Submissions have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hey everyone …
• Here’s this week’s Served podcast:
• Apologies to Lorenzo Sonego, but we have a new (and not dissimilar) shot-of-the-year candidate.
• Big story to follow: the L'Équipe report that the top 20 players have signed a letter demanding more prize money from the majors. It’s an interesting tactic—coming barely a week after the PTPA lawsuit, which none has publicly supported. What is the bottom line here? Are players asking for more? Or are they willing to strike?
• Coco Gauff is headed to WME.
Onward …
Isn't Jannik Sinner the big winner from this spring? He gets a few months off, doesn't miss a major and everyone else (except [Jakub Menšík]) seems to be taking on damage.
J.O.B.
• Thanks. I took the liberty of adding this to our Served Q&A, and Andy and I discussed this topic the other day.
To level-set: If the choice were going winless in 2025 or dealing with a doping suspension, and all that comes with it—the stress, the palette of emotions, the reputational stain, the locker room awkwardness—we can safely assume that Sinner would take Door One. It’s hard to frame a doping suspension as some kind of disguised blessing.
But J.O.B.’s point stands. As the PTPA lawsuit stressed, “Players are forced to endure grueling schedules.” For 16 or so months, Sinner has played peerless tennis, winning three of the past five majors, but he has been going nonstop. And doing so with the stress of the positive test. Suddenly, he “gets” a mandated 90-day hiatus. No competition. No travel. No defending points. No physical grind. No jet lag. No rain delays. No hard mattresses. He doesn’t miss any majors and even gets a tune-up—at his home country’s Masters 1000—before Roland Garros. All while his main rivals and contemporaries are retreating a bit (see below).
We’ll see what happens at Roland Garros. Sinner is in a tough situation. If he wins on clay (not his best surface), there will be complaints that he benefited from time off while everyone else was grinding out matches. If he fares poorly, there will, inevitably, be whispers that his aura is vanishing. If there’s any silver lining, I suppose it’s this: he’s 23. Plenty of time and opportunity to win more majors and distance himself from this unpleasant situation.
Hi, Jon,
In what Jenson Brooksby must hope will become a metaphor for his tennis career, he had a stunning series of comeback wins to win the title last week in —overcoming match points in three separate matches and coming back from 5–3 deficits in what would have the decisive set in both his opening qualifier against Federico Gómez and his second round match against Alejandro Tabilo, who also led 6–3 in the third-set tiebreaker. Have you seen anything like it? Is having such coolness under pressure taught or something you're born with?
Rob
• In keeping with our theme for 2025, there will not be the predictability of the past two decades. In its stead, there will be surprise winners, revelations and heartwarming stories. We got all of the above in Houston as Brooksby took the title with, as Rob notes, poised play to complement his usual craft. If you have been following Brooksby’s career, it’s especially heartening. Hat tip to Howard Fendrich for this piece. Hat tip to Brooksby for telling the world he’s neurodivergent and explaining why this not only poses a challenge but may benefit his tennis.
Was ATP CEO Massimo Calvelli forced to depart the ATP in June or did he decide to voluntarily leave on his own for a different job opportunity?
Sunny, Philadelphia
• Last week, the ATP announced that CEO Massimo Calvelli would step down from his role by the end of June. I was told by multiple sources that he had a job opportunity he could not pass up. Then came a Bloomberg report that Calvelli will be working for RedBird Capital Partners, a big player in the sports and media space.
So often—not simply in sports, much less tennis—there’s an announcement like this and, in due course, it’s revealed that the executive lost the trust of the CEO, or the board, or there was another indication the “amiable” departure was not, in fact, voluntary. It would be naive not to point out that this announcement comes shortly after the majors rejected the ATP-driven plan to restructure the sport, in which Calvelli had a significant hand. (And the week before that, the PTPA filed a lawsuit against the ATP et al.) But no one whom I consulted believes that he was pushed out. That he already has such a significant landing spot would seem to support that this was voluntary (though the PTPA implies otherwise).
Hey Jon,
Not too long ago, when the Big 3 (and Stan [Wawrinka] and Andy [Murray]) were dominating, there was a narrative, for better or for worse, that the ATP was wildly predictable, and the WTA was completely opposite. Predict a WTA slam winner at your own peril. Is it fair to say that right now, the WTA is actually the slightly more predictable of the two tours? If anything, they must be even in that regard? It’s so crazy how parity has been established in such a short time.
Best regards,
LT (Toronto)
• We have gone from the ritual excellence of three guys in particular—but Andy Murray to the semis, Wawrinka to the quarters/semis, and David Ferrer to the quarters even seems to have been taken for granted!—to anyone-can-beat-anyone parity. When four players in the group retire, it is going to add significant variance.
If said variance accelerated this year, it’s with good reason. The No. 1 player (Sinner) is currently serving a doping ban. The No. 2 guy (Alexander Zverev) is slumping at a most inopportune time (not that there is an opportune time to slump). The No. 3 guy (Carlos Alcaraz) is the rare star who plays better at majors than at Masters events. And no other player in the current Top 10 has won a major. …
To your point, the WTA might well be more predictable than the ATP now. Even baking in the fact that the smaller sample of best-of-three sets versus best-of-five will always lead to statistically flukier results, there is an empirical answer here. Maybe a Jeff Sackman type with better quantitative skills can furnish the results. Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek and Gauff might not be week-in-week-out Serena-style locks. But they are awfully reliable overall.
Do note that this is normal in sports, both team and individual. There is a dominant entity, and fans complain, The Lakers or Celtics win every year! There is an “Any Given Sunday” parity, and fans complain that it was more fun when there was a bankable winner.
Jon:
I notice Coco Vandeweghe seems to be broadcasting tennis more and more. I assume you have worked with her at Tennis Channel and I’m curious what you think of her on-air. Thanks, Emily
• I try to be fully transparent and go the neither-fear-nor-favor route. But I’m not sure it’s professional and/or cool to weigh in on colleagues.
An exception here. To borrow from Conan O’Brien, I’m team Coco. Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Coco. She’s a pal. Objectively, she’s great. When she played, her tennis was sourced to the let-in-rip school; so is her commentary. Expect to see more of her.
A fair number of you ask about commentary. With last week’s announcement that Andre Agassi will join the TNT team for Roland Garros coverage, this is as good a time as any to dust off old media cut-and-pastes.
Without specifics or naming names, here are some ground rules:
• For all of tennis’s issues and challenges and own-goals, a lack of broadcasting talent isn’t among them. Overall, I’d say the tennis roster is quite good. A lot of people have a lot of chops. Among former players, there’s a deep bench (Andrea Petkovic, the aforementioned Vandeweghe, Chris Eubanks and now … Agassi enters the booth).
• The tennis rot that is conflicts of interest can spoil a broadcast. When a coach is angling for a new job, is he going to be necessarily critical? When a broadcaster and a player on the court share an agent, is the said broadcaster going to be objective?
• The best of the bunch are the non-narcissists. Lindsay Davenport and Jim Courier are Hall of Famers. Brad Gilbert was a top-five player. So too, James Blake. Often, you would never know that when listening to them. Why? Because they can process a match without the prism of their own experience. When appropriate, they can—and do—draw from their history and perspective. But they are unencumbered by ego.
• Conversely, the broadcasters who struggle rely on the vertical pronoun (I) and get overwhelmed by their narcissism. They could watch Rafael Nadal win a 15th French Open and say, That’s amazing. I never even won one! Or there’s the annihilatingly lame and self-referential, That means Nadal and I have combined to win 15 Roland Garros titles!
•TV is harder than it looks.
•TV is subjective. Some people love John McEnroe and his everyman, I-just-parachuted-in-just-like-you-likely-did approach. Some people hate John McEnroe for his lack of familiarity with mainstream players. There is no scoreboard or objective measure. And so, compliments and criticism tend to cancel each other out.
• The gentle reminder that broadcasters do not decide which matches to show. They do not set the price of the streaming subscription. They are not responsible for buffering and technical glitches and VPN.
• If tennis has a media problem, it’s the balkanization and—a theme for this sport—the structure, whereby the greater good of the sport takes a backseat to fiefdom protection. This Charlie Eccleshare piece from The Athletic should be required reading.
Jon, I saw what you wrote last week about the bad image tennis sends when tennis players toss their sweaty towels at ballkids. I agree but here’s my question. Do we need to rethink the idea of the ballkid entirely?
Anon, London
• I don’t think so. Some of this is practical. Tennis might look elitist when athletes throw kids sweat-and-snot-saturated linens. But it would also look amateur if players were ambling around between points picking up the balls, the way we recreational players do. It would also add delays, etc.
Maybe more important, serving as a ballkid is an A+ way for tennis to inspire kids. They get to see the sport up close. They see firsthand how grueling it is and how extraordinarily accurately and powerfully players hit the ball. They get to be part of the circus. It’s remarkable how many top players were once ballkids.
I recently met a teenager who was a ballkid for an event in Europe. With great specificity, she can tick off the names of players who treated the ballkids with courtesy (Grigor Dimitrov, Jack Draper) and those who did not (charity will prevent us from naming names without giving the alleged bad actors an opportunity for due process).
She raised a fair point that it would be nice if more players thanked the ballkids in their winner’s speeches. Here’s how to get players’ attention: In other sports, it’s tradition for athletes to tip the clubhouse attendants and locker room staff (the folks handling their sweaty laundry and linens). In tennis, they’re just asking for some acknowledgment. Seems like a reasonable request.
HAVE A GOOD WEEK, EVERYONE!
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tennis Mailbag: What to Expect From Jannik Sinner’s Return .
