Morning after the night before: In the cold light of day, a tennis match at 3am is ridiculous

the nearly unanimous opinion of everyone involved in the game — its leaders, its players, tournament organizers, sponsors, media executives, coaches — is that professional tennis is broken, a structural mess that exhausts its players, cannibalizes its business with dueling events and exists in a constant state of civil war among its alphabet soup o... See more

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

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