NEW YORK—As pre-tournament favorites go, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal haven’t exactly impressed in their first two matches at the US Open, while Alexander Zverev crashed out in the second round. Meanwhile, Garbine Muguruza, the consensus favorite on the women’s side, has somehow managed to exceed prognosticators’ lofty expectations. The

MELBOURNE—A wise woman once said she was never more serious than when making a joke. Just ask Naomi Osaka. Serving at 5-4, 15-0 love in the second set of her third-round match versus Su-Wei Hsieh, Osaka tumbled and fell on the court. Asked by chair umpire Manuel Absolu if she

WATCH—What happens when the world's best are no longer around?

It’s become pretty clear that in tennis, 18 is the new black. Like Pete Sampras before him, Roger Federer wasn’t content to break the all-time Grand Slam singles title record—he shattered it. And it’s a shame in many ways that he did it so soon after Sampras’ epic feat. Roy

The storyline leading up to this weekend’s first round of Fed Cup has been a grimly familiar one: Where are the players? Russia, a traditional powerhouse, will travel to Australia with what can charitably be described as its D team—the country’s 11 best women won’t make the trip, and one

At the turn of the last decade, a Romanian player named Andrew Ilie briefly made inroads on the ATP tour. He was squat and stocky, a fire hydrant on wheels. He was also an excitable sort, so much so that I remember it being said that you could only explain

Part II of my Rally from north of the border with Kamakshi Tandon, editor of Tennis Journal, who is on site in Toronto. See Part I here.

MELBOURNE—What you don’t want in your first Grand Slam semi is to be broken in your opening service game. Losing the first set 6-0 against an opponent who makes one unforced error also isn’t particularly helpful. And really, alas, it was ostensibly a match point when, in the second set

Some co-names, like Bennifer and Brangelina, are eternal. But I’ll bet you thought you had heard the last of “Wozzilroy” after Rory McIlroy ended his engagement with Caroline Wozniacki two months ago. Not so fast—judging by the events of this weekend, we may be hearing quite a bit more from

It’s been an historic summer, a tearful summer, a lordly summer. We’ll likely never witness a month of all-time achievements like the one we just saw from Roger Federer. But it’s also been one-sided summer, because the person who has defined this era with Federer, Rafael Nadal, has been missing.

By now you know what the color of tennis is going to be next week. The crazy blue clay of Madrid is the talk of both tours as they converge on the city for the first mandatory French Open tune-up event. We’ve had shock, we've had awe, we’ve had complaints,

Nasdaq-100 Saturday, March 25 It was a sunny and not-at-all-sweltering Saturday in Key Biscayne. Here's one account of it, bit by bit, from morning to night. 9:30 A.M.: Doubletree Coconut Grove breakfast room For a second straight day, the first person I see at the hotel is Paul Goldstein. Yesterday

In the two days—has it only been two days?—since the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup, there has been a lot of optimistic talk in the States about this country’s newfound appreciation for women’s sports. To the joy and surprise of many, the women's blowout win over Japan

Can live tennis make you woozy after a while? You wouldn’t think so, but that’s what watching it to does to me—more so than watching baseball or football or basketball. Tennis requires you to concentrate on hundreds of individual points and moments per match with little respite. Everything counts. Have

I tried to serve to learn to serve and volley, I really did. But I was a baseliner, and that’s all there was to it. That’s pretty much all there could be to it. It was watching Michael Llodra play this morning that made realize why there haven’t been many

There are players whose shots make you go “wow.” There are others who make you plant your palm against your forehead. Then there’s Su-Wei Hsieh. How do you know when the 32-year-old from Taiwan is making a rare appearance on TV? When the person watching is constantly breaking out in

Recent form. It’s one of the crutches that all tennis prognosticators use as we try to peer into the unknown and predict who will win a match. But it’s one of our fallacies, as well. If a player is in the middle of a hot streak, does that mean she’ll

WIMBLEDON, England—No, not this. Not this, too. That, I’m willing to bet, is what millions of tennis fans were thinking as Sergiy Stakhovsky inched closer to an improbable victory over Roger Federer late Wednesday afternoon. Was there really another upset, another freak occurrence, in store for us on this freakiest

The flimsy junior racquets of the past get an upgrade. If you began playing tennis as a kid anywhere from the late 1970s to the late ’90s with one of those 25- or 26-inch aluminum junior racquets, you knew when it was time to move up to a standard 27-inch

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)—Canadian Milos Raonic needed only 75 minutes to beat Benjamin Becker of Germany 6-4, 6-4 Saturday in the semifinals of the Regions Morgan Keegan Championships and reach his second final in as many weeks. Raonic won at San Jose last week and is 15-1 in match play this