Culture
Emma Raducanu’s turning point and the fairness of tennis wildcards
Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.
This week, Emma Raducanu made her plans for 2025, the off-season, well, happened and the Australian Open dealt out some not-so-wild wildcards.
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How will Emma Raducanu handle her rise back up the rankings?
Raducanu started 2024 ranked world No. 301 after an injury-ravaged 2023. Thanks to her ‘special’ ranking — the WTA term for a protected ranking — and the occasional wildcards that come the way of a Grand Slam champion, she could compete at most of the events she wanted to while taking breaks when necessary. Her ranking now stands at No. 57.
“One thing with the WTA is we’re pretty much made to play the events when we’re in a certain ranking. Where my ranking was and is at, I didn’t have to play every single event,” she told reporters at London’s National Tennis Centre this month.
Raducanu added that “having to play every single tournament” is a major burden not just physically, but also in producing a balanced schedule. “Having a mulligan to not play a tournament would be a really good addition,” she said.
One of the big discussion points this year has been the demands placed on players by the WTA’s increased number of mandatory events, which includes all Grand Slams, all WTA 1000 events and six 500-level tournaments for those ranked high enough for automatic entry (designed to bolster those events just below the majors and to give the 250-level events just below them more of a regional focus). The world No. 2, Iga Swiatek, lost the top spot to Aryna Sabalenka in October after not playing enough 500-level events.
“It’s not going to end well, and it makes tennis less fun for us, let’s just say,” Swiatek said in a news conference at the Cincinnati Open in August. “I don’t think it should be like that because we deserve to rest a little more.”
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Raducanu, who missed the Asian hard-court swing with a foot injury in September after organizing her season around that block of tournaments, said that the time away helped outside of physical recovery. She went to see her grandmother in China, which “was a bit of a turning point”.
“I was playing the piano, painting. Exploring my artistic side a bit. It just got me thinking. That final foot injury just had me saying, ‘I want to stay healthy next year’.
“That was probably a big moment where I wanted to spend more time and energy on my fitness.”
Raducanu, who subsequently brought on fitness coach Yutaka Nakamura for the 2025 season, wants to plan her events “holistically” after feeling her scheduling was too short-sighted. She wants to ask herself, “What is the best for me this year? What is the main objective? How are we going to build the schedule around the main objective for this year?”
Whatever she decides, Raducanu says that in 2025: “Everything I want to do is match a philosophy. I don’t want to be doing things that are bitty. Every decision I make, I want it to link to a deeper reason. Not just, ‘OK, it’s spontaneous, I’m going to do this’. Everything has to link together.”
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Emma Raducanu has done all-or-nothing tennis. Now, can she just play?
Charlie Eccleshare
Once again, how wild is a wildcard?
With prize money for just making the first round of a Grand Slam approaching $100,000 (£80,000), the countries that host them may want to consider adjusting their process of handing out wildcard entries.
It’s always been reasonably unfair to young players from countries other than Australia, France, Great Britain and the United States that they basically have no shot at receiving the free pass that host countries hand out to their own. With the windfall it now brings, it seems increasingly out of whack.
Tennis Australia released its wildcards for next month’s Australian Open on Friday.
Stan Wawrinka got one. He’s 39, a three-time Grand Slam champion who won the tournament in 2014. He also got whipped in the first round of the U.S. Open by Italy’s Mattia Bellucci. He’s ranked world No. 161 right now.
Stan Wawrinka beat Rafael Nadal in the 2014 men’s singles final. (Matt King / Getty Images)
Other than the entries they swap with other Grand Slam hosts and the champion of an Asia-Pacific playoff, the Aussies kept the rest for themselves. The other men:
- Tristan Schoolkate, 23, 1-3 in 2024 on the ATP Tour, ranked 168.
- Li Tu, 28, 0-4 on the ATP Tour in 2024, ranked 174. He did take a set off Carlos Alcaraz at the U.S. Open.
- James McCabe, 0-4 on the ATP Tour in 2024, ranked 256.
On the women’s side, Daria Saville, No. 108, and Ajla Tomljanovic, No. 109, are defensible. They’ve battled injuries in recent years, have been inside the top 50 and are right on the cusp of a main draw spot. They may very well get in on ranking once withdrawals begin.
Maya Joint, 18, isn’t far behind at No. 116, but she’s just 1-2 at the tour level. Emerson Jones is 16 and ranked No. 375. Talia Gibson is 20 and ranked No. 140 but is yet to win a tour-level match.
Grand Slams rightly market themselves as the pinnacle of tennis. That may be true, but they’re not nearly as tough as they could be with fewer home-country free passes into their main draws.
Matt Futterman
And how long is a piece of string (or a tennis off-season)?
Do you want to know why players complain so often about the off-season? Because there isn’t one. Not really.
Ben Shelton took four days off.
Carlos Alcaraz didn’t touch his rackets for 10 days, which might sound like a lot.
Players competing in the United Cup have to be in Australia on Christmas Eve, a mere eight days away. It takes two days just to get there from much of the world. A handful of top players, including Taylor Fritz, are heading to Abu Dhabi for the World Tennis League exhibition that runs December 19-22. Many of them use it as part of their pre-season prep.
Fritz played his last 2024 match at the Davis Cup on November 20. Between then and landing in Abu Dhabi, he will have squeezed in a 10-day fitness block in Florida and a 10-day on-court camp in L.A. Factor in intercontinental travel and you can count the off-days on just about one hand.
That’s not an off-season. That’s a long weekend.
GO DEEPER
How the fight to improve the tennis calendar risks destroying its soul
Matt Futterman
Recommended reading:
🏆 The winners of the week
🎾 WTA:
🏆 Viktorija Golubic (No. 7 seed) def. Celine Naef 7-5, 6-4 to win the Limoges Open (125) in Limoges, France. It is her fourth WTA 125 title.
📅 Coming up
🎾 ATP
📍Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: ATP Next Gen Finals featuring Arthur Fils, Alex Michelsen, Jakub Mensik, Learner Tien.
🎾 Exhibition
📍Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: World Tennis League featuring Iga Swiatek, Daniil Medvedev, Aryna Sabalenka, Nick Kyrgios.
Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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