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.

If you’d like to follow our fantastic tennis coverage, click here.

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.”

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.”

GO DEEPER

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)

Saturday, December 7, Joao Lucas Reis da Silva, a 24-year-old professional tennis player, did about the most normal thing anyone does these days. He posted a couple selfie on Instagram.

It was his partner’s birthday, so he posted a sweet carousel of them posing by the water in Rio de Janeiro. “I love you so much,” he wrote. The post made him a trailblazer — the first out gay active professional male tennis player — but he was just wishing his partner a happy birthday.

“I didn’t think about it… I just wanted to post a picture with him,” Reis da Silva told The Athletic Sunday from São Paolo, in his first international interview since he inadvertently made himself a part of tennis history.

About an hour earlier, he had won a tournament for the first time in four years, defeating Daniel Dutra da Silva 7-5, 1-6, 6-4 to lift the Procopio Cup and earn a spot in the qualifying at the Rio Open, the ATP 500 event he has played the past two years. Not a bad few days for the world No. 367.

“It’s been a crazy week but in the end it was perfect,” he said. After two long injury layoffs, the 24-year-old said he has played the best tennis of his life of late, reaching the semifinals of a tournament in Chile before this run to the title in São Paulo. Even as he felt the tennis world watching him in a way it never had before.

“I didn’t feel pressure,” he said. “I was happy. I had my boyfriend here with me. He was supporting me. My whole team was here.”

The women’s tennis tour has had numerous out gay players, including all-time greats Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, who won 98 Grand Slam titles between them across singles and doubles.

Men’s tennis has not been this way. Bill Tilden, the American star who dominated tennis in the 1920s, never publicly discussed his sexuality outside of his 1948 book, “My Story: A Champion’s Memoirs.” Brian Vahaly, who played in the 2000s and reached a career-high of world No. 57, and Bobby Blair, on tour in the 1980s, came out after they had retired from professional tennis.

Reis da Silva said Sunday that he told his family and friends that he was gay five years ago. “Before that, it was tough,” he explained.

“I couldn’t say too much about myself to my coaches, to my friends. When I tried to love myself, that was something different. It changed my life, changed everything, the relationship with my parents, with my coaches.”

Over a year ago, Reis da Silva fell in love with Gui Sampaio Ricardo, a Brazilian actor and model. Then Ricardo’s birthday rolled around for 2024, and Reis da Silva did what 24-year-olds do.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s my boyfriend’s birthday. Like happy birthday. I love you.’ And then, boom!

“It was so normal for me that I didn’t think about it.”

Messages and support from big names inside and outside the tennis world began to roll in. Lulu Santos, a massive music star in Brazil, sent him a message. Thiago Monteiro, Brazil’s current No. 1, added heart emojis to the post. He got a like from Diego Hypolito, a gay Brazilian gymnast who won a silver medal at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

Just like that, this largely unknown player from Recife, a coastal city in Brazil’s northeast corner, had become a sports and cultural icon. He said he expected to receive some negative reactions, but the responses have been “99.9 percent positive.”

“I’m really happy that people respect me, that people look at me, admire me maybe,” he said.

Speaking in an interview with The Telegraph in 2018, Vahaly said that he heard homophobic comments from other players in the locker room, describing it as “part of the culture.” He added that he hoped for a time when “we can say, ‘Congratulations,’ and then quickly move on. For people to be defined by their sexuality is what we need to get past.”

Reis da Silva, who said he was aware of Vahaly being honored by the U.S. Open (he will be USTA president beginning in 2025), remembers being 18 and hearing someone saying something offensive in the gym.

“In the locker rooms and at tournaments I used to hear some things that kind of bothered me,” he said.

“But when I started to tell everyone that I’m gay and these people knew about it, they stopped saying these things. It’s like when they have someone close to them that is gay, they respect them more. They stop doing sh**** comments,” Reis da Silva said.

“Maybe that’s a big thing to stop it — if people see someone in the top that is gay, things can change. People might stop saying things they shouldn’t that hurt people.”

Alison Van Uytvanck, the recently retired former world No. 37 who is married to physio Emilie Vermeiren, said that she never received any negative comments in the locker room. In an interview earlier this year, Van Uytvanck told The Athletic that “it is kind of surprising“ that the ATP Tour was yet to have an out, active male player.

“If only one player, like a top 100 player, would be open about it, it would be easier for others to open up.”

GO DEEPER

‘Now I can breathe a bit more’: Alison Van Uytvanck on life after tennis and Grand Slam anxiety

Reis da Silva said seeing a role model in the sport would have made a huge difference to him.

“When I was 16, 15, I had problems accepting myself.

“Maybe if I had had someone playing saying, ‘I’m gay, I’m here, I’m competing for the big tournaments,’ it would have been easier for me to accept myself and to love myself. People have told me that. People told me that they admire me. That I inspire people. So it’s a big deal for me and them.

“I don’t have a problem with being remembered as the great gay tennis player,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about that every time, you know?

“I know there will be a lot of attention on me.”

Born into a tennis-playing family, Reis da Silva said he began hitting balls when he was three. He followed in the footsteps of his brother, who is six years older and who competed at the junior level. As a little boy, Reis da Silva was so obsessed with tennis that he would cry when his father told him it was time to go home.

He began to compete nationally at 10, leaving home at 13 for São Paulo, where he lived and trained for seven years before he moved to Rio de Janeiro. Reis da Silva prefers to battle from the baseline, rather than rush the net, and he rates his service return and his backhand as his biggest weapons.

“I love to break serves,” he said. “I like to stay there in the point and be aggressive in my forehand and play big rallies.”

He has competed throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia in addition to South America, playing the Grand Slams as a junior. After the win in São Paulo, he plans to take a week off, including a few days of holiday with his boyfriend in Porto de Galinhas, the beach town known for its natural pools and white sand. He will then spend Christmas with his boyfriend’s family in Goiania, a small city in the center of the country near the capital, Brasilia.

Joao Lucas Reis da Silva hitting his favorite shot during the Wimbledon boys’ singles in 2018. (Michael Steele / Getty Images)

After that, he will return to Rio to begin preparations for some Challenger tournaments (one rung below the ATP Tour) that lead into the South American ATP Tour swing in February and the Rio Open. His big goal for 2025 is to play in the qualifying tournament for Roland Garros — and to build the tennis life he wants.

“It’s an individual sport, so you can be whatever you want,” he said hopefully. “Everybody will accept you.”

(Top photo: Joao Pires / Photojump)

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — and in the works of Charles Dickens, that character was 19th-century London. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights locations or landmarks around the city that are mentioned in five of Dickens’s books, and each question offers a London-themed hint to help jog your memory. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading.