How to fix tennis
Curfews and start time cut-offs feel like the most obvious solutions. And if tennis actually wants to address the root of the problem, it should give serious consideration to making the first weeks of Grand Slams best-of-three rather than best-of-five sets for men’s matches.
Baseball and cricket are evidence that sports can evolve and modernise, eve... See more
Baseball and cricket are evidence that sports can evolve and modernise, eve... See more
Morning after the night before: In the cold light of day, a tennis match at 3am is ridiculous
Alex Burns added
but moneyyyy
the most dramatic change in recent years is the strings. The advent of a new elastic polyester string, which creates vicious topspin, has turned average players into greats, and greats into legends.
Andre Agassi • Open
The basic arc of Andy Roddick’s life goes something like this:
One day you’re a chirpy, hot-shot teenager with a thunderclap serve, who wears a baseball cap on a tennis court before that becomes a thing, and then one day you’re not good enough anymore, because inevitably nobody is. In between, you go to the top of a sport that doesn’t love chirpy te... See more
One day you’re a chirpy, hot-shot teenager with a thunderclap serve, who wears a baseball cap on a tennis court before that becomes a thing, and then one day you’re not good enough anymore, because inevitably nobody is. In between, you go to the top of a sport that doesn’t love chirpy te... See more
Andy Roddick, the U.S. Open’s last American male champion, sees himself a tennis schlub
“Out of all the research that we’ve done with top players, we haven’t found a single player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does,” the legendary tennis coach Vic Braden once complained. “They give different answers at different times, or they have answers that simply are not meaningful.”7
Sebastian Mallaby • More Money Than God
Days after a quarterfinal loss in the 2010 French Open, Novak Djokovic told his coach, Marián Vajda, that he had decided to quit playing tennis. He was No. 3 in the world, a grand slam winner, and a favorite to win Wimbledon. After Djokovic said he was quitting, Vajda asked, “Why did you start playing this sport?” Vajda immediately sensed what the
... See moreAlara added
Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our
... See moreAndre Agassi • Open
By the 1980s McDonaldisation was spreading to the world of leisure and sports. Partly as the result of new technologies, tennis was being McDonaldised too.