Can Tennis Survive Its New Golden Age?

The golden age of tennis didn’t end with a whimper. After Roger Federer walked off the court for the final time, at the 2022 Laver Cup, he broke into full-on sobs. Federer’s doubles partner at that event in London, his longtime rival Rafael Nadal, seemed to understand that he was staring down his own tennis mortality as well. After the match, the two players, their faces streaked with tears, touched hands as they sat side by side. It felt at once like a private moment between intimates and a communal wake for a sport they’d helped define for decades.

Another of the game’s 21st-century icons also got weepy when she played at that year’s U.S. Open. In an essay for Vogue, Serena Williams confessed that she felt “no happiness” as she said farewell. Williams refused to use the word retirement, preferring to say that she was “evolving away from tennis.”

As these champions left the scene, their sport clearly needed to evolve too. Tennis was entering a rebuilding phase during which the legends of the past would make way for … someone, hopefully, at some point. The roster at that Laver Cup, an all-star competition on the men’s circuit, was littered with hyped young players, such as Stefanos Tsitsipas, Félix Auger-Aliassime, and Taylor Fritz, who had yet to win one of tennis’s four major tournaments (the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open). At the 2022 U.S. Open, a pair of women seen as Williams’s potential heirs, the tournament’s previous two winners, the then-teenage phenom Emma Raducanu and the four-time major champion Naomi Osaka, each lost in the first round.

Tennis fans, it seemed, had no choice but to be patient. This next generation needed time to grow into consistent championship form. But in fact, tennis’s new wave was already crashing ashore.

At that same U.S. Open, a couple of European neophytes, 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz and 21-year-old Jannik Sinner, slugged it out for a grueling five hours and 15 minutes before Alcaraz struck the final blow at 2:50 a.m. Their marathon quarterfinal featured a running behind-the-back forehand (by Alcaraz), a saved match point (Alcaraz again), and shot-making so absurd that it felt extraterrestrial. The following night, 21-year-old Iga Świątek and 24-year-old Aryna Sabalenka faced each other for the first time in a Grand Slam. In a semifinal match replete with punishing ground strokes and astonishing all-court defending, Świątek earned a comeback three-set victory.

Before that tournament, this tennis quartet had claimed two major titles, both won by Świątek. Less than four years later, they’re up to 21, seven for Alcaraz, six for Świątek, and four each for Sinner and Sabalenka. Only two other players have won more than a single major during this time: Novak Djokovic, the greatest male player ever, still battling the youngsters at age 39, and Coco Gauff, whose talent and drive have her in position to join tennis’s new pantheon.

The rapid emergence of this cohort of stars is the inciting event in The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis, the journalist Matthew Futterman’s account of the thrilling and grueling lives of the tennis elite. Reaching the summit of a sport played by 100 million people worldwide is close to impossible. Staying at the top isn’t much easier. Even as these exhilarating talents have reenergized the game and risen above their peers, they’ve been brought low by injuries, doping scandals, and self-doubt. After Gauff lost in January’s Australian Open, she was caught on camera obliterating her racket in what she thought was a hidden corridor. She immediately bemoaned the breach of privacy, suggesting that “maybe some conversations can be had” about the burdens of life in the tennis panopticon. Świątek was less politic, asking in a press conference, “Are we tennis players, or are we animals in the zoo, where they’re observed even when they poop?”

The tennis ecosystem has unexpectedly thrived in the absence of Federer, Nadal, and Williams, but the gains, for the sport and for its marquee players, are far from secure. Although Futterman adeptly surveys tennis’s stressors, the shape of the crisis that tennis faces, and its stakes, eludes him. Everything about the professional game, the way it’s played, structured, and consumed, seems ripe for transformation.

Futterman, who covers the pro circuit for The Athletic, wants us to understand that tennis is incredibly hard, perhaps especially for those who make it look easy. “There is no instruction manual,” he writes, “to help someone navigate their way through a sport and a culture seemingly designed to mess with their brains.”

Much of that torment is intrinsic to the game. Every sport has moments of tension, but in tennis the anxiety is metronomic. The stress starts early, flinch on a break chance two minutes in and the whole first set might be gone, and it never really stops. On the court, there’s no such thing as running out the clock or calling for a sub.

Anger, isolation, and exhaustion are endemic to each tennis era, as much a part of the game as the fuzz on the balls. Just ask the perpetually tortured John McEnroe or his cooler-headed Scandinavian rival, Björn Borg, who packed up his rackets in his mid-20s and became, in Futterman’s view, “the canary in the coal mine” for tennis burnout. Another early-’80s sensation, the prodigy Andrea Jaeger, retired at 20 and later became a nun. World No. 1 Ashleigh Barty abruptly quit in 2022, saying simply, “I am spent.” And Andre Agassi, the sport’s bard of introspection, said this in his autobiography, Open: “I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”

At the risk of undercutting an all-time great: I love tennis. Plenty of players love it too, at least when they’re winning. (No one is more delighted by a beautiful Carlos Alcaraz drop shot than Carlos Alcaraz.) Whether I’m watching matches, listening to press conferences, or scrolling on Instagram, I’m struck that it’s never been better to be one of the best tennis players in the world. It’s also never been worse.

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Financially speaking, this is the sport’s golden era. Borg, an 11-time major champion, collected $3.6 million in career prize money. Alcaraz and Sabalenka won $5 million each for their victorious runs at the 2025 U.S. Open. For women especially, the allure of professional tennis is easy to quantify. Forbes’s 2025 list of the world’s highest-paid female athletes features Gauff in the No. 1 spot, with $33 million in on- and off-court income. She’s followed immediately by Sabalenka ($30 million), Świątek ($25 million), and six more tennis players in the top 12. (The leading basketball player on the list, Caitlin Clark, is No. 11, sandwiched between American tennis stars Jessica Pegula and Amanda Anisimova.)

Tennis players are essentially their own small business, with ever-expanding retinues, not just agents, managers, coaches, and trainers, but dietary advisers and sports psychologists to tune up their bodies and minds. Futterman gets his best material from these support staffers. Sabalenka’s “high-performance coach,” Jason Stacy, a practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu who professes to “know nothing about tennis,” taught her breathing exercises that, according to Futterman, he “used to follow when an opponent would have him in an upside-down headlock.” (He also called in a biomechanics expert to fix her balky serve; that same specialist now works with Gauff.)

Deep insights from the athletes themselves, in The Cruelest Game and in press coverage generally, are scant. Top players now cultivate their image primarily via social media, affording meaningful (and not so meaningful) access only to their own videographers. A recent “unfiltered” Q&A on Sinner’s personal YouTube channel featured such questions as “How many hours do you usually sleep?” and “Which shoe do you tie first?” The three-month ban that Sinner served last year after testing positive for an anabolic steroid did not come up. (Tennis’s anti-doping authorities ruled that Sinner was not at fault, accepting his explanation that trace amounts of the drug had been rubbed into his body during a massage. Świątek, too, got a finding of “no significant fault” and a light suspension when she tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine in 2024.)

Friendly YouTube Q&As notwithstanding, life online can be perilous for players, especially women. Tennis has become a hotbed of online harassment, a phenomenon fueled by omnipresent legalized gambling. Thanks to the sport’s international reach, its huge inventory of matches, and its continual discrete action, FanDuel and DraftKings both accept wagers on individual points, tennis is particularly popular with bettors worldwide, ranking behind only soccer and basketball by some estimates. For years now, high-profile women on tour have been speaking out about the torrent of sexualized and violent threats they receive from angry gamblers. Still, nothing seems to change. This past March, two women reported getting texts demanding that they lose a match; those messages were accompanied by a photo of a gun and the names of their family members.

Although this variety of cruelty goes unaddressed in The Cruelest Game, Futterman does highlight the unprecedented physical toll of tennis circa 2026. Thanks to modern fitness regimes and equipment, high-tech rackets and strings that make any shot possible from anywhere on the court, the sport is far more demanding than it was in Agassi’s day, let alone McEnroe and Borg’s. From the couch or the stands, high-level tennis can appear weightless. At ground level, it’s a brutal struggle, an hours-long series of leg-churning, lung-bursting sprints, punctuated by torquing, full-body whips of the racket, often in close-to-boiling temperatures. (Sinner’s two toughest opponents in recent years have been Alcaraz and the sun.) That ordeal has a cost: strained muscles, twisted knees, stretched and torn ligaments.

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Tennis isn’t just getting tougher from shot to shot. The tour itself is a multinational grind, with key events in Australia, the Middle East, North America, Europe, and East Asia. Tennis also has a shockingly short offseason, about a month for highly ranked players. The superstars aren’t happy. Sabalenka said earlier this year that the schedule “is definitely insane, and that’s not good for all of us, as you see so many players getting injured.” In 2024, Alcaraz said with a resigned chuckle, “Probably they are going to kill us in some way.” A year later, he pleaded with tennis authorities “to do something,” because there’s no “good period of time that we can practice, we can rest.” This year, he finally got some extended time off: He missed the French Open and Wimbledon because of an injured right wrist.

Overwork is a perverse consequence of success: The more you win, the more matches you play, the more your joints get pulverized, and the more prize money you make. There’s an uneasy synergy in tennis between pain and profit. Although Alcaraz made it sound like he was powerless to resist the unremitting tennis calendar, players are able to opt out. In 2023, the 21-year-old Amanda Anisimova announced on Instagram that her life on tour had “become unbearable,” and that she was stepping away to prioritize her mental health.

Anisimova, who’d been tapped as a can’t-miss star when she made the French Open semifinals at 17, threw herself into painting and worked with a therapist who specialized in trauma. She came back to tennis after eight months away, and with the help of a Swedish Canadian physiotherapist, Futterman calls her “the chief operating officer of Anisimova’s body”, transformed from an injury-riddled athlete into a strong, confident title contender. Last year, she made the finals of both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

Although male players have become more open about their mental-health struggles, the sport’s leading men rarely go on leave. “There were months when I thought about taking a complete break from tennis to cleanse my mind,” Nadal said in a post-retirement essay for The Players’ Tribune. “I conquered it by always moving forward.” For cultural and biological reasons, female tennis players far more commonly take sabbaticals. Maja Chwalińska, a surprise finalist at this year’s French Open, took a hiatus in 2021 after, she said, the sport became a source of “pressure, stress, and crying.” Williams, Osaka, and Elina Svitolina are among the many women who have returned to the tour after giving birth. (Williams, who “evolved away” from tennis as she prepared to have her second child, has now launched another comeback, at age 44.) That path is slightly less arduous now that players have succeeded in pushing the WTA Tour to make accommodations for women who want to start families, paid leave, grants for fertility treatments, ranking protection during time off.

Women have been battling for just policies since the creation of modern pro tennis in the late 1960s. Billie Jean King and eight others fought against pay disparities by forming their own tour. Thanks to the efforts of King and Venus Williams, who’s still competing at 46, female players as of 2007 receive prize money equal to men’s at all four Grand Slams. Now they’re pushing to get even bigger checks, for themselves and their male peers. At a press conference in May, Sabalenka raised the prospect of a Grand Slam boycott if players don’t get a larger portion of tournament revenue. Gauff backed her up, saying, “If everyone were to move as one and collaborate, then yeah, I can 100 percent see that.”

I can’t quite picture players walking out of a Grand Slam, and tennis’s lack of a formally recognized players’ union has historically made collective action difficult. But that could be changing: Sabalenka, Gauff, Świątek, Sinner, and other highly ranked men and women came together at the French Open, cutting short their initial media obligations as part of their protest over prize money. The balkanization of tennis could also be a source of leverage. The men’s and women’s tours are distinct entities, as are the sport’s four major tournaments. If one of the tours cuts down on the number of mandatory events, or one of the Grand Slams ratchets up its payouts, the others might feel compelled to follow suit.

It’s also possible that, as King did more than half a century ago, the players could create something new, in partnership with or in opposition to the existing tour and Grand Slam leadership. Rumors have circulated for years about a combined “Premier Tour” for the sport’s top tier, with fewer events and a real offseason. Part of tennis’s appeal comes from its connection to history, the fact that players have been stepping onto the grass at Wimbledon since the 1800s. The new elite have shown no sign that they want to abandon tradition, but they also won’t be cowed by it. Federer, Nadal, and Williams left an unmatched tennis legacy. This generation could reshape the entire sport.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Tennis’s New Golden Age.”