Before the French Open started, experts assembled by Tennis magazine, including the assiduous historian Steve Flink, gave the tournament to Novak Djokovic over Rafael Nadal by four to three; the magazine’s editor, Steve Tignor, whose bias tends toward tradition, demurred…
In the middle of the first set, the score 3-3, it looked like Sofia Kenin, the five-seven dynamo from Bradenton, Florida, was going all-out on her let-it-rip offense. Having made up for a three-game deficit, she aimed bullets at the…
Anything can happen in tennis, but the two-set trouncing of Simona Halep by Iga Swiatek was a shocker. The teen from Raszyn, which is a little village near Warsaw (the capital of Poland), put an end to the top seeded…
It was Yom Kippur and Tennys Sandgren, like Diego Schwartzman (and Sandy Koufax) a Bible man but unlike them not a Jew, played a gritty match that went into overtime, which you have to admit is how Yom Kippur feels…
There was not much to say about the match between Simona Halep and Sara Sorribes Tormo other than that the señorita from Castellón de la Plana gave it the old college try and the mighty mite (five-six) from Constanta never…
At the French Open one time not too long ago, I spied an usher whom I remembered from a previous year and said hello. He was dressed impeccably in the designated business attire, and he acknowledged the greeting courteously. I…
Serving at 0-30 and down 0-40, the young challenger hits two aces and a perfect forehand winner on the next serve-plus-one to even the score. He goes on to hold; then the rout begins. In less time than it takes…
As Stan Wawrinka and Stefanos Tsitsipas approached the fifth hour of their round of 16 matches at the French Open in the Suzanne Lenglen Stadium of Paris’s storied Roland-Garros, it was like this: who’s going to blink? They play a…
Rafael Nadal won his ninth Italian Open, commonly called the Rome Masters, on Sunday, with a convincing demolition of Novak Djokovic. Demolition may sound inflationary, with even a whiff of hype, but the fact is that despite conceding the second…
