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.

“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)

The Los Angeles Clippers are making a push for the NBA playoffs. If the postseason started today, the Clippers would be in the play-in tournament. 

On Wednesday, Los Angeles bolstered their playoff hopes by defeating the Detroit Pistons. The 123-115 victory was fueled by James Harden’s 50-point night. The number represented the most points the 11-time NBA All-Star has scored in a single game during the 2024-25 campaign.

Harden has appeared in 59 of the Clippers’ 62 games so far this season. Los Angeles enters Friday night’s home contest against the New York Knicks in eighth place in the Western Conference Standings.

LEBRON JAMES BECOMES FIRST-EVER PLAYER TO REACH 50,000 CAREER NBA POINTS

Harden logged 38 minutes in the Clippers’ latest win and the 35-year-old’s workload has appeared to increase since last month’s All-Star break. After Wednesday’s game, he was asked about the uptick in playing minutes.

James Harden #1 of the LA Clippers in action against the New York Knicks during a game at Madison Square Garden on November 6, 2023 in New York City. The Knicks defeated the Clippers 111-97.  (Rich Schultz/Getty Images)

He proceeded to deliver an epic response. “I’ll rest when the season’s over,” the Clippers guard said before walking away.

Fellow Clippers star Kawhi Leonard sat out of Wednesday’s win due to rest. 

Harden’s conditioning has been a topic of conversation at times throughout his NBA career.

Apr 12, 2024; Los Angeles, California, USA;  Los Angeles Clippers guard James Harden (1) warms up prior to the NBA game against the Utah Jazz at Crypto.com Arena. (Kiyoshi Mio-USA TODAY Sports)

In 2022, FOX Sports reported that Harden and Kevin Durant “butted heads.” The discontent stemmed from Durant’s belief that Harden was not “in peak physical shape.” Harden and Durant both played for the Brooklyn Nets at the time. 

The Clippers have gone 2-6 over their last eight games. They entered Friday’s action trailing the seventh-place Minnesota Timberwolves by two games in the win column.

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With players constantly in and out of the lineup, the Clippers are struggling to find consistent success at this stage of the season.

The return of Kawhi Leonard (right knee management) and Derrick Jones Jr. (right groin strain) coupled with the absence of Norman Powell (right hamstring strain) and Ben Simmons (left knee management) on Friday night underlined the scope of the issue.

But the Clippers have been able to count on one thing all season — James Harden‘s high level of play.

Two nights after scoring 50 points, Harden put on another show, finishing with 27 points and seven assists in a 105-95 victory over the New York Knicks at the Intuit Dome.

Harden wasn’t alone in spearheading the win. Leonard had 20 points, seven rebounds and six assists in 37 minutes, and Ivica Zubac finished with with 16 points and 14 rebounds. The standout center has a career-best 763 rebounds this season.

Nicolas Batum, starting in only his fourth game, had a season-high 17 points, and Bogdan Bogdanovic had a career-high 12 rebounds off the bench.

Jalen Brunson did not play for New York (40-23) because of a right ankle sprain. The All-Star guard, injured in Thursday night’s overtime loss to the Lakers, is seventh in the NBA in scoring (26.3 points per game) and seventh in assists (7.4).

The Clippers (34-29) have won two in a row since dropping six of seven. They are eighth in the Western Conference with 19 games left.

“Just take it day by day,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said before the game. “Our shootarounds, our walk-throughs and just taking advantage of those, even though guys can’t go full speed a lot of times. But, like I said, we are behind, and I think the guys are doing the right thing trying to get back, trying to get on the court but also putting the work in trying to understand and learn what we need to do and get better at.”

The Clippers face a critical stretch of games. They play host to Sacramento on Sunday, with the Kings just half a game behind them, before playing New Orleans, Miami and Atlanta on the road.