For anyone who thinks the life of a professional athlete is by nature brutish, short, and occasionally nasty, you don’t know your French tennis players. On the whole, they consider the game more than merely a profession, or a competition where the sole goal is to line their bank accounts

Danish teen Clara Tauson has cut a unique figure at the Open 6ème Sens Métropole de Lyon. The 2019 junior Australian Open champion has yet to drop a set all week, outhitting top seed Ekaterina Alexandrova, Timea Babos, and Camila Giorgi to reach her first WTA semifinal. “I’ve been playing

NEW YORK—As games go, it was a heartbreaker, and when it was over—after Maria Sharapova followed up that break of serve with a match-clinching hold to beat Marion Bartoli, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4—you were entitled to pay homage to Sharapova’s well-documented fighting spirit. But you could also easily conjure up that

Yesterday, a ray of sunlight broke through the gloom in which U.S. tennis has been mired lately: Madison Keys and CoCo Vandeweghe won the final warm-up tournaments before the start of Wimbledon. It was the first time a brace of American women won tournaments in the same week since Venus

Four times a year, major events turn the pro tennis court into a runway of sorts. With Roland Garros at its midpoint, the style report is in as a tailored, trimmed-down account of the tournament's well-heeled wardrobing. Earlier this week, you enjoyed the fashion aces, and now, here are the

FLASHBACK: Auger-Aliassime meets with artist/musician Stan Yarramunua

• 201101170231090917798-p2@stats_com by Pete Bodo* NEW YORK—It didn't exactly feel like an omen for the qualifying tournament of the U.S. Open, but when fishing nut Frank Dancevic caught a couple of 10 lb. walleye in Lake Erie just a weeks ago (trolling a harnessed worm rig, if you must know)

There was no shortage of Irish men and women - honorary as well as authentic - scattered around in the big bowl of the main stadium at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, like so many green M&Ms.But the luck for which the Irish are famous was showered on someone no

MIAMI, USA — Amid feel-good breakthroughs and big-name upsets at the Miami Open presented by Itau, 20-year-old Coleman Wong of Hong Kong has grabbed all the headlines. Ranked No. 182 in the world, the wild card clinched the biggest win of his career to date with a 7-6 (3), 2-6,

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” said Shakespeare’s Cassius. There is a general feeling among the tennis cognoscenti with whom I have spoken that Novak Djokovic, who seems to be taking on a Cassius persona with Vasek Pospisil

Stan Wawrinka stood, frozen and flat-footed, in the middle of the court as the ball went past him for a winner. He had been expecting it to come to his backhand side. When it went to his forehand instead, there was nothing the newly-crowned U.S. Open champion could do but

Steve Tignor will return from vacation next Monday. In the meantime, we'll be running some past articles from Steve, including this one, on the beauty and variety of the tennis score: Seeing the unlikely final score—7-6 (0), 1-6, 7-6 (4)—of John Isner’s high-wire win over James Blake Thursday night in

105055963 by Pete Bodo Whatever happens in the Novak Djokovic-John Isner semifinal at the China Open will produce a bumper crop of those "irresistible force meets immovable object" moments. Tennis match-ups are tantalizing for any number of reasons having to do with strategy and/or technique, and sometimes for a variety

Okay, the first big results from Rogers Masters is in: Robin Haase has bounced Tomas Berdych. While that's not stop-the-presses-grade news, it's a testament to the strength of the Montreal field. Gee, after LA, Indianapolis and Washington, I'd almost come to believe that the guys in tennis who really matter

There’s a mystery, a void in our understanding of the rules of cause and effect, at the center of professional tennis at the moment. It has to do with Ana Ivanovic’s serve. The unanswerable question is this: Why can’t the former French Open champion toss the ball in the right

WATCH: World No. 1 Ashleigh Barty leads a top tier of challengers into the Wimbledon semis.

In the early stages of at stay-at-home orders brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many across the globe turned to online shopping to seek out necessities and products to enhance life under quarantine. Except there was one problem: the E-commerce world wasn’t prepared to take on the exponential increase in

The French have always been paragons of sophistication and they’ve never shied away from letting you know it. They have the finest wine, the most cerebral writers, luxurious scarves, and the Mona Lisa, not to mention the stinkiest cheese, and—d’accord!—those Repetto ballet flats. But that only makes their obsession with

What would the French Open look like if it were played somewhere other than Roland Garros? Let’s take a step back: Could there even be a Grand Slam in Paris at any other location? The tournament and the site where it has been played since 1928 are so intertwined that,

First-time Grand Slam finalist Petra Kvitova will face former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova in the women's final. We asked Peter Bodo, who's reporting from the All England Club, five questions about the match. 1. How much of an underdog is Kvitova? I don’t think she’s much of an underdog at