Happy holidays, and prepare for the greatest gift: tennis returns tomorrow, December 27.
In the spirit of looking back on the previous season and remembering all the moments big and small that defined it, here is a compendium of tennis stories of all kinds from The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, with a few guest appearances. This is not a “best of,” but rather a “remember when?” and a “did that really happen?” as well as an opportunity to revisit the stories you may have missed.
Matt will hold up the front end of the year given Charlie’s joining for the full launch of tennis coverage in May. See you next season, or rather, tomorrow. — James Hansen
“There is nothing quite like a comeback in tennis, a game that essentially punishes players for time away.
Ranking points disappear. There is no job protection the way there might be for an athlete in a team sport, with an organization committed to managing a rehabilitation, if only to salvage value from a contract. There are no practice starts without consequences in the minor leagues to ease the transition back to top-tier competition.
For older players, the game, the practice sessions, the matches, they all hurt more.”
Matt Futterman
“Mirra Andreeva showed up to tennis in the middle of last season, like the new kid at school whose mother or father has just been transferred into the local branch office.
One day, no one had ever heard of her, the next, she’s all anyone is talking about: 16 years old, three days into the online version of her junior year in high school, complaining about the homework and taking over this Australian Open.”
Matt Futterman
“There was Andy Murray (or was it an actor named Fraser McKnight?) looking very serious, sitting for a tell-all interview.
“The players, the matches, it’s all just made up,” he said. “Let’s face it, people are stupid, so they’ll buy anything.”
There was Novak Djokovic coming clean about his true identity as the actor Bert Critchley, practising ripping his shirt in front of a bathroom mirror and discussing his process of getting into character.
“I want to bring truth to Novak,” he said. “What is he thinking, what is he feeling, what would motivate him, if he was a real person?””
Matt Futterman
“Maybe one day his name will become household. Or maybe not. Tennis is a difficult business; only a tiny sample size of its athletes achieve enough to become part of the vernacular. But what Top Nidunjianzan already has done is extraordinary. In the 50 years since the ATP Tour started its singles ranking system, not a single player from Tibet had earned a single ranking point. Nidunjianzan has 20 of them and ranks 869th in the world.”
Dana O’Neil
Fnu (Top) Nidunjianzan in Tibet. (Courtesy of Princeton Athletics)
“For several minutes, Alcaraz stood in the center of the court in his warm-up jacket, conveying his fears to Davis and a tournament supervisor. They assured him the random flying bee he might still see was harmless.
“If I see the bee, I cannot concentrate on the ball,” he told them.
Both are yellow after all.
Matt Futterman
“No one will ever know whether tennis would have experienced a surge in popularity had more of the best players let in the cameras the way some of the biggest stars in F1 and golf have in recent years for Drive to Survive and Full Swing, the golf equivalent. Still, in many ways, the failure of Break Point revealed some of the long-running fractures and countervailing interests throughout tennis, especially at a time when the best players treat access to their lives as their intellectual property.”
Matt Futterman
“We do compete in many countries that certainly reflect different cultures and value systems,” said Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour. “We certainly understand and respect that Saudi is something that provokes some very strong views.”
Matt Futterman
Challengers, Tashi and the film’s director Luca Guadagnino have plenty to say about that metaphysical quandary. They have plenty to say about the aggression-filled flow state two players enter when they are in the middle of a high-octane match, rhythmically pounding and pattering a ball back and forth across a net.
Challengers may not really be a tennis movie — but it has plenty to say about the quintessence of the sport.
Matt Futterman
“One normal day of Corentin Moutet, that’s all we ask. It will never happen.”
James Hansen
“Initially, it was thought that the bottle might have been thrown deliberately because footage of the incident obscured where the bottle had come from. However, video shows the bottle slipping out of a spectactor’s backpack as they bend over to attempt to get the attention of the 24-time Grand Slam champion.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“The knee-jerk reaction is that women don’t bring in as much money as the men and if they did, they wouldn’t be second-class citizens. Yet consider a counter-narrative: during the 55-year history of the sport’s modern era, if women had received the same exposure and investment as men and didn’t have to confront countless barriers and aggressions, maybe they would be bringing in the same amount of money.”
Matt Futterman
“The dominance becomes self-fulfilling once she wins a few games and she and her opponent both feel like they know what’s coming next, so the starts and ends of points become more inevitable; what happens in between is less important.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“The world of invention is full of products and gadgets intended for one purpose that found their groove with another.
Bubble wrap was supposed to be three-dimensional wallpaper. Viagra was a new blood pressure medication. The slinky was a surefire way to secure naval instruments in rough seas.
Umpire-Head-Camera, welcome to the ranks of unintended consequences.”
Matt Futterman
Corentin Moutet was just one of the players to fall victim. (Eurosport)
“The weeks before the French Open had been filled with doubts. He had barely been able to practice. It seemed like what he had experienced during the previous year, and even for some months before that, was coming for him all over again.
Back then, Alcaraz was starting to gain a reputation as a beautiful but possibly brittle player. His young body, so fast and so strong, way beyond the level of most 20/21-year-olds, somehow kept betraying him.”
Matt Futterman
“All the pent-up emotion that Murray must have been feeling for days, weeks, months, even the seven years since he limped off this court with a hip injury against Sam Querrey and was never the same again, could pour out.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“For the second time in five weeks, Paolini, the diminutive Italian, has forced everyone in the sport to forget everything they thought they knew about the modern version of tennis. She has reminded them of one of the things, maybe even the thing, that makes tennis special.”
Matt Futterman
“After Krejcikova left the court, she saw her name next to Novotna’s on the board that lists the champions on a wall inside the All England Club. Emotion overcame her then.
Afterwards, she said she had been dreaming of Novotna lately. In the dreams, they are talking. She didn’t want to say about what.
“It’s a little personal,” she said.”
Matt Futterman
Barbora Krejcikova’s Wimbledon title stretched back into her tennis youth. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
“Andy Murray made you care.
That was his superpower. There were better players in his era; there were more stylish ones. But none possessed the ability to make you invest emotionally in their matches as much as Murray did.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“I have no cartilage in my knees,” Bopanna repeated several times during a recent interview, emphasizing the absurdity of what he has accomplished despite all that. He shook his head. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he recalled asking a relative, a yoga teacher, if she could help.
At the time, it was not a particularly serious question. The answer ended up changing his life.
Matt Futterman
Aged seven, Zheng went to Wuhan with her father to play in front of a coach. She impressed so much that she would stay there to train — alone.
“Now I can tell him I made history,” she said, beaming with the brightest of smiles.
Matt Futterman
“Djokovic went to the center of the court and knelt in prayer, crossing his chest, his closed eyes looking skyward with his arms raised in the air. He crouched on the clay, crying more, his hands trembling.”
Matt Futterman
“All of these processes follow the Tennis Anti-Doping Program (TADP) regulations. But that hasn’t stopped the fury from Sinner’s fellow players.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Gauff knows this isn’t about just about her. During her lifetime, Black Americans have become some of the biggest stars in tennis and in some cases have transcended the sport, especially in the U.S.”
Matt Futterman
“Most people can envisage dating someone who does the same job or works for the same company. But most people’s jobs don’t involve travelling the world to play a very selfish sport in front of thousands of people, sometimes with — or even against — your partner.”
Charlie Eccleshare
It was a summer of love in tennis in 2024. (Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)
“How did that chirpy teenager suddenly get to this middle-age existence, wife and kids and in-law dinners, wearing the status of millennial tennis wise man?
Where does life, his and ours, go?”
Matt Futterman
“Muchova has come from a place that no tennis player wants to go. After that surgery in February, on the area of the body tennis players most dread becoming damaged, Muchova worried she might not play the sport again.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Something about the human backboard nature of her play, the hard (but not too hard), flat power of ball after ball after ball opposing off her racket. The beauty of her game, her economic and elegant movement, and the subtle scything of her forehand almost go unnoticed.
She is plenty steady, sure, but that doesn’t begin to describe her. Stealthy is more like it.”
Matt Futterman
“Sabalenka can be funny and bubbly off the court but has a temper to match her athletic gifts on it, and an obduracy that follows her out of the tramlines too. When the stress ramped up, she would get so hot she could barely breathe or function, let alone serve.
That is when it helps to have someone with a background in martial arts: a discipline in controlling your breathing and your emotions when you are facing someone beating the crap out of you.”
Matt Futterman
“Both are so quick that they look like they could be Olympic sprinters, and where Alcaraz lunges and bends like his limbs are putty, Sinner dives and twirls like a superhero escaping from a burning building.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Forlan expected to spend much of his retirement honing his golf game, but instead has found himself drawn back to tennis. Nothing else gives him the same satisfaction as the sport that, along with football, he excelled at in his youth.”
Diego Forlan’s professional debut was one of the less likely stories of the year. (Kevin Santamaria / Tenis al Maximo)
“When the WTA go to Saudi, I would say they should adopt a political prisoner’s case and take it on and say ‘OK, we’re going, but we are also advocating for them. And Manahel al-Otaibi (the jailed fitness instructor) is the closest case you could have to sports. Say, ‘We are happy to be in Saudi. We’re happy that Saudi women are to now play tennis. But what about Manahel al-Otaibi?’”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Jannik Sinner is trying to speak, but his own name is resounding too loudly across the Inalpi Arena in Turin. Lit up on billboards, written on placards, chanted across the aisles. Sinner, the first Italian to achieve the men’s world No. 1 ranking, isn’t just the featured attraction of the ATP Tour Finals tournament in his home country: He is the tournament, on the court and off it.”
Matt Futterman
“Instead of letting her serve become a complete albatross, Errani has used her ground skills, tactical nous and the shock factor of a serve that regularly registers around 60mph (96.5kph) on the speed gun to reach the very top of tennis in singles and doubles.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“For two decades, whatever outrageous fortune controls tennis injuries kept slinging arrows at Rafael Nadal.
When the Spaniard finally raised his white flag last month, he admitted defeat to an opponent he had vanquished not just in his later years but for two decades, until he couldn’t win the battle any more.”
Matt Futterman
Rafael Nadal’s retirement was one of many that defined the year. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)
“Both Swiatek’s one-month suspension and the decision not to ban Jannik Sinner for his two positive tests for clostebol, an anabolic steroid, have been conducted according to ITIA protocol. Both cases have also revealed deep wells of mistrust and anger within tennis from fans and players alike, confused at players being allowed to play while under investigation. Everything has been done by the book. The book appears in need of a rewrite.”
Matt Futterman
“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “It wasn’t something wrong with me.”
Matt Futterman
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s my boyfriend’s birthday. Like happy birthday. I love you.’ And then, boom!
“It was so normal for me that I didn’t think about it.”
Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman
(Top photo: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6013554/2024/12/26/best-tennis-moments-stories-2024/
