Sports
Emma Navarro keeps her eye on the ball at the Australian Open as tennis limelight shines brighter
MELBOURNE, Australia — A seriously cold December afternoon in midtown Manhattan, in the lobby of a hotel off Central Park.
A 23-year-old woman looks up from a club chair near an elevator. She’s wearing a baseball cap, diddling around a bit on her phone.
“Hey,” she says.
Take another look. Oh, right, that’s Emma Navarro: U.S. Open semifinalist and a top-10 women’s player after just one full season of top-tier tournaments. She’s chilling ahead of a packed evening of photo ops, press gaggles, and an appearance at the New York Knicks NBA basketball game with a few other tennis players you might have heard of — Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton and Jessica Pegula.
It might be fun. Then again, hanging out in this comfy chair, anonymously watching the bustle of her native city pass by is pretty cool too. There are many reasons why Navarro, who plays Ons Jabeur in the third round of the Australian Open Saturday, pursued tennis. Being a famous person was not one of them.
“The exact opposite,” she said the other day, after a second-round win in Melbourne over Wang Xiyu of China, her second consecutive three-set battle with the outcome up in the air until the final point.
She was at it once again Saturday, when she opened a packed Margaret Court Arena against Ons Jabeur, a three-time Grand Slam finalist and darling of the sport on the way back from a torrid few months with injury. After winning 20 of the first 24 points and surging to a 5-0 lead in the first set, she had to scramble in the third to prevail, saving three break points when serving at 1-2.
When it was over, she credited her parents for taking her and her siblings on six-hour bike rides when they were kids for her third-set prowess. Then she scribbled “me heart 3 sets” on the television camera. She should. She went 19-6 in matches that went the distance last season. On her way off the court, she was straight into signing autographs for fans hanging over the stands. The match was played in the light and shadow of lunchtime in Melbourne and Navarro is not yet fully adjusted to being center stage, day after day after day.
“It’s something that I work really hard at managing and feeling comfortable with being in the spotlight. It’s the opposite of my nature. It feels unnatural,” she said.
This happens in tennis sometimes. Not everything develops in sync. Not everyone who can fire forehands and backhand on a wire seemingly all afternoon is an alpha-dog extrovert, letting their life unfold in a series of Instagram posts and TikTok videos.
And so it is with Navarro, whose tennis life had been an exploration in incrementalism up until the summer of last year. At 18, after a terrific junior career — including a singles final and doubles title at the French Open — she still wasn’t sure she wanted to be a professional tennis player. So she went to the University of Virginia for two years, where she won the NCAA nationwide college-level women’s singles championship.
When she did turn pro, she opted not to pursue wild-card entries that might have been easily attainable, given that her father, Ben, is active in the tennis business and owns the ATP and WTA 1000-level Cincinnati Open. She was fine climbing her way through second-tier tournaments on the ITF and WTA 125 circuits.
GO DEEPER
Win or lose, Emma Navarro wants to hit one more ball
Navarro was outside the top 100 as recently as April 2023. She finished that year as world No. 32, the magic number for a Grand Slam seeding, and won her first WTA Tour tournament in Hobart, Tasmania, the day before the start of the 2024 Australian Open.
Then she played her way into the spotlight. She notched consecutive wins over Coco Gauff, first at Wimbledon and then the U.S. Open, where Gauff, now a friend, was the defending champion. She rose into the top 10 for the first time. And that’s when things started to get a little busy.
Emma Navarro is figuring out how to live in the tennis limelight. (Daniel Pockett / Getty Images)
A flood of interview and appearance requests. A commercial portfolio that now includes deals with Fila, Yonex, Red Bull, Dove, Fanatics, De Bethune and, as of Friday, Mejuri, the high-end jewellery brand that put her in a bespoke photo shoot in Charleston, S.C., in December. Navarro is the company’s first athlete ambassador.
For Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka and Gauff, Iga Swiatek and Zheng Qinwen, something like that is just another day ending with a “Y”. For Navarro, it is, in her own words, “an adjustment”.
The adjustment has a tennis guise too, which might go some distance toward explaining Navarro’s first two matches here this month. Both ended up being tennis escape rooms, first on Rod Laver Arena and then on the site’s second stadium, Margaret Court Arena.
She was down a break of serve in the third set in both matches. Peyton Stearns, another former NCAA champion, had a match point against her in a second-set tiebreak that she couldn’t take. Stearns then served for the match in the third, but couldn’t get over the line.
In both cases, Navarro was in the first match of the day, putting her in the prime-time slot back in the States on ESPN — a slot that Gauff often plays in. Like the fame and exposure that winning and marketing deals carry, big court assignments and prime-time hours bring a not-so-subtle message of expectation.
In both matches, the usually steady Navarro sprayed balls from the middle of the baseline that she had roped back for much of last year, wearing down opponent after opponent. Then she found a way, stringing together her best shots of the afternoon in the handful of deciding points that made the difference twice over.
Against Jabeur, she raced through the first set to 5-0 before Jabeur started playing with the finesse that carried her to the brink of the biggest prizes in the sport. She got back to 5-4. Navarro still took the set.
For nearly her entire tennis life, Navarro had been the girl and then the woman who was thrilled when she showed up at a tournament and learned she was playing on Court 35 in the back of the facility.
“Like, put me in the forest,” she said.
That’s not happening anymore.
“You spend whatever 20 years working at something, mainly behind closed doors, and then all of a sudden you’re a form of entertainment for people,” she said. “People pay to come watch you do what you do. It’s definitely an adjustment.”
Navarro’s coach, Peter Ayers, has been working with her the past eight years. He said his way of getting Navarro used to being a new version of herself during the off-season was to stick with the formula that got her here.
“It’s always been a very methodical approach,” Ayers said during an interview in Melbourne. “We want her to get better without neglecting her bread and butter. It’s always a balance.”
For Navarro, who will never be one of the WTA tour’s giants, that means trying to play bigger and more aggressively within the parameters of her strengths. She is not about to start firing lasers, like some of her peers can do point in, point out.
“I’m very leery of just chasing velocity,” said Ayers.
There are other ways.
Ayers is a baseball guy. One of his favorite pitchers was Greg Maddux, the Atlanta Braves ace of the 1990s. Maddux was far from the hardest thrower, but no one could place balls on the edge of the strike zone as well as he could. “There’s a lot she can do with being more precise,” Ayers said.
Same with her strokes.
Navarro doesn’t have to try to out-hit players such as Aryna Sabalenka or out-spin Swiatek. But she can do a lot of damage if her feet are a step or two closer to the baseline more often, or even inside it.
Ayers, like Navarro, knows that life is different when there is a single digit next to your name on the rankings ladder. It’s been a while since Navarro sneaked up on anyone, as she did on Gauff at dusk in southwest London six months ago. People aren’t afraid of losing to her anymore, Ayers said; when that fear goes away, opponents can play free without worrying about the consequences.
“You’re getting everyone’s best shot,” he said. “The idea is that makes you better.”
Emma Navarro has found herself on her heels in her two Australian Open matches to date. (Daniel Pockett / Getty Images)
Navarro has always been something of problem-solver, whether it’s figuring out an opponent, how she wants to spend her time and who she wants to be as a tennis player. In a sense, what she’s doing now, is figuring out another problem — how to exist as this new version of herself, the version that has been better than all but a handful of players in the women’s game for the past six months.
“The single-digit gets me a little bit,” she said. “It’s just so far outside my realm of expectations for myself.”
There’s been some revelations lately, though, that will hopefully begin to pay some dividends soon. There’s a way to play a certain kind of tennis and still be that woman sitting on a club chair in a hotel lobby, anonymously watching the world go by.
“My tennis can be alpha and I’ll let that do its job and I can just be me,” she said. “If I’m not feeling like myself, I’m probably not going to be playing my best tennis.”
(Top photo: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
DENVER — Before Anze Kopitar left the ice after the final regular-season home game of his NHL career, he told the fans he was saying good-bye, not farewell.
He would return, he promised, in the playoffs.
He’ll make good on that pledge Thursday when his Kings and the Colorado Avalanche face off in Game 3 of their first-round series at Crypto.com Arena. But it could prove to be a short encore because after losing the first two games of the best-of-seven Stanley Cup playoff in Denver, the Kings need a win Thursday or in Game 4 on Sunday to extend both their season and Kopitar’s Hall of Fame career.
The Kings’ — and Kopitar’s — last six playoff appearances have all ended after just one round. And they’re halfway to another first-round loss this year, though they probably deserve better after giving the league’s best team everything it could handle, only to lose twice by a goal, including a 2-1 overtime loss in Game 2 on Tuesday.
“To a man we’re playing hard,” interim Kings coach D.J. Smith said. “We hoped to split here, but regardless we’re gonna have to win at home. We’ve got to find a way to win a game.
“Clearly good isn’t enough.”
Kopitar announced his retirement before the start of this season, the 20th in his Hall of Fame career. And while many of his teammates talked of their desire to see their captain hoist the Stanley Cup one more time, just making the playoffs appeared beyond the Kings’ reach until the final two weeks of the regular season.
Colorado, meanwhile, led the league in everything, winning the most games, collecting the most points, scoring the most goals and allowing the fewest. The Kings? Not so much. They gave up 22 more goals than they scored, worst among playoff teams, and needed points in 11 of their last 13 games just to squeak into the postseason as the final wild-card team.
Colorado left wing Joel Kiviranta skates under pressure from Kings center Scott Laughton and goaltender Anton Forsberg during Game 2 of their first-round NHL playoff series Tuesday in Denver.
(Jack Dempsey / Associated Press)
Yet two games into this series, it’s been hard to tell the teams apart on the ice. The Kings have outhustled, outhit and outskated the Avalanche for long stretches. But those moral victories have been their only wins.
Asked if he can take solace for the way the team has played, goalie Anton Forsberg, who was outstanding in his first two career playoff games, stared straight ahead.
“No,” he said. “We wanted to go to home [with] a win.”
Forward Trevor Moore was a little more forgiving.
“We would have liked to steal one,” he said. “But you can’t look back. You have to look forward. Confidence-wise, we hung in there with them for two games and we’ve been competitive. I think we could have won either night.”
They won neither night, however, which leaves little margin for error in the next two games.
If the Kings lacked wins in Denver, they didn’t lack chances. On Tuesday they had a man advantage for nearly a quarter of the first 25 minutes and had five power plays and a penalty shot on the night.
When Quinton Byfield’s second-period penalty shot was stuffed by Colorado goalie Scott Wedgewood, a group of Avalanche fans celebrated by pounding on the protective plexiglass behind the Kings’ bench with such force it shattered, raining shards down on the team’s coaches
“Whoever the guy [was] just kept pushing and pushing and pushing,” Smith said. “I looked back because it hit me a bunch of times, then it broke.”
The Kings couldn’t score on the power play either until Artemi Panarin finally found the back of the net with less than seven minutes left in regulation, giving the team its first lead of the series.
“We had every opportunity,” Smith said. “You’ve got to be able to close it out.”
They couldn’t. So when Colorado captain Gabriel Landeskog evened the score 3 ½ minutes later, the teams headed to a fourth period.
The overtime was the 34th in 84 games for the Kings this season, an NHL record by some distance. But it ended in the team’s 21st overtime loss when Nicolas Roy banged home a rebound 7:44 into the extra period.
“We had some good looks. I thought we really had the momentum in overtime,” Smith said. “Maybe a bad bounce or a turnover, whatever, it ends up in your net. But to a man this team is playing hard and we’ve got to find a way to win.
“I expect that we’ll be better at home.”
If they aren’t, the Kings face another long summer and Kopitar’s retirement will start earlier than he had hoped.
Sports
Austin Reaves nearing return for Lakers as Luka Doncic remains out indefinitely with hamstring strain: report
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In early April, with just five games remaining in the regular season, the Los Angeles Lakers announced that star guard Luka Doncic would be sidelined at least until the NBA playoffs.
Doncic’s setback was a Grade 2 left hamstring strain, an MRI confirmed. The reigning NBA scoring champion sustained the injury during an April 2 game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Lakers also entered the playoffs without another key member of their backcourt, Austin Reaves.
The shorthanded Lakers upset the Houston Rockets in the opening game of their first-round Western Conference series Saturday. Ahead of Game 2 on Tuesday, the Lakers reportedly received a clearer update on the health of at least one of their injured stars.
Lakers guard Austin Reaves brings the ball up court against the Washington Wizards in Los Angeles on March 30, 2026. (Ryan Sun/AP)
Reaves, who was diagnosed with an oblique strain, appears to be progressing toward a return later in the first-round series if it extends to six or seven games. If the Lakers advance sooner, he could be on track to return for the Western Conference semifinals.
According to ESPN, Reaves recently returned to the practice court for 1-on-1 drills. The 27-year-old will still need to progress to 2-on-3 and then 5-on-5 work before he can be cleared for playoff action, but he appears significantly further along than Doncic, who remains out indefinitely.
Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers controls the ball against the Orlando Magic at the Kia Center on March 21, 2026. (Nathan Ray Seebeck/Imagn Images)
Doncic is unlikely to play in the first round, regardless of the series length. ESPN footage showed him on the practice court on Tuesday, though the six-time All-Star was not doing high-intensity work.
2025-26 NBA PLAYOFF ODDS: SPREADS, LINES FOR FIRST-ROUND SERIES
The Rockets, despite being widely favored in the opening round playoffs series, also contended with key injuries. Kevin Durant missed Game 1 with a knee contusion. He was cleared to play in Game 2 on Tuesday night.
Houston Rockets forward Jabari Smith Jr. shoots the ball against the Lakers during Game 1 in the NBA playoffs at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, California, on April 18, 2026. (Kirby Lee/Imagn Images)
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LeBron James scored 19 points, while Luke Kennard led Los Angeles with 27 in Saturday’s win.
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Watching junior right-hander Fabian Bravo of Sun Valley Poly High pitch for the first time, there was something strangely familiar about his windup.
When he turned his back to reveal he was wearing No. 32, everything made sense.
He had to be a fan of Sandy Koufax, the 1960s Hall of Fame left-hander for the Dodgers.
Two friends sitting next to me refused to believe it.
“No way,” one said.
“Kids today have never heard of Sandy Koufax,” another piped in.
Only after Bravo threw a three-hit shutout to beat North Hollywood 3-0 was my belief vindicated.
“I come into the back with my arms and it’s a little bit like a Sandy Koufax kind of thing,” he said. “I wear 32 too. He was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers and was good in the World Series.”
Koufax was perfect-game good on Sept. 9, 1965, against the Chicago Cubs at Dodger Stadium, striking out 14.
Bravo started learning about No. 32 when his parents would bring him to Dodger Stadium as a young boy.
“I always saw No. 32 retired on the wall,” he said. “Once I got to know him, I was able to see who he really was. I felt I could really copy him and get myself deeper into history.”
Bravo is no Koufax in terms of being a power pitcher. He’s 5 feet 10 and 140 pounds. Since last season, when he changed his windup to briefly emulate Koufax’s arms going above his head, he has a 12-3 record. This season he’s 3-1 with a 1.50 ERA.
“I saw his windup and he looked like he was calm and composed and I tried it. I felt more of a rhythm. I was able to calm down and pitch better,” he said.
After Bravo’s arms go up over his head in his windup, he also does a brief hesitation breathing in and out before throwing the ball toward home plate.
“My dad always taught me to breathe in, breathe out before I do anything,” he said.
Nowadays, teenagers seemingly don’t pay much attention to greats of the past, from old ballplayers to Hall of Fame coaches. Ask someone if they know John Wooden, kids today probably don’t. He did win 10 NCAA basketball titles coaching for UCLA. And who was Don Drysdale? Only a Dodger Hall of Fame pitcher alongside Koufax from Van Nuys High.
Bravo is fortunate he’s seen Dodger broadcasts mentioning Koufax at the stadium and on TV, motivating him to learn more, which led to seeing his windup on YouTube.
His older brother also wore No. 32, so no one was getting that uniform number other than a Bravo brother at Poly.
There is another Bravo set to arrive in the fall. Julian Bravo will be a freshman left-handed pitcher and wants No. 32.
“While I’m there he’s going to have to find a new number,” Fabian Bravo said.
Julian might also want to help his big brother gain a few pounds at the dinner table.
“My brother takes food from me,” he said.
As for recognizing Bravo’s Koufax connection, it was No. 32 that provided the clue. How many pitchers in the 1970s were choosing No. 32? A lot. And it’s great to see a 17-year-old in 2026 paying tribute to one of the greatest pitchers ever.
Emulating Koufax is hard, but forgetting him is unforgivable.
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