian Finney/Getty ImagesEvery so often, the screen flashed to a young woman wearing a crisp white dress and gold jewelry with blond tendrils framing her face, sitting ultra-poised in the player’s box with Mr. Fritz’s team of coaches and supporters. They looked her up online and soon began following Ms. Riddle on social media, where she shares her life as a tennis WAG — an acronym for “wives and girlfriends,” popularized in Britain in the mid-2000s to describe, disparagingly, a group of preening, partying women attached to soccer players.Ms. Riddle, 26, doesn’t mind the acronym, she said. She also doesn’t mind being called an influencer, a similarly stigmatized title. She has thick skin and a cleareyed confidence in the life she’s building while accompanying her boyfriend around the world for some 35 weeks each year.What began in early 2022 with her trying on outfits for the Australian Open on TikTok (a video that has since been viewed 1.5 million times) has evolved into her being hired by Wimbledon to host “Wimbledon Threads,” a video series on fashion at the tournament. This summer, she released two pieces of gold-plated jewelry — a bracelet ($125) and necklace ($175), each with a tennis-racket charm — in collaboration with a small New York jewelry company called Lottie.In Toronto, one of several women who approached Ms. Riddle between Mr. Fritz’s sets thrust out her wrist, flashing her Lottie racket bracelet.This lifestyle is not one Ms. Riddle could have imagined for herself three years ago, when she didn’t even know the rules of tennis.“I genuinely did not have any friends who were interested in tennis, I had no friends who watched tennis, I had no friends who played or wore cute tennis clothing,” said Ms. Riddle, who still does not regularly play tennis. She does, however, watch a lot of tennis now, and wear a lot of cute tennis clothing.‘She’s Got a Plan’“I’ll be honest, I was very apprehensive,” said Grace Barber, a senior producer at Whisper, the sports production company that created Ms. Riddle’s fashion series for Wimbledon. Ms. Barber knew little about Ms. Riddle before being assigned to produce “Wimbledon Threads.”“I just assumed that because she’s, like, really hot and got loads of followers and is Taylor’s girlfriend, she’s basically coasting,” said Ms. Barber, who used the phrase “train wreck” to describe her expectations for the project. She was wrong, she said: Ms. Barber found Ms. Riddle to be hard-working, funny and self-aware while filming the series, which largely consists of interviews with attendees describing their outfits.“She’s got a really clear directive, creatively, of where she wants to go,” she said. “She’s got a plan.”The Lottie founder Charlotte Alden said she had sold more than 250 each of the bracelet and necklace made in collaboration with Ms. Riddle.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesThe series has already been commissioned for next year’s Wimbledon, provided that “he’s still playing and she still wants to do it,” Ms. Barber said. In July, after Mr. Fritz was eliminated in the tournament’s second (of seven) rounds, the production sped up its timeline, conscious of avoiding online criticism over why Mr. Fritz’s girlfriend was still working at Wimbledon when he was not.And here is where things can get complicated: In the tennis world, at least, Ms. Riddle’s exposure is still partly tied to her boyfriend’s success.Many fans who take selfies with Ms. Riddle know her from “Break Point,” the Netflix series that follows the highs and lows of several rising tennis stars. On the show, Ms. Riddle cheers for Mr. Fritz in full preppy, doll-like glam — and, slightly less glamorously, eats takeout with him in their hotel bed — while his story line devolves from a great victory over Rafael Nadal in Indian Wells, Calif., in 2022, to a surprising defeat in the first round of the U.S. Open later that year.Mr. Fritz has since failed to advance past the third round of any Grand Slam tournament. As such, the “Break Point” crew hasn’t spent much time with the couple for the scheduled second season, Ms. Riddle said. It’s her understanding they won’t be featured again unless he has a big win.Netflix aside, the difference between winning Grand Slams and not can be financially stark — even for top players like Mr. Fritz, who has already earned $12.9 million in prize money throughout his career, along with sponsorships from Nike and Rolex. According to Forbes, winning the U.S. Open in 2021 translated to $18 million in endorsements the next year for Emma Raducanu, who now models for Dior. After Carlos Alcaraz won his U.S. Open title in 2022, he signed high-profile deals with Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton.Still, Ms. Riddle has prioritized financial independence in a way not all WAGs do. Ms. Barber, who is the wife of a professional golfer, said she had seen younger women set aside their career goals, tempted by the lifestyle of financially supported world travel.“For the first year or so, it’s like a fairy tale,” said Ms. Barber, who is now in her late 30s. “But it’s not your dream. You want to be supportive to the person you love, but you know how quickly time passes, and suddenly it’s been 10 years and you have no career of your own and you’re bored of living out of a suitcase.”Ms. Riddle often wears white on match days — here at the Australian Open in January — regardless of whether she’s at Wimbledon, where all-white outfits are popular for attendees and mandatory for players.Cameron Spencer/Getty ImagesMs. Riddle has found a way not to be bored — funneling most of her creative energy into a YouTube channel she started this year for longer form vlogs — while also supporting herself. Her income from one TikTok is about five times what she made in a month at her previous 9-to-5 job, she said. (She was formerly a media director for an organization that brought video games into children’s hospitals.)“I’m really happy with what I’m doing, and I’m making good money,” she said. “People are allowed to make all the judgments they want. A lot of times people have assumptions about me, but then they watch my YouTube, or they listen to me on a podcast, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I was wrong.’”‘Not a Bad Deal’Ms. Riddle and Mr. Fritz met in Los Angeles in 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, on the private dating app Raya.At first, Ms. Riddle did not try particularly hard with Mr. Fritz, she said. On their first date she suggested they watch “Midsommar,” a fairly disturbing film she had already seen. She loves horror movies and figured that if he couldn’t handle some gory Swedish strangeness, they weren’t a good match. (In turn, he later got her to watch anime.)Ms. Riddle had just moved to California earlier that year and was living adjacent to influencers, having befriended members of the Hype House, but she wasn’t yet one herself. She had been raised in Minnesota by a public radio executive and a guided tour fisherman, then studied English at Wagner College on Staten Island in New York.The couple has separate brand deals but hopes to work with more fashion labels. (Here she wears Bronx and Banco, and he Brunello Cucinelli.)Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesMr. Fritz grew up near San Diego, born to two tennis players. (His mother, Kathy May, was ranked 10th in the world in 1977.) He joined the professional tour at 17 after winning the junior U.S. Open. Mr. Fritz had grown up fast: By the time he met Ms. Riddle, at 22, he had already been married, fathered a child and gotten a divorce. But because of Covid-19, he was, for the first time in his career, on an extended break from tennis.Mr. Fritz knew his nomadic life would eventually resume, so he broke it down for her.“I prefaced it,” Mr. Fritz said, sitting in their hotel room in New York, the week before the U.S. Open. “I was like: ‘Look, this is not how it’s going to be. I don’t have this free time. I’m going to be traveling, like, every single week.’ But I also said, ‘You know, it’s not a bad deal — you can travel all over the world, if you’re up for it.’”She liked the deal. And he liked having her around. They moved in together after dating for just a few weeks.“She’s very on me about eating healthy, getting lots of sleep,” said Mr. Fritz, who seems shy off court, but like many players, talks a lot to himself and his team while on court. “It’s the little things that create a healthy routine for me, and that helps me perform better.”When they met, he was ranked 24th. Now he is ranked ninth. But Ms. Riddle knows how ugly her DMs and comments section — already a place where she is denigrated by some fans for dressing up at matches, selling tennis merch and generally having opinions about the sport — would become if those numbers were reversed.“If his ranking had gone down, they’d say it’s my fault,” said Ms. Riddle, who sometimes wears an evil-eye bracelet on her wrist, given to her by Lilly Russell, the wife of one of Mr. Fritz’s coaches, who travels with the team and “knows how much” she takes online.Power Couple“Power couple,” the Tennis Channel captioned a photo of Ms. Riddle and Mr. Fritz as they walked around Wimbledon in June. Earlier that month, they both became memes after a Paris crowd loudly booed Mr. Fritz, who had just beaten a French player. He shushed them with a finger to his lips, like a kindergarten teacher; Ms. Riddle was seen smiling devilishly behind her pink camera.She knows she is always being watched. But she is also always watching, able to sense when Mr. Fritz needs encouragement, while also keeping her cool during tense moments. Most cameras can’t see when her knee is bouncing.The couple after the biggest win of Mr. Fritz’s career, at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., in 2022. Clive Brunskill/Getty Images“The only time I really get nervous is when I see him getting nervous,” Ms. Riddle said. She knows his tells, like looking at his nails or fiddling with his racket strings. He doesn’t often smash rackets — a stereotype of frustrated players — but when he does, he’ll break them over his knee. The first time Ms. Riddle saw it happen, “I was like, ‘This guy is psycho.’”Tournaments can be chic; sometimes there are champagne tents and Ralph Lauren-decorated suites and celebrities sitting courtside. During the U.S. Open, Mr. Fritz and Ms. Riddle stay at the posh, wellness-oriented Equinox Hotel New York — he has a partnership with the hotel — and take a Blade helicopter to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.But sometimes they are indescribably boring. On Mr. Fritz’s final day in Toronto, Ms. Riddle and I spent a full hour watching a court be dried, inch by inch, by vacuum-like machines after a rainstorm. The day before, we had gotten sunburns. Now it was windy and chilly, and Ms. Riddle texted Mr. Fritz, who was waiting out the delay in the locker room, to ask to borrow a jacket. She hoped it wasn’t ugly, she said.“Welcome to the glamorous life of being a WAG.”At one point during the delay, Ms. Riddle considered greeting Alex de Minaur as he quickly passed by but decided against it. Mr. de Minaur, the top-ranked Australian player in the world, was playing Mr. Fritz later that day — a match Mr. de Minaur would win. I thought of this moment later, when a couple of tournament regulars described tennis WAGs to me as “political wives,” diplomatically representing their partners around the grounds.But Ms. Riddle had become a kind of ambassador for the sport, too. Her behind-the-scenes explainer content is a gateway drug for some people, like Jaiden McDonald, the young woman who approached Ms. Riddle with her mother in the grandstand. Within a few months of seeing Mr. Fritz and Ms. Riddle for the first time, she went from ambivalence toward tennis to making a PowerPoint presentation of her U.S. Open predictions. She watches Ms. Riddle’s YouTube videos every single week.Ms. Riddle, wearing Tory Burch, said she understands the sport well enough to know the strengths and weaknesses of players, even beyond Mr. Fritz. Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesDuring the rain delay, I searched Ms. Riddle’s name on X, formerly Twitter, and found fan art of her and Mr. Fritz as Barbie and Ken. It wasn’t the first time she had seen the comparison. Ms. Riddle, who has a Barbie-themed iPhone case, had decided to lean into it: When Mr. Fritz appeared on a magazine cover in July, Ms. Riddle commented “hi ken!” on his Instagram.She likes to joke that Mr. Fritz is her fan, and her fans like to joke about his matches being “Morgan Riddle meet-and-greets.” This started around the time the tagline on a “Barbie” poster (“She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”) went viral.Ms. Riddle’s publicity team, which she began working with this summer, even suggested “she is Barbie and he’s just Ken” as the concept for the couple’s photo shoot accompanying this article.As in: She’s everything. He’s just the best men’s tennis player in the United States. More

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      At the U.S. Open Tommy Paul Readies Himself for the Second Round

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      After numerous misfires with his career, Paul, an American seeded 14th at the U.S. Open, finds himself as comfortable on the court as off it, and into the second round in Queens.The last time Tommy Paul needed an attitude adjustment, he had just flamed out of a small tournament in the Netherlands in the spring of 2022 in the most petulant way, and his coach had seen enough.Brad Stine, who guided Jim Courier to four Grand Slam singles titles and the world’s top ranking and coached several other top players of the past 20 years, is 64 years old and knows when a player has crossed the line from battling through a rough patch into behaving unprofessionally.For several weeks, he had watched Paul act like a child instead of a man in his mid-20s. During an opening-round match in Geneva that May, Paul had mocked someone sitting in the player box of his opponent, Tallon Griekspoor of the Netherlands. Paul thought the man was cheering too loudly. Another time, in the grass-court tournament in ’s Hertogenbosch, he had disrespected Brandon Nakashima, a fellow American, yelling that he should not have been losing to a player he felt he was much better than.Stine’s kids are grown and his bills are paid. He has been to tennis’ mountaintop. He doesn’t need the work. He needed to tell Paul exactly what he believed, and if their three-year player-coach relationship ended there, so be it.The coach Brad Stine gave Paul a reality check in 2022.Sandra Ruhaut/Icon Sport, via Getty Images“You’re embarrassing me,” Stine told Paul as they talked in a quiet spot at the tournament after the loss to Nakashima. Then he rattled off his complaints about Paul’s attitude and competitiveness during the previous month.Paul absorbed Stine’s words for a few moments before he spoke, then told Stine he didn’t disagree with anything he had said.Among the top American men, Frances Tiafoe, a 25-year-old son of immigrants from Sierra Leone whose run to the U.S. Open semifinals last year was electrifying, sucks up most of the oxygen these days. Taylor Fritz, the 25-year-old Californian, has the highest ranking among the group and last year won the BNP Paribas Open, the so-called fifth Slam. Sebastian Korda, the son of a Grand Slam singles champion, has the pedigree.But Paul, 26, who has a dangerous, all-court playing style, who likes to hold a rod and reel in his hands as much as (OK, maybe more than) a tennis racket, has arguably had the best season of them all.He is the only American man to make a semifinal of a Grand Slam tournament, falling to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open, which Djokovic went on to win for a record 10th time. Paul’s ranking shot up to No. 13 this month, from No. 35 in January. He has given Carlos Alcaraz, the world No. 1, fits during the past month, beating him for the second time in his career in Toronto, then falling in three tight sets to him a week later in the Cincinnati suburbs.Paul, right, is the only American man this year to reach the semifinal of a Grand Slam tournament. He lost to Novak Djokovic, left, who went on to win a record 10th Australian Open title.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Associated PressThe rewards, including nearly $2 million in prize money, have begun rolling in. His agents at GSE Worldwide have gotten Paul new endorsement deals with Yonex, a racket manufacturer; De Bethune, the maker of his luxury watch; Motorola; IBM; Acorns, a financial management firm; and Celsius, a beverage maker. He appeared in a fashion photo spread in Vanity Fair, his hair slicked down and his body wrapped in a shiny overcoat.“Not really my thing,” said Paul, who is more suited to a trucker hat and a hoody than haute couture.This was the way it was supposed to go for Paul, who was almost always the best in his age group among American junior players. He won the French Open junior title in 2015. But then came a frustrating climb up the tennis ladder, years when Paul’s desire and commitment to his craft failed to match the talent that he had showcased from the time he was a small boy, and he learned the hard way that talent only gets a player so far.“He was the big fish in the little pond, and then he got out there and realized, these other players they’re better, and they’re working harder, too,” said his mother and first coach, Jill MacMillan, who was courtside for Paul’s four-set, first-round win over Stefano Travaglia of Italy on Monday. She and her husband live on a small farm in South Jersey, with two horses, eight sheep and various other animals.In talking about his journey later that night, Paul was philosophical.“I don’t think I ever really stopped believing,” he said. “I kind of knew that I could make it. I just didn’t really know how to do it.”Or if he really wanted to.Growing up in Greenville, N.C., where his mother and her ex-husband owned and operated a health club with some tennis courts, Paul received his first tennis racket from an older woman whom Paul and his siblings called Grandma Betty — she wasn’t their grandmother — when, he thinks, he was about 5 years old. He promptly went outside and started banging it against a tree. She followed him out and told him that wasn’t how he was supposed to use it.Paul and his older sister started spending every afternoon playing tennis at the health club. Beating his sister, who would go on to play collegiate tennis, was his earliest goal. MacMillan said that when Paul started playing — and winning — tournaments at age 6, he barely knew the rules or how to keep score. “He just loved to hit the ball.”That love never faded, even as Paul played plenty of baseball and basketball before focusing exclusively on tennis when he was about 13. Then tennis got serious and a little weird.He has vivid memories of seeing parents hitting their children for losing tournaments. His parents could not afford intensive private coaching, so Paul began to spend much of his time practicing at the United States Tennis Association’s training grounds in Florida. There were a lot of rules and a lot of coaches telling Paul what to do, such as to limit his time with friends and family. Sometimes he listened and followed the rules and practiced hard. Sometimes he didn’t. He still won plenty, so there weren’t many repercussions.He planned on attending the University of Georgia. But then he started winning lower tier pro tournaments and captured the junior title at the French Open. So instead of going to college he turned professional.Paul lost the support of the United States Tennis Association in part because of his behavior during the 2017 U.S. Open.Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBig mistake. No agents wanted to represent him because of his reputation as a player with questionable commitment, Paul said. For the next two years, he was miserable. That misery boiled over at the 2017 U.S. Open, when the aftereffects of a night of indulgence after a first-round loss in singles led to a 6-0, 6-0 loss in a doubles match. A falling out with the U.S.T.A, ultimately resulting in his loss of support, ensued over the next several months.“That was a different life,” Paul said last week while sitting on a couch in a home in Southampton on Long Island, where he was a guest of the chairman of GSE, his agency.Paul said losing the support from the U.S.T.A. was the best thing that could have happened to him. Finally, he had to take responsibility for his future in tennis, hiring his own trainer and coach. He stopped going through the motions in the gym and on the practice court.“I wasn’t going to waste my investment,” he said.The biggest one came in 2019, when following a loss in the U.S. Open qualifying tournament, he asked Stine, whose main player was battling injuries, to evaluate his game.As he watched Paul play, Stine didn’t understand how such a gifted athlete could so often be off balance on the court. He gave him a list of 11 things to fix, everything from improving his footwork to developing a slice. He shared his “conversion theory,” that all it takes to completely shift the momentum of any game regardless of the score is winning three points in a row.“Do the math,” Stine said. He’s not wrong.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Paul and his compatriots spent much of their time in Southern California, playing at the Los Angeles-area mansions of tennis enthusiasts. He was still getting used to feeling like he belonged.Paul has a 2-2 record against Carlos Alcaraz, who is currently the No. 1 men’s singles player in the world.Vaughn Ridley/Getty ImagesEight days before the U.S. Open, Paul was fishing for tuna off Long Island. His face lights up as he talks about the hourlong fight to land a 350-pounder too big to keep. He has yet to buy his own boat, but has been pricing them out. The next day he was on the court of another seaside mansion practicing for two hours with Diego Schwartzman of Argentina.“I want him to continue to have fun,” Stine said later at the mansion they were calling home for the pretournament week.Was Paul having fun? His eyes went to the sprawling lawn and the pool and backyard tennis court.“Look where we are,” he said. More

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      Ons Jabeur Struggles to a First-Round Win at the U.S. Open

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      Jabeur, who said she had been dealing with an illness before the tournament, appeared weary at the end of the match but nonetheless took the first step toward a repeat run to the final.As Camila Osorio hugged Ons Jabeur at the net following their match on Tuesday, she almost looked as if she were holding Jabeur upright. Jabeur was exhausted and drained, sweat saturating her tennis uniform. She had managed to defeat Osorio, 7-5, 7-6 (4), but she was so weary and wobbly that Osorio asked her if she was OK.“I told her, ‘Not really,’” Jabeur, a Tunisian seeded fifth in singles, said in an on-court interview following her first-round victory at the U.S. Open.Jabeur reached the final at this tournament last year and is a sentimental favorite of tennis fans worldwide. But those fans will be concerned over whether Jabeur is healthy enough to get back to the championship match. Last week, Jabeur mentioned that she was suffering from nasal congestion, but it appeared to have worsened significantly on Tuesday. She left the tournament grounds in Queens after her match and will have a day to recover before she faces Linda Noskova, an unseeded 18-year-old Czech, in the second round on Thursday.It has not been a smooth several weeks for Jabeur since her loss to Marketa Vondrousova in the Wimbledon final in July. She took time off after that demoralizing defeat, then played the Western & Southern Open outside Cincinnati, where she won two matches before falling to Aryna Sabalenka in straight sets. During that match, Jabeur needed medical attention for a foot injury.That ailment did not seem to affect her play against Osorio, an unseeded Colombian, but Jabeur still needed help from a tournament doctor during the match because of her illness. She took some medicine, and even though she was able to remain upright and win, it was an obvious struggle. She sweated through her clothes and needed a full change of uniform at one point, apologizing to Osorio at the net for all the delays.“I know it is tough to play a player who is injured or not feeling well on the court,” Jabeur said.Playing in Louis Armstrong Stadium, Jabeur said the audience’s support helped her through the match, just as Coco Gauff, the American star seeded sixth, said the crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium helped her through her tightly contested match with Laura Siegemund of Germany on Monday. A prolonged dispute over how long Siegemund took to serve and to be in position to receive Gauff’s serves ramped up the tension. The pro-Gauff crowd turned on Siegemund, who later said she had been grossly mistreated.“I have to say I am very, very disappointed of the way people treated me today,” she said.She added: “They had no respect for the player that I am. They have no respect for tennis, for good tennis. This is something that I have to say hurts really bad.”Fans clapped when Siegemund missed her first serves, which is not considered appropriate decorum in tennis, and even Gauff signaled several times for the crowd to stop. Also, even on tough rallies Siegemund won, there were times when no one clapped for her.By contrast, it was all love and respect on Tuesday in Armstrong Stadium, where both Jabeur and Osorio played without any tension. When it was over, the fans sang “Happy Birthday” to Jabeur, who turned 29 on Monday.“I’m feeling blessed to have all of this,” Jabeur told the fans. “For me, it’s more important than to win any match because I know that any love you get from people you will cherish until the end of your life, not your career.” More

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      How the War in Ukraine Turned Tennis Into a Battlefield

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      It was a few days before the start of Wimbledon this summer, and Elina Svitolina, just off a flight from Geneva, had come to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club to check in for the tournament. She was returning after a year’s absence. “It feels like it has been 10 years,” she said as she got out of the car. A lot had happened since she last competed at Wimbledon, in 2021. She had given birth to a daughter named Skaï, the first child for her and her husband, the French player Gaël Monfils. Also, her country, Ukraine, had been invaded by Russia.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      At the U.S. Open, Frances Tiafoe Picks Up Where He Left Off

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      Tiafoe, who made a sensational run to the semifinal in New York last year where he ran into Carlos Alcaraz, got an easy first-round win over Learner Tien on Monday.The last time Frances Tiafoe was playing a match inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, it was under the lights last year in front of a teeming crowd of 23,000, roaring with every point, as he tried to topple Carlos Alcaraz, the eventual U.S. Open champion and No. 1, in the semifinals.Michelle Obama was sitting in the front row of the President’s Box, urging him on within earshot. There were N.B.A. players in the lower bowl, including Bradley Beal, then a star of Tiafoe’s beloved Washington Wizards, as well as a slew of Tiafoe’s friends and relatives lucky enough to land tickets for the biggest match an American man had played at the U.S. Open in years.On Monday, Tiafoe, a 25-year-old from Maryland who has catapulted himself into a different level of sports celebrity, experienced something a little different in Ashe Stadium than what transpired a year ago. Opening day at the U.S. Open is an opportunity for tennis fans, even those with a ticket for Ashe, to wander the grounds in search of the up-and-comers, or to take in a tight four-hour match between middling pros at close range.The result can be a lifeless, half-empty atmosphere in the biggest stadium in the sport, especially for a mostly one-sided win like Tiafoe’s 6-2, 7-5, 6-1 drubbing of Learner Tien, a 17-year-old Californian likely to have better days at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in the future. From Tiafoe’s perspective, that was good. The only thing that would have boosted the buzz would have been a match far tighter than Tiafoe, the tournament’s 10th seed and one its most popular players, would have wanted.And yet, while there may not have been too much buzz in the big stadium, there was plenty pulsing through Tiafoe, who knows this U.S. Open is far different than any he has played before.“A bunch of new experiences today,” Tiafoe, a favorite for the first time on Ashe, said in his news conference after the match.That dynamic has consequences, both literal and figurative, good and potentially complicating, since they are loaded with reminders of Tiafoe’s new status.It was the first time his team got to sit in the player’s box belonging to the favorite, on the west side of the court, forcing Tiafoe to pivot his head in a different direction for support. As the favorite, he got introduced to the crowd and entered the court after Tien. That meant he sat in the chair on the left side of the chair umpire rather than on the right side, farther from the entrance, where the underdog traditionally walks to.Everywhere he looked, there was a reminder of who he is now, just like it has been all week as he moved between sponsor events — he has a shiny new Cadillac Escalade in his driveway — and other appearances. And then the tennis began.“I’ve never played a match before where I was supposed to win on Ashe,” he said.How Tiafoe handles all this will go a long way toward determining how many wins he can manage at the tournament every American man desperately wants to win. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the last time it occurred, when Andy Roddick grabbed his lone Grand Slam singles title before the rise of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.The expectations are high.“They should be,” said Martin Blackman, the general manager for player development at the United States Tennis Association, who has known Tiafoe since his elementary school days.“It’s a lot,” said Ray Benton, the chief executive of the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md., where Tiafoe’s unlikely rise to tennis stardom began. Tiafoe’s father, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, was a maintenance man in the early years of J.T.C.C., where the tennis pros first noticed how proficient his young son was at hitting a tennis ball against a wall.Benton was at Tiafoe’s match on Monday and has been in contact with him over the summer.“He’s a little —” Benton paused and with his arms imitated someone who was experiencing the inevitable weight of expectations, the biggest of which are those Tiafoe has set for himself. “In some ways all he can do is disappoint.”As well as the season has gone for Tiafoe, including wins in tournaments in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany, he has fallen short of his own goals at the most important events. He has lost in the third round at the year’s first three Grand Slam tournaments.He was downright despondent after he played arguably his worst match of the year in a three-set loss to Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria at Wimbledon on grass, a surface he loves and that would figure to suit his aggressive and creative game.At heart, Tiafoe, who burst onto the scene in 2019 when he made the quarterfinals of the Australian Open and quickly broke into the top 30, is a showman, an entertainer who loves to play off the energy of the crowd. One of the challenges from his earliest years has been figuring out how to do that most effectively.A typical Tiafoe sequence occurred Monday during a tight second set against Tien. With the score knotted at 4-4, Tien rose and twisted and snapped a backhand overhead that looked like a certain winner. Tiafoe chased it down and threaded the needle with his shot, zipping it between the umpire’s chair and the net post to set him up for what seemed like a crucial break of Tien’s serve. Then he did his trademark frozen stare into the crowd, his cue for the fans to get loud. They did.But then he lost his own serve with a series of careless errors — a forehand into the net and an overhead wide — allowing Tien a chance to draw even in the set once more. Megan Moulton-Levy, a former pro who is the general manager of player development at J.T.C.C. and has been a mentor to Tiafoe for years, spoke earlier this summer of her long talks with Tiafoe about cracking the code of entertaining and using the energy of his ever growing fan base without burning too much energy or losing his focus.“He’s such a social guy,” Moulton-Levy said in an interview earlier this month. “He has this big beautiful personality, so what he has to do is manage how to turn it on and off through the course of a match. He has to figure out when and how to let it show.”Tiafoe spoke of his search for balance Monday after his win over Tien, of choosing when to fire up a crowd that will undoubtedly be in his corner during this tournament and that is coming to Queens specifically to see him, and of when to focus on the taxing task of winning best-of-five-set matches.“I don’t want to gas out in the first set,” he said, noting that it would be important especially as the tournament wore on, and the hype and excitement and the interest of all those A-list names and countless others among the Tiafoe faithful took note of another, he hoped, deep run.“I have to keep winning so they stay interested,” he said. More

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      How to Recognize a Tennis Prodigy

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      The people who coached Frances Tiafoe as a child said they could see even then that he would become one of the world’s top players. But how did they know?You may have seen it if you’re a tennis fan. The ad begins with a young boy of 10 or 11, sitting in a humble apartment watching Venus Williams on a tiny antique television. He’s interrupted by a man tapping him on his shoulder.“Hey Frances,” the man says, “What if a wall isn’t an obstacle, but an opportunity?”The apartment melts away and now the boy and the man — presumably a coach — joyfully hit beautiful looping groundstrokes against a wall. As they hit, the sweet-faced boy grows gradually older, finally melding into a regal, heavily muscled adult, his head crowned by a now-familiar headband as he delivers a sizzling ace and the crowd roars. It is Frances Tiafoe, one of the most popular and recognizable faces in men’s tennis, now ranked 10th in the world and considered a contender in the U.S. Open, which begins Monday.Of course the young Tiafoes in the ad were the product of a casting call, not the actual young Frances. But the producers did a good job finding someone who looked like the 11-year-old boy I met in 2009, when I spent a couple of months writing about the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md., a then-obscure tennis training academy which had shockingly produced three boys in the world’s top 20 of junior tennis. I eventually accompanied their top two players, Denis Kudla and Mitchell Frank, to the French Open, where they competed in the junior championships.But here’s the relevant bit: During my reporting at the tennis center, I spent a day with a boy the coaches seemed to have a strange regard for. Kudla might actually make it to the pro tour, they said, adding: “But this kid is going to be better. This kid is special.”I was baffled. He appeared to be an ordinary 11-year-old, a ringer for the first kid in the ad — except instead of stylish new tennis duds he was wearing a well-worn Pikachu T-shirt. Frances was not especially big for his age, with no notable force of personality I could detect except an open and appealing disposition. I spent a morning in an attic above the tennis courts with him while he suffered through a geography class that was part of the in-house academic program. He wasn’t sullen, as so many kids would be, forced to focus on latitude and longitude with a strange adult looking over his shoulder. It was more a mild bemusement: “How did I end up here when I could be playing tennis?”Tiafoe being trained by Pat Etcheberry, a strength and conditioning coach, in 2012.Matt Roth for The New York TimesAfter class I hit with him. He was really good for his age. But I noticed that after he hit the ball, he didn’t immediately bounce back into position for the next shot — a trademark of a serious player. And when I watched him play in a local tournament in a dingy sports bubble, he beat an older kid, but only by moon-balling him to death. I couldn’t see why the coaching staff was so high on him.A year later, I returned to the tennis center, and Frances, now 12, had replaced the moon ball with fearsome topspin groundstrokes that shot off the court and smacked into the back fence with a thud. When he was 15 — just four years after he left me so unimpressed — Tiafoe became the youngest player to win the Orange Bowl, the world’s premier 18-and-under tournament, which had previously crowned Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Jim Courier, Roger Federer and Andy Roddick.When I delved into what it was, exactly, that the College Park pros had seen in Frances that I had missed, I discovered I had some expert company in my oversight.Kudla left College Park when he was 18 and became the first Junior Tennis Champions Center alumnus to break into the top 100 in men’s tennis, peaking in 2016 at No. 53 in the world. He knew better than most what combination of skill, dedication and gut-busting work that took.Early in his pro career, Kudla returned to the tennis center for a visit, a conquering hero. Frances was 13, still a few years away from winning his first junior titles. When he saw Frances play, he was more than a little skeptical. “He had that weird technique, weird forehand, I didn’t think his tennis I.Q. was that high,” Kudla said.He hit with Tiafoe and had the same sense of his potential that I did.“I just never thought that he had the discipline to be top 100 — not from a fitness point of view, but from a decision-making point of view,” Kudla said. “Decisions on the court are so important and take so much work, so much instruction, so much studying. I didn’t see him doing that.“But I was also basing that on the way I did it. I’m definitely more of an overthinker than he is. He’s a lot more natural, a lot more creative, a lot more God-given with his hands, so I was wrong about that as well. I was definitely wrong about a lot of things with him.”Tiafoe playing in Indian Wells, Calif., in 2016, the year he turned pro. Julian Finney/Getty ImagesTiafoe turned pro in 2016 and quickly became a fan favorite. He had an infectious gaptoothed grin and a moving back story: The impoverished son of refugees from the civil war in Sierra Leone, he had grown up in the tennis center, where his father was a janitor, sometimes sleeping on a massage table head to toe with his twin brother, Franklin, when his dad worked late. He also had a performative flair and winning disposition to go with his killer forehand. He was an enthusiastic and indiscriminate hugger at the postgame handshake who obviously loved being on the court and drove the crowd into a frenzy with gutsy shotmaking, fist pumps and biceps flexes.He rose to the top 100 at 19, broke the top 50 at 20, and at 21 broached the top 30. No longer the shy little boy, he was 6 feet 2 inches and built like a linebacker, with 135 m.p.h. serves and forehands not much slower. Even then, Kudla remained skeptical that Tiafoe had what it took to make the top 10, and from 2019 to 2021 Tiafoe seemed to feed those doubts. He had a propensity to get ahead in matches and then lose focus. He lost too often to lower-ranked opponents in the first round of too many tournaments.During this period I suggested to the tennis center chief executive, Ray Benton, that Tiafoe’s career might have peaked at age 21. No shame in that, I said. Getting into the top 30 of the brutally competitive pro tour is almost a miracle to begin with. There are about 1,800 professional players in the ranking system, but only roughly the top 100 can make much of a living from competitive play alone. Benton himself had once told me: “There are 11 Americans in the top 100. That basically means there are 11 jobs in the whole world of tennis for Americans. How bad are your odds there?”Maybe, I suggested, Frances had finally found his limit at a very rarefied altitude.Benton just smiled and said, “Nope.”Really? I asked. Just how high did he think Frances could go?“All the way to the top,” he said. “No. 1.”What about that kid Carlos Alcaraz? I said. He looks like he will be eating everyone else’s lunch for a couple decades. And who knows if Novak Djokovic’s deal with the devil has an expiration date.Benton shrugged. “OK, then, top 10, at least.”As if on cue last summer, Tiafoe began to hang on in matches in which he had jumped to a lead. He would switch into a higher gear and finish, against even some top 10 opponents. He made a thrilling, stadium-shaking run to the U.S. Open semifinals, barely losing to Alcaraz. Along with Taylor Fritz, he is one of two American men in the top 10 for the first time in more than a decade.Tiafoe at the U.S. Open last year. “I haven’t seen anyone in my 35 years in tennis whose love of the game was so pure,” the coach Vesa Ponkka said of young Tiafoe.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWhich left me where I began — mystified. How did Benton know then? And how did his coaches know at the beginning?At the tennis center in 2009, I watched as Vesa Ponkka, the director of tennis, and the coach Frank Salazar ran a horde of local children through drills cleverly disguised as games in a “Free Fun Festival” at the academy. Some kids twirled like ballerinas or flapped their arms like birds when instructed to run a route among orange cones. But one girl cut and bobbed through the obstacles like a cornerback. “Frank, check this out,” Ponkka told Salazar. “See how she pumps her knees high, her arms move in sync, her head stays still?”Ponkka knew that kind of balance, focus and poise in a young child was the best indication of future athletic success — she could maybe play on her high school team someday, or even at college. But what did he see in the young Frances that far exceeded anything he saw in that girl, or anyone else who ever stepped onto those College Park hardcourts?“We all noticed that the moment he came in here at 4 or 5 he just couldn’t get enough tennis,” Ponkka told me recently. “He was always observing, always watching, and all the spare time he had he was hitting against the wall. It wasn’t so much about his natural ability, but his absolutely unbelievable love of the game.”Salazar recalled: “Other kids that age watched cartoons. Frances only watched the Tennis Channel. If you didn’t want to talk about tennis nonstop, you couldn’t be his friend.”Physically, Frances had a good start — his dad, Frances Sr., was well over 6 feet tall and naturally athletic. “He never worked out, but he had this amazing six-pack,” Benton said of the father. But Ponkka insists that Frances’ genetic potential was a secondary consideration.“In tennis, the mental and the emotional are more important than the physical, and this was Frances’ unique talent. He moved well because he wanted it more than other kids, he wanted so badly to get to the ball,” he said. “He loved everything about the game, the smell of the new tennis balls, how the ball sounds on the racket.”Tiafoe in his family’s apartment in 2012. “From the beginning, he was an absolutely world-class competitor,” Vesa Ponkka said. “He hated to drill, he just wanted to compete.”Matt Roth for The New York TimesMisha Kouznetzov, who coached Frances in his junior years, helped get his homework done and sometimes gave Frances’ mother grocery money, says Frances’ drive came from more than love. “Look,” he said, “the kid was poor. He needed to get out of there, get out of Hyattsville. He wanted to make a name for himself and start making money for his family. So the level of hunger and desire during competing was always there. He was all in, he had no choice.”In a match, even a practice match, “he fought like crazy,” Ponkka said. When he lost to older kids, he would pester them for an immediate rematch. “There were days where he’d play five, six, seven matches in one day because he wanted to finally beat the guy. He learned how to win.”Indeed he did. I met Frances in person again for the first time in 14 years in late July. He was sitting in a barber chair in a utility building beside the Junior Tennis Champions Center courts getting his hair and makeup done before the filming of an ad for Cadillac, which had just signed him as a brand ambassador. His brand-new black Escalade was parked just outside, one of the many perks that have come from winning, a lot.I reminded him of the afternoon I spent with him in the cramped classroom, and he politely pretended to remember. As always, his schedule was overcrowded. As I talked to him he was surrounded — his agent, the producer, the cosmetician all hovering around him like worker bees around the queen. So I got to the point and asked him the most relevant question: When did he believe he was going to make it as a pro?“Oh I always believed it,” he said. “There was no doubt in my mind I was going to be a pro from the time I was 10 or 11. And I felt like that made the process very easy. I was only ever focused on one thing, and it showed in every match and tournament I ever played.”As the hair clipper buzzed and his agent fielded phone calls, I was definitely getting in the way, but I had to know just one more thing.“How’s your geography knowledge these days?”He beamed that gaptoothed grin that has won so many fans. “Yeah, well, I’ve been around the world so many times by now, I guess I know where I’m at.”Karsten Moran for The New York Times More