Sports
Tennis bends to the wind’s will at Indian Wells as desert weather blows players off course
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — For a tournament that bills itself as a tennis paradise, Indian Wells has a tendency to bring some Old Testament elements to the sport in the California desert.
The sun that blazes down in the day is replaced with temperatures that can turn frigid at night. In a part of the world that sees rain around 14 days out of 365, a few always seem to land in the first fortnight of March, interrupting play. Last year, bees swarmed the main stadium. This year, the sworn enemy of tennis players at all levels — that rarely stops play, but defines its rhythm more than any other weather condition — is puppeting the small yellow ball they try to hit inside the white lines and driving them to distraction.
“Bloody windy out there,” said Rinky Hijikata, the 24-year-old Australian who credited his childhood in a windy suburb of Sydney for getting through his first-round match with Alexander Shevchenko of Kazakhstan, 6-1, 6-3. Across the complex, 40mph gusts buffeted palm trees, sending serve tosses askew and wobbling balls through the air like a swerving soccer free kick.
Hijikata said Thursday’s wind wasn’t just powerful: it seemed to be coming from every direction. Given that, there was only one way to survive, and it didn’t involve taking dead aim at the lines to try to end points quickly.
“You got to give yourself big margins,” he said. “You’ve got to hit the ball in the court and get your running shoes on.”
Belinda Bencic, who followed her usual strategy as she prevailed 6-1, 6-1 over Tatjana Maria, had a similar approach. “Trying to play with it, not trying to go for risky shots and just kind of playing a big target and working your legs hard.
“Respect the wind,” she warned.
Heat can be exhausting and rain can delay play, but wind is the most capricious. Much like a powerful first serve or groundstroke, its power over tennis means little without knowing its direction. If it’s blowing up and down a court, parallel with the sidelines, the effects are more predictable. At one end, players have to be wary of overhitting with the breeze at their back. At the other, they have to be mindful of how much it will hold up their shots. The player receiving a ball with wind behind it needs to react quicker; if it’s slowing a ball down, their footwork needs to take them to it and adjust to any sudden changes of direction.
It doesn’t usually work that cleanly. The breeze can howl off Flushing Bay some days at the U.S. Open in New York; Arthur Ashe Stadium, the main arena, was known for its vortexes before the installation of a partial roof in 2015. At the ATP Tour event held in Estoril, Portugal, just north of Lisbon, the wind off the Atlantic could make a mess of matches.
The winds in Indian Wells are of another sort, something that somehow slips most players’ minds as they wax poetic about what is for many their favorite stop on the tennis calendar. The place is basically a wind machine thanks to its location between two sets of mountains, the San Jacintos and the San Bernardinos, in the Coachella Valley about 120 miles east of Los Angeles. The mountains act like a funnel; the hot air from the desert ground rises, and the cool air from above rushes in to take its place. On the outside courts, it will go in whatever direction it has chosen for the day. On the main arena, Stadium 1, the bowl structure and its doors and openings create currents and vortexes to which players have to adapt on the fly.
You can literally see the wind just take the ball over mid-air pic.twitter.com/0uMjtaVD8K
— Owen (@kostekcanu) March 6, 2025
A desert wind can create other hazards as well. Bencic said she left the practice court last Friday with a mouthful of the desert’s finest.
“It was like a sandstorm,” she said.
The wind made for a troublesome first match for Joao Fonseca, the 18-year-old rising star from Brazil who is playing the tournament for the first time. Fonseca had to scramble back from break down in the third set against Jacob Fearnley Britain to win his Indian Wells debut.
Fonseca dominated Fearnley in the first set, as the Briton adjusted to the wind and figured out how to play aggressively in it. Fearnley might have expected to have an advantage. He played college tennis at Texas Christian University, which can be plenty gusty in its own right, especially at the T.C.U. home courts, which are built into a kind of bowl.
“A lot of it is mental,” Fearnley said. “You can’t really control what the weather is going to do, so you kind of just accept it and try and use it to the best of your ability.”
He seemed to have it mastered things, outhitting the Brazilian until a double fault allowed Fonseca to draw even in the deciding set. Fonseca didn’t lose another game in the windiest match he could remember, in which his kick serve, jumping out of the ad-court and into Fearnley’s backhand, shackled his opponent. His hat blew off at one point; a towel rolled onto the court and interrupted play during another.
Players battling the wind as well as each other 🤝
The Towel had enough of this point 😆#Tennisparadise pic.twitter.com/Rp6ElRk4Oz
— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) March 6, 2025
“When it’s windy, it’s just a little mistake, and at this level it’s just one point that you won the match,” he said.
Still, the wind made Fonseca so uncomfortable that after the two-hour match he headed for the practice courts to hit for another half-hour and try to gain a feel for the ball.
After Fonseca and Fearnley finished in the main stadium, it was Emma Raducanu’s turn to try to figure out the elements. Raducanu was playing her first match since a spectator was removed from one of her matches for exhibiting fixated behavior toward her in Dubai last month. The person who appeared at her second-round match against Karolina Muchová had “approached her, left her a note, took her photograph, and engaged in behaviour that caused her distress,” according to a statement from Dubai authorities.
Indian Wells brought safety and plenty of support for her. “I didn’t have what happened in Dubai in my head at all today,” she said.
Unfortunately for Raducanu, who thrives on rhythm and finding her groove, it also brought the kind of conditions that no player would want for a first match after a break. The wind, and the tricky challenges of Moyuka Uchijima, who mastered the conditions by varying her shots, proved too much in a 6-3, 6-2 defeat.
Like many players, Emma Raducanu found the windy conditions challenging at Indian Wells. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
“Extremely awkward in the wind here,” said Raducanu, who was playing her first match with her new trial coach, Vladimir Platenik. Platenik previously coached Lulu Sun, who beat Raducanu at last year’s Wimbledon, and top-15 mainstay Daria Kasatkina.
“A lot of balls that were very, very spinny on these courts in the day and in the wind,” Raducanu said. “So it was just jumping up a lot, and then kind of short, like, almost like mishits.
“I didn’t really know what was coming.”
As night fell and the temperature dropped, the wind died down. Of course, then the rain came, a cold steady drizzle that caused play to stop around 8:30 p.m. At 9:25 p.m., officials called off play for the night.
Prior to the tournament, the BNP Paribas Open’s decision to change its court provider had dominated discussion among the players about conditions. At first evidence, the new Laykold surface is still bouncy, with the desert sand and grit in its paint sending balls spinning out of strike zones and roughing up the felt. It’s the swings in sun and cloud, hot and cold, and most of all, windy and calm that define conditions that Andrey Rublev has likened to playing four tournaments in one.
If the forecast is right — always a big if in the desert — the gusts will be lighter in the coming days, making life on the tennis courts easier to handle. Unless the bees swarm again.
(Top photo: Frey / TPN via Getty Images)
Sports
Law firm fighting for women’s sports in SCOTUS battle comments on ruling possibly impacting SJSU trans lawsuit
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A law firm leading the charge in the ongoing Supreme Court case over trans athletes in women’s sports has responded after a federal judge suggested the case’s ruling could impact a separate case involving a similar issue.
Colorado District Judge Kato Crews deferred ruling in motions to dismiss former San Jose State volleyball co-captain Brooke Slusser’s lawsuit against the California State University (CSU) system until after a ruling in the B.P.J. v. West Virginia Supreme Court case, which is expected to come in June.
Slusser filed the lawsuit against representatives of her school and the Mountain West Conference in fall 2024 after she allegedly was made to share bedrooms and changing spaces with trans teammate Blaire Fleming for a whole season without being informed that Fleming is a biological male.
Meanwhile, the B.P.J. case went to the Supreme Court after a trans teen sued West Virginia to block the state’s law that prevents males from competing in girls’ high school sports.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is the primary law firm defending West Virginia in that case at the Supreme Court, and has now responded to news that Slusser’s lawsuit could be affected by the SCOTUS ruling.
“We hope the ruling from the Supreme Court will affirm that Title IX was designed to guarantee equal opportunity for women, not to let male athletes displace women and girl in competition. It is crucial that sports be separated by sex for not only the equal opportunity of women but for safety and privacy. Title IX should protect women’s right to compete in their own sports. Allowing men to compete in the female category reverses 50 years of advancement for women,” ADF Vice President of Litigation Strategies Jonathan Scruggs said.
Slusser’s attorney, Bill Bock of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, expects a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the legal defense representing West Virginia, thus helping his case.
(Left) Brooke Slusser (10) of the San Jose State Spartans serves the ball during the first set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Oct. 19, 2024. (Right) Blaire Fleming #3 of the San Jose State Spartans looks on during the third set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym on October 19, 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. ( Andrew Wevers/Getty Images; Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
“We’re looking forward to the case going forward,” Bock told Fox News Digital.
“I believe that the court is going to find that Title IX operates on the basis of biological sex, without regard to an assumed or professed gender, and so just like the congress and the members of congress that passed Title IX in 1972, allowed this specifically provided for in the regulations that there had to be separate men’s and women’s teams based on biological sex, I think the court is going to see that is the original meaning of the statute and apply it in that way, and I think it’s going to be a big win in women’s sports.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared prepared to rule in favor of West Virginia after oral arguments on Jan. 13.
Slusser spoke on the steps of the Supreme Court on Jan. 13 while oral arguments took place inside, sharing her experience with a divided crowd of opposing protesters.
With Fleming on its roster, SJSU reached the 2024 conference final by virtue of a forfeit by Boise State in the semifinal round. SJSU lost in the final to Colorado State.
Slusser went on to develop an eating disorder due to the anxiety and trauma from the scandal and dropped out of her classes the following semester. The eating disorder became so severe, that Slusser said she lost her menstrual cycle for nine months. Her decision to drop her classes resulted in the loss of her scholarship, and her parents said they had to foot the bill out of pocket for an unfinished final semester of college.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education determined in January that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of the situation involving Fleming, and has given the university an ultimatum to agree to a series of resolutions or face a referral to the Department of Justice.
Among the department’s findings, it determined that a female athlete discovered that the trans student allegedly conspired to have a member of an opposing team spike her in the face during a match. ED claims that “SJSU did not investigate the conspiracy, but later subjected the female athlete to a Title IX complaint for ‘misgendering’ the male athlete in online videos and interviews.”
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SJSU trans player Blaire Fleming and teammate Brooke Slusser went to a magic show and had Thanksgiving together in Las Vegas despite an ongoing lawsuit over Fleming being transgender. (Thien-An Truong/San Jose State Athletics)
SJSU Athletic Director Jeff Konya told Fox News Digital in a July interview that he was satisfied with how the university handled the situation involving Fleming.
“I think everybody acted in the best possible way they could, given the circumstances,” Konya said.
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Sports
Myles Garrett cited for speeding a ninth time, an elite pass rusher seemingly always in a rush
Myles Garrett is in a hurry to become the greatest pass rusher in NFL history. The Cleveland Browns All-Pro defensive end set the single-season sack record in 2025 and has cracked the top 20 career leaders after only nine seasons.
“I’m going to take that down, and I prefer I take it down in the next five years,” Garrett told Casino Guru News last month.
Off the field, however, his urgency to get from point A to B is a problem. He’s accumulating speeding tickets at an alarming rate.
On Feb. 21, Garrett was handed his ninth speeding ticket since his NFL career began in 2017. He was cited for driving 94 mph in a 70-mph zone on Interstate 71 between Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.
The citation from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office says Garrett was driving his green 2024 Porsche at 1:35 a.m., returning home after attending a Miami of Ohio basketball game in Oxford.
Body cam footage shows the officer telling Garrett that she kept the charge under 100 mph so that a court appearance wouldn’t be mandatory. Garrett reportedly still holds a Texas driver’s license — he attended Texas A&M — and told the officer that he did not have an Ohio license.
Cleveland Browns’ Myles Garrett wears a jacket displaying his girlfriend Chloe Kim before the women’s snowboarding halfpipe finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy.
(Lindsey Wasson / AP)
The officer wrote that the famously affable Garrett was “kind and cooperative,” and that drugs and alcohol were not a factor.
Garrett’s need for speed flies in the face of his persona. He has written poetry since high school, peppers social media with inspirational sayings and donates time and money to several charities.
His girlfriend is two-time gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, for whom he wrote a poem he shared on social media: “You enrapture fools to kings, and exist without a peer, put on this Earth for many things, but our love is why you’re here.”
Verse hasn’t slowed his roll. On Aug. 9 he was cited for ticket No. 8, clocked at 100 mph in a 60-mph zone in a Cleveland suburb a day after the Browns returned home from a preseason game at Carolina.
Garrett’s seventh ticket followed a frightening crash in 2022. He flipped his gray 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S off State Road in Sharon Township and he and a female passenger were injured. He was cited for failing to control his vehicle due to unsafe speeds on what had been a slick roadway.
A witness told a responding police officer that Garrett’s vehicle went airborne, took out a fire hydrant and rolled three times. Garrett sustained shoulder and biceps sprains and was sidelined for the Browns’ game that week against the Atlanta Falcons. His companion was not seriously injured.
Cleveland television station WKYC reported that in September 2021 Garrett was stopped twice in a 24-hour period — for driving 120 and 105 mph. The infractions occurred on Interstate 71 in Medina County, where the speed limit is 70 mph, and he paid fines of $267 and $287.
A year earlier, Garrett was cited for driving 100 mph in a 65-mph zone of Interstate 77 — again while driving a Porsche — and paid a $308 fine. He accumulated his first batch of speeding tickets in 2017 and 2018, and the police reports recite similar circumstances: Garrett driving well over the speed limit, cited without incident, paid a nominal fine.
The piddly fines certainly aren’t a deterrent. Garrett, 30, and the Browns agreed to a four-year contract extension in March 2025 that made him the highest-paid non-quarterback in NFL history at the time. The deal pays the seven-time All-Pro more than $40 million a season and includes more than $123 million in guaranteed money.
He set the NFL single-season sack record with 23.0 last season, surpassing the 22.5 accumulated by T.J. Watt and Michael Strahan. Garrett has 125.5 career sacks, averaging 14 a season, a pace that would enable him to break Bruce Smith’s career record of 200 in five years.
“That is definitely on my mind to go out there and get,” Garrett said. “That’s a goal I’ve had for years now since college.”
Garrett has declined to discuss his driving habits.
“I’d honestly prefer to talk about football and this team than anything I’m doing off the field other than the back-to-school event that I did the other day,” he told reporters after ticket No. 8 in August, referring to a charity appearance.
“I try to keep my personal life personal. And I’d rather focus on this team when I can.”
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Former ESPN broadcaster Keith Olbermann once again incited backlash on social media Wednesday after he called late legendary college football coach Lou Holtz a “legendary scumbag” in an X post on the day Holtz was announced dead.
“Legendary scumbag, yes,” Olbermann wrote in response to a clip of Holtz criticizing former President Joe Biden in 2020 for supporting abortion rights.
Olbermann received scathing criticism in response to his post on X.
“You’re a scumbag that needs mental help,” one X user wrote to Olbermann.
One user echoed that sentiment, writing to Olbermann, “You’re the real scumbag here. Lou Holtz had more class, integrity, and genuine decency in his pinky finger than you’ll ever show in your lifetime.”
Another user wrote, “You’re a grumpy, lonely, Godless man. All the things Lou Holtz was not.”
Keith Olbermann speaks onstage during the Olbermann panel at the ESPN portion of the 2013 Summer Television Critics Association tour at the Beverly Hilton Hotel July 24, 2013, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Olbermann has made it a pattern of sharing politically charged far-left statements that are often combative and ridiculed on social media, typically resulting in immense backlash.
After the U.S. men’s hockey team’s gold medal win, Olbermann heavily criticized the team for accepting an invitation from President Trump to the State of the Union address. Olbermann wrote on X that any members of the men’s team who attended the event were “declaring their indelible stupidity and misogyny,” while praising the women’s team for declining the invitation.
In January, Olbermann attacked former University of Kentucky women’s swimmer Kaitlynn Wheeler for celebrating a women’s rights rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments for two cases focused on the legality of biological male trans athletes in women’s sports.
Former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz listens before being presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in Washington, D.C., Dec, 3, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“It’s still about you trying to find an excuse for a lifetime wasted trying to succeed in sports without talent,” Olbermann wrote in response to Wheeler’s post.
In 2025, Olbermann faced significant backlash after posting (and later deleting) a message on X aimed at CNN contributor Scott Jennings, that said, “You’re next motherf—–,” shortly after the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
Holtz was a stern supporter of President Donald Trump, even saying in February 2024 that Trump needed to “coach America back to greatness!”
Near the end of Trump’s first term, shortly after former President Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, Trump awarded Holtz with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States.
After Holtz’s death was announced Wednesday, several top GOP figures paid tribute to the coach on social media.
Those GOP lawmakers included senators Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.; Todd Young, R-Ind.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; representatives Greg Murphy, R-N.C.; David Rouzer, R-N.C.; Erin Houchin, R-Ind.; and Steve Womack, R-Ark.; and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Indiana Gov. Mike Braun; U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon; and Rudy Giuliani.
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Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame football coach, addresses the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda Summit at the Marriott Marquis July 26, 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc)
At the time of publication, prominent Democrat leaders have appeared silent on Holtz’s passing, including prominent Democrats with a football background.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who worked as an assistant high school football coach; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who was a recruiting target for Holtz in 1986 as a college prospect; Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, who played in the NFL; and Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Ill., who played football for the University of Illinois, have not posted acknowledging Holtz’s death.
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