Culture
Jessica Pegula reclaims American No. 1 women’s tennis ranking with a clay-court free hit to come
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, the most mercurial player on the men’s tour did what he does best, there was an American shuffle at the top of the women’s rankings and a Wimbledon champion’s quandary revealed the delicate balance of tennis scheduling.
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An important milestone for Jessica Pegula?
The American trio just below the summit of the women’s tennis rankings reshuffled this week, as Jessica Pegula moved ahead of Coco Gauff by winning the WTA 500 title in Charleston. Pegula, who beat Sofia Kenin 6-3, 7-5 after coming from 1-5 down in the second set, is now world No. 3, matching her career-high ranking.
With a big gap between the American and world No. 2 Iga Świątek, and another big gap between Gauff and world No. 5 Madison Keys, it may look as if Pegula’s first clay-court title is more significant than the tight tussle between world No. 3 and world No. 4, with just 38 points separating them.
But Pegula, who missed last year’s clay-court swing with injury, is now entering the two WTA 1,000s in Rome and Madrid and then the French Open in Paris with no points to defend, effectively giving her a free hit for the next few months. She’ll be going into the surface transition with the most wins on the WTA Tour this season (25) ahead of world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, who has 23.
With Gauff defending over 1,200 points, and Świątek on the hook for 4,195, Pegula could yet climb higher without having to win big on the red dirt.
James Hansen
Who can explain the enigma of Botic van de Zandschulp?
Is there a more intriguing player on the ATP Tour than this Dutchman?
The mercurial Van de Zandschulp has become the tennis master of the unexpected, winning when he is in line to lose and falling apart when there’s seemingly no reason to do so.
Van de Zandschulp has beaten Carlos Alcaraz at the U.S. Open in straight sets, ended Rafael Nadal’s career with a Davis Cup humbling in Spain and defeated Novak Djokovic at Indian Wells (including a 6-1 hammering of a final set) in the last eight months. All those wins were achieved with barely a flicker of nerves — remarkable for a player with a history of buckling under pressure. He served for the match three times against Holger Rune in the 2023 Munich Open final and held four championship points in all, but he ended up losing.
Just over a year later, in May 2024, Van de Zandschulp said that he had become so disillusioned with tennis that he was considering retiring. Instead, he beat three of the best players in recent history on some of the sport’s biggest stages, staying calm under pressure as if he were having a knock at a local club.
So, how would Van de Zandschulp fare in the first round of the Bucharest Open ATP 250 — the lowest rung on the tour — against Richard Gasquet, the 38-year-old Frenchman who will retire after this year’s French Open?
He led by a set and two breaks, and had a match point on his serve for a 6-4, 6-4 win. But he missed it, and ended up losing 6-1 in the decider, looking as neutral as he had done in beating some of the best to ever do it.
Charlie Eccleshare
How did American men’s players reach a milestone in Houston?
With an easy put-away, Alex Michelsen secured a three-set victory over the French veteran Adrian Mannarino to reach the Houston Open quarterfinals. A fairly unremarkable moment in and of itself, but with his win on April 3, Michelsen ensured that all eight of the quarterfinalists would be American. It was the first time that had happened at an ATP Tour event since the Prudential-Bache Securities Classic in Orlando, Fla., in 1991.
Andre Agassi ended up winning the tournament, while Pete Sampras lost in the semifinals. Those two, plus Jim Courier, started dominating the sport soon afterward. Will the Houston 2025 alumni do something similar?
That feels like a big stretch, but in Michelsen, a 20-year-old Californian, they have one of the breakout stars of this year. Having reached the fourth round of the Australian Open, Michelsen is a couple of hundred ranking points outside the world’s top 30 and has a bright future.
Of the other quarterfinalists, Frances Tiafoe and Tommy Paul are established top-20 regulars, while Colton Smith, 22, Brandon Nakashima, 23 and Aleksandar Kovacevic, 26, are a bit further down the tennis food chain. Christopher Eubanks, 28, has failed to kick on after his breakthrough in 2023.
Jenson Brooksby, 24, started the week as the furthest down of them all at No. 507, has he rebuilds his ranking after a doping ban. He saved five match points across qualifying and his main draw matches on the way to the final, where he eased past Tiafoe for his first-ever tour title, rising 335 places in the rankings in the process.
American tennis fans will be hoping the event provides a springboard for the clay-court season for at least one of those eight quarterfinalists.
Brooksby followed a close run of matches with a relatively routine victory in the final. (Leslie Plaza Johnson / Icon Sportswire via Associated Press)
Charlie Eccleshare
What is the price of national pride?
The Billie Jean King Cup takes center stage in women’s tennis from April 10 to April 13, with the final round of qualifiers for the international team event. Two of the headliners scheduled to play — Świątek of Poland and Britain’s Emma Raducanu — declared they would not be representing their countries last week, both citing the need to capitalize on an off-week in their schedule.
Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion who switched from representing Russia to representing Kazakhstan, will be traveling to Melbourne to represent the country against Australia and Colombia. She became a citizen of Kazakhstan in 2017 in exchange for financial support from the country’s tennis federation, which has since 2007 been bankrolled by billionaire businessman and philanthropist Bulat Utemuratov in a decades-long surge designed to transform a country with little preexisting tennis infrastructure into a genuine sporting power.
For Rybakina, that means a trip to Australia — and missing the WTA 500 in Stuttgart, Germany, which begins April 14. Rybakina is the defending champion there and will lose 500 points by not playing, which will see her drop out of the top 10 at best. She may drop further if other players perform well. If Kazakhstan go through, that may matter less — but it’s a fine demonstration of the push and pull of tennis competition.
James Hansen
Shot of the week
Or perhaps month, or maybe even year, from Ryan Seggerman in Houston.
UNBELIEVABLE 🤯
RYAN SEGGERMAN WITH THE SHOT OF THE YEAR!#USClay | @TennisTV pic.twitter.com/VaxFKnaYYe
— Fayez Sarofim & Co. US Clay (@mensclaycourt) April 5, 2025
Recommended reading:
🏆 The winners of the week
🎾 ATP:
🏆 Flavio Cobolli (3) def. Sebastian Baez (1) 6-4, 6-4 to win the Tiriac Open (250) in Bucharest, Romania. It is the Italian’s first ATP Tour title.
🏆 Luciano Darderi (7) def. Tallon Griekspoor (1) 7-6(3), 7-6(4) to win the Hassan Grand Prix II (250) in Marrakech, Morroco. It is the Italian’s second ATP Tour title.
🏆 Jenson Brooksby (Q) def. Frances Tiafoe (2) 6-4, 6-2 to win the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship (250) in Houston. It is the American’s first ATP Tour title.
🎾 WTA:
🏆 Jessica Pegula (1) def. Sofia Kenin 6-3, 7-5 to win the Charleston Open (500) in Charleston, S.C. It is the American’s first clay-court WTA Tour title.
🏆 Camila Osorio (2) def. Katarzyna Kawa (Q) 6-3, 6-3 to win the Copa Colsanitas (250) in Bogotá, Colombia. Osorio has now won the event three times.
📈📉 On the rise / Down the line
📈 Jessica Pegula moves up one place from No. 4 to No. 3 after her win in South Carolina.
📈 Jenson Brooksby ascends 335 spots from No. 507 to No. 172 after his win in Texas.
📈 Sofia Kenin reenters the top 40 after rising 10 spots from No. 44 to No. 34.
📉 Matteo Berrettini falls seven places from No. 27 to No. 34, relinquishing the top-32 spot that would see him seeded at big events.
📉 Maria Sakkari drops 18 places from No. 64 to No. 82.
📉 Fabio Fognini tumbles 14 spots from No. 99 to No. 113.
📅 Coming up
🎾 ATP
📍Monte Carlo, Monaco: Monte Carlo Masters (1,000) featuring Alexander Zverev, Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Jack Draper.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻
🎾 ITF
📍Various locations: Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers featuring Elena Rybakina, Victoria Mboko, Elina Svitolina, Danielle Collins.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.:
Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.
(Top photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)
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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