Culture
Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen’s Australian Open is a milestone for American’s men’s tennis
MELBOURNE, Australia — Across seven hours on Friday afternoon, the Australian Open morphed into an American tennis trout farm.
It was nearly impossible to watch a singles match without seeing a red, white and blue flag on the scoreboard, as two early-twenty-somethings and one teenager who looks even younger than his 19 years rumbled through the men’s draw and into the second week.
Did anyone have two Orange County boys, Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen, tearing into the round of 16?
They didn’t.
“I was down a set and a break in the first round of qualies,” Tien, the teenager in the group, said after he had dusted Corentin Moutet of France in three sets. “To now be in the second week feels a little crazy,” he added.
Michelsen had got there first, putting out No. 19 seed Karen Khachanov in three sets.
Wins for American women sandwiched all this, with Emma Navarro getting through to the second week in her third consecutive three-set win to the start of the day. Madison Keys got there to end the night, beating friend, compatriot and Australian crowd favorite Danielle Collins.
All that was a little less surprising. Keys and Navarro have been there before, as has Coco Gauff. Tommy Paul’s best Grand Slam result came in Australia when he reached the semifinals in 2022, and he joined Gauff, Keys and Navarro with a routine win over Roberto Carballes Baena the previous day. Paul and Gauff then kept the American mojo rolling even further, winning their fourth-round matches over Alexander Davidovich Fokina and Belinda Bencic.
Tien, 19, and Michelsen, 20, who will try to keep the vibes alive Monday in Melbourne, are on a rise that is the opposite of that. Michelsen has some past form: he made the third round in Melbourne last year and he has won a couple of first-round matches at the U.S. Open in the last two years — but not like this, knocking off two top-20 players in three matches.
Tien, a two-time national junior champion, had played two Grand Slam main draw matches before this week, a four-set loss to Arthur Fils at the 2024 U.S. Open, and a three-set loss to Tiafoe the year before. The third time was the charm. He beat Camilo Ugo Carabelli of Argentina in five sets
Then the draw handed him two matches against the arch antagonists of the ATP Tour, less a baptism of fire than a mind-bending trip into twisting shots, beguiling spins and the dark arts of tennis with the big boys. Tien took on fifth seed Daniil Medvedev for five sets and nearly five hours in a match that ended not long before dawn. Then came Moutet, who at two sets down reminded Tien that he still had to win a third one, which Moutet played as though hobbled by a hip injury on some points while scrambling across the court at full speed on others. Interesting times for a Grand Slam newbie.
“I didn’t really know what was going on with him,” Tien said in his news conference, still with one foot in the washing machine.
Add in Ben Shelton’s four-set win over Lorenzo Musetti, the Italian who had beaten him two times out of two, and a remarkable statistic appears: this is the first Grand Slam since 1993 with three American men under 23 in the second week. Tien and Michelsen are also the first pair of American men aged 20 or younger to reach the third round at a Grand Slam since the 2003 U.S. Open when Andy Roddick and Robby Ginepri, Michelsen’s coach, did it.
It was America’s two most recent major finalists, Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula, who found the fourth round a bridge too far. Gael Monfils produced an immaculate four sets to knock out Fritz; Olga Danilovic produced two of the same to take out Pegula.
Yes, it’s a bit weird. But maybe it’s explainable.
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In mid-November, Michelsen and Tien were banged up. The two close friends, who play Fortnite together in their spare time and who have trained at the same Orange County tennis academy for the past four years, had just ended long seasons. They had the usual menu of sore joints from hitting too many balls for too long.
They didn’t boot up the console.
“They basically put the rackets down for two weeks and went to work,” Rodney Marshall, the Southern California tennis fitness guru who has been working with Michelsen the past year, said during an interview from Los Angeles Saturday.
Everyone calls Marshall ‘Rocket’. He’s one of those experts in sporting torture that American tennis players have trusted with making them faster and stronger and more durable for 15 years.
Marshall, Michelsen and Tien worked together twice a day, six days a week at the academy in California where they have trained together the past four years — and on the sands of Aliso Beach, Calif.
They only had a small window and they needed to figure out what sort of incremental gains they might be able to make. They wanted to gain strength in their lower bodies and fine-tune their movements, so they could get in and out of the corners of the court faster — an essential skill these days.
Tien, who’d missed three months during the first half of the year with a cracked rib, needed some more leverage from his left leg — his back leg on a forehand — to maximize the power he could unleash from his 5ft 11in (180cm) frame. Michelsen, who is 6ft 5in, needed to get better at lowering his center of gravity and finding power from a squatting position.
Life became an endless series of isometrics and plyometrics. The isometrics (holding positions for long stretches) strengthen muscles and tendons; the plyometrics (jumping) build explosiveness.
Saturdays, they went to the beach — to do sprints. Marshall brought an American football and sent them on passing routes across the sand, with one acting as the wide receiver and the other as the cornerback.
“It was almost like they were cramming,” he said of Tien and Michelsen. “They really embraced the suffering.” If that line sounds familiar, it’s for good reason: four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz, 21, credited finding “joy in the suffering” for his French Open title last June.
Pretty soon, Tien was getting a little more oomph when smacking a tennis ball down the line. Michelsen was getting himself into a ground-level contortion and telling Marshall he could stay there all day. “I love it down here,” he’d yell.
“It’s a constant battle every day,” Michelsen said in an interview after his third-round win over Khachanov, his second win over a seed in six days.
“I look at Marin Cilic. He was like 6-6, and he was always so low. I’ve been trying to replicate that.”
Alex Michelsen’s explosiveness from the ground has been key to his run in Melbourne. (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)
On the other side of the country, in Florida, Paul was going through a fitness block of his own with Fritz before the latter headed to southern California for tennis training. Frances Tiafoe, Reilly Opelka, Jacob Fearnley and several other pros were with Paul in Florida.
“A good group,” said Paul, who often talks NFL and NBA with Michelsen in the locker room. “He’s a crazy good competitor,” he said of Michelsen.
Paul said during an interview Friday that he is determined to play matches on his terms in 2025. He wants to move other people around this season, and not be the one getting moved around as much. That always seemed to happen last year when he ran into Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. His fast-paced, front-foot tennis could hurt them for a little while. He won a set off Alcaraz at Wimbledon and went up 4-1 up on Sinner at the U.S. Open. But then they would force him behind the baseline, and out of the contest.
“Carlos moves unbelievably well when he has to, but if you look at him when he’s playing his best tennis, he’s dictating,” Paul said.
Shelton was in Orlando, doing his own thing. He was trying to figure out how to go from being a below-average returner to someone who can get free points on his serve while stopping other guys from getting free points on theirs.
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From the pre-dawn hours Friday, when Tien was beating Medvedev in a match that ended at 2:56 a.m., until sunset Saturday, when Shelton bested Musetti in a fourth-set tiebreaker, the 23-and-under trio showed that the training was worth it.
Tien got back to his hotel after 4 a.m. He ate cold, stale pizza, and didn’t fall asleep until just before 7 a.m. He slept till about 1:30 p.m. before making his way back to Melbourne Park, where he hit tennis balls basically standing still for 45 minutes and endured massage and physiotherapy for five hours.
He was dead asleep by 11 p.m. “That was much needed,” he said.
Then he filleted Moutet, doing to the Frenchmen what Moutet had done to so many others over the years, minus the dark arts of delay and distraction.
“Incredible effort from him today,” Tien’s coach, Eric Diaz wrote in a text message. “Body was not doing well. Impressive mental rebound as well.”
Learner Tien’s court craft has tied his opponents in knots. (Daniel Crockett / AFP via Getty Images)
Shelton had some rebounding to do as well. He’d watched his two losses against No. 16 seed Musetti over and over, reliving the Italian rolling a series of backhand passing shots down the line. Tied at 5-5 in a fourth-set tiebreak, Shelton hit an awful drop shot that sat up for Musetti’s fearsome running backhand. The point looked lost, but Shelton knew what to expect. He covered the line, stabbed a volley into the open court and served out the match.
He’d spent the afternoon keeping an eye on the other matches, especially Michelsen.
“Me and Alex are boys,” Shelton said in his news conference.
“I’ve texted him and told him he’s a dog after every match that he’s won because it’s true. He is a dog. He’s going to be towards the top of the game very soon.”
With Shelton watching on, Michelsen effectively sealed his win over Khachanov with three huge points in the second-set tiebreak. All of them had roots in the off-season training block. He won the first with a curving 108mph second serve, a product of the leg strength and jumps. He took the second after sprinting to a ball outside the tramlines and whipping a forehand down the line. He won the third with his bread and butter, a powerful backhand down the line — with a little extra pop from all those medicine ball throws with Marshall and Tien.
As for Tien, Shelton can see a kindred spirit in his fellow left-hander, despite their diametrically opposite styles. Tien’s game is all about changing pace, floating balls deep to the backcourt and then suddenly attacking. His tennis is nothing like Shelton’s full-frontal assault, but Tien is breaking through here, out of nowhere, two years after Shelton did on the same courts.
“Not a bad place to have a breakthrough,” Shelton said. “On top of all the guys that are already at the top in the U.S., we have a lot more coming. It’s really starting to show itself.”
Indeed it is. The trout farm, a lot easier to create in a wealthy country with more than 300 million people, is doing what it is supposed to do. There were 33 Americans across the singles draws, more players than any other country. As the tournament moves into the quarterfinals, there are already two with safe harbor and potentially four more on the way.
Now comes the hard part: breaking the tape at the finish line as Gauff did in New York 16 months ago. That doesn’t require a trout farm. It requires a unicorn — and there are no farms capable of producing those.
(Top photo: Peter Staples / ATP Tour)
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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