Being named the world’s most marketable athlete puts you in some fairly exclusive company—recent editions have given the top spot to Lewis Hamilton, Simone Biles, and Lionel Messi. But who gets to join them depends on a fairly subjective set of choices about what makes an athlete marketable.

Sabalenka has plenty going for her commercially, and her growing presence across fashion and consumer brands is definitely notable. But placing Gauff 31 spots below her is difficult to square with the business the 22-year-old has built, including an expansive New Balance relationship, her partnership with Miu Miu, and a multiyear Naked Smoothie deal that has grown to include her own product, to name a few.

When I looked through the methodology to try to make sense of it, the most revealing detail was that Gauff actually scores slightly higher than Sabalenka on “Brand Equity,” the category meant to capture how strong and established an athlete’s brand already is. Almost 91 percent of the gap between their overall scores comes from another category, “Momentum,” which rewards how quickly their audience and commercial activity are growing, including through new partnerships.

So what looks like a verdict on their relative appeal to brands is largely a judgment about how quickly their sponsorship businesses are growing. It’s a narrower finding than the 31-place gap suggests, especially to anyone encountering the ranking without reading the fine print.

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SportsPro produces the ranking with NorthStar Solutions Group, a business consulting firm that helps assess sponsorship opportunities. Together, they consider how strong an athlete’s brand is, how quickly it’s growing, and how much potential remains. Growth and future potential account for more than half the score in their model, giving athletes whose businesses are expanding an advantage over those with strong, established partnerships.

Signing new sponsors is the most obvious way to earn that advantage. But the emphasis on new deal activity introduces a problem that anyone who works with athletes will recognize: the number of partnerships someone signs isn’t a great indicator of how many brands actually want to work with them.

Keep reading for a breakdown on what a ranking like this reveals and overlooks about an athlete’s commercial appeal.

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There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with being a promising young tennis player these days. It’s no longer enough to be good, or even exceptionally good. You have to be deemed the future of the sport—the next big [insert number here]—often before you’ve had much time to figure out who you are in the present. As a result, every breakthrough is treated as a coronation, while every setback is a referendum on whether any hype bestowed upon was justified.

Jakub Mensik is in a particularly unique position. The Czech player has already accomplished things that many professionals spend their careers chasing. In March 2025, at just 19, he won the Miami Open, defeating his childhood idol Novak Djokovic in the final to claim his first ATP title. It was a remarkable achievement, made even more so by the fact that he had nearly withdrawn from the tournament before his opening match because of a knee problem. Instead, he went on to beat a string of top players, including Jack Draper, Arthur Fils and Taylor Fritz, before delaying Djokovic’s 100th career title.

Mensik’s success has earned him plenty of attention, though perhaps not quite as much as some of his peers. He’s frequently compared to João Fonseca, the young Brazilian whose enormous popularity at home and growing international profile have made him one of tennis’s most talked-about prospects. Much of that comparison centers on the attention each of them receives, with Fonseca generating considerably more buzz despite Mensik having a stronger resume thus far. Mensik, for his part, doesn’t seem particularly interested in keeping score.

“If someone my age does something big, obviously, to stay competitive, you want to do it too,” Mensik says. “But I don’t think you can spend your life looking sideways at what everyone else is doing. There are so many young guys coming up, so someone is going to win something every week and if you react to everything you’ll go crazy.”

It’s a pragmatic outlook from someone who has barely entered his twenties. But Mensik, who turned 21 in September, has never quite seemed his age. At six-foot-five, with a formidable serve and a generally measured demeanor, he has the presence of someone who has been doing this for much longer than he actually has. Even his answers tend to be unusually thoughtful for a player so early in his career.

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Or perhaps, he suggests, we’re giving him too much credit.

“I don’t know if I would describe myself as mature,” he says, laughing. “Maybe I just don’t talk that much.”

Keep reading for more on how Mensik is navigating the expectations that come with early success, the challenge of sustaining it, and his determination to build a career on his own terms—despite the oft-cited comparisons to Djokovic.

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Jason Stacy has spent nearly two decades working in professional tennis, which is somewhat remarkable considering he never really intended to work in tennis at all.

Stacy, Aryna Sabalenka’s longtime mental and physical performance coach, found his way onto tour in the mid-2000s almost by accident. He had been working as a performance coach, sports therapist and strength coach across disciplines including combat sports, swimming, gymnastics and professional dance when a mutual friend connected him with former top-20 Russian player Dmitry Tursunov, who was looking for someone to join his team. A training block with Tursunov and fellow Russian pro Igor Kunitsyn turned into a few tournaments, a few tournaments turned into other players asking for his help, and, as Stacy puts it, “I just got stuck here.”

He arrived at a very different moment in tennis. Tournament gyms could amount to “some stuff in the corner,” he joked to me, and Stacy was borrowing exercises from martial arts and other disciplines that occasionally earned him strange looks. He remembers former world No. 1 and two-time Grand Slam champion Marat Safin once making fun of a homemade suspension trainer he’d rigged up with carabiners and PVC pipe, only to see similar equipment become commonplace on tour a few years later. Even now, he and Sabalenka joke about doing something completely ridiculous at practice just to see how quickly someone else starts doing it.

That tendency to look at things differently has become central to Stacy’s role with Sabalenka. Sometimes he’ll deliberately walk away from one of her practices and come back later because he worries that staring at the same thing for too long can make it harder for him to see what’s actually happening. During matches, he’s watching not only how Sabalenka moves and hits the ball, but how quickly she walks to the baseline, where her eyes go between points, and even where in her body she seems to be breathing.

Stacy has now been with Sabalenka long enough to have seen just about every version of her: the young player who was, in his words, “all fire;” the one struggling to understand why her best tennis disappeared at the Grand Slams; the one whose serve famously deserted her; and, eventually, the player who spent 99 consecutive weeks at world No. 1 and became one of the most consistent forces in the sport. His new book, The Pressure Code, draws heavily on what he learned along the way.

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I spoke to Stacy about his unlikely path into tennis, what he saw in Sabalenka when they first began working together, why he pushed for her longtime hitting partner Anton Dubrov to become her coach, the three-hour breakfast he considers a turning point in her career, and all the tiny things he watches from the player box that the rest of us probably miss.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You didn’t come up through tennis in the traditional way. How did you actually find your way onto the professional tour?

Yeah, I wasn’t a tennis player. I’ve been on tour since around 2006 or 2007, so about 20 years now. I’ve worked with a lot of players, men and women, and with Russian and Kazakhstan Fed Cup and Davis Cup teams.

But it really started because I had a friend who had a friend who happened to be a tennis coach, and one of his athletes was Dmitry Tursunov. This was when Dmitry was a kid and had just moved from Russia to the U.S. We were living in California, so I met him then, but that was about it.

Many years later, I was living in Australia and already working as a performance coach, sports therapist, and strength coach in other sports. That mutual friend came to Melbourne for the Australian Open, and Dmitry and his coach happened to be looking for someone new to work with him physically. They basically said, “Have you ever worked with tennis players? Would you be interested?”

I was moving back to the U.S. anyway and didn’t really have a plan, so I agreed to go to California and do a training camp with Dmitry and Igor Kunitsyn. It went really well. Then they said, “Traveling at tournaments is very different from doing a training block. Do you want to try some tournaments?” I said, “Yeah, let’s go.”

And then I just got stuck here. [Laughs.] People kept asking me for help. Davis Cup captains, different countries, players on the men’s and women’s sides. It just grew from there.

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And it sounds like you were bringing a pretty different approach to tennis at the time.

Yeah. Because I didn’t have the same background, I looked at things differently. A lot of what I was doing came from martial arts, movement drills, and mobility work.

It’s funny, because a few months ago Marat Safin was in the gym and asked me to help him set up a TRX. Many, many years ago, I think at the Kremlin Cup, I had basically made my own suspension trainer with carabiners and PVC-pipe handles and hung it over a door. This was before TRX was everywhere. Marat was making fun of me: “What is this thing? What are you going to do with this rope on the door?” A few years later, they were all over the tour.

There were a lot of things we’d do where the guys would say, “Let’s go train somewhere else,” because they didn’t want everyone watching. Then a couple of weeks later you’d see other people doing the same thing.

Even with Aryna now, we have this ongoing joke that we should just do something crazy because everyone’s watching and see if people start doing it. [Laughs.]

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Keep reading for more on what Stacy saw in a young Sabalenka, the inner workings of her team, the conversation he considers a turning point in her career, and what he sees from the player box that we don’t.

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When I spoke with Eva Lys at Indian Wells in March about her love of fashion, I asked whether she hoped to attend runway shows, as her peers like Naomi Osaka and Aryna Sabalenka have done in recent years. “For sure, it’s definitely a dream of mine,” she told me, adding that her agent at Evolve, Carly Duguid—who was sitting right next to us—was well aware.

“I’m trying to send her a lot of stuff,” Lys told me of the opportunities and brand deals she wanted to secure as her career progresses. “I just sent her something I saw online and I’m like, one day!” Carly chimed in with a smile: “We’re working on it.”

Lys had another event in mind, too: the Oscars, which were taking place the following week. “I know I’m not an actress,” she said with a laugh, but she could picture herself walking the red carpet one day, as Coco Gauff and Serena Williams have done. She wasn’t expecting Duguid to find her a ticket for next week, but letting her know what she hoped might be possible down the line.

Players have always told their agents what they want, but social media has changed how often they’re confronted with what someone else already has. One top tennis agent told me players regularly send them deals they’ve seen their peers land online, asking bluntly, “Why don’t I have this?”

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“It’s really tough to be a public figure and a player in the era of social media where you’re constantly, whether you’re doing it on purpose or not, comparing yourself to other players, and other athletes,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

She described this reality, wryly, as “the generational pain of representing Gen Z.” Players today are encouraged to think of themselves as brands, and they can watch other athletes’ brands flourish in real time on their phones. “I think it’s made for a more insecure era of players, naturally so,” the agent said.

Keep reading for more on how a blockbuster deal can reset other players’ expectations, why one agency thinks twice before posting its own deals, and how players’ online wish lists keep adding to agents’ already crowded to-do lists.

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What happens when your personal brand revolves around WAG-dom but you’re no longer a WAG? Morgan Riddle presents an interesting case study.

After spending roughly five years traveling the ATP Tour with her then-boyfriend Taylor Fritz, Riddle managed to turn the access that came with the relationship into a substantial business of her own. She documented life on tour for an audience that, like her when she first met Fritz, often knew very little about tennis, explaining the basics of the sport while putting on makeup, showing off her outfits and taking viewers to her favorite restaurants and hotels in tournament cities around the world.

The formula worked. Tennis gave Riddle an unusually glamorous setting for what was, at its core, fairly traditional lifestyle influencer content, while Riddle gave followers who might not otherwise care about tennis a reason to pay attention to it. She also arrived at an extremely ripe moment, as tournaments were increasingly trying to position themselves as cultural events and fashion brands were discovering the commercial possibilities of the sport.

Riddle herself has been candid about where she started. In 2023, she told Town & Country that she knew “really, really” nothing about tennis when she and Fritz began dating and, despite attending college in New York, didn’t think she had ever heard of the US Open.

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Nevertheless, within a few years, she became one of the most visible non-players in the sport. The New York Times notoriously dubbed her “The Most Famous Woman in Men’s Tennis,” a designation that would follow her through almost every profile thereafter. She hosted a social media series for Wimbledon, landed tournament-adjacent brand deals, and became a regular fixture in Fritz’s box.

But there was always something a bit funny about Riddle becoming a tennis authority when, even after years traveling the tour, her interest seemed to lie primarily in everything surrounding the sport. Her content focused on the clothes, the travel, the tournaments as social experiences and, of course, life as a player’s girlfriend, rather than the sport itself.

There’s nothing wrong with that! Riddle found an angle that resonated with a passionate audience and built a successful business around it.

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But it becomes more complicated when the proximity that built that business largely disappears just as Riddle begins positioning her understanding of tennis culture as broader expertise on the sport and its fans.

Keep reading for what Riddle’s new sports venture and very tennis-y perfume reveal about what happens when a brand built on proximity starts moving beyond it. Plus, how fluency in the culture around a sport is increasingly confused with expertise in the sport itself.

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Lululemon and Asics recently reported earnings, while On and Amer Sports, the parent company of Wilson, laid out their longer-term strategies for investors. All four have made significant investments in tennis over the past several years, making what they have to say about the sport and where it fits into their broader businesses particularly interesting.

But figuring out exactly how tennis is performing inside these companies requires a little detective work. None of them reports tennis revenue as its own line item. Depending on whose financial statements you’re reading, the sport gets folded into categories like “Core Performance Sports” or “Ball & Racquet,” or disappears entirely into much larger footwear and apparel businesses.

Still, these updates tend to leave behind some useful clues. A regional growth figure here, a new long-term target there, a comment about where marketing dollars are going. Even which sports get singled out when a company lays out its plans for the next three years can tell us something. And this latest batch gave us quite a bit to work with.

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Amer Sports just raised its long-term growth expectations for the division that houses Wilson, with the expansion of its tennis business playing an important role in that optimism. Asics revealed some pretty wild numbers about how quickly tennis is growing across Asia. Lululemon is still talking up the sport while trying to revive momentum around its broader business.

And then there’s On, which spent this morning laying out an ambitious new plan through 2029, including the sports it sees helping power its next phase of growth. Tennis didn’t make the list.

Keep reading for what On’s new growth plan tells us about where tennis fits into its next chapter, the impressive numbers coming out of Asics in Asia, and the clues Wilson and Lululemon are giving us about what comes next.

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Last Monday I broke the news that Ben Shelton and his team were closing in on an apparel and footwear deal with a brand not named On. This came after my earlier reporting that his contract with the Swiss athleticwear brand was up for renewal at the end of this year.

There was a bit of unintentional foreshadowing in the piece when I wrote:

Nothing is official yet, and On’s matching rights mean there remains a path—at least contractually—for Shelton to stay put. One person familiar with Shelton’s commercial situation joked that if he wins this year’s US Open, On might suddenly find itself willing to pay up.

Of course, Shelton didn’t win the US Open. But after he beat Carlos Alcaraz in the semis and made his first Slam final, a lot of people wondered whether the run would significantly change the value of his next apparel deal.

The truth is there’s often a discrepancy between how much audiences think these moments matter in business and how much they really do. Look at the number of one-off Slam finalists we’ve seen over the years and you’ll understand why most companies want to see some repetition before hinging a massive deal on a single result.

I don’t think anyone assumes this will be Shelton’s last Slam final, but that’s also precisely why making one doesn’t drastically change the equation around his next apparel deal. The brands bidding for him were already pricing in the possibility that he could win a Slam. Every company his team spoke to—including On—was weighing Shelton as a potential major champion when deciding what it was willing to pay to sign or retain him. Getting within one match of doing it certainly helps validate that bet, but it doesn’t suddenly create a valuation that wasn’t there two weeks ago.

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Keep reading for the latest on Shelton’s next deal, the truth about Maja Chwalińska’s Lacoste kits, and why Elena Rybakina is “still” wearing Yonex.

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A quick programming note for all the new readers: I’ll be back shortly with how Ben Shelton’s win over Carlos Alcaraz—and a potential run to the US Open final—could affect his apparel negotiations, plus some reader-requested intel on Elena Rybakina’s partnership with Yonex. But first, I wanted to put a period on the take-iest tournament yet.

After an especially long three weeks, the US Open is almost, finally, over. “Thank god” seems to be a fairly common refrain after the onslaught of truly insufferable takes that this year’s tournament brought with it. How lucky are we to have so many brilliant minds outlining how to fix tennis? Or, in many cases, simply explaining who’s responsible for breaking it?

The amount of fighting about tennis over the last few weeks is worthy of a page in the history books. May we never forget the moment the sport broke so far into the mainstream that seemingly every minor controversy became a referendum on what was wrong with it. The current grievances go a little something like this: Influencers are solely to blame for the noise level in Arthur Ashe and—details shmetails—the USTA is somehow responsible for every single one of them being there; journalists should apparently request interviews with every single player, but god forbid they get one and fail to ask what fans want; getting rid of best-of-five tennis would fix everything, but if you insist on keeping it, you should at least put a quarterfinal match on Court 17. And the beat goes on…

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The annoying part is that there are legitimate complaints buried underneath all of this hysteria. The crowds on Ashe have been disruptive, media access is flawed, and there are fair questions to ask about scheduling and whether the current format is actually working for fans and players. But instead of arguing about any of those things on their merits, everyone is busy trying to figure out who to blame.

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A few months ago, I broke the news that Ben Shelton’s apparel and footwear deal with On was up for renewal at the end of this year. Disappointed with both the Swiss brand’s marketing and product thus far, and eager to better capitalize on Shelton’s star power, his team had quietly gone out to the market to see what other opportunities beckoned.

Considered by many in the industry to be the most marketable player on the ATP Tour besides Jack Draper, who secured a massive contract with Vuori before injury struggles sidelined him for more than a year, my reporting at the time found that Shelton had a roster of options, all with mouth-watering price tags. But while a new apparel contract couldn’t technically be signed until later this year, Shelton’s team apparently wasn’t satisfied with the lack of movement in other categories in the meantime.

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Keep reading for where Shelton is likely headed next, how much the deal is worth, and details regarding the major shakeup to his team that happened along the way.

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Every year at the US Open, the top American men are asked some version of the same question: Is this finally the year?

It has now been 23 years since Andy Roddick won the 2003 US Open, the last time an American man won a Grand Slam singles title. In the years since, the drought has become its own storyline, one that gets dusted off every August and handed to whichever group of American men happens to arrive in New York with the best chance of ending it.

This year, there are plenty of reasons to ask the question again. Taylor Fritz made the final here two years ago and believes he is as good, if not better, than he was then. Ben Shelton has spent the summer playing some of his best tennis on his favorite surface. Frances Tiafoe says he barely recognizes the person who arrived—sullen and out of form—in New York a year ago. Tommy Paul, meanwhile, points to the number of Americans who went deep in Montreal and Cincinnati as evidence that the group is arriving at the US Open in particularly good form.

Jannik Sinner’s absence from the tournament has only made the temptation to look ahead stronger. What was already an intriguing opportunity suddenly appears a little more open, and after more than two decades of waiting for another American man to win a major, it is very easy to start dreaming.

However, the Americans themselves would prefer not to.

“I’m focused on my first round, my first match,” Shelton said when asked before the tournament whether Sinner’s absence made him think differently about his own chances, or those of the American men more broadly. “I don’t think too far beyond that.”

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Tiafoe was even more succinct when the drought inevitably came up in his pre-tournament press conference. “Still gotta beat seven guys however way you slice it,” he said. “Just trying to beat the guy in front of me.”

And when Fritz was asked after his first-round win whether injuries and early upsets had made this year’s field feel particularly open, he barely entertained the premise.

“None of that matters until I’m in the semis or the finals, honestly,” he said. “So I don’t even worry about it until then.”

Keep reading for how Fritz, Shelton, Tiafoe and Paul are approaching the pressure and possibility of this US Open.

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Things have been moving quickly for Iva Jovic. Just two years ago, the 18-year-old American made her tour-level debut as a wild card at the US Open. Since then, she’s won her first WTA title in Guadalajara, reached the Australian Open quarterfinals and climbed to a career-high No. 14 in the world, establishing herself as one of the most exciting young players in the sport.

The higher Jovic climbs, though, the more there is to manage beyond what happens on court. There’s the near-constant travel, of course, but also more people who know her name, more media requests and more brands interested in being associated with her. It’s a strange amount of life to accelerate through at 18, particularly for someone who is still experiencing many of the milestones of a professional tennis career for the first time.

Her latest partnership was announced just before the US Open, when Jovic was named the newest member of the Gorjana Sports Club, joining fellow American Jessica Pegula in the jewelry brand’s growing roster of female athletes. Jovic grew up in Los Angeles and told Hard Court her interest in fashion started early, shopping and dressing up with her mom and older sister. The partnership comes at a point in her career when she’s beginning to think about how she wants to represent herself to a world just getting to know her.

Ahead of her first-round match against Magdalena Fręch today, Jovic and I spoke about learning to live on the road, realizing she could hang with the best players in the world, the strange experience of becoming increasingly recognizable and how she’s deciding which brands she wants to bring along for the ride.

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You’re 18 and already playing a full professional schedule. What has been the biggest adjustment from junior tennis to life on the pro tour—whether that’s the travel, the level of competition, managing your schedule, or simply being away from home so much?

I would say that the biggest adjustment from going from the juniors to the pros is the constant travel. You don’t have to deal with as much of that in the juniors. As a pro, you really have to learn how to manage your schedule: your training, your matches, your personal life and really just find a balance between it all while you’re constantly moving from one place to another.

Was there a specific tournament or match when you first felt like, “Okay, I belong at this level”?

I don’t think there was one specific match where I felt like something clicked. But I think at the beginning of this year, when I was winning a lot of matches and climbing into the top 20 for the first time, after that run it really started to sink in. I felt like, “Okay, I can play here. My level is good enough that I don’t even need to play at the very best of my ability every single day to be competitive with these girls.”

Keep reading for Jovic on navigating newfound attention, what she’s looking for in the brands she puts her name behind, and why mentorship gets complicated when your mentors are also your competition.

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The US Open officially kicks off today and when players on the schedule for day one pull up to site, they’re likely to be a little exhausted. The past week has included a calendar of events so bloated that even mere mortals—journalists and creators—have found themselves foggy headed, burned out, and longing for mid-September. But it’s affecting the athletes too, who have been shepherded around New York City and the tournament site by their various handlers to meet a growing list of sponsor obligations that include everything from events to TV spots. All while practicing for the last Grand Slam of the year.

“I was telling my coach in practice today that my body just felt slow, I could feel it in my reaction times, so we cut it short because I need rest,” Leylah Fernandez told me at a Lululemon dinner on Friday when I asked how she was juggling all the extracurricular activity with training. She wasn’t complaining—Fernandez is perpetually cheery, it seems—but most athletes have learned it’s best not to do so publicly.

Case in point, when I asked an agent friend if their athletes were feeling the effects of the non-stop socializing, they said yes but noted, “I don’t know that I necessarily want that message out there because, as crazy busy as it is, I need my athletes to not complain and understand it’s part of their job and do it all with a smile.”

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Keep reading for what players and agents are saying about the increasingly chaotic week before the US Open—and why the brand frenzy may be reaching a breaking point.

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When I decided to throw the inaugural Hard Court cocktail party a month ago, I envisioned a room filled with my favorite people in tennis—the people moving the sport forward every day with their creativity, intellect and business savvy. More than anything, I wanted it to feel like the kind of space I wish existed more often in tennis: one where nobody felt judged when they walked through the door, where a famous influencer and a reporter who couldn’t care less about fashion not only felt equally welcome, but might actually end up talking to each other. Where top agents mingled with young creators, all the WAGs (who are far more interesting than that catchall title suggests) came together rather than competed, and brand execs left with a long list of people they were suddenly dying to work with.

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There is something uniquely humbling about professional tennis. One year you’re one of the biggest stars in the sport, winning Olympic gold and reaching the upper echelons of the rankings; not long after, you’re preparing to play qualifying at the US Open.

That is where Qinwen Zheng finds herself this week. After an injury-plagued stretch sent the former world No. 4’s ranking tumbling to No. 127, Zheng did not receive a main-draw wildcard into the US Open and is set to make her first appearance in qualifying. It’s a strange position for a player who, at 23, has already experienced almost every trapping of tennis stardom: a Grand Slam final, Olympic gold, enormous fame in China and partnerships with brands including Nike and Dior.

But when I spoke to Zheng in Washington, D.C. last month, she seemed remarkably clear-eyed about the situation. There was no attempt to pretend that her ranking didn’t matter, or that the commercial opportunities that accompany being one of the best tennis players in the world exist independently of actually being one of the best tennis players in the world. If anything, Zheng was more willing to acknowledge the transactional realities of professional sports than most athletes I’ve spoken to.

She was also, crucially, finally feeling good.

“The body right now is finally all good,” she told me. “I play without pain. That’s what I’ve been searching for for the last two years, and thank God that finally I’m able to do that.”

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A few months earlier, Zheng had described the process of returning from injury as feeling like she was starting over. By Washington, that feeling had begun to subside. “I would say right now everything is on a good path,” she said. “The last two weeks, because I can feel right now my body is getting better, my mind is finally starting to get a bit better, and I’m starting to find my level little by little.”

For now, she’s trying not to look much further ahead than that. “I think I just need to keep going at this stage and working on myself, and then trying to reach the best [version] of myself on court,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, we are playing tennis matches, and the best level you have is [the one you have] when you are in the match.”

Injury is, of course, difficult enough when your job is predicated on your body cooperating. But for Zheng, the losses that followed also came with the feeling that she was disappointing an enormous number of people. She is one of China’s most famous athletes, with the kind of fandom that makes it difficult for a loss to ever feel like hers alone.

“After coming back from injury, I lost some matches I shouldn’t have lost, which felt really painful,” she said. “I felt like, oh, the people who love me, my fans, that I let them down. That was a bad feeling for me because I don’t want to let them down. I want to win as much as I can, and I want to give them courage, but the last few months [I haven’t been] able to do that. So I’ve also been feeling very sad about myself.”

Still, Zheng had realized that there’s no way to play good tennis if she’s carrying all of that around with her. “I’ve learned one thing: I only can control what I’m doing,” she said. “I cannot control how my tennis on court affects others, because I cannot carry so many expectations on my shoulders. That’s too heavy for me to play tennis with.”

Her solution has been to strip things back. “Right now, what I’ve learned is just to be simple, as simple as I can as a person, as simple as I can as a tennis player,” she said. “And the tennis will become better as a result.”

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Keep reading for Zheng on what happens to sponsorships when your ranking drops, the real reason she avoids close friendships on tour, and the freedom she finds in fashion.

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Carlos Alcaraz announced his return yesterday via Fabrizio Romano, an aura-depleting move in the words of my friend James Hansen, and simultaneously dashed the hopes of many top players who fantasized that, with him out and loose chatter about Sinner being on the fence, they might finally have a chance. Of course, Alcaraz’s form is likely to be rusty and playing best-of-5 after a long break isn’t easy for anyone, so, fret not, there is still hope for the underdogs.

Nevertheless, I think we’re all thrilled that the tour’s resident golden-retriever-with-a-killer-instinct is …

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Alex de Minaur has long gravitated toward a classic uniform off court, so when Ralph Lauren came calling, he was already dressing the part.

“It’s very much in style with the clothes I normally wear,” de Minaur told Hard Court in Washington, D.C. last month. “I like to always be more on the smart side of clothing whenever I go to dinner. Classic, elegant, never-go-out-of-fashion style.”

Now, de Minaur has signed a partnership with Ralph Lauren, bringing the American brand’s longstanding relationship with tennis somewhere it has rarely gone: to the players themselves. It’s a logical next step, albeit one it’s somewhat surprising Ralph Lauren didn’t take sooner.

For more than two decades, Ralph Lauren has been one of tennis’s most visible fashion partners while largely staying out of the player endorsement business. The brand has served as the official outfitter of the US Open since 2005 and Wimbledon since 2006, designing uniforms for officials and ball crews alongside tournament-specific collections that have made the Polo pony a familiar sight at two of tennis’s biggest events. Ralph Lauren added the Australian Open to that portfolio in 2021, a partnership that will end after this year as BOSS takes over as the tournament’s official lifestyle outfitter in 2027.

There is one little-known exception. When Ralph Lauren first signed its US Open deal in 2005, it also signed then-19-year-old American prospect Scott Oudsema to represent its tennis brand on court and in an advertising campaign. Oudsema, who peaked at No. 145 in the world, never became a fixture at the top of the sport, and Ralph Lauren has largely avoided individual player endorsements in the two decades since.

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De Minaur therefore represents a considerably bigger bet on tying the brand to an individual tennis star. That the player Ralph Lauren chose to make that bet on is Australian is a small irony for a brand synonymous with American style.

Keep reading for more details on de Minaur’s Ralph Lauren deal—including whether we could eventually see it on court—plus his thoughts on working with Wilson and managing the pressure he puts on himself.

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Jessica Pegula has a lot of sponsors, even by the increasingly lucrative standards of a top tennis player.

There are the familiar tennis names: Adidas, which has dressed her since 2021, and Yonex, which makes her rackets. Beyond those, her portfolio stretches across industries: KPMG, Hyatt and IBM, California jewelry brand Gorjana, Vital Proteins, Swiss watchmaker De Bethune, air purifier company Blueair, odor-eliminating brand Azuna and global investment firm Irongrey. Nintendo paid her six figures for a campaign around the Miami Open this year, and another partnership, in a category particularly close to Pegula’s heart, is set to be announced during the US Open.

What’s more notable than the sheer number of logos is how many of those companies had never previously signed a tennis player. Pegula was the first tennis ambassador for KPMG, Hyatt, Gorjana, Vital Proteins, Blueair, Azuna and Irongrey; when the forthcoming US Open deal is announced, the number will rise to eight. At a moment when seemingly every company wants a piece of tennis, Pegula has quietly become something of an entry point into the sport.

It’s a role she’s particularly proud of, and one she hopes can ultimately bring more money into tennis beyond her own sponsorship deals, she tells me. Pegula has already spoken with the WTA about introducing some of her partners to the WTA Finals this year, and several of the brands she helped bring into the sport are reported to be exploring deals with other players.

Her agent, Chris McCormack of GSE Worldwide, sees the broader opportunity, too. “There are all these founding-block sponsors of our tours, but it’s great to have new blood in the sport,” he says.

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Pegula has learned that the more she puts into those relationships, the more interested brands become in doing something bigger. “What has been fun the last couple years is building relationships with my sponsors,” she says. “I like to give my time, and you see how thankful they are for that. Then they want to do more with you and invest more in the sport.”

Her current roster isn’t simply the result of an agent identifying brands and presenting her with contracts. Pegula frequently sends ideas the other way, and says McCormack now has a good sense of what will interest her. The criteria have evolved considerably from earlier in her career, when, as she puts it, “you’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m getting paid and I’ll do this.’” These days, she is much more interested in partnerships that bear some relationship to who she actually is.

“I get compliments, honestly, from a lot of players that have said, ‘No, I really love the stuff that you do because it seems like you,’” Pegula says. “‘It’s dogs, it’s video games.’”

Nintendo is perhaps the most obvious example—Pegula is known for her love of video games—but Gorjana has become a particularly good illustration of what she wants a sponsorship to become. The jewelry company has hosted in-store events with her, brought players she’s friends with into those activations and raised money for A Lending Paw, the charity Pegula runs with her husband, Taylor Gahagen, which helps fund the training of service dogs for people with disabilities.

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“I love when you can make those connections,” she says. “With Gorjana, they’ve connected tennis, the jewelry and my work with animals, and put real time and effort into doing something different.”

Pegula’s personality also makes a certain degree of authenticity practically necessary. “I’m pretty direct and dry, so you can tell when I’m not exactly vibing with something,” she laughs.

That makes the biggest sponsorship decision on her immediate horizon particularly interesting.

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Keep reading for the inside story on Pegula’s upcoming apparel decision, how her sponsorship portfolio is shaping the negotiation, and the reality of running a skincare brand while playing professional tennis.

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Each topic gets a Court Index rating (Low, Medium, or High) based on how effectively it moves the needle. This is the core of what I do with Hard Court, so the full breakdown and ratings are for paid subscribers. If you already are one, thank you—it really makes this possible.

Become a paid subscriber to read my reporting and analysis on Naomi Osaka's latest fan initiative, the inside story and cinematic rollout behind Wilson's Defyer campaign, and why Nike's US Open collection is equal parts brilliance and baffling.

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The 21-year-old American holds victories on the surface over Taylor Fritz, Alex de Minaur and Lorenzo Musetti—all players who have spent time inside the ATP’s top 10—and arrived in Washington this week fresh off a Challenger title after returning from an oblique injury that disrupted his grass-court season.

Ahead of the Mubadala DC Open, I caught up with Michelsen to talk about his recovery, his friendship with Learner Tien and what he’s learned from playing some of the best players in the world. I found one answer particularly interesting.

When I mentioned his win over Taylor Fritz at Indian Wells, Michelsen challenged what feels like a pretty intuitive assumption: that practicing together benefits the higher-ranked player.

“Fritz, it’s trickier, I think, for him because he’s better than me, and we practice together,” Michelsen said. “Usually, when you practice with someone and you play them in a match, it favors the one that is a little worse because you kind of know what’s coming a bit.”

Rather than seeing familiarity as an advantage for the top player, Michelsen believes it can actually help close the gap. You know their favorite patterns, you recognize their tendencies and, perhaps most importantly, they lose some of the unpredictability that makes elite players so difficult to face.

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But Michelsen was careful not to overstate the point.

“I got a little lucky there,” Michelsen added. “I saved a crazy set point. I remember I got lucky to win that set.”

His explanation for his other marquee wins was similarly matter-of-fact.

Keep reading for Michelsen's candid thoughts on beating top players, playing his way back into form on the Challenger Tour and sharing life on tour with his buddy Learner Tien.

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For much of the past two years, Naomi Osaka’s story has been viewed through the lens of a single word: comeback.

It’s an easy narrative. She stepped away from tennis, became a mother, returned to the tour and is once again climbing toward the top of the game. But it’s one she increasingly rejects.

Ahead of the Mubadala DC Open, Osaka explained that she has never quite connected with the language surrounding her return. Saying she dislikes it would be too harsh, she said, because she’s “grateful for people even thinking about” her, but the suggestion that she’s trying to become the player she once was doesn’t square with reality.

“When I think of coming back, it kind of washes away the whole process,” she said. “Also, what am I coming back to, you know?”

The Naomi Osaka who arrived in Washington this week doesn’t feel like she’s chasing a previous version of herself.

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Keep reading for Osaka's candid reflections on her Wimbledon run, why she doesn’t feel like she’s making a "comeback," and how fashion has helped her break out of her shell.

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