Tennis

Saturday

Daniel Seifert

Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course, is that you immediately feel more infantile than raffishly young. Picking up fresh skills means relearning how to learn, decades after university, when you actually had the appetite for self-improvement. Sure, tennis is, as studies have found, one of the most effective activities for staying healthy. But it’s also infuriatingly finicky. Technique-wise, I can fire off a decent groundstroke (forehand and backhand), thanks to lessons as a mopey teen.

tennis

Saturday

Gage Klipper

Don’t let Serena bully you into taking the fat shot

Serena Williams is one of the world’s greatest living athletes, but in her retirement, she seems to have forgotten the basics of diet and exercise. You’ve likely seen Williams’ ad campaign for Ro, a telehealth provider that specializes in GLP-1 weight loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound. In the now ubiquitous commercials, Williams tells how she personally used the drug to burn stubborn postpartum fat, a respectable 31 pounds over 8 months.“It’s not a short cut, it’s science,” reads the company’s tagline. Williams looks great – of course, of course. But just because scientists have discovered a cure for fatness doesn’t mean she still hasn’t taken the easy way out.

Serena Williams

Tuesday

Gage Klipper

True winners steal from children

“Sack of garbage,” “common thief,” “shameful jerk” – but a few of the choice words tennis fans had for the man who swiped an autographed hat from a child at the US Open over the weekend. Sure, the alleged thief is no saint. But now that he’s reportedly been identified as a self-made millionaire, I’d rather just call him a shark. The video of the courtside incident quickly went viral, showing a grown man snatch the hat away as Polish tennis star Kamil Majchrzak passed it up to a boy who pleaded in vain. The internet did as it wont, and identified the alleged thief as pavement plutocrat and fellow Pole, Piotr Szczerek. What is this world coming to? A man can’t even steal from a child anymore without having his whole life dissected by an internet mob.

Kamil Majchrzak

Friday

Britt McHenry

The US Open OnlyFans star

Sachia Vickery, a 559th-ranked player, lost her qualifying match yesterday, but likely gained new followers from her activity off the court: OnlyFans. That’s right, Vickery charges $12.99 a month for any fan or sexually-charged viewer to subscribe to exclusive content. During an Instagram Q&A this week, she said, “I’m very open-minded and I don’t care what people think of me. It’s also the easiest money I’ve ever made and enjoy doing it.”Clutch your pearls and breathe. Your first thought might be: Does she need money? Why else would an athlete of her stature resort to OnlyFans. Vickery is hardly broke. She made a reported $2 million in 14 years of professional tennis and even cracked the top 100 in 2018.

Sachia Vickery

Friday

Britt McHenry

The Washington Post can’t cancel John McEnroe

From his lofty BBC and ESPN perches at Wimbledon, John McEnroe is agitating people… again.In particular, he has irked Sally Jenkins from the Washington Post who has accused him of “belching up words” in a diatribe column dedicated to removing him from TV.This, however, only goes to prove that McEnroe can still move the needle. As he should. It is the McEnroe way. Dare I say, it’s the American way – brash, loud, and a bit erroneously confident.Sure, McEnroe mispronounced names this tournament, notably calling Hungarian Marton Fucsovics, “Fuskovitz,” or “Fuksovitz,” in a third round loss to American Ben Shelton. He didn’t fare much better with 26th ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas in this year’s Australian Open.

John McEnroe

Monday

Adrian Brune

On the front line of the tennis magazine wars

The issue appeared without fanfare at the 2017 US Open giftshop: a bright-red background offset an Impressionist yet unmistakable painting of Yannick Noah hitting a forehand, dreadlocks flaring. And with that, publisher Caitlin Thompson and editor-in-chief Dave Shaftel — an unlikely journalism pair who had met bonding over the poor state of tennis media — announced the launch of Racquet magazine, a journal that would explore the lifestyle, culture, history and zeitgeist behind modern tennis. In his first editor’s letter, Shaftel more or less laid out his and Thompson’s grand plans. “We don’t think of the game as a country club sport lumped in with golf and healthy only in the suburbs,” Shaftel wrote.

tennis
Richard
Alex Perez

Serve and volley

Richard Williams, the mercurial father of the tennis superstars Venus and Serena, is the subject of the wonderful new biopic King Richard, starring Will Smith in an Oscar-worthy performance. Williams is a fascinating figure who, as longtime tennis fans know, planned out the careers of his daughters before they were even born, telling anyone who’d listen that the Compton-bred girls were destined for superstardom. It was a preposterous statement, all the more so since it was made by a man who knew next to nothing about tennis. Yet as we now know, Williams’s vision became reality.

Monday

The Spectator

This month in culture: July 2024

The Bear, season three Hulu, June 27 America loves a misanthropic, depressive chef. How else would we know the chef is a real artist? The Bear returns for its third season with the trailer promising lots of arguing, screw-ups, failures and everything else you’ve come to expect from the beloved show. We’re not sure why you would take a perfectly good beef-sandwich shop in Chicago and try to turn it into a Michelin-starred restaurant, but we hope Carmy and the gang give us some sort of good reason. — Zack Christenson Jeremy Allen White in The Bear Wimbledon ESPN and ABC, July 1 You know summer has arrived when the brilliant green grass of the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club lights up your screens.

culture

Friday

Taki

The Oprah-fication of Wimbledon

Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 — the year of the boycott — is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was fifty at the time, while Pam was seventeen, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it was legal. The age of consent varies from place to place, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter I had dated, rang me early in the morning and complained about me being seventy-two. “There is no age limit as far as being too old,” I told him. He rudely hung up on me. But before I go on about Pam Shriver and her oldie coach, a few comments are in order about how Oprah has taken over tennis and even Wimbledon.

Monday

Rosie Gray

Big Pickleball is coming for your tennis court

One morning this past summer I played tennis with two friends at the John J. Carty tennis courts in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. About halfway through our session, dozens of senior citizens flooded onto what looked like four child-sized tennis courts next to ours. Wielding rectangular paddles, the seniors formed doubles teams and thwacked plastic wiffleballs back and forth across the nets, producing a bracingly loud pop-pop-pop sound. They were playing pickleball, a sport with origins as a 1960s backyard pastime that has become a craze in the United States over the past few years. Given the small courts and slow ball, the players didn’t have to move very far in any direction to keep a good rally going. They looked like they were having a lot of fun.

Pickleball

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Naomi Osaka is tennis’s Meghan Markle

Well, it looks like the tennis world has found its Meghan Markle. Naomi Osaka, who may in theory be Japanese, but is to all intents and purposes Californian when it comes to worldview, will no longer be taking part in the French Open because she can’t handle the post match interviews, especially when she loses. She wants to go away and look after her mental health. It’s rough luck on other Japanese tennis players (and maybe the Japan Olympic team), on her sponsors (is she too shy to do endorsements too, the ones she’s getting tens of millions of dollars for?) and on the tournament organizers. But nowadays when you say you’ve got mental health issues, there’s no arguing with that. Except, of course, there is.

naomi osaka

Sunday

Julie Bindel

What gives the trans lobby the right to chastise Martina Navratilova?

Many of us have been waiting a very long time for ‘peak trans’ to be reached, and for liberals, faint-hearted feminists, journalists and politicians to break out of their cowardly complacency and face the reality – that extreme trans activism is misogyny. Perhaps peak trans may well have arrived, thanks to the latest valiant efforts of the trans bullies. The latest target in the vicious and often violent war being raged by extreme trans activists is one of my all-time heroes – the world tennis champion and LGBT rights campaigner, Martina Navratilova. Navratilova has been accused of being ‘transphobic’ as a result of a tweet responding to a question from a follower about transgender women in sport. ‘Clearly that can’t be right.

martina navratilova