Between 1960 and 1971, the men's singles title at the Australian Championships went to a home player every single year. Eleven straight.
You try a shoe on in the store. You walk a few laps of the carpet, do a couple of awkward little hops by the bench, and it feels right — snug at the heel, no pinch across the toes.
The week before the 2025 US Open, we printed the men's singles draw and did something that took ninety seconds and felt slightly grim: we counted the Americans. Eleven in the 128.
Most of the gear writing you will read about court shoes inherited its vocabulary from a source nobody checks anymore.
Vibration dampeners are the cheapest thing in the bag and the most over-explained. Players who have spent a season fine-tuning string tension and swingweight will drop a five-dollar rubber button…
The grip that feels most unnatural in your hand is the one tennis started with. Everything else came later. That is the part most lesson plans skip.
The between-the-legs shot gets the highlight reel and the slow-motion replay and the commentator who forgets words for a second. It is the tennis shot everyone clips.
In the first round at Wimbledon in 2010, John Isner hit 113 aces in a single match. Mahut hit 103. The match ran 11 hours and 5 minutes across three days and finished 70-68 in the fifth set.
There is a sentence you will hear in nearly every conversation about American tennis history: that the United States produced an unbroken line of champions until the 1990s, and then the well went dry.…