The best tennis stories of 2025: An all-time Grand Slam final, dark arts and a papal court – The New York Times

Tennis
Will Tullos / The Athletic; Andrej Isakovic, Alberto Pizzoli / Getty Images
Happy holidays, and prepare for the greatest gift: All the best tennis stories of 2025.
In the spirit of looking back on the previous season and remembering all the moments big and small that defined it, here is a compendium from The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, with a few guest appearances. This is not a “best of,” but rather a “remember when?” and a “did that really happen?” as well as an opportunity to revisit the stories you may have missed.
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See you next season — in January, this year. What a concept.
James Hansen
“In soccer, countries and cities bid to host the Champions League and World Cup finals; the Olympics changes every four years and even the Super Bowl in the NFL moves around the United States, with cities and franchises trying to one-up one another.
“The four Grand Slams, though, are the four Grand Slams. There are good reasons for this beyond prestige: the infrastructure, both physical and learned, required to host a two- or three-week event at the scale of a major year in, year out is available to a vanishingly small number of tennis facilities around the world. There is no opportunity for another organization or event to bid to replace one of the Grand Slams by offering a richer purse or other amenities.”
Matt Futterman
“Sinner and Alcaraz have reconfigured tennis into a hyper-aggressive game of chicken. To hit a neutral ball is to be on defense and to be on defense is to lose (against each other) or to steal the point (against pretty much everybody else).
“Their ATP Tour rivals, from Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev to Taylor Fritz, Casper Ruud and all the way down, are at a loss. The tennis they knew has vanished before their eyes.”
Matt Futterman
“Trying to explain a phenomenon of which she is at the center, Mirra Andreeva describes an evolution in tennis itself.
‘I think that tennis has changed a lot in the last 20 years. The speed of the ball is different and everyone is playing so powerful and aggressive.
‘I think it’s going to take a bit more time for younger players to come in, because everyone hits the ball so hard. I feel like it’s getting tougher and tougher for everyone to stay in there, stay in the point. For younger ladies, it’s also a bit tough to deal with the speed of the ball.’
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Charlie Eccleshare
“Not every player in a bad matchup is a pigeon. The tennis rankings rarely lie and some players are just better than others. A head to head starts developing soft grey plumage through a combination of volume and style, especially between higher-ranked players who are more likely to run into each other in the later stages of big events.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Keys was coming for tennis. Instead, tennis sort of came for her. At first, the buzz empowered her, but then it became something like a panic.
‘If I don’t do it, am I considered a failure?’ she said in her news conference of what she had wondered for many of those 16 years.
Matt Futterman
“Bergs set off an extraordinary chain of events, featuring disputes between Garín and his own doctor, debate over tennis’ rules on disqualification and what Chile’s Olympic committee publicly called a ‘shameful international incident.’”
Charlie Eccleshare
“’I see my game every day,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to see the changes because they’re little. I know. They only seem big on a bigger horizon.’”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Reporting for this story involved interviews with multiple people involved with or briefed on the investigation, as well as people with personal and professional relationships with Elena Rybakina, Stefano Vukov and Goran Ivanišević, the coach hired to be Vukov’s replacement.”
Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare
“The sport needed one of its ugliest stories, one that started in 2001 in the same stadium where Serena Williams and the organizers hoped it might end, to have an ending that was far different than the beginning.”
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Matt Futterman
“To come home, to get the familiar feels and the perspective that has always come with growing-up-Gauff in this park, where a small sign on the two tennis courts tells visitors that they are the courts that made her; that the grass and trees and fields were always at the center of her life.”
Matt Futterman
“The tension between official and unofficial content — and how the rights and deals are made that decide which is which — is at the center of tennis’ future.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“With the bounce of a ball, tennis finds itself in a quandary that cuts to the heart of how people experience the world. When two different knowledge systems disagree with each other, which one should they believe?”
Charlie Eccleshare
“A high, netted fence juts above the wall, stretching a few meters across. It would not deter anyone who had just overcome 12 meters of vertical brickwork, but it is not there to protect the Pope, the Cardinals, the Swiss Guard and Vatican staff.
“It is there for the benefit of the people walking below: to stop a bad shank, an over-enthusiastic lob or a spiked smash sending a tennis ball plummeting to earth and onto the heads of passing pedestrians.”
Matt Futterman
“The drop shot has always been important, but it was recently considered a bit of a last resort. Frequent use was seen as a novelty or a cop-out, the preserve of players who lacked proper power.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Twilight has fallen in Paris on a cohort of tennis players whose window of opportunity has less slammed shut than never truly opened.”
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Charlie Eccleshare
“Debilitating back pain has a new cure: 10,000 people chanting your name in song, before delivering a perfect rendition of the La Marseillaise. For it to work, it needs to be administered in the fifth set of a five-hour tennis match, on one specific court.”
Matt Futterman
“On her first match point, Boisson sent a forehand inside-in and raised her arms to a roar that shook Court Philippe-Chatrier. It was her roar after the handshake, arms out and screaming into the sky, that made the past 12 months melt into air.”
James Hansen
“It was just like tennis dreamed it. Five and a half hours of thrilling play and unrelenting drama between the two new stars of men’s tennis.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“While the twang of ball on racket soundtracks player preparations for the third Grand Slam of the year, it’s the noise of ladders being unfurled, pressure washers blasting floors clean and an occasional bit of drilling in the distance that stands out. This is the sound of Wimbledon’s green and purple wonderland getting ready for edition No. 138.”
Caoimhe O’Neill
“The ball will arc from his opponent’s right to their left, cutting through the air and getting lower and lower. As it floats, Alcaraz moves. The opponent might not realize it yet, but the point is flipping. The balance of power shifts, as the ball crosses the net and Alcaraz follows it forward.”
Matt Futterman
“Players look for any edge they can find, and there are countless individuals and countless methods, too many to fully enumerate here.”
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Charlie Eccleshare
“Anisimova’s career will outlast and exceed this moment. But in its immediate aftermath, and as it unfolded, she became one of the most sympathetic and relatable characters in the world.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“A stubborn myth had attached itself to conversations around Świątek, mostly on the fringes but at times bubbling up during broadcasts: a clay-court specialist who couldn’t find a way out of her head, with little chance of ever being able to adapt her strokes to the fast, skidding, bounces of the All England Club.
“The statistics explode it.”
Matt Futterman
“The youngest by seven years of four tennis-playing siblings, Mboko has been winning more than just about anyone in professional women’s tennis since the start of the year.”
Matt Futterman
“The sport cannot eliminate the characteristics that attract behaviors that tip from fandom into fixation without eradicating the essential nature that makes it one of the most captivating in the world.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Jannik is the duck’s back, water sliding off; Siglinde is the feet whirring below the surface, shock and awe etched on her face.”
Matt Futterman
“All across the net-cord taxonomy, a player who wins the point thanks to one of these outcomes is expected to raise a hand in a brief gesture of apology — and they better do it while their opponent is looking.”
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Matt Futterman
“To adapt the old saw about people going broke, Taylor Townsend’s rise to fame was fast, and then it was slow. At this summer’s U.S. Open, it has happened all at once.”
Matt Futterman
“Players have long been synonymous with certain kits, from Björn Borg’s Fila outfit and Serena Williams‘ catsuit to Roger Federer’s monogrammed blazers, and luxury brands have coveted its biggest stars as ambassadors. But the businesses of tennis, fashion and beauty have never been as indivisible as they are now.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Winners receiving praise and sharing their joy with everyone watching is a fixture of just about every sport. Asking the beaten finalist to stick around, watch their rival be presented with a trophy and adulation, and, hardest of all, have a microphone thrust in their face and sum up how they are feeling is a form of emotional laceration unique to tennis.”
Charlie Eccleshare
“Underarm serves and serves such as this one are increasingly being seen for what they are: A legitimate way to disrupt an opponent, rather than an obnoxious piece of trickery.”
Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare
“’I was lost in this world,’” Borg said of the period after he officially left the sport in January 1983. ‘I didn’t have any help. I didn’t have a team or agents to push me in the right way. I did everything by myself, I didn’t really have any help during that time and it’s very tough to fix yourself.’
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Charlie Eccleshare
“The most difficult thing about using court speed to understand tennis is that players don’t always agree with the objective data, because it is also a sport of perception.”
James Hansen
“This nail-biter of a match, and the days leading up to it, crystalized the bargain that the WTA struck when it decided to bring its flagship event to a tennis nation in a different league to every other financially, but still in the incipient stages of its adoption and understanding of the sport.”
Matt Futterman
“In addition to on-the-record interviews, reporting for this story involved discussions with a half-dozen people at the highest levels of tennis who had direct involvement in Andrea Gaudenzi’s push to expand the sport’s biggest events, and with its fallout. Several of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships in the sport.”
Matt Futterman
“Tennis will always be his passion. Not because of the titles he won, or his part in the rivalries that made men’s tennis so culturally relevant in the 2000s, but because of something more visceral. ‘Sport is all about emotion,’ he said.
Charlie Eccleshare
“Not coming back, but subjecting herself to tennis’ whereabouts rules, which entail accepting the possibility of random drug testing, and remaining in a certain place for an hour a day, every day? If Williams has an explanation for that, she wasn’t sharing it.”
Matt Futterman

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