Gerald Marzorati

Zheng may no longer be the face of a national movement, but she has become one of the game’s most promising young players.

In the most absorbing Grand Slam championship match on the men’s side in years, what mattered most was in-the-moment decision-making.

Hard as it may be to believe, this is the fifth time that Gauff has had a spot in the U.S. Open’s main singles draw. She is still a teen-ager—she will turn twenty next March. She was only fifteen years old, and just months into her first season on the W.T.A. tour, when she caught the world’s attention by stunning Venus Williams in the first round at Wimbledon, in 2019. She left the court overwhelmed and teary; the Williams sisters had inspired her to take up tennis. People already knew that Gauf…

The young American player has inherited the mantle of the big servers of the past—and it’s thrilling to watch.

This summer, it was mostly Gauff’s offense—the aggressive mind-set that saw her stepping inside the baseline, getting her body behind her ground strokes, and ending points quickly—that raised the level of her game and won her a pair of hard-court titles in the weeks leading up to the Open. She arrived in Flushing being discussed, for the first time in her still young career, as a favorite to win a major championship. But, from the opening moments of Saturday’s final, it was clear that offense wa…

The 2024 Australian Open is getting under way, and it will mark Osaka’s return to Grand Slam tennis after she gave birth, last July, to a daughter named Shai, which is Hebrew for “gift.” Since she won the Australian Open for the second time, three years ago, Osaka has rarely played at a title-contending level; before her pregnancy, she was hampered by injuries and by strains to her mental health. Last year, she described her mood after that Australian Open win, her fourth victory at a major: “I’…

Aryna Sabalenka, at age twenty-five, is now the preëminent power player in women’s tennis, and, in the Australian Open women’s final, on Saturday, she overwhelmed her opponent, China’s Qinwen Zheng, 6–3, 6–2. If it was drama you were after, or even a few lengthy, all-court rallies, it probably was a hard one to watch. But if you focussed on Sabalenka, directed your attention to her game, you were afforded a near-perfect master class: power at its finest, in tennis, anyway, is more beauty than br…

Alcaraz wasn’t wrong. The contest between him and Djokovic was a fight between generations—the greatest player in one cohort trying not to pass the torch to the one who’s up next. But tennis’s true rivalries pair players who are coming of age at roughly the same time, arriving at the cusp of preëminence together. These battles, if they last long enough, become mnemonic, helping us to recall eras: the Borg-McEnroe period of the late seventies and early eighties, the Agassi-Sampras age in the nine…

Fresh injuries were continually added to what would eventually be a long list; in his roughly two-decade-long career, Nadal has been sidelined for sixteen majors. But the list of victories would grow along with it: ninety-two singles titles, including twenty-two major titles and, among those, an astounding fourteen French Open wins. Nadal, who will turn thirty-eight next month, is in Paris once more to compete in what is likely to be his last French Open, and perhaps his last tour tournament as…

Italy boasts the No. 1 player in the world, and has as many players in the Top Forty as the United States. It’s not an accident.