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      Novak Djokovic Eyes a Fifth Straight Wimbledon Title

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      If Djokovic can win his fifth consecutive title at the All England Club, he will be three-quarters of the way to a Grand Slam.Novak Djokovic, bent over with a towel in hand, delighted the Centre Court crowd during a rain delay at Wimbledon on Monday when he mopped some moisture from the grass. It seemed appropriate for someone who has been doing the same general thing to his opponents over the last five years at this tournament.Djokovic has not lost a match at Wimbledon since 2017, and with a victory over Pedro Cachin of Argentina in their first-round meeting Monday, he extended his record over the last five Wimbledon tournaments to 29-0. He has won the last four men’s singles titles, and one more this year would set him up to eclipse even more names in the record book.If Djokovic can claim a fifth consecutive title at the All England Club, he will have taken home the first three major trophies of 2023 and increased his chances of winning the first men’s Grand Slam (all four majors in the same year) since Rod Laver did it in 1969. He would also become just the third man to do it, joining Laver (1962 and 1969) and Don Budge in 1938. Three women have accomplished the feat: Maureen Connolly in 1953, Margaret Court in 1970 and Steffi Graf in 1988.Djokovic would also tie Roger Federer for most Wimbledon men’s singles titles (eight) and tie Bjorn Borg for the most consecutive (five). Finally, he would match Court’s record of 24 major titles, and would be the only player to do it entirely in the Open era. (Court won 13 majors before 1968, during a time when professionals were not allowed to play in the majors.)On Monday, Djokovic, the No. 2 seed but the overwhelming title favorite, walked onto Centre Court absorbing a moment that only a happy few have experienced.“It’s a feeling like no other tournament in the world, of walking out on the Centre Court of Wimbledon as a defending champion, on the fresh grass,” he said. “It’s amazing, amazing to be back to a dream tournament, and to be able to get the first match out of the way.”Wimbledon was the first tennis tournament Djokovic watched on television when he was growing up in Serbia, and it has held an allure for him since. And while that is true for thousands of players, few have enjoyed it as much as Djokovic, who ingests blades of grass immediately upon winning his titles (unlike when he wins on the red clay of Roland Garros).Winning on grass, especially in an era when there are so few tournaments on the surface, and the season is so short, is particularly challenging, and Djokovic rarely plays the warm-up tournaments anymore. There are many tactical aspects that make grass distinct from clay and hardcourts, even now, when the Wimbledon surface is much bouncier and faster than it once was.“I had to learn how to move,” Djokovic said about the transition from playing on red clay to playing on grass.Daniel Leal/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor Djokovic, who likes to slide across hardcourts and clay as he reaches for balls out wide and at the net, the grass at Wimbledon does not allow for the same kind of horizontal movement. But Djokovic has become as adept as anyone at adjusting from clay to grass in short order.“I had to learn how to move,” he said, “how to walk, how to play, how to read the bounces, etc.”But the grass was actually too slippery for a while on Monday after a light rain fell toward the end of the first set of Djokovic’s victory, 6-3, 6-3, 7-6 (4) over Cachin. It was Djokovic’s toughest obstacle of the day.The match was halted, the tarp spread over the court and the roof rolled closed. Normally the courts dry off in less than half an hour. But the moisture mysteriously persisted on Monday, and tournament officials and the players returned to a still slippery court.In all, the delay lasted almost 90 minutes, a surprising duration for a court with a roof. But Djokovic endeared himself to the disappointed spectators by employing his towel and joking with them, as if he could clean it all up himself. Considering his success on that patch of grass — he hasn’t lost on Centre Court since 2013 — some might have expected him to do it.Some wondered whether his good temper was an indication that Djokovic, with a men’s singles record 23rd major title safely in hand, was now in a more relaxed and jovial mood.“I wouldn’t particularly say it’s quite a unique feeling for me just because I’ve won my 23rd Slam,” he said. “I’ve always tried to have fun in particular circumstances where I guess you can’t control things. I’ve had some funny rain delays in Paris, as well, New York, where I joked around.”He acknowledged being physically and emotionally exhausted after winning the French Open in June. So he and his wife, Jelena, went to Portugal’s Azores Islands to hike and relax. They were even forced to spend an extra day there because fog grounded their original flight home.“It was great because I’ve been through a lot of different emotions during the clay season,” he said, “particularly obviously reaching the climax in Paris, and I needed to get away, get isolated a little bit.”One player Djokovic will not have to contend with this year is Nick Kyrgios, his opponent in last year’s Wimbledon final. Kyrgios, who has been recovering from surgery on his left knee in January, withdrew from the tournament on the eve of the first day after a scan revealed a torn ligament in his wrist.“I think people just forget how strenuous this sport is, how physical it is,” Kyrgios said Sunday, before announcing his wrist injury. “I dare someone to go out there and play four hours with Novak and see how you feel afterward.”Since Djokovic’s current run began in 2018, they’ve all been wiped away. More

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      Ben Shelton Arrives at Wimbledon With His Father as Coach

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      Bryan Shelton guided his son for years as a junior and in college. Now he is taking the reins on the ATP Tour. Next up: Wimbledon.Last year, when Ben Shelton decided to leave college and turn professional, he wondered aloud to his father, Bryan, a former player on the men’s tennis tour, if they ought to embark on a venture together.Sorry, Bryan Shelton told his son, he already had a full-time job coaching at the University of Florida. Bryan Shelton handed the reins to Dean Goldfine, a highly respected coach who had previously worked with the former world No. 1 Andy Roddick. Perhaps, they reasoned, it was better this way, giving the 57-year-old father and his 20-year-old son a healthy distance for his first couple years as a professional.Then Ben became the breakout star of this year’s Australian Open, riding his booming serve into the singles quarterfinals, while Bryan was back home in Gainesville, Fla., readying the Gators for the spring season. It turns out even well-adjusted, middle-aged dads can be susceptible to FOMO. In early June, shortly after Florida’s men’s team was eliminated from the N.C.A.A. Division I tennis tournament, the Sheltons announced that Ben had a new/old full-time coach.“It was the right time,” Bryan Shelton said.On June 12, father and son set out for the grass-court season and the next phase of their relationship, which has a big-stage debut this week at Wimbledon, where Shelton, who has been billed as a star in the making, is scheduled to play Taro Daniel in the first round Tuesday.“We knew eventually this is what we wanted to happen,” Ben Shelton said Saturday at the All England Club.Parent-child relationships can be fraught. Mix in coaching, which is not uncommon in tennis, especially when a parent is a former professional, and they can quickly turn “toxic and tough,” in the words of Bryan Shelton.Stefanos Tsitsipas yelling during matches at his box, with his coach and father, Apostolos, sometimes yelling back, can make spectators feel like uncomfortable guests at an awkward family dinner. Then again, things seem to be working out all right for Casper Ruud, who has made (but lost) three of the past five Grand Slam finals under the tutelage of his father, Cristian. Like Bryan Shelton, Cristian Ruud was a decent pro on the ATP Tour.Looking for the Ruuds between tournaments or on off days? Try the nicest nearby golf course, where they compete like college buddies. Still, after his loss last month to Novak Djokovic in the French Open final, Casper Ruud, 24, said he would not rule out one day getting guidance from someone other than his father.“It can always be good with new, fresh eyes on your game,” he said.For Ben Shelton, there are benefits both on and off the court in having his father around, he said. Given his strapping frame and 12-month rise from Florida Gator ranked outside the top 400 to Grand Slam quarterfinalist, it can be easy to forget just how young and raw he is in tennis years and life experiences.A late bloomer, Ben did not play most of the major junior tournaments growing up. He attended a regular high school rather than a tennis-focused academy. His journey to Australia for the Open and its lead-up tournaments was his first trip overseas.This year’s clay-court swing was his first trip to Europe. On Saturday, he confessed to feeling homesick while traveling without his parents earlier this year.Not only has he never played Wimbledon before, but until the middle of last month, he had never set foot on a grass court. He won one of his three matches on grass the past few weeks, though both losses needed a deciding third set.Expectations for Ben’s Wimbledon debut are high, and arriving alongside his dad, who has coached him before and has won his own matches at the All England Club, may bolster his chances.Ben Shelton trained on the practice courts at Wimbledon on Friday as his father looked on.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesThe young player’s pounding serve, walloping forehand and his ability to move forward on the court make grass an ideal surface for him if he can figure out how to stay low and master the quick, controlled foot movements that winning on grass requires.The first two days were rough, Ben said Saturday.“My legs were feeling weird,” he said. “And then after those two days, I started having a lot of fun.”Bryan Shelton said he has always told his son that Wimbledon is the game’s most special venue, a place where he had dreamed of playing as a teenager in Alabama watching the famous matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe on television. In 1989, he walked onto a field court to play Boris Becker, who was already a two-time Wimbledon champion at 22, two years younger than Bryan Shelton. Becker beat him in three sets.“Someone pulled up a video on an iPad and handed it to me so we could watch it,” Bryan Shelton said. “Better than I thought it would be.”He made the fourth round of Wimbledon in 1994, his best performance at a Grand Slam tournament, beating the second seed, Michael Stich of Germany, in his opening match.Bryan Shelton said for the past six months he and his wife, Lisa, had been discussing him leaving his college job to work full-time with Ben, but first he needed to make sure Ben still wanted him. He did.During Ben’s early teenage years, father and son would practice before Ben headed off to school, hitting the courts at 6:45 a.m. each morning. Through that experience and during Ben’s college career, Bryan learned a lesson that nearly all parents learn about their children: Despite all that shared DNA, they are not mini-me’s.Bryan loved to drill on the tennis court, honing shots through hours of practice. Drills bore Ben. Competition drives him. He needs to play more points in practice.Bryan said as a junior player there were times when Ben would come home from losing in a tournament and Bryan would ask his son what had gone wrong.This was before Ben had grown to 6-foot-4 and 195 pounds. He would tell his father he just needed to get bigger.Ben Shelton said his father has become good at picking up on the signals that it’s time to switch from coach mode into dad mode. Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesBryan didn’t necessarily like that answer. He would tell his son that there were always things he could get better at, that he should make a list of the elements of his game he needed to improve, the way Bryan had after some of his losses. But that wasn’t how Ben ticked.“I was getting in his way,” Bryan Shelton said. “What I learned that I need to do is let him think about how good he is and know that he will do the work.”Like any coach and player, they have had their moments on the court. There are times when Ben needs to let off steam, and Bryan needs him to be composed. An hour later, someone will apologize, and they move on. They share an understanding that people make mistakes, and they try to maintain their “no grudges” rule.Ben said his father has become good at picking up on the signals that it’s time to switch from coach mode into dad mode. Bryan will set a time limit on a video session, so they aren’t constantly watching and talking about tennis. So far, he’s been happy to let Ben head to dinner with friends while he stays back in his hotel room, orders in and watches golf.“He’s pretty easy to travel with,” Ben said of his father.Good thing. They will be doing a lot of it. More

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      Andy Murray Returns to Wimbledon Aiming for Another Long Run

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      A decade ago, Murray broke the 77-year singles championship drought for British men at Wimbledon. It has been up and down since. Can he recapture the magic?In late May, with most of the world’s best tennis players focused on the red clay at the French Open, Sir Andy Murray was 300 miles away on the other side of the English Channel, dialed in on preparations for the grass at Wimbledon.That had been the plan, anyway. But then his wife, Kim Sears, had to head up to Scotland for a few days to handle some business at the hotel she and Murray own. That left him solo for the morning rituals beginning at 5:30 a.m. with their four children, all younger than 8: cooking breakfast, getting everyone dressed and dropping them off at school.Three hours later, with the last child delivered, he headed to Britain’s national tennis center in Roehampton, where he received treatment from his physiotherapist and trained for several hours on the grass court and in the gym. There was also an afternoon of interviews and shooting promotional videos. It’s all part of the next phase of Murray’s quixotic, late-career quest to finish his journey on his terms, metal hip and all.Maybe that means somehow recapturing the magic of 10 years ago, when he became the first British man in 77 years to win the most important title in his sport. Maybe it’s simply cracking the top 30 or 20 once more, proving wrong all the doctors and doubters who called him foolish for entertaining a future in professional tennis after hip resurfacing surgery in 2019.Or maybe it’s pushing off for however long he can be the full-time tennis elder, entrepreneur and someone who, years ago, did that glorious thing.The default demeanor that accompanies Murray’s grueling physical play has always looked something like misery, peppered with a near-constant verbal self-flagellation that pulls spectators into his battle. But there is also joy in the training, the competing, the quest to improve and get the most out of himself while doing something that he loves, even when that means struggling against seemingly inferior opponents. Murray knows nothing else he does will ever match the feeling. So he goes on, results be damned.“I’m jealous of your Jannik Sinners and these young guys that have got an amazing career to look forward to,” he said during a recent interview at the end of that harried day as he headed for the tennis center parking lot. “I would love to do it all over again.”Murray’s Wimbledon singles title in 2013 was the first by a British man since Fred Perry won in 1936.Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto Agency‘An Outrageous Career’A decade on from the moment Britain had been waiting on since the Great Depression, Murray returns to the All England Club a version of himself that he could not have imagined in 2013, when he was just another 20-something bloke who walked his dogs in London on the south bank of the Thames.The tennis obsessive is now a man in full: a husband of eight years; a father of four; an officer of the Order of the British Empire (hence the “sir”); an art collector; an entrepreneur with a portfolio that includes a hotel, a clothing line and other investments; and the wise man, sounding board and occasional practice partner for the next generation of British tennis stars, such as Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu.Mirra Andreeva, the 16-year-old Russian phenom, would like some time with him, too. She called him “so beautiful” this spring.Regrets, he has a few, especially in those years in his 20s when he trained like a fiend and viewed time with friends and family as an impediment to a tireless search for every ounce of success. Another speed workout. More lifting, or hot yoga, or hitting practice balls. Why did he make life so difficult for his coaches? Why did he eat all those sweet-and-sour candies? Why did he stay up until 3 a.m. playing video games so often?The lazy view of Murray, who plays Ryan Peniston of Britain in the first round on Tuesday, is a player with just three Grand Slam singles titles, the same as Stan Wawrinka, who is a fine champion but no one’s idea of an all-time great. Novak Djokovic just won his 23rd. Rafael Nadal has 22; Roger Federer, 20. They are the so-called Big Three.Djokovic said recently he doesn’t much like that term because it excludes Murray, a player he has been battling since his days on the junior tennis circuit. The longtime mates practiced together on Saturday at the All England Club.There is a reason Federer included Murray as a central character in his send-off last year at the Laver Cup. Murray has beaten Djokovic, Nadal and Federer a combined 29 times, including two wins over Djokovic in Grand Slam finals. He made 11 Grand Slam singles finals during the most competitive era of elite men’s tennis. Only he, Nadal, Federer and Djokovic held a No. 1 ranking between 2004 and 2022. And he withstood unmatched pressure during his run to that first Wimbledon title.“It’s an outrageous career,” said Jamie Murray, a top doubles player who teamed with Andy, his younger sibling, in 2015 to deliver Britain its first Davis Cup triumph since 1936.Or it was an outrageous career, until that grueling physical style exacted its toll on Murray’s back and ankles and eventually led to the degenerative hip condition that stymied his run at the top in 2017. In January 2018, Murray had an initial unsuccessful hip surgery. For the rest of the season, everyone saw him suffering and limping through the pain.At the 2019 Australian Open, Bob Bryan, a 23-time Grand Slam doubles champion, put his breakfast tray down at Murray’s table and told him about the hip resurfacing surgery he had undergone the previous summer. The operation allowed Bryan to return to high-level competition doubles in just five months. Elite singles was something else entirely.“‘All I want to do is play,’” Bryan said Murray told him.Later that month, Murray posted a startling photo on Instagram that showed him lying in a hospital bed.“I now have a metal hip,” he wrote after the roughly two-hour resurfacing procedure that replaced the damaged bone and cartilage with a metal shell. “Feeling a bit battered and bruised just now but hopefully that will be the end of my hip pain.”Murray’s pain had grown so severe that the primary goal of the operation was to give him the ability to play with his children.For the next six months, he attacked physical therapy and rehabilitation the way he had attacked tennis. He was a full-time father. He played golf. He hung around with old friends.Matt Gentry, Murray’s longtime agent and business partner, said the downtime gave Murray a window into life without tennis. It wasn’t terrible.Murray has long admired American sports stars who take an entrepreneurial approach to their careers, and he and Gentry began to map out opportunities. Murray has since launched a clothing line. He has invested with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in TMRW Sports, a company that is seeking to find new ways to marry sports media and technology, including a new golf competition. He is part of a group that is building thousands of padel courts at sports clubs throughout the United Kingdom.In 2013, he purchased Cromlix House, a 15-room castle-like hotel near his childhood home in Dunblane, Scotland, for roughly $2 million. The property was especially meaningful: His grandparents held their 25th anniversary party there in 1982. He and Sears held their wedding reception there. His brother, Jamie, also got married at the property.Murray and Sears recently completed the first phase of a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion of the property that will eventually include cabins by the nearby loch. The hotel is home to several pieces of art from Murray’s private collection, including a series of Damien Hirst and David Shrigley prints.For now, Murray said, he mostly listens to pitches and writes checks, but he plans to become more involved in his business ventures when he is done playing tennis. If he has his way, that day will not arrive for some time.‘Why Shouldn’t He Keep Playing?’Murray’s mother, Judy, a former player who was his first tennis coach, said tennis allows her son to express so many parts of his identity, beginning with a burning need to compete, but also an analytical mind that loves studying the game and its history.From the time he was a small boy, she said, if a game of cards or dominoes wasn’t going his way, those cards and dominoes would go flying across the room. He also had an older and bigger brother he desperately wanted to beat, and plenty of people who said that a boy from a small town in Scotland, where the weather was terrible and indoor courts were scarce, could never win Wimbledon. Now those same people say his time has passed.“If he still loves it, then why shouldn’t he keep playing?” Judy Murray said in an interview on Friday.Andy Murray with his mother, Judy, at the All England Club in 2019, when he played doubles while recovering from hip surgery.Hannah Mckay/ReutersMurray said he has a rough idea of when and how he would like his tennis career to end, but he knows it might not be his choice. Federer desperately wanted to play more, but his knee wouldn’t allow it. Murray has seen the videos of Nadal limping off the court in Australia in January with a torn muscle and hip injury from which he may never fully recover.Murray knows that his next desperate sprint for a drop shot, or one of his signature points earned while running the baseline back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, could be his last. Then again, he could still be doing this three years from now, which carries its own unique complications.He recently ran out of his stash of the bulky, extra-support tennis shoes that Under Armour manufactured for him until their last partnership deal expired. So Murray had to call his friend Kevin Plank, the Under Armour founder, and ask if he could make him more shoes. Plank did.In early June, when Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz and nearly everyone else of consequence was playing in Paris, Murray was playing a Challenger tournament at a racket club in Surbiton, southwest of London, in the tennis minor leagues.The field was made up of pro-tour deep cuts and some early round French Open casualties. A crowd of hundreds packed the stands, which were set on shaky scaffolding.Murray took only a few games against Chung Hyeon, a journeyman from South Korea, to show why he is certain he can beat anyone in the world on grass at a time when so few pros have mastered the surface: the slice backhands that go successively lower until they barely bounce above an opponent’s shoelaces; the dying volleys in the front of the court, and the stinging ones to the baseline; the slice serve that slides so far off the court; the softballs that look like meatballs but are really knuckleballs, wobbling in the air and twisting when they hit the grass.Two weeks and two Challenger trophies later, Murray had claimed 10 straight matches, the first five won while commuting from his home outside London, where he had decamped to a spare bedroom for the month to get some rest.Then came his final Wimbledon tuneup, at Queen’s Club in London, where he lost his first match to Alex de Minaur of Australia, a top 20 player who took advantage of Murray’s heavy legs and lackluster serve that day. Murray tried not to read too much into the result.All journeys have peaks and valleys. As the teachers in Murray’s hot yoga classes would say, the only way out is through — even on those days when the end feels closer than Murray hopes it might.Murray passed on the French Open and played two grass-court ATP Challenger tournaments in England instead. He won both.Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Before Wimbledon, There’s Practice on Grass at an English Garden Party

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      The Boodles, which draws elite players on their way to the All England Club, is unlike nearly anything else on the tennis calendar — a Gatsby-like few days on an estate outside London.Even for the best tennis players in the world, the days before a Grand Slam can be filled with nerves and stress, especially the time leading up to Wimbledon, the grandest Grand Slam of them all.Days can become a blur of hunting for hitting partners and time on the limited practice courts a tournament has available, or one last try to win some tour-level matches at competitions in Eastbourne or Majorca.A handful of pros, including several clients of Patricio Apey, a longtime agent, end up at a classic English garden party called the Boodles that is unlike nearly anything else on the tennis calendar — a Gatsby-like few days on an estate outside London that makes Wimbledon’s All England Club, supposedly the apotheosis of tennis elegance, feel like a gathering of the masses at the local park.The Boodles tennis exhibition, set on a sprawling estate outside London, is unlike nearly anything else on the sport’s calendar.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesDriving in this morning, I was kind of shocked,” Lorenzo Musetti, the rising star from Italy, said of the 300-acre property, whose owner since 2021 has been Reliance Industries, a company run by the Ambani family of India, which bought it for roughly $70 million. “Not every day you see a property like this.”Or a high-end jewelry show masquerading as a tennis event at a sprawling former country club called Stoke Park.“The best event we do all year,” said Michael Wainwright, the managing director of Boodles, the Liverpool- and London-based jewelry company that his family has owned since 1880.Guests in the outdoor seating area before the matches began.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesStoke Park was bought by Reliance Industries, a company run by India’s Ambani family, for roughly $70 million in 2021.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesWhen he started the Boodles two decades ago, Apey wasn’t thinking about putting on a tennis event that would feel more like a polo match. He just knew that players who won Wimbledon made more money than players who won the other major tournaments. (Wimbledon’s men’s and women’s singles champions will earn nearly $3 million each this year.)He represented a number of players who excelled on clay courts but not on grass. They struggled to acclimate during the few weeks between the French Open and Wimbledon because they often lost early in the few tournaments available during the brief grass court season.“I needed to get them more matches,” Apey said.The only way for him to do that, he reasoned, was to create a grass court exhibition event near London ahead of Wimbledon. Stoke Park, with its some two-dozen-bedroom mansion, a rolling golf course — tennis players love to relax with rounds of golf — and immaculate grass tennis courts provided the perfect location.Through an acquaintance, he landed a meeting with Wainwright and his older brother, Nicholas, who warmed to the idea. It was a soft sell opportunity: Put their jewelry in front of hundreds of their top customers and thousands more in the upper echelon of the tennis demographic (think pocket squares and long, flowery summer dresses) whiling away a summer afternoon drinking champagne and Pimm’s, eating multicourse catered lunches, enjoying high tea, browsing a tented pavilion filled with sparkling baubles and perhaps taking in some tennis in a small stadium under high trees surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens.Who doesn’t love mixing grass court tennis and expensive jewelry?Andrew Testa for The New York TimesBoodles sponsors another high-end sports event, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a well-heeled equestrian race, but women like tennis more, Wainwright said, and horse racing doesn’t offer the same “dwell time” that tennis does.In other words, with all of tennis’s changeovers and the breaks between sets and matches, and the fact that the matches don’t actually matter, the 10,000 patrons who come to the five days of the Boodles tennis event have plenty of time to peruse that $2.9 million diamond ring, or the more affordable $80,000 necklace. There were several cases of Patek Philippe watches on display as well.Boodles also threw an evening gala on the Stoke Park grounds for roughly 40 of its top customers Wednesday night. Wine and champagne flowed, and jewelry was sold, into the small hours of the morning.Andrey Rublev took advantage of the grass courts at Stoke Park to practice before his match.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesBorna Coric worked out after a match.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesCoric, left, and Sebastian Korda answer questions during an interview.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesFor players, the Boodles can offer an appearance fee and — just as valuable — a chance to chill. Sebastian Korda and his coach, Radek Stepanek, joined Wainwright for a round of golf earlier in the week.There is an expansive gym for the growing cohort of lifting obsessives on the tour. Perhaps most important are the moments of calm practice on the Stoke Park grass before the chaos of Wimbledon.“It’s a chance to work on a few things,” said Korda, who played in Eastbourne the week before Wimbledon last year and lost his first match.Borna Coric of Croatia, who was winless in two grass court tournaments this year, said he had arrived at Stoke Park this week harried and worried about his form. He had then climbed into bed in a luxurious room.“I had the best night of sleep I’ve had in weeks,” Coric said. More

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      Wimbledon Boycott in 1973 Changed the Tennis World

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      The walkout was the result of the tennis federation banning Nikola Pilic, an instance of player unity that is still felt today.Stan Smith’s 1972 Wimbledon cup sits alongside his 1971 United States Open winner’s prize in a trophy case inside his Hilton Head Island, S.C., home. Smith had hoped to defend his title in ’73.“I was playing the best tennis of my life,” said Smith, who had lost in the Wimbledon final in 1971 to John Newcombe in five sets and then went on to beat Ilie Nastase in the 1972 final, also in five sets. “Once you’ve won it you always want to win it again.”But in 1973, Smith decided not to play. Instead, he and 80 other players voted to boycott the tournament just before the first matches in support of the player Nikola Pilic. Pilic had been barred from the tournament by the International Lawn Tennis Federation, now the I.T.F., the world governing body of tennis that runs all the Grand Slam tournaments, for refusing to play a Davis Cup match for his native Yugoslavia a month earlier. “It was really difficult,” said Smith in a phone interview.This year, as the Women’s Tennis Association celebrates the momentous meeting at Wimbledon 50 years ago in which Billie Jean King encouraged her fellow players to form that organization, the Association of Tennis Professionals is also remembering a watershed moment in its own history. It was when its members banded together, flexed their muscles and walked out on the most prestigious tournament in tennis, with ramifications that are still being felt today. Among them: greater communication between the players and the tournaments, and wider distribution of prize money at all levels of the pro game.“This was the beginning of the ATP and players coming together because it was really testing the relationship,” said Andrea Gaudenzi, the current ATP chairman, who was born one month after the boycott, by video call. “Everybody was surprised of the support that Niki got. And that made the players think that if we get together, we are powerful and can do something. That was a very important milestone.”While the male players group had been started a year earlier, the men were still enduring power struggles between its members and the tournaments. Many of the top players were committed to World Championship Tennis, a professional circuit founded in 1968 that was backed by the Texas businessman Lamar Hunt. The tour competed with the International Lawn Tennis Federation.The ATP’s initial group of players, called the Handsome Eight, included Cliff Drysdale, Pilic and Newcombe. Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall soon signed on.In 1971, the federation, laboring to maintain control over players, voted to ban all competitors from the rival World Championship Tennis from the federation’s major events for 1972, including the French Open and Wimbledon. The ban lasted just one year, and created animosity with players.Pilic, shown playing in the men’s singles at Wimbledon in 1970, chose to compete in the doubles at the 1973 WCT Masters rather than the Davis Cup quarterfinal for Yugoslavia, his native country. Yugoslavia wasn’t happy.Ted West/Central Press/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesPilic and his doubles partner, Allan Stone, qualified for the 1973 WCT Masters, but the event coincided with a Davis Cup quarterfinal tie between Yugoslavia and New Zealand. Pilic opted to play the World Championship Tennis event, infuriating Yugoslavia, which went on to lose to New Zealand.The Yugoslav Tennis Federation asked the International Lawn Tennis Federation to act against Pilic. The federation suspended him for nine months, but that was reduced to one month, just long enough for him to miss Wimbledon.“Probably if I had played we would have won easily,” Pilic said by phone from his home in Croatia about the Davis Cup. “There was a big fight with the [Yugoslav] federation” and then with the lawn tennis federation. “They could do whatever they wanted. We had no control over the sport. We had to do something.”When the players gathered in London for Wimbledon, there were countless discussions and late-night meetings. Laver, the four-time champion, said he wouldn’t compete. So did the three-time winner Newcombe, as well as Smith, Rosewall and Ashe.“We needed to take the pulse of the players,” said Drysdale, the ATP’s first president, by phone. “We were professionals, and we wanted to stay that way. Niki had the right to play wherever he wanted to. There was no opposition to what we were doing. We never wrung our hands wondering if we were doing the right thing.”On the morning of the first day of play, Drysdale phoned the tournament referee, Mike Gibson, at 9, asked him if he had a pen and paper and began reading aloud the names of the 81 men who would no longer be competing, including 12 of the 16 seeds. By the time play began hours later there were 29 qualifiers in the draw and 50 lucky losers, men who had lost in the qualifying tournament but were suddenly awarded spots in the main draw.To show the extent of the players’ solidarity, Ashe held up a list of all the male Wimbledon competitors, with check marks next to all those who were boycotting the 1973 championship. Getty ImagesThere was some opposition to the players’ plan to withdraw. Nastase, who had been runner-up to Smith the year before, opted to compete. So did Roger Taylor, whom Pilic said he refused to speak to for a year afterward.Jimmy Connors also played, and Bjorn Borg, then just 17, did too, his first Wimbledon.Jan Kodes, a two-time French Open champion from Czechoslovakia, also opted to play and won his only Wimbledon. He beat Alex Metreveli of Russia in the final.“No one even asked me to support the boycott,” Kodes said via email. “I was not an ATP member, so I was not in the room. No one believed that this would happen. In my opinion it was pushed by the newly established ATP to show and increase the players’ power.“I’m not sure if the boycott was really necessary,” added Kodes, who went on to reach the final of the U.S. Open two months later. “There are many controversial situations and problematic decisions in tennis.”Drysdale, the former player, said the boycott had a long-lasting effect.“It changed the game forever because no one has ever forgotten what happened that year,” he said. “And we are all aware that it could happen again, depending on how the players are treated.“Everyone knows that the players walked out once on one of the most important tournaments in the world and no one will ever be sure that they wouldn’t do it again.”Gaudenzi said he believed that player unity was important to the growth of the game. What he would like to see now is greater synergy between the ATP, the WTA, the I.T.F. and the Grand Slam tournaments.“We need to come together and collaborate a lot closer,” said Gaudenzi, who stopped short of saying there should be one commissioner for the men’s and women’s tours. “I want tennis to be bigger. I want tennis to be relevant vis-à-vis other sports and other entertainment. We need to adapt to the new generation, the new technology, the new way fans are consuming the content and the competition. So we need to step up our game, and the only way to do it is to get together.”Pilic, now 83, still marvels at the tremendous sacrifice his fellow players made for him.“In that time I thought, maybe Niki Pilic is not that important,” he said. “But we were the products, and you cannot have the tournament without the products. People could not believe that we did it. But we proved in that moment that we were a very strong group. We lost that year, but the war was won.” More

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      Cameron Norrie Goes to Wimbledon as Britain’s Top-Ranked Player

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      He is the top-ranked British player at the tournament. Seven years ago when that was Andy Murray, he won.Cameron Norrie has had two mystical moments at Wimbledon. Both took place on Centre Court, the most revered venue in the sport.The first occurred in 2021 when Norrie faced Roger Federer in what turned out to be the eight-time champion’s last Wimbledon and the final singles tournament of his career.“Playing Roger on Centre Court at Wimbledon with my home fans there was surreal,” said Norrie of Britain, who had chances to break serve and send the match into a fifth set before losing 6-4, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4. “Obviously they love him there as well. I think they supported him more than they supported me that day.”The second moment happened last year, when Norrie reached his first major semifinal at Wimbledon. He became only the fourth British man in the open era — behind Roger Taylor, Tim Henman and the two-time champion Andy Murray — to reach the semifinals there.Murray won in 2016 when he was ranked No. 2 in the world; he is the last British man to have taken the tournament. This year, Norrie will be playing Wimbledon as his country’s top-ranked singles player.“There was already expectation to do well because I am the British No. 1,” said Norrie, 27, who won the first set from Novak Djokovic before falling in four sets last year. “Obviously you feel a lot of pressure. But the only way to go in is to embrace all of that. If you just run and hide from it, you’re going to get eaten alive on the court.”Norrie, who was ranked a career-high No. 8 last year and now sits at No. 13, already has wins this year over Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, whom he upset to win a clay-court title in Rio de Janeiro in February. Last year, he also won two Association of Tennis Professionals tournaments.Cameron Norrie played a backhand return to Jordan Thompson during their round of men’s singles at the Cinch Championships in June.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs a junior player, Norrie was ranked No. 10 in the world. But instead of turning pro, he opted to go to college at Texas Christian University. There he met Facundo Lugones, who was a senior when Norrie was a freshman. The two would often share sideways glances as they destroyed their respective opponents. They became close friends. Now, Lugones is Norrie’s coach.“College was so valuable and so much fun for me,” Norrie said. “As a tennis player, you have to sacrifice a lot, and it’s not a normal life. I wasn’t ready for this lifestyle when I was 18 years old. I made a lot of mistakes at college that don’t really cost you so much. I enjoyed myself more than I should have. If I was doing that on tour, I would be ranked nowhere.”Norrie admits to being undisciplined in the sport during his first year at college. He showed up late for practice, scrapped his team uniform and didn’t give all of his effort. A few indoor losses caused him to be dropped in the lineup from No. 1 to No. 3.Lugones said the coaches gave Norrie an ultimatum when he came back his sophomore year. “After that, you could tell he was a different player,” Lugones said.Norrie’s on-court strength is his ability to compete on all surfaces and to fight until the end. He’s left-handed, which aids him in hitting his favorite shot: a low, flat, short backhand from the right side of the court.“He reminds me a little bit of a left-handed version of David Ferrer,” said Jim Courier, a former world No. 1. “He’s very difficult to beat, doesn’t get tired and doesn’t beat himself often.”Norrie earned the ire of Djokovic in Rome in May by taking aim on a powerful short overhead shot and hitting Djokovic in the leg when his back was turned. While Norrie apologized at the time, he has no regrets about the shot.“I wanted to win,” said Norrie, who lost the match in straight sets. “It was in the heat of the moment for me to break [serve], and I was trying everything. I was competing as hard as I could.”Lugones said Norrie’s greatest strength is his mind game.“His mental skills are different from everybody else’s,” Lugones said. “He smells blood early and then raises his level. You can’t teach that skill.” More

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      Thousands of Bylines to His Name, and One That’s Not

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      A sports reporter reflects on his 30-year career and the mistake that started it all.It was the day after Christmas in 1991, and as a young journalist, I received quite a gift: my first byline in The New York Times.There was one — and only one — downside: They misspelled my name.I use “they” because as I leave The Times’s Sports desk this month to become a full-time author, I still don’t know who got it wrong or how the mix-up happened. That is because I never asked for a correction. At 26, I had just fulfilled a childhood dream and was new in the freelance reporting rotation. Rightly or wrongly, I had no desire to make waves or do anything other than write more Times articles.Thirty-two years later, the mishap seems, above all, amusing. There was no changing the misspelling, anyway. There was no online version to fix; The Times did not launch its website until 1996. There was no way to update a page after it printed. Had The Times published a correction, it would not have changed the fact that my surname was spelled “Clary” instead of “Clarey” in the Dec. 26, 1991, newspaper.Mr. Clarey’s surname was misspelled “Clary” on his first New York Times article.The New York TimesThe error, I should note, did not stop my proud parents from sending copies of the article to a fair share of their Christmas card list. Though I remember feeling a certain sense of disappointment — akin to getting an indelible smudge on a pair of shoes, fresh out of the box — I also saw the incident as a reminder that nobody was perfect in my chosen profession. Certainly not me, and not even The Times.It will humble you, this business, and that is surely a good thing. Today, the scoop might be yours, but tomorrow, it will be your competitor’s. Stop hustling for long, and you will pay the price. Start relying on memory instead of double-checking the facts, and you will soon screw up.There were many nights when I was startled out of sleep by my subconscious, which had somehow registered that a fact was wrong in an article I had filed a few hours earlier; that Roger Federer actually won his first Wimbledon in 2003, not 2002. (Maybe I did not ask for a correction that December, but I’ve had my own share of corrections over the years.)Yet however flawed we, and journalism, may be, this churning, round-the-clock quest to get things right remains a worthy endeavor, especially when a powerful person does not want us to look into those things.It can also be, if you’ll allow me a moment of complete candor, a hell of a lot of fun.In 1991, I took a big chance: I left a solid staff job at The San Diego Union and moved to Paris to marry a Frenchwoman. I had very little in the bank, no matter the exchange rate, and spoke the kind of French that only an American mother could love.My hope was to write about international sports. There were a few what-have-we-done moments as I searched for freelance work, but it was above all a heady time. We were in love and starting anew; I was conjugating verbs and riding my bike around Paris, rolling by the Eiffel Tower and, in an age without quite so many rules, riding circles around the glass pyramid of the Louvre at midnight.It was a late night, too, when the phone in our apartment rang. I was surprised to find Bill Brink from The Times’s Sports desk on the other end of the line. He asked, in a hushed voice (I swear it was hushed), if I might be able to get to Germany on short notice to report an article on Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay, a brother-sister team of ice dancers poised to be one of the biggest draws of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.(Unbeknownst to me, Barry Lorge, my former boss in San Diego, had sent a letter about my move to Neil Amdur, then The Times’s Sports editor.)I don’t recall exactly what I said on the phone, but I do remember shouting “Yeeeeessssss!” in a thoroughly undignified fashion after I hung up.Off I went. I took the night train to Oberstdorf, Germany, reporter’s notebooks, ballpoint pens and a micro-cassette recorder in tow. There was not much sleep to be had in the sleeper car, but no matter. As with many a fulfilling journey, the anticipation was every bit as sweet as the trip itself.I spent a day with the Duchesnays, learning about their choreography and the Olympic pressure. I filed the article, and in a few days it was published, “By Christopher Clary” sitting under the headline.I have filed several thousand more articles over the past 30-plus years — under the right name. I have written about soccer from Cameroon, badminton from Indonesia, skiing from Switzerland, yachting from New Zealand, golf from Scotland and bullfighting from Spain. I have covered 14 Olympic Games, 10 Ryder Cups, nine world track and field championships, six soccer World Cups, five America’s Cups, one Masters and a whole lot of tennis tournaments. As I leave The Times, I am grateful not only for the passport stamps, but also for the people who have crossed my path in so many places, including The Times’s newsroom.As a parting gift, and in the true spirit of our daily quest to get things right, perhaps the time has finally come to correct that first byline. More

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      Once the Prince of Tennis and a Prison Inmate, Boris Becker Starts Again

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      Becker, who is featured in a new documentary, is beginning a third act after serving eight months in prison. “I’m sort of in late summer, fall of my life,” he said.There is something about athletes achieving a level of greatness as teenagers that makes watching them progress into middle age especially jarring.The toll of life replaces the exuberance of youth. Paunch overtakes once-chiseled physiques. In the most unfortunate cases, bad decisions from the triumphant years, the years after, or both, lead to an existence that seemed unimaginable back when life brought the glory of championship after championship and the attendant glamour.This is what comes to mind when Boris Becker — a Wimbledon singles champion at 17, an inmate in a British prison at 54 and now a free man at 55 — appears on a laptop screen in his first interview with The New York Times since he was released from prison late last year. Becker served eight months of a two-and-a-half year sentence for hiding and transferring money and assets during a bankruptcy proceeding. He was previously convicted of tax evasion in Germany in 2002.Now, he hopes, all that is behind him, and he can begin to reclaim the better parts of his pre-incarceration life, doing what retired tennis greats of a certain age generally do — commentating on television and picking up work as an occasional coach and adviser for younger players. Becker, a six-time Grand Slam champion, has a sadly unique but valuable perspective on the perils and pitfalls of life as a modern tennis star.“I have now a little bit of wisdom of what to do and certainly what not to do,” he said.The prison uniform is gone, replaced with a neatly tailored blue suit. Sitting in front of a camera in Dubai, where he had traveled for business meetings and interviews, Becker was noticeably thinner than before his incarceration, though his blue eyes were once again bright and hopeful, compared with his sagging, heavy-lidded demeanor of a year ago.Becker at Wimbledon in 1990.Dave Caulkin/Associated PressBecker’s rise and crash are portrayed in a new two-part documentary, “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker,” by the filmmakers Alex Gibney and John Battsek. Becker participated in and is promoting the film, which premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, but unlike many celebrity documentaries these days, “Boom Boom” is not a vanity project in which the subjects or members of their management teams serve as executive producers, craft the narrative and gain from the film’s financial success.That is not how Gibney (“Enron,” “The Armstrong Lie,” “Going Clear”) and Battsek (“Searching for Sugar Man,” “One Day In September”) work. It’s also not what Becker, who has always gone his own way, both on and off the tennis court, with occasionally calamitous results, was interested in.“If you are a co-producer, you’re going to cut the corners, you’re not going to show yourself the way that maybe the outside world sees you,” Becker said. “It shows a you in a much better light than you truly are. And for me, you know, honesty was always important.”The result is a bare-knuckles portrait of a player who as a teenager rose to the pinnacle of his sport and peak celebrity in Germany, his home country. His seemingly perfect marriage to Barbara Feltus, a Black woman, served as an inflection point for race relations in Germany (after eight years, the marriage ended in divorce).But in retirement, Becker’s life degenerated into a sordid story of philandering, failed business ventures, bankruptcies, tabloid scandals and prison time. Along the way, there was also a nearly three-year stint coaching the world No. 1 Novak Djokovic through one of the most successful periods of his career.Gibney, the writer and director who is a self-described “tennis freak,” said he had been drawn to footage from a 1991 documentary in which Becker said he enjoyed falling behind by a set or two in matches. That would focus his mind, Becker said, and then he would roar back.“Not such a good plan in real life, and not a really great plan for tennis, either,” Gibney said.Battsek, the producer, said he initially approached Becker about making a documentary in 2018, before Becker’s bankruptcy cascaded into a criminal conviction. Gibney interviewed him extensively in 2019, and again last year after his conviction and just days before his sentencing, when an overweight and scared Becker tried to have his say for what he anticipated could be the last time for several years.Becker and his partner, Lilian de Carvalho, in London before Becker’s sentencing in 2022.Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock“His biggest mistake was to mistakenly think the swagger that carried him through everything would carry him through tricky ground when it came to his financials,” Battsek said of Becker. “You’ve got to be smart enough to know, ‘I can’t swagger through this.’”Becker was released from prison early under a fast-track deportation program for foreign nationals, but not before what he described as eight challenging months in two prisons.“Very difficult, especially from the life that I came from,” he said.During his first weeks of incarceration, the man who once had ruled hallowed Center Court at Wimbledon was locked inside his cell for 22 hours a day, let out only for lunch and dinner, a shower and a brief period outdoors.In Becker’s early 20s, when he nearly retired from tennis on multiple occasions, he would spend hours at night in his hotel room writing in his journals. Similarly, the isolation in prison gave him plenty of time to reflect on where his life had gone wrong, he said. He remembered plenty of poor choices — putting too much trust in managers and advisers, impregnating a woman in the back room at a Nobu restaurant in London, making a series of poor investments. He also thought about the good times, though, the great moments of his career and all the high-flying luxuries his success afforded him.He said he feared for his safety in prison, but that he checked his ego and fell in with a group that protected him. He declined to provide details.“There’s a code of honor that you don’t speak about prison on the outside,” he said. “I have too much respect for the inmates.”He knows his life did not have to go the way it did and that he should have spent more time during his playing days locked in an office, familiarizing himself with all those documents he signed, instead of on a beach or a tennis court.He also was not mentally prepared when he retired, he said, for the shock of being called old at 35 and of having to start a second career from scratch.But now he is starting over once more. Eurosport hired him to commentate on the Australian Open. He is hopeful that some of his other partners and employers will return as wellFor the first time, he is keeping his goals small.“I’m sort of in late summer, fall of my life, so I want to really work on the next 25 years,” he said. “You look back on your life incarcerated, you look back on your professional life as a player, as a coach, as a commentator. You want to learn from the experience, you want to improve on some of the things that you started. And so that’s my goal.” More