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

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

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      Roger Federer’s Absence Leaves a Void at Wimbledon

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      Federer said he hoped to return to the tournament he has won eight times before. His absence from the field this year left a void over Wimbledon’s early rounds.WIMBLEDON, England — There he was, a surprise, perhaps the biggest of this Wimbledon fortnight: Roger Federer in the flesh Sunday on Centre Court.As always, he looked handsome and freshly pressed. But instead of his tennis whites, Federer wore a trim, dark suit to to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Centre Court.Flanked by a slew of past Wimbledon champions, Federer was on hand only briefly, but no player received a louder greeting. Not Bjorn Borg. Not Venus Williams. Not Rod Laver or Billie Jean King, not Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic.For the first time since 1998, when he announced himself to the tennis world by winning the junior event, Federer is not playing Wimbledon. At age 40, he’s still rehabbing after surgery on his right knee and is unsure of his playing future.“I’ve been lucky enough to play a lot of matches on this court,” Federer said, speaking into a microphone, his voice ringing across the court. He added, “It feels awkward to be here today in a different type of role.”He continued for a short while, bathing in the warm adoration, taking in the old stadium and its memories. “This court has given me my biggest wins, my biggest losses,” he said.“I hope I can come back one more time.”The fans sitting around me at Centre Court went nuts.And then Federer was gone.Wimbledon 2022 has been a strange journey. Instead of the usual electric energy coursing through each day, signaling the peak of the tennis season and the start of the English summer, the feel has been slightly off — like a master violinist struggling for just the right note.During the opening four days, attendance dropped to levels not seen in over a decade. The barring of Russians and Belarusians robbed the tournament of several marquee names, including the world’s top-ranked male, Daniil Medvedev. Their exclusion caused protests by the men’s and women’s tours, which decided not to officially recognize the results with ranking points, essentially turning the entire affair into the most lavish tennis exhibition ever held.Those are some mighty blows.But there’s something else that feels off about this Wimbledon.Instead of charging into the tournament’s second week as the men’s favorite and the fans’ hoped-for winner at a tournament where he is worshiped like a god, Federer floated in for the centennial celebration and then was scheduled to jet back home to Switzerland.The tournament goes on. But a Wimbledon without Federer is like a Wimbledon where there are strawberries but no cream.How do you explain the power of absence? Maybe through the shock of looking at the men’s draw and not seeing the most familiar name. Or through a fan’s shout, such as the one that came out loud and true, expressing palpable longing during a prime-time match last week.“Is that Roger Federer?” someone yelled, the voice ringing across Court No. 1 during a tense late-night match between two guys, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Nick Kyrgios, who could offer only a glimpse of the grace Federer brought to every match at Wimbledon.The yell was aimed at Tsitsipas, of Greece, whose one-handed backhand and flowing strokes call to mind the eight-time champion.Close is not the real thing. Tsitsipas is no Federer.There are no guarantees that Federer will ever play here again, though we now know that he hopes to. “I think maybe there’s a little magic left,” said Tony Godsick, Federer’s longtime agent, as we walked the grounds last week.“I’m not sure that magic means having to hold up a trophy,” Godsick added. “Magic means going out on your own terms, being healthy, and enjoying it.” He looked out at one of the grass courts. “There will be places where he’ll be able to do better just because of the nature of the surface,” he said. “But if it doesn’t happen, he gave everything.”The deep, even ethereal connection Federer has with this vine-covered Taj Mahal of tennis is about more than longevity.Part of it is style. Wimbledon is white linen, polished gold, light cotton fineries, ascots and the Duke and Duchess of Kent in the royal box. Everything about the refined Federer fits this palace, from his old-school game to the gliding way he walks.Part of it is substance: the fine art of victory. Federer was the champion in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2017.Part of it is losing, but weathering the storm in the right way.For a while, the Swiss player seemed like he might never be conquered on the low-cut grass. Then came Nadal. When Nadal finally beat Federer in the final in 2008, their match was regarded as one of the greatest ever played. Who can forget Federer’s comeback, his saved match points and Nadal’s unquenchable desire? The match ended in the dwindling sunlight, 9-7 in the fifth set, with Federer shedding tears of agony.Federer’s Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic in 2019 was perhaps the last great match of Federer’s career.Nic Bothma/EPA, via ShutterstockHe suddenly seemed vulnerable, human, within reach. Showing weakness at a tournament he had owned for five straight summers, and handling it with grace, made Federer more popular than ever.To the fervently loyal fans of Nadal and Djokovic, he was the perfect foil, the one to root most lustily against, the one player they most wanted to defeat and send off with head bowed.In the last great match we saw him play at Wimbledon, possibly the last great match of his career, the marathon championship final of 2019, Federer held two match points while serving against Djokovic. The Serb won both, tracking down the last of them by skimming across the baseline and, as he so often does, producing a winning passing shot. About an hour later, he won the match, 13-12, in a fifth-set tiebreaker.Watching Djokovic play on Centre Court last week, it was impossible not to think of that classic. There he was again, the defending champion, dashing across the same baseline with the same staunch resolve as when he snatched victory from his longtime rival. Djokovic may well win this year’s tournament, which would give him seven Wimbledon titles overall. But other than among his loyal fans — and yes, there are many — watching him plow through opponents with metronomic efficiency and tight-lipped swagger does not quite stir the soul.He is a marvel, all right. So is a microwave oven.Then I watched Jannik Sinner of Italy, 20, who is little known outside tennis but regarded as a potential future force within it. Sinner may not win Wimbledon this year, but there’s a good chance he will one day.On Sunday, against another precocious talent, 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz, Sinner hit his forehands with a consistent mix of heavy speed and daring curve. He added aces, drop shots and deep returns. The crowd on Centre Court swayed and swooned with his every move.It felt reminiscent of the energy surrounding a certain Swiss player at the start of his great Wimbledon career. It was a reminder of the way greatness gives way to greatness, one generation to the next — and a reminder that Federer was not on hand to help keep youth at bay. Not this year, at least. Maybe next. More

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      Lesia Tsurenko Plays Tennis to Earn Money to Help Ukraine

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      WIMBLEDON, England — Lesia Tsurenko’s Wimbledon campaign ended Friday during a match in which her head was someplace else.Ms. Tsurenko, a 33-year-old tennis veteran from Kyiv, had been watching the news from home all week and seeing that Russians had bombed a shopping mall and other civilian targets.“They’re just trying to kill as many people as possible,” Ms. Tsurenko said of the Russian military.Since February, she had gotten better at keeping thoughts about the Russian invasion of Ukraine out of her mind when she was on the tennis court, but Friday was a bad day. She said she felt off-balance from the time she woke up, “like there was no ground beneath my feet.” And once she took the court against Jule Neimeier of Germany, she said she “had no idea how to play tennis.”Juggling the constant travel and physical and mental grind of professional tennis is hard for even the best players. For players from Ukraine these days, who have not been home in months and spend much of their free time getting updates on the health and safety of friends and family members back home, the challenge is monumental.The good news for Ms. Tsurenko is she seems to have found a semi-permanent home in northern Italy, at an academy run by the famed coach Ricardo Piatti. She has an apartment. Her sister, Oksana, recently joined her. So did her husband, Nikita Vlasov, a former military officer, who is ready to return as soon as he gets the call but for the moment the forces do not need someone at his level.“We have no problem with people,” Ms. Tsurenko said, a little while after her defeat. “The problem is the heavy weapons.”Ms. Tsurenko left Ukraine before the war started, so she is not technically a refugee. Recently, she had to miss a tournament so she could stay in Italy and file paperwork to allow her to remain there. She is waiting for approval. Also, her mother, who lives near Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, does not want to leave, despite heavy bombing. The mother of her sister’s husband also lives there.Her time playing tennis in England the past month has provided a respite. Russian and Belarusian players were barred from competing at Wimbledon. Knowing how popular President Vladimir V. Putin remains in Russia, Ms. Tsurenko has assumed some of the Russian and Belarusian players likely support him. It’s been better, she said, not bumping into them in the locker room, though she will soon when the WTA Tour moves outside of Britain and they return to competition.There have been many matches since the war began Feb. 24 when Ms. Tsurenko has wondered what she is even doing playing tennis. One particular match in Marbella, Spain, stands out. That morning she had seen a photo of an administration building in Mykolaiv with a massive hole from a missile strike. She could not get the image out of her head.Lately, though, she has found clarity. She has always played tennis because she loves the game. The riches the sport offered never motivated her. Now they do.“I play for the money now,” she said. “I want to earn so much so I can donate this,” she said, “I feel like that may be a bad quality, because it has nothing to do with tennis, but that is what I am playing.”Coming into the tournament, Ms. Tsurenko, who has four career WTA titles and has earned more than $5 million, had won $214,000 so far this year. Making the third round at Wimbledon earned her an additional $96,000. For the world’s 101st ranked player, that is a solid month’s work. She hopes there will be more ahead this summer. More

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      Iga Swiatek Falls at Wimbledon, Ending a Long Win Streak

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      Frustrated by low bounces on the grass courts that took away her most powerful weapons, the top-seeded women’s singles player lost in straight sets to Alizé Cornet of France.WIMBLEDON, England — Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 and the top seed at Wimbledon, did something she had not done in more than four months Saturday. She lost a tennis match.Swiatek, the 21-year-old two-time Grand Slam champion from Poland, lost in the third round to Alizé Cornet, the veteran Frenchwoman, 6-4, 6-2, ending her winning streak at 37 matches, one of the longest in modern women’s tennis.Swiatek, though, did not lose the match so much as Cornet won it, emphatically even.Playing with strapping on her left thigh, Cornet came out swinging hard, matching Swiatek’s power and taking advantage of the Polish champion’s discomfort on grass.Alizé Cornet celebrated Saturday during her straight-set victory over Swiatek.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAfter losing the first set, Swiatek seemed to right things quickly, and surged to a 2-0 lead. But Cornet reeled off six straight games with Swiatek losing the final point with a forehand into the middle of the net.Swiatek shook hands with her opponent, quickly stowed her rackets and headed for the exit of the No. 1 court, where she had been pushed to three sets by a relative unknown only two days earlier.She waved and gave a thumbs up to the crowd as she walked, then stopped to sign a series of autographs before leaving.The result had a familiar feel for Cornet. In 2014 she beat Serena Williams, then the world No. 1 and the top seed at the tournament, on the same No. 1 court.That was relatively early in her career, though. Eight years later, in just 93 minutes, she pulled off another monumental upset and made the second week of a Grand Slam for the second time this year. Then, fittingly, she compared herself to another French favorite.“Like good wine,” she told the crowd. “It ages well.”The afternoon was really about Swiatek, though.Anyone who has ever picked up a racket knows the most basic adage of the game — it is hard to win a tennis match but incredibly easy to lose one. A few errant shots, a bad quarter-hour of serving, the briefest lapses of concentration, and one set and then another slips away in what feels like minutes. Hopelessness sets in, and getting off the court as quickly as possible can feel like the best and only alternative, even though it isn’t.Hopelessness, however, was not what led to Swiatek’s demise Saturday. It was Cornet. A fearless opponent can be just as fatal.That is just part of what made Swiatek’s accomplishments during the first half of this year, in an era of women’s tennis when the competition is intense from the first round of nearly every tournament, so remarkable.Swiatek lost to Jelena Ostapenko, the free-swinging Latvian, on Feb. 16 in the quarterfinals of the Dubai Tennis Championships. Since then she has won six consecutive singles titles, including her second French Open. She won three tournaments at the Masters 1,000 level, just below the Grand Slams.In March and April she won the so-called Sunshine Double — the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., and the Miami Open. Only three other women had done that before. At the French Open, she lost just one set. Other players talked about just trying to get past the one-hour mark on the court with her. Many failed.During her winning streak, Swiatek won the women’s singles title at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA Today Sports, via ReutersSwiatek, though, always figured the grass court season might spell the end of her streak. She is most comfortable taking balls on the rise and using her topspin and her power to put opponents on the back foot from the very first moments of the match.After she won the French Open in early June, she faced the choice of playing a warm-up tournament or two to get more comfortable on her least favorite surface or taking a break and arriving at Wimbledon feeling refreshed. She chose to rest and hoped that her cresting confidence would help her solve the puzzle of grass. It did not.In practice, her timing was off. In matches, balls skidded along the grass instead of bouncing into her strike zone, taking her most potent weapon, that topspin power, out of her quiver, forcing her to play more conservatively.On Saturday afternoon, she reverted to Plan A, trying to hit Cornet off the court. Unable to control the ball, she dropped the first three games against a player who truly believed she could do the thing that had not been done in a long while.Swiatek rallied her way onto the scoreboard, but Cornet never gave up the advantage and finished off the first set with an emphatic overhead. She then left the court before the start of the second set, leaving Swiatek to sit in her chair and ponder her fate.In the second set, Swiatek went back to Plan A and surged to a 2-0 lead, but before long she had fallen out of her groove once more. On break point in the fifth game, Cornet jumped on a second serve and laced a forehand down the line. Swiatek dropped her chin and walked to her chair for the changeover.From there, the only question was whether Cornet could stay solid enough to get across the finish line. The answer came quickly.Swiatek, bidding farewell to Wimbledon for this year, lost 12 of the last 14 points in the match. “I just didn’t know what to do,” she said.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Usually when I’m coming back, I have some kind of a plan, and I know what to change,” Swiatek said. “Here I didn’t know. I was confused. On grass courts everything happens so quickly.”Cornet won the next three games and 12 of the final 14 points.“I didn’t tank it, but I just didn’t know what to do,” Swiatek said.Swiatek will get a bit more rest now. Before long, though, she will journey to North America for the hard court season. Clay still reigns in her mind, but after she won the Miami Open in April, two weeks after winning Indian Wells, she said hard courts were a very very close second.Another streak could be in the offing. Few would be surprised. And if not, she will always have 37. More

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      Tennis Gets Another Fairy Tale in Tim van Rijthoven, Maybe the Craziest One Yet

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      Tim van Rijthoven is a perfect 8-0 in the last month. Before that, and seven years into his professional career, he had yet to win a main-draw match.WIMBLEDON, England — Tennis has had its share of come-out-of-nowhere stories in recent years. A qualifier named Emma Raducanu won the U.S. Open last September. The sport is as deep as it has ever been.But even by those standards, what Tim van Rijthoven of the Netherlands has accomplished during the last month does not just border on the absurd — it is the definition of absurd. And the ludicrousness continued on Friday as van Rijthoven, the 205th-ranked player in the world less than a month ago, played himself into a final-16 showdown with the top-seeded Novak Djokovic.Ah, but that is just the beginning, because van Rijthoven’s journey is even more ridiculous than that.On June 6, van Rijthoven, an injury-prone 25-year-old, and Homer Simpson had the same number of wins in the main draw of ATP Tour events. That would be zero. Unlike Simpson, though, van Rijthoven received a wild-card entry into the Libema Open, a low-level grass-court tournament in the Netherlands.On June 7, he recorded his first main-draw tour win. During the next five days, he reeled off four more wins, including upsets of the top three seeds in the tournament — the fourteenth-ranked Taylor Fritz, the 9th-ranked Felix Auger-Aliassime, and to cap it off in the finals, he drubbed the current world No. 1, Daniil Medvedev.He has since won three more matches, all at Wimbledon, his first Grand Slam tournament. He has beaten two seeded players. He has dropped just one set, in a tiebreaker. Some players can take a year to win a half-dozen matches on the ATP Tour. Van Rijthoven has done it in four weeks.“From the outside, it obviously looks like a fairy tale,” he said Friday after he beat the No. 22 seed Nikoloz Basilashvili of Georgia in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4. Van Rijthoven began just after 11 a.m. He played like someone with a girlfriend waiting to meet him for lunch, finishing Basilashvili off in 102 minutes.When Basilashvili’s last shot sailed out, van Rijthoven calmly raised his arms and strolled to the net to shake hands. He briefly clapped his racket to the crowd, packed his bag and left. Just another day at the office.Van Rijthoven celebrating his win against Nikoloz Basilashvili.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Very difficult to explain,” said his coach, Igor Sijsling, who was still playing tournaments himself last year and only began working with van Rijthoven six months ago. “Our first day here, he had big eyes, but now he’s acting like he’s been here 10 years already.”Late bloomers with triple-digit rankings have had some eyebrow-raising runs at Grand Slam tournaments of late. Van Rijthoven’s countryman Botic van de Zandschulp was ranked 117th before his run to the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open last year. Aslan Karatsev of Russia had been in the tennis wilderness for years and was ranked 114th ahead of his semifinal run at the 2021 Australian Open.“All it takes is a couple of wins against a big player, and then your confidence goes up and you start thinking you’re as good as these guys,” said Marc Lucero, who coaches Steve Johnson, the veteran pro from the United States now ranked No. 93.The grass also helps, said David Witt, a longtime coach. Players rarely practice on it, and they compete on it for just one month each year, making it something of an equalizer for those who are comfortable with the surface when they play against more established professionals who may not be.A watered-down draw missing the barred Russians, including Medvedev, does not hurt either.Still, van de Zandschulp and Karatsev had won top-level tour matches before getting hot on the big stage. Until early June, van Rijthoven was winless in ATP Tour main-draw matches. How is this happening?He was promising enough as a teenager to train at the IMG Academy in Florida in 2015 and said he has struggled with injuries, some tennis-related and one that was just bad luck, for three years. He had surgery on his wrist and battled inflammation of the tendons on the inner, or medial, side of his elbow.“They call it golfer’s elbow, but I got it playing tennis,” he said Friday. (Tennis elbow is inflammation of the tendons on the outer, or lateral, side.)Also, completely unrelated to his elbow problem, he developed thrombosis in the arteries of his arm, which caused the tips of his fingers to become cold and numb. He had to have surgery to remove the blood clots.The biggest problem, he said, was not physical but mental. He is plenty big (6-foot-2, 195 pounds) and strong and fast enough, but when he missed easy shots or made bad decisions he became sullen and embarrassed. He would obsess during matches about what other people were thinking about his level of play, assuming it was not good.Earlier this year, frustrated that his chance at a professional career might be slipping away, he had an epiphany.“I decided I was going to accept my mistakes and grow up and become an adult,” he said as he walked to the first of more than a dozen television interviews, a new part of his schedule. “I told myself, ‘I’m not going to be negative anymore.’ I will tell you that is not a one-day shift that you make. It’s something you have to work on every day.”Igor Sijsling, right, watching Tim van Rijthoven as Maartje Basten, Rijthoven’s girlfriend, cheers.Kieran Galvin/EPA, via ShutterstockHe has also started training with Sijsling, who works for the Dutch tennis federation, which had continued to support van Rijthoven through his struggles. Sijsling told him that he needed to stop playing defensively and use his power to play more aggressively and push forward into the court.“You have to attack with power or else it’s wasted,” Sijsling said. Sijsling has also encouraged van Rijthoven, who likes to work intensely but not for very long, to put in more time on the practice court. “I don’t think you can get to the top without working very hard,” he said.On Sunday, van Rijthoven’s undefeated status this spring will get its stiffest test against Djokovic, the six-time singles champion here and winner of the last three Wimbledon titles. Djokovic said he watched some of van Rijthoven’s matches in recent days in anticipation of their showdown, which will most likely take place on Centre Court, an atmosphere unlike anything van Rijthoven has experienced.Djokovic’s scouting report: van Rijthoven is well suited to the grass, he said. “Big serve, one-handed backhand, uses the slice well. He’s an all-around player. He can play fast; he can also stay in the rally and come to the net.”Djokovic has 20 Grand Slam singles titles, but van Rijthoven said he would walk onto the court with the same thought he has tried to have all year, whether in those backwater challenger tournaments or during the past month on the ATP Tour. He will believe he can win.“It’s basically going into every match thinking I’m the better player,” he said, “even though it’s maybe not always the case.” More

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      Iga Swiatek, a World No. 1, Gets Comfortable Using Her Clout

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      “It’s a new position that I’m in, and I’m trying to use it the best way possible,” Swiatek said. She announced an exhibition match to help raise money for young Ukrainians.WIMBLEDON, England — Iga Swiatek, cap still pulled low after her latest victory, was sitting in a players café perched high above the All England Club and the grass she is still learning to love.From her table on Thursday evening, there was a sweeping, soothing vista of privileged people enjoying their privileges, but Swiatek’s focus was elsewhere. It was on the war in Ukraine and on the exhibition match that she had announced a day earlier to help raise money for young Ukrainians.It will be held on July 23 in Krakow in Swiatek’s home country of Poland. For Swiatek, ranked No. 1 and on a 37-match winning streak, it is the latest sign that she wants to use her new and rapidly expanding platform to do much more than sell shoes and pile up Instagram followers.“It’s a new position that I’m in, and I’m trying to use it the best way possible,” Swiatek said. “But I still haven’t figured out how to use it the best way, you know? But for sure, I want to show my support.”“I’ve been really emotional about it,” she said of the war.Poland, which borders Ukraine, has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees, but Swiatek, whose job takes her to five continents, is concerned that too much of the rest of the world is moving on, along with some of her fellow players.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, many players began wearing ribbons on court that were blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine’s national flag. At this stage, Swiatek is one of the few non-Ukrainians still wearing the ribbon, which she pins to the side of her cap.“In our country, we are aware that there is war, but when I’m traveling, I can see there is not a lot of news about it,” Swiatek said. “For sure, there was at the beginning, but later there was more and more silence. So basically, I hope I’m going to remind people that the war is out there. Society, we don’t have a long memory. But, I mean, lives are at stake so I think we should remind people.”Swiatek, 21, also used her victory speech at last month’s French Open to offer her support for Ukraine.Swiatek wearing a pin in support of Ukraine.Adam Stoltman for The New York Times“But that’s just talking, I suppose,” she said. “Right now, I’m pretty happy that we are making some action.”The exhibition will feature a match between Swiatek and the retired Polish tennis star Agnieszka Radwanska and raise funds in support of children and teenagers affected by the war in Ukraine. Elina Svitolina, Ukraine’s most successful current player who is pregnant and off the tour for the moment, will serve as a chair umpire. Sergiy Stakhovsky, a former Ukrainian men’s star now in the Ukrainian army, will play doubles with Radwanska against Swiatek and a Polish partner.Wimbledon has, of course, taken action, too, generating great debate in the game as the only Grand Slam tennis tournament to bar Russian and Belarusian players because of the invasion. The All England Club made the move, a wrenching one, under some pressure to act from the British government, but the club stuck by its position despite being stripped of ranking points by the men’s and women’s tours.Swiatek would have liked more consultation between the leaders of the tour and the entire player group on the decision to strip points, although the WTA player council, with its elected representatives, was deeply involved in the process.“I wasn’t really focused on points before, because we should talk about war and people suffering and not about points,” Swiatek said. “But for sure, when I think about that, it seems like right now for the winners, and for people who are winning and really working hard, it’s not going to be fair.”British public opinion polls have reflected support for Wimbledon’s ban even if the other big events in tennis, including the U.S. Open, have not followed Wimbledon’s lead, maintaining that individual athletes should not be punished for the actions of their governments.Swiatek’s counterpart on the men’s tour: the No. 1 ranked Daniil Medvedev, a charismatic and polyglot Russian, is not in London and is instead training (and golfing) at his base in the south of France. Six women’s singles players ranked in the top 40, including No. 6 Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, also have been barred.The ban has been met with mixed reactions on tour, both publicly and privately, but Swiatek, after much deliberation, can see Wimbledon’s perspective.“I think it’s the only way to show that it’s wrong, having war, and their aggression is wrong,” she said.“It’s not fair, for sure, sometimes for these players,” she said of the barred group. “But we are public, and we have impact. That’s why we are making a lot of money also. We are sometimes on TV everywhere, and sports has been in politics. I know people want to separate that, and I also would like to kind of not be involved in every aspect of politics, but in these kind of matters it is, and you can’t help it sometimes.”Wimbledon has not emphasized the Russian and Belarusian ban during the tournament, but it has invited all Ukrainian refugees who have settled in the area near Wimbledon to attend the tournament on Sunday.The most eloquent opponents of the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the tournament have been its players, including Lesia Tsurenko, the last Ukrainian left in singles, who lost in the third round on Friday to Jule Niemeier of Germany.All of the leading Ukrainian players have had to leave the country to continue their careers. Some like Anhelina Kalinina are still living out of suitcases and using tournament sites as training bases, but Tsurenko has finally been able to rent an apartment in Italy and is often training alongside Marta Kostyuk, another talented Ukrainian player, at the tennis center operated by the longtime Italian coach Riccardo Piatti in Bordighera.“A small town by the sea,” Tsurenko said. “And sometimes, when you are just eating great food and having amazing Italian espresso, and you see that you are surrounded by beautiful nature, for some moments you forget and you’re relaxed, and you think, oh, the life is good. But it’s just seconds. It’s very tough for me to explain to you, and I hope the people will never feel this, but it’s just like some part of me is just always so tight. And I think it will be a big release when the war will finish, but not before.”Tsurenko during a break in the third round women’s singles match against Niemeier.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressSwiatek, raised in a family of modest means in the suburbs of Warsaw, cannot fully grasp what the Ukrainians are experiencing, but she can sympathize, and she is increasingly determined to act. She, like Naomi Osaka before her and the 18-year-old American Coco Gauff, are part of a new wave of WTA stars who have made it clear that they do not intend to stick simply to sports. Gauff has been vocal in recent weeks about gun violence and about the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.Martina Navratilova, a former No. 1 who remains an activist on many fronts, has been watching Swiatek and Gauff find their voices.“Socially, the awareness from these two, they could really change the world,” said Navratilova, who vows to block anyone on Twitter who tells her to stick to tennis.Swiatek is not there yet. She is still navigating how and where to use her clout, but she is all in on July 23 in Krakow.“For me, it’s really important,” she said. “It’s like a fifth Grand Slam.” More

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      At Wimbledon, American Men Are Putting on a Fourth of July Bash

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      Nearly everywhere one looked on Wednesday and Thursday, an American man was slamming or slicing or grinding his way into the final 32, and it feels like the 1990s.Taylor Fritz, left, Francis Tiafoe and Tommy Paul are three of eight American men ranked in the top 50. Shaun Botterill/Getty Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; Justin Setterfield/Getty ImagesWIMBLEDON, England — Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, the American men are throwing a party on British soil.As night fell on Thursday at the All England Club, eight American men were set to qualify for the third round of the prestigious Wimbledon tournament, accounting for 25 percent of the final 32 spots. That is the most American men in the third round at the event since 1995, when nine qualified in the Sampras-Agassi-Courier-Chang heydays. It is also the most in any Grand Slam tournament since the U.S. Open in 1996.Nearly everywhere one looked on Wednesday and Thursday, an American man was slamming or slicing or grinding his way into the final 32, and one more will clinch his spot Friday. The sun has seemingly set on the era when every male American player had a big serve and a forehand and not much else.Some were familiar faces, like John Isner, bashing his way past the hometown favorite Andy Murray. But several were part of the next wave of rising Yanks in their mid-20s — the clique of Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul and Francis Tiafoe that first bonded as teenagers at a national training center in Florida. And then there were a couple from the wave after that (Jenson Brooksby and Brandon Nakashima) who are still a couple years away from needing a daily shave. Two Americans, Maxime Cressy and Jack Sock, one new to the scene, the other a veteran, were dueling for the last available spot until rain interrupted their match on No. 3 Court on Thursday.Brandon Nakashima won his second-round match against Denis Shapovalov of Canada on Thursday.Toby Melville/Reuters“It’s been a long, long progression,” said Martin Blackman, the former pro who is the general manager of player development for the United States Tennis Association.Now before anyone stateside rushes out to the liquor store to get some Pimm’s on ice for a championship celebration, it is worth noting that no one expects any of these players to actually win the men’s singles title, at least not this year. American men’s tennis is deep but light on the top.The U.S. now has eight men in the top 50 and 13 in the top 100, more than any other country. Arguably the most promising of the lot, Sebastian Korda, son of the former world No. 2 Petr Korda, had to withdraw from Wimbledon 10 days ago with shin splints.“Didn’t give me anything to fish for,” Denis Shapovalov of Canada said of Nakashima, who beat him in four sets Thursday.Despite the stampede this week, there are no Americans in the top 10 and just two in the top 20 — Fritz and Reilly Opelka. Russia and Spain each have two players in the top 10. Spain, the best tennis country of the last decade, has four players in the top 20.But for a country whose male talent stock has long been seen as fairly lacking and is without a Grand Slam tournament champion since Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003, depth represents significant progress. It also serves as a kind of motivational tool. A friendly competition has emerged between the Americans in their mid-20s, who are led by Fritz, and the ones who have just reached the legal drinking age in the United States, or are not there yet, to be the first to play into the final rounds of a Grand Slam tournament.“They’re great for us,” Paul, 25, said of Brooksby, Korda, both 21, and Nakashima, 20. “They push us.”“For tennis to grow, we’re going to need some winners on the men’s side,” he added.The U.S.T.A. knows that as well. For years, it has been trying to hone a system to help develop players that will work in a vast country with more than 330 million people and plenty of competition from more popular sports that are cheaper for good young athletes to pursue.Taylor Fritz is the highest-ranked American men’s player at No. 14.Alastair Grant/Associated PressIn Europe, especially Eastern Europe, young teenagers with promise often leave home for academies. The academic and psychological support can be thin. A “Lord of the Flies,” sink-or-swim environment persists. Despite its success there in producing some formidable talent and champions, including Novak Djokovic, that model was never going to work with American parents.Instead, over the last decade the organization has tried to create a trout farm rather than find a unicorn. It developed a three-tiered program of local, regional and national camps that bring together top talent throughout the year but also allow kids to stay home for as long as possible and work with their own coaches. Airfare to the camps isn’t included, but just about everything else is, even some money for private coaches to attend sometimes so they don’t feel squeezed out of the process as a young player gets older and better.There is no one-size-fits-all approach. During the crucial years of development between the ages of 15 and 22, some players choose to work with U.S.T.A. coaches and trainers at their training centers in Orlando, Fla., or Carson, Calif., outside Los Angeles. Fritz was a part of the U.S.T.A. program for six years, Paul for five, Opelka for four and Tiafoe for three, Blackman said.Others, such as Korda, Nakashima and Brooksby, choose to remain largely outside the system, but they still can qualify for financial support and come to the occasional camp or show up at the training center for competition.Blackman also does not want the organization to preach a certain style of play. Cressy’s serve-and-volley game is just as valued as Brooksby’s finesse, Tiafoe’s serve-and-forehand power, and Nakashima’s all-court approach.At one such camp, a national gathering in Boca Raton, Fla., a decade ago, Fritz, Paul, and Tiafoe first bonded.“It was just really boring in those dorms, nothing to do, so we didn’t have much choice,” Fritz said recently.Fritz, with his big feet and mop of hair, and the least advanced game of the group, quickly became the group punching bag, friendly punching of course.“Big, goofy guy like that, you know he was going to end up being the target,” Tiafoe said.Jenson Brooksby beat Benjamin Bonzi of France on Thursday to advance to the third round.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesPaul said Fritz took it well. Fritz also saw that members of his new clique were better at tennis than he was, and he began working harder to catch up. Within a few years, he had pushed ahead. He is now the top-ranked American man at No. 14 and the only one of the younger set to have won a Masters 1000 tournament, the level just below the Grand Slams, emerging at Indian Wells, Calif., earlier this year.They remain close friends and genuinely invested in each other’s success, which helps during a long season filled with travel. Paul has been on the road for nearly 10 weeks.“I’m so homesick I want to throw up,” he said Thursday.Text threads and group dinners, sometimes fancy, sometimes burgers and pizza, and lengthy bull sessions help. Tiafoe made the final at a tournament in Portugal earlier this year. As he came off the court following each win, he would find congratulatory notes on his phone from the posse.A big and extremely difficult task for the next generation and the one right behind them still lies ahead — getting into the top 10 and becoming fixtures in the last matches of the biggest tournaments, the way American women, led by the Williams sisters, have performed for years.It’s getting closer.“I expect us to do well in all of these tournaments now,” Paul said. “It’s all about winning one more match and going one round deeper.”Paul has never made the second week of a Grand Slam. On Friday, on the first day of a third round with plenty of American company, he will get another chance. More

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      At Wimbledon, Maxime Cressy’s Throwback Style Helps Him Charge Forward

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      We’re well past the glory days of the serve-and-volley style that took John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Pete Sampras to the Hall of Fame. Maxime Cressy is on a one-man revival mission.WIMBLEDON, England — “My butt is killing me.”That was Maxime Cressy, a little more than an hour after his four hour, 10 minute marathon win over Felix Auger-Aliassime on Tuesday in the fading light of the No. 3 Court, the steeple of St. Mary’s Church in sight just above the tree line. The little-known Cressy, a 25-year-old American who was born and raised in France, only recently cracked the top 50, but he has already achieved something no player ever will, and few aspire to, because, well, as Cressy said, it’s rather painful, and maybe not so smart.To watch Cressy play and win a match on the Wimbledon grass is to take a journey back in time, to the glory years of serve-and-volley tennis, to the days of John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras.It was a time before professional tennis became much more uniform and far friendlier to camping out on the baseline and blasting groundstrokes. Before ever-lighter and more powerful rackets and next-generation polyester strings made passing shots on the run from the deepest corners possible with a wrist-flick. It all turned rushing the net on too many points into a foolish, anachronistic mission, like stuffing 30 wooden rackets in the bag before taking the court.“They don’t really know how to volley that well, so they don’t want to come in even when invited,” Navratilova said this week of the modern generation of players.Even Reilly Opelka, who is nearly 7 feet tall and possesses one of the deadliest serves in the game, won’t consider it, despite having the wingspan of an Andean condor. Too tough to move, he explained, especially on soft grass, and especially for anyone who takes big strides like he does.Maria Sakkari is one of the most aggressive players in the game. But she has long been somewhat allergic to the net, so much so that her coach, Tom Hill, has set a goal for her to go to the net 20 times in a match, though not by serving and volleying, which she rarely practices.“Whether I can do it or not, that’s the goal,” she said.She got there 10 times on Tuesday in her straight-set opening-round win over Zoe Hives of Australia.Carlos Alcaraz is still trying to figure out how to play on grass even though he is the game’s hottest rising star and one of the fastest players. He possesses some deft touch at the net, too.He tried a bit of serve-and-volley early in his opening match against Jan-Lennard Struff of Germany. It was one of the main things he wanted to do in the match.“I lost every time,” he said. “I didn’t want to try again.”And yet, amid all this net-play pessimism, there is Cressy, all 6-foot-6 of him, plus the mop of dirty blond curls that gives him an extra inch or two. He comes in behind his first serve, his second serve and on his opponent’s serve, whenever he senses a chance. He comes in after every shortish ball he sees and even after his opponent passes him on three consecutive points. He believes in serve-and-volley with the fervor of a cult member, even if it is a cult of one.“This style can take me to the top,” he said after a first-round loss at the French Open, and when he says “the top,” he means the No. 1 ranking. After all, that loss was on clay, which has long been kryptonite to serve-and-volleyers.Cressy has been battling conventional wisdom for a decade, trying to master the serve-and-volley since he was a promising junior player in France. France’s tennis federation basically told him to cut it out, as though he were goofing off during practice. If that was the way he was going to play, they didn’t want much to do with him. Cressy would not budge.“I loved it,” he said Tuesday night after knocking off Auger-Aliassime, the sixth-seeded Canadian and a fashionable dark-horse at Wimbledon, 6-7 (5), 6-4, 7-6 (9), 7-6 (5). He will play another American, Jack Sock, in the second round on Thursday. “If it is something I love, I might as well do it and make it as efficient as possible.”Cressy trained at an academy during his last year in high school and was recruited to play at U.C.L.A., where coaches saw some potential for him in doubles. They were correct, and he became a collegiate doubles champion in 2019.But Cressy never stopped believing in the idea that his sport was ignoring a style that could be incredibly efficient for a singles player with a big serve, an ability to move, unflappable confidence and a willingness to sprint, scurry, bend, crouch, squat and stretch for balls before they land. Hence the sore rear end after Tuesday’s match.Lately, something has clicked. In December, Cressy was ranked 112th. He played into the final 16 at the Australian Open in January, had a rough patch in the late winter and early spring, then got on a roll that has sent him up to No. 45, one of the fastest rises in the sport this year.The elevation has come after years of studying film of Sampras and McEnroe and all the other great net hounds. His three years as a professional have been a process of trial and error, especially trying to figure out how to best use his cannon-like serve. At some point, he’s not sure when, there was an epiphany — the most effective and reliable serve was not the perfectly placed, overpowering 140-mile-an-hour ace. Too often, that is a low-percentage shot.Rather, it’s the serve that produces an easy volley. His first serve averaged 123 miles an hour on Tuesday; his second 119. Many players, even the best ones, lose 20 miles per hour or more from their first to second serve. He did not lose a service game.“It’s very difficult playing someone who is basically hitting two first serves,” a frustrated Auger-Aliassime said of Cressy after the match.Cressy has experimented with different serve patterns, trying to spray them across the service box, but he ultimately settled on using just two — one wide and the other down the middle of the court, though he mainly uses the latter just to keep his opponents from focusing fully on his wide serves. Most often, he hits a high, kicking serve out wide. It goes in a lot. If it comes back, it’s often in his volleying strike zone.After the serve, he sprints to the net and instinct takes over. He never has a plan for where the volleys will go. In a split second, he sees the ball, the court and the opponent. A pulse from his brain to his hands says punch, or drive, or cut, or slice or drop volley.The ball crashes into his strings. And it goes from there. So many of his volleys land just inches from the baseline. Even the lost art of the deep volley, something lamented by many, including Dick Gould, the retired Stanford tennis coach who helped turn McEnroe into a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, lives on in Cressy.It is a lonely way to play, Cressy said: so many doubters telling him serve-and-volley is a relic and no one over his shoulder when he looks back to see if anyone will join his cause. There is, though, the joy and cockeyed logic that only the iconoclast understands and figures out how to use for his benefit.“It is a bumpy road to be unique on the tour,” he said Tuesday, “but that helps my confidence.” More