0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/24/2016
The French Open didn’t occupy a prominent psychological place in Andy Murray’s tennis season — not in the distant past. Murray’s favorite major tournament is and has been the U.S. Open. His most consistent major tournament is the Australian Open, where he’s reached five finals dating back to 2010. The major tournament freighted with the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/17/2016
The past week at the Rome Masters did not reveal much about the ATP Tour — certainly not in terms of tennis. The story of men’s tennis at the Foro Italico proved to be illuminating not for its on-court aspects, but for its off-court dimensions. Italy’s Masters 1000 tournament represented a convincing argument for anyone […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/9/2016
The official record will state — for anyone and everyone who looks up the result in subsequent years — that Novak Djokovic defeated Andy Murray on Sunday for his latest Masters 1000 championship in Madrid. Unofficially, the man Djokovic most centrally defeated at La Caja Magica was Djokovic himself. The World No. 1 has won […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/18/2016
Anyone who has ever loved tennis knows the sport possesses a singular quality, a uniquely combative nature which resonates across much of the globe. This is a violent sport. It’s anything but the longstanding and laughably empty stereotypical image of a “sissy” or “genteel” activity. Yet, the competitors don’t suffer black eyes, fractured jaws, or […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/4/2016
The 2016 Miami Open might become something very different in the course of time… and that’s part of what made it such a fascinating tournament to observe. We could look back on the past week and a half in Key Biscayne, Florida, and realize that the journey led to predictable endpoints in 2016: Novak Djokovic […]
Roger Federer of Switzerland wipes the sweat from his face during his semifinal match against Novak Djokovic of Serbia at the Australian Open tennis championships in Melbourne, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016.(AP Photo/Andrew Brownbill)
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 1/28/2016
Roger Federer, being 34 years old, could be viewed as a tennis player who is stepping into the twilight of his career. Whether or not that view is supremely fair or substantive is another question, but the idea that a 34-year-old tennis player stands in or near the twilight realm of his (her) journey is […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 1/24/2016
One relatively common, pervasive and durable component of tennis analysis — especially in relationship to the practice of predicting outcomes — is the citation of a player’s form. He’s the more in-form player at the moment. Based on current form, she should be the favorite. The idea is easy enough to understand, and it’s not […]
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – JANUARY 19: Rafael Nadal of Spain speaks to the media during a press conference following his loss to Fernando Verdasco of Spain during day two of the 2016 Australian Open at Melbourne Park on January 19, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
0 comments by Yesh Ginsburg on 1/19/2016
Between the men’s and women’s draws, 17 upsets emerged in the first round if viewed strictly through the prism of seeded players losing–five from the men and a whopping 11 on the women’s side. Some of these came out of nowhere, some were more-or-less expected, some were in between. In order of most expected to […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The 2016 Australian Open — which burst into dramatic color on Tuesday in Melbourne — can be summarized in this image: The tournament smacked a lot of players in the face, immediately changing the tenor of a very young tennis season. * Remember the 2015 U.S. Open? Yeah, me neither. Many of the events which unfolded […]
0 comments by Yesh Ginsburg on 1/17/2016
The draw for the 2016 Australian Open is here, and everyone has been poring over it since it was first announced. So, without further ado, here are the five things that most jumped out to me when I first looked at the draw: 1. Lleyton Hewitt Has the Perfect Opportunity However much this tournament will […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 12/10/2015
(NOTE: A story on Novak Djokovic’s 2015 season was originally posted here after Mr. Djokovic won the 2015 ATP World Tour Finals in late November, days before the Davis Cup. It was accidentally deleted and unable to be retrieved. It was not scrubbed or purposefully removed. Life just happened. What follows is therefore not a […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 11/29/2015
If you traveled 80 years into the past, you would have traveled into a world which — in tennis terms — featured Great Britain as a foremost tennis nation, not a peripheral player on the scene. In 1935, the part of the world which birthed the sport of tennis was also the best at playing […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/14/2015
One set all. 4-4 in the third set. The U.S. Open final. The two best ATP stars in the world, playing their hearts out before 23,000-plus spectators (many of them poorly behaved, but that’s another story). This is the moment every professional tennis player dreams of. It’s the moment every tennis pro tries to reach. […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/5/2015
Our story begins not with a review of the first week of the U.S. Open, but with a story about the evolution of American college football. Europeans and other international readers, you’re not going to get an explanation about the innards of Yankee-style football, merely a note about the culture of this sport and how […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Before those of us who write about sports made the decision (or were granted the opportunity) to write about sports, we were fans first. Whether as a writer or a fan, anyone who follows sports — for pleasure or for a living — remembers where s/he was when something truly remarkable happened. Truly remarkable. Epic. […]
