Culture
Medvedev's 3.40am finish is latest absurd example of why tennis has to change
It happened again. Of course it did.
Two tennis players, starting near midnight, battling nearly to sunrise in front of a scattering of fans, with a squad of kids in their early teenage years scurrying after balls at nearly four in the morning.
Last year it was Andy Murray duelling with Thanasi Kokkinakis until the night sky began to lighten at around 4am. On Thursday, and into Friday, it was Daniil Medvedev of Russia and Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland doing the tennis version of the 2am jazz set.
“I would not have stayed,” Medvedev said in an on-court interview after he completed his comeback from two sets down and eliminated Ruusuvuori 3-6, 6-7(1), 6-4, 7-6(1), 6-0. Judging from the scoreline, Ruusuvuori decided not to and it was hard to blame him.
The dynamic would seem absurd if it wasn’t so routine. The main two tournaments where this happens, the Australian and U.S. Opens, seem to treat this as a badge of honor rather than a serious risk for the players involved, especially the one that wins the match, gets to bed some time around 6am, then has to come back the next day.
(Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Medvedev was floating around Melbourne Park by mid-afternoon on Friday after grabbing a strange night of sleep and trying to figure out how to prepare for his Saturday evening match against Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada.
“I wake up for my match today at 7 and I’m sure that’s when he went to sleep,” Karen Khachanov, Medvedev’s good friend and fellow Russian said on Friday after his win over Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic. “There should be certain limits because especially the best-of-five, you know that match can go up to five hours and then you start at 11pm. This is not normal, not healthy for anybody to recover, to get ready for the next day, the next match. You lose a complete night of sleep. Sleeping is part of the recovery, one of the biggest parts. The food, everything we do, treatments, ice baths. All this stuff and you don’t sleep. So how are you going to feel the next day?”
In recent years, a growing number of players have said enough is enough.
“Late-night matches don’t only harm players — they have negative consequences for fans, ball kids, event employees, and all stakeholders involved,” Ahmad Nassar, the executive director of the Professional Tennis Player Association, the organization Novak Djokovic co-founded in 2020 to address, among other issues, working conditions for arguably the most important people in the sport. “From a health and safety standpoint, it’s not optimal, it’s frankly not fair,” Nassar said.
Pressure from the PTPA – as well as Jannik Sinner’s decision to pull out of the Paris Masters in November after he won a match that started at 12.30am and finished at nearly 3am — helped force officials with the men’s and women’s tours, the ATP and the WTA, to agree to prohibit matches from starting after 11pm as of next year. Matches scheduled for a court that is still being used after 10.30pm will be moved to another court and both tours have told tournament organizers they want night sessions to begin at 6.30pm rather than 7 or 7.30pm, with no more than two matches on the night schedule.
(Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
However, tennis being tennis, with seven different organizations empowered to enact their own rules with little input from active players, the four most important tournaments — Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and the French Open — do not have to follow this rule.
Late-night finishes are not an issue at Wimbledon, which has an 11pm curfew, or at the French Open, which schedules just one match in its night sessions, but Melbourne and New York do not adhere to curfews, so some of their greatest matches end up unfolding in front of a few hundred hardy souls.
“It’s a very obvious thing that needs to change,” Andy Murray said last week of the late-night starts and finishes and the tour rule changes. “From a player’s perspective, it’ll definitely help with recovery for the following day’s matches and things like that. I certainly think for the fans and the tournament, it just probably looks a wee bit more professional if you’re not finishing at three or four in the morning.”
Tennis Australia made some tweaks to the tournament this year that it said were aimed at avoiding late-night starts and finishes. Most notably, it has scheduled just two afternoon matches on the main show courts rather than three, lessening the chance of a late start to the evening session.
It expanded the first round to three days from two, allowing more room to schedule the first 128 singles matches. That has had little effect on late starts because the evening session start time remained 7pm and because tennis matches are longer than they used to be because there is more depth, more athleticism and points, thereby games, sets and matches last longer.
On the opening night, the women’s defending champion, Aryna Sabalenka, walked onto the court at 11.30pm following Novak Djokovic’s four-hour fight with Dino Prizmic.
It should be noted, and Tennis Australia officials made a point of doing so, that a cascading series of events led to the late start and finish on Thursday.
Two unexpected rainfalls occurred early in the afternoon, the first of which delayed play on Rod Laver Arena because rain was not in the forecast and its roof was open. Iga Swiatek generally blows through matches like she has a Taylor Swift concert to get to, but her duel with Danielle Collins lasted more than three hours.
(Robert Prange/Getty Images)
Then Carlos Alcaraz’s win over Lorenzo Sonego lasted nearly three and a half hours. Since play in Rod Laver does not start until noon, compared with 11am on other courts, the long afternoon matches pushed back the 7pm start of the evening session. Then the first evening match, between Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova, lasted nearly three hours and included a deciding-set tiebreaker with a final score of 22-20, the longest tiebreaker in Grand Slam history.
Medvedev stood in the tunnel for half an hour waiting for it to end. He finally took the court at around 11.30pm. Another, albeit smaller, show court, roughly 250 meters from Rod Laver, had been available for nearly two hours at that point. Four hours and five sets later, Medvedev was in the third round.
Two men’s and two women’s matches on average at the Australian Open should account for about nine hours of tennis. On Thursday and into Friday morning, the action on Rod Laver lasted nearly 14 hours.
There was even one benefit of the late, late finish that officials with Tennis Australia touted on Friday afternoon in the bleary light of the day. They had been looking at social media and saw lots of fans in Europe and the United States, who, given the double-digit-hour time difference, got to enjoy Medvedev’s triumph through a chunk of their workday.
All it took was for the world No 3 to pull an all-nighter.
(Top photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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