LONDON (AP) — Through it all, Venus Williams kept working, kept striving, kept eyeing yet another Wimbledon championship. Through it all, through the difficult days of adjusting to life with an energy-sapping autoimmune disease, through the disappointing days of first-round losses that led to questions about retirement, through all of

Nestled between January's summer swing of tournaments in Australia, and March's Sunshine Double in the U.S., February can be overlooked in tennis. But not in 2021, with the Australian Open's temporary move to the second and shortest month of the calendar. Beyond that, February is Black History Month, and also

The tours have reached a mid-winter state of equilibrium, or stasis, depending on your point of view. For the second straight week, the women will gather in the Arabian Desert, while the men remain scattered between continents and surfaces in Europe, the U.S. and South America. Let’s do it again,

At 5-5 in the first set against Matteo Berrettini in Rome on Tuesday, Alexander Zverev had a break point. In the middle of that point, he had a look at a short backhand. Now, it seemed, the moment had finally come for the No. 4 seed to rip his favorite

How did Ash Barty react on court when she had to pull out of a Grand Slam event that many had favored her to win? Pretty much the way you’d think she would react: Stoically and unflappably, with little more than a quick wave as she made her undramatic exit

When Novak Djokovic’s career is complete, he’ll own at least 17 Grand Slam singles titles, 36 ATP Masters 1000 trophies and five season-ending championships. We’ll remember some of his 900-plus victories more than others, many of which took place in Melbourne, where he’s won a record eight Australian Opens. At

PARIS—Late Saturday night, Novak Djokovic stepped onto Court Philippe Chatrier for his third-round match with Lorenzo Musetti. By early Sunday morning—with the on-court clock ticking over to four hours and 29 minutes just after Djokovic wrapped up another Grand Slam victory he won't soon forget—the 24-time major champion prevailed at

If Novak Djokovic were ever going to let a big final go and live to fight another day, it would have been on an afternoon like this one. The world No. 1 had been sick the previous night, after winning a draining semifinal. He had a stiff neck for much

It’s good to see the family again, isn’t it? That’s what I kept thinking as I watched the WTA play over the last seven days in Palermo. It was the site of the first official tournament since the pandemic lockdowns began in March, and it felt like a reunion of

What can drive a player to win a tournament he’s already won 10 times? That’s not a question we’ve ever had to answer before in tennis, but we’ll find out on three occasions this spring, when Rafael Nadal goes for No. 11 in Monte Carlo, Barcelona and at the French

Leave tennis for a week, and chances are you’ll come back to discover that nothing is quite the same. The last time I wrote a post here, on Thursday, September 11, the sport was trying to recover from its U.S. Open hangover in New York by perusing that weekend’s Davis

PARIS—One advantage of the compact nature of Roland Garros is that it’s easy, during a slow hour in the second week, to stumble onto a junior match. The side courts where the kids play at Flushing Meadows are mostly off the main thoroughfare, and I somehow managed to miss the

Tennis Magazine contributing editor Joel Drucker was covering the ATP event in San Jose this week for the 26th straight year. He checked in here with a quick missive after the final. I'll be back with my armchair quarterbacking later today. Hi Steve, There are those who say they wish

Disagreement is the name of the game in tennis, however far and wide you travel. I was sitting in a coffee shop a few mornings ago near Melbourne Park, happily attempting not to think about the sport for a few minutes, when I heard two American women at the next

It’s amazing how quickly, when you watch a tennis match and your Twitter feed at the same time, the tweets can shift from “Upset Alert!” to “Epic Collapse Alert!” This afternoon the switchover came in a flash during the second set between Victoria Azarenka and Dominika Cibulkova in Miami. Cibulkova,

There are four tour events on the Continent this week; the men are in Nice and Düsseldorf, the women in Strasbourg and Nürnberg. Yet with no Top 5 players involved, it still feels like a pause in the run-up to this Sunday’s start of the French Open. Here’s a quick

By the time Novak Djokovic was up 4-2 in the third set against David Goffin in Monte Carlo on Friday, it felt like déjà vu, and the result felt little more than academic. Djokovic had escaped his first match this week 7-5 in the third over Gilles Simon, and he

Quiet February begins to get a little noisier this week, as most of the top women return to action in top-dollar Doha, and the men get their first 500-level event of the month in Rotterdam. Here’s a look ahead at what we might see at those and two other men’s

There may not be a sure-fire way to beat Rafael Nadal, but there is a type of player who can do it, and Ernests Gulbis, whatever his other flaws may be, fits the bill. The irascible, mercurial, and sometimes lackadaisical Latvian is tall enough to take Nadal’s high-bouncing topspin in

NEW YORK—The first words that I scrawled, hurriedly and blurrily, in my notebook during the match between Roger Federer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Thursday night were these: “JWT aggressive early; RF not keeping up.” A second earlier, JWT had taken an RF serve and followed it forward to win a