With the return of tennis at Wimbledon on Monday, the only thing perfectly clear about the sport’s reentry from the pandemic will be the crisp whites that players don at the All England Club over the next two weeks.
Wimbledon was canceled last year amid the pandemic, the last memories of the tournament being Roger Federer serving with two match points against Novak Djokovic in the 2019 final only to see Djokovic survive and win the championship.
Despite erratic vaccination rates and surges in the U.K., India and South America, capacity for the Wimbledon fortnight will be limited to 50% until the finals, when it will be increased to 100% for both the men’s and women’s title matches.
Europe’s soccer championships are being played at varying capacities around the continent — a strategy that feels premature for tennis, a sport unlike soccer, that is often played indoors and in tight quarters.
At the beginning of 2020, the French wizard Gael Monfils was enjoying his finest start to a season in years — 16-3 with two titles, and losses only to top-5 players Dominic Thiem and Djokovic — but Monfils has barely won a match since the pandemic began.
After the Grand Slam Board’s bludgeoning response to her decision — it threatened her with daily fines and suspension not just from Roland-Garros but all four tennis majors — Wimbledon officials announced they had reached out to Osaka to engage her in a dialogue for her participation.
Virtually no players have suggested the necessity for the type of reforms she seemed to be advocating, and now she has missed the past two major tournaments — a blow to the events, to her as a championship player, to the marquee draw and to the fans who come to see her play.
She is the reigning champion of the upcoming US Open, the event at which she became part of the athlete movement against police brutality.
And what will the players do with the game? Osaka’s emergence as a figure in the social justice movement and the 2020 pandemic shutdown were the dominant events of the tennis calendar; but the Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil-led Professional Tennis Players Association players’ union.
One of those members, Katarina Pijetlovic, already has apologized for past derogatory tweets about “some high profile players.” Pijetlovic referred to “several tweets from a long time ago,” but it was just nine months ago, in a now-deleted tweet in September 2020, when she called Osaka “all fake” — hardly ancient history, and hardly the opening act of a body trying to convince players it can be trusted.
The ATP fired back at the PTPA announcement, reiterating that it is the sole voice of the players and player partner with the business of tennis, especially as the game moves toward a crucial vote on a 30-year strategic plan that would define the future of the sport.
Gilles Simon, the French player who at the time headed the ATP Player Council, took the weight as the bad guy chauvinist; but Simon in his position was not speaking for himself but all male players, and during that Wimbledon — won by equal-rights champion Andy Murray — men’s players did not criticize Simon’s position.
Several years ago, talk had increased of the men further separating themselves from joint events, but if the PTPA wants to be truly revolutionary, there has to be some steak behind its sizzle.
1 Ashleigh Barty are all battling injuries — opening the sport up to the criticism that, NBA-style, pushing the French Open back a week has compressed recovery time and not given players enough transition time to the quick and slippery grass surface.
But Serena, who will be 40 in September, is still at her most dangerous on grass, evidenced by her eight titles and oversize banners of her holding trophies on what feels like every bare wall and stairwell on the grounds.
Nadal looked weary in his Roland-Garros semifinal earlier this month with Djokovic, and those tired legs in the fourth set turned the theory that time was finally beginning to break his hold in Paris into reality; and although he hasn’t won Wimbledon since 2010 nor made a final since 2011, Nadal’s withdrawal further creates a pathway for the Age of Djokovic.
In their major final debuts, both Zverev and Tsitsipas held leads of two sets to love — Zverev on Thiem at the 2020 US Open, Tsitsipas in Paris earlier this month — and both lost the tournament.