Where's the Next Andy Roddick?

Everything was normal and nothing was weird when a spiky-haired Andy Roddick, after beating Juan Carlos Ferrero to win the U.S. Open in 2003, went on the Late Show with David Letterman to talk about how it felt to be a champion. At first, he seemed a little nervous. The tournament had just honored a retiring Pete Sampras, and Roddick was heir apparent. He mentioned his actress girlfriend Mandy Moore. He faced questions about what it felt like to be 21 and the toast of the five boroughs, if not the country, and answered with a candor that would become his hallmark. And really nothing was surprising about any of this: Another handsome young man from California, New York, or Florida (in this case, Nebraska) had won the trophy of our home Grand Slam and showed up on late night television—if anything, it felt predictable, a template that had stood for decades and might go on forever, the biggest tennis trophies hoisted by American men, only now, for the turn of the century, in a feathery fauxhawk and distressed jeans.

“You’ve got the world by the tail for heaven’s sakes!” Letterman exclaimed toward the end of the interview. Roddick answered, “I don’t know about that.” But if you watch the clip a few times, it’s evident that Roddick did know about that, very much, as he fell into line behind other champions, and so did we.

Now we know differently. The 2021 U.S. Open, which kicked off this week in New York, featured 20 Americans in the men’s singles draw. Judging by recent years, it is very unlikely that any of them will reach the final, or even the semis; our top contender, John Isner, currently ranked 22 in the world, just lost in the first round. “The short answer is, it's possible but doubtful,” four-time U.S. Open champion John McEnroe told me. “I'm hopeful, because Lord knows we need it.” That’s because for practically the sport’s entire history, besides a few Europeans and South Americans, and a couple rounds of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie,” Americans ruled the men's Grand Slams. Whereas lately: not at all.

Pro tennis as we know it started in 1968, with the dawn of the Open Era. Americans have since claimed the most Slam titles by far, with 52. Notable names from history include Don Budge, Dick Savitt, Pancho Gonzales. Since ’68, the champion-not-sneaker Stan Smith. The champion-not-stadium Arthur Ashe. The “Lithuanian Lion” Vitas Gerulaitis, aka “Broadway Vitas,” a hard-partying heartthrob who resembled a lifeguard with a side hustle in porn. Not to forget the prodigal champion and “Brash Basher of Belleville” Jimmy Connors. Prodigal champion and “Superbrat” Johnny Mac himself. I haven’t even reached the late ’80s and the ’90s, perhaps the pinnacle of stars-and-stripes ball, with Andre Agassi, Michael Chang, Jim Courier, and Sampras competing to break records. “If you look at previous generations, there has been an American at the absolute top of the men’s game forever,” Todd Martin, the world number 4 in 1999, told me. “It just seemed sort of second nature,” said Stan Smith. If anything, by the turn of the century, the glut of male tennis superstars from the States felt like overkill, even perhaps in need of correction. “We won so many slams, so many titles,” Michael Chang said, “I don’t know if we’ll have another generation like that.”

Flashback to the aughts, Roddick country. The terrain that greeted him and his cohort—James Blake, Mardy Fish, Robby Ginepri—was mountainous. Big expectations, big rewards. The public didn’t mind if players stayed out late partying (they liked their players out partying) as long as they brought home the hardware. But Roddick’s generation also came of age during a period of significant shifts. First off, the game was changing: Training was more complex, nutrition was better appreciated. New technology, particularly the rise of polyester strings, enabled players to hit harder with more control, meaning fast balls with tons of spin that cleared the net higher and then dove down inside the lines, no matter their velocity, and bounced up like a fist flying at an opponent’s gut. Basically, tennis players were spending less time at the club, more time in the gym. “The Studio 54 days all changed with [Ivan] Lendl,” James Blake explained, referring to the Czech-American champion who went on a winning streak in part based on his fitness. “You couldn’t be out partying and still be as successful with guys who were that serious about training.”

But that’s nuance; the United States does not do nuance. We expect greatness with the same entitlement that requires stocks to rise, wars to be won, and pizzas to be delivered in 30 minutes or less. Champions should deliver not just trophies, but celebrity, which meant that a star needed to be a couple things. Sufficiently bankable, in both appeal and performance, to anchor night sessions at the Open and satisfy advertisers. Sufficiently relatable to inspire children to choose tennis over other sports. Sufficiently appealing and trendy for legions of shoppers to purchase his look. This was the machine that previous generations had constructed, and the machine wanted more. “Courier, Agassi, Sampras, Chang, those guys set the bar really high,” Robby Ginepri said. “Andy was kinda the one who carried the American flag all those years.”

Following his big win, Roddick grabbed that bar and performed chin-ups for the next decade almost single-handedly—which I guess are one-arm pull-ups, and that seems about right. He hosted Saturday Night Live and founded a charity. He married a swimsuit model and started a family. He sold a brand: signature sneaker, signature racquet, some not-inexpensive trucker hats. Most importantly, on-court, Roddick finished 2003 ranked number one in the world. He was pretty much ranked in the top 10 for the rest of the decade. He helped the U.S. win a Davis Cup, and for a period held the record for the fastest serve. But his most visible achievement was being a finalist four more times at Grand Slams—Wimbledon in 2004, 2005, 2009, and the U.S. Open in 2006—in some of the most gut-wrenching matches I’ve ever seen, and I can say that because I watched them all on TV and cried after two of them, maybe three of them, as Roddick lost.

At the age of 30, he put away his racquets. With him went our dominance, our age of empire. Though really it had been over for a decade, basically since the night that Roddick went on Letterman, faux-hawk and all, and talked tennis with a restless aura of expectation, having no idea—him or us—that we would all start wandering the desert the next day.

Spring 2021 marked the first time since the men’s tour began its ranking system in 1973 that there were no American guys ranked in the world’s top 30 players. Why this happened, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former pros, coaches, and tennis heads, is obvious for a couple reasons and a few that are less pronounced. To understand what went wrong—and how we could find our way again—I went looking for the venue where our comeback might begin.

The United States Tennis Association (USTA) Training Center West is a 125-acre facility ringed by palm trees in Carson, California. It’s a parcel of Los Angeles where some of the next (potentially) great (hopefully) American men’s champions (but who knows) are brought to a spread-out campus to lift weights, hit forehands, and eat take-out turkey sandwiches while thumbing through Instagram on their phones. “There’s kids training there from 10-years-old to the pros,” Sam Querrey, currently ranked 78 in the world and a Wimbledon semifinalist in 2017, told me when I asked him what I should expect. From the parking lot, from all the serves being banged, it sounded like a gun range.

The USTA, tennis’s governing body in the U.S., takes its fair share of blame for America’s recent lack of male champions. People told me that, for decades, it was spoiled for talent and didn’t feel the pressure to develop players; and when it began to in earnest, it only focused its resources on a few. Recently, in addition to its center in L.A., the USTA built a $63 million training center in Florida. According to a USTA official, it administers a network of over 200 programs, mostly inner city, that combine tennis and school to put kids on a path to college. And in Carson, every court was full, watched over by hovering minders: coaches, agents, assistants, family. Several courts featured groups of teenage boys or girls working with coaches. A couple courts had kids even younger doing the same thing. Many of the players had been groomed by the USTA for years, I was told, in some cases since they were eight years old.

And then, on his own court, was Taylor Fritz. Fritz, 23, currently ranked 42 in the world, has a bio and a look to suggest a type familiar to tennis regulars: a tall, soft-spoken Southern Californian with formidable eyebrows and a big serve, dressed by Nike. All of which is to say, basically, Pete Sampras 2.0. Many consider Fritz to be The Next One, amid a generation of other Next Ones—even Sampras thinks so. “Taylor’s got a good future,’’ Sampras told the New York Post in 2016. “It’s a cycle and we’re not quite what we used to be in the ’80s and ’90s. I’ve hit with him. He’s a nice kid who is doing all the right things.”

It’s a cycle. That is, unless the cycle stops.

Broadly speaking, tennis is major but niche, and that split in its personality shows up in a lot of places. It’s a mainstay among professional sports, but organized like a network of amateur beauty pageants. It’s a path to success for scrappy nobodies, but one that can’t seem to wash out the starch (and stink) of exclusive clubs. Tennis is one of humanity’s most global pastimes, and yet, according to the Aspen Institute’s 2020 State of Play survey, it ranks lower in youth participation (ages 6-17) than basketball, baseball, or soccer. Personally, I rarely see a tennis racquet on-screen when I watch SportsCenter, and even less often does the person holding it turn out to be a guy from here.

Partly that’s because American pro tennis is far more about goddesses than gods these days. We have so many female champions, there’s a categorizable range. The kind who’ve won steadily, if not relentlessly (Venus and Serena Williams), and the kind who win occasionally (Sloane Stephens). The kind who grew up and still live here but win championships under a different flag (Naomi Osaka). We even have recent Grand Slam winners that no one remembers (Sofia Kenin). And for the men: no kinds whatsoever.

In 2016, when he was 19 years old, Fritz was named the Association of Tennis Professionals’ (ATP) “Star of Tomorrow” for being the youngest player in the Top 100. This year, he reached the third round of the Australian Open and the fourth round at Miami. He tore a meniscus at the French Open, only to return to Wimbledon, fresh from surgery, and make the third round there, too. The morning I visited Carson, Fritz spent about two hours practicing, playing points, swinging back and forth across the baseline. Rarely did he show emotion, similar to the way most of us go about our daily jobs, putting in work—but was it a potential champion’s work? What would that even look like? On court were José Higueras and Paul Annacone, both former coaches of Sampras. Americans are “used to having the best,” Annacone told me during a break. “The United States is about being the best, being number one, and that's all well and good until you're the person that's not number one and you're trying to get there.”

Another thing that links Higueras and Annacone? They both coached Roger Federer, one of “the Big Three,” with Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, those perennial champions of late who can’t seem to stop winning.

“There's a question that people ask,” Higueras said to me under his breath, “and it's, ‘Why are Roger and Rafa and Djokovic still winning?’ Well, it's pretty simple. They're better.”

Which brings us to the most obvious, frequently cited reason to explain why American men no longer win championships: the arrival of the Big Three, though if we’re quibbling, you can extend it to the Fucking Four if you include the U.K.’s Andy Murray, or even the Frigging Five, with Switzerland’s Stan Wawrinka. But really it’s the Big Three who are the story, and not because they set out to prevent U.S. men from hoisting trophies. For nearly a quarter century, they’ve shut out the world.

Those four Slams lost by Andy Roddick? Were won by Roger Federer.

For people who don’t follow the sport, the Big Three’s statistics might sound hyperbolic. For people who know tennis, they’re mind-melting. The sport has four major tournaments, or Grand Slams, per calendar year. One or two members of the Big Three have reached the final in 62 of the last 65 of them; one of them took home the trophy in 56. (Europeans have won 64 of the last 65 men’s Grand Slam titles, for any Americans who need a statistic to feel worse about.) In fact, since Roddick bagged the year-end number-one ranking in 2003, either Djokovic, Federer, or Nadal has held it in 16 of the past 17 years. (Murray briefly snagged it in 2016.) “I call them gatekeepers. One of [the Big Three] is going to be the greatest of all time,” said Frances Tiafoe, 23, currently ranked 50, one of the Next Ones alongside Fritz. “When you’re competing with someone of that magnitude, you can't even begin to think of it.”

“I grew up watching them on TV while I'm playing junior tournaments,” said Reilly Opelka, 24, another Next One, currently ranked 24. “I don’t know tennis as anything without them.”

Multiple players echoed similar sentiments, the idea that the Big Three have occupied not just the penthouse in the sport, but their top of mind. What would tennis be without them? The Big Three have been the flesh of men’s tennis’s self-image for so long—both in the sport globally and in other players’ conception of their own chances at success—they feel like permanent tenants. This year, when 25-year-old Russian Daniil Medvedev became the world number two—going by weekly rankings—he was the first guy other than Djokovic, Federer, Murray, or Nadal to reach that perch in more than fifteen years.

To repeat: In a decade and a half, no one but the Fucking Four was ranked second in the world for even a week. Fucking incredible.

Of course, as the Big Three’s success grew, so did their income, during a period when the very top players took home paychecks bigger than anything tennis had ever seen. Meaning, down the road, Roger and Rafa and Novak probably won’t need to put their trophies up for auction to survive retirement, like the great Björn Borg nearly did. The point is, their prosperity has been cumulative, aided by the likes of private flights and support teams and traveling nannies. But still. Three different men. Three different styles of plays. Three different home countries, family backgrounds, national languages—and yet, from a distance, they resemble a single warlike species that arrived on Earth from a very angry planet, and they touched down at almost the exact same time. Federer the gallant. Nadal the reticent. Djokovic the ingratiator. I mean, no wonder they’re known for being polite—who wants their Martian overlords being dicks?

Which leads to the big story behind the Big Three. The real reason the U.S. men’s streak stopped? The game isn’t just ours anymore. The Big Three didn’t stomp on American men’s tennis exclusively. Australia, home to legends like Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, hasn’t had a men’s champion since 2002. France, a tennis power, hasn’t seen a man win a Grand Slam since Yannick Noah won Roland-Garros in 1983. What's happening is the globalization of a sport. “In the locker room, you’re hearing every language,” said Nick Monroe, doubles specialist and Tennis Channel commentator. “You go to the tournaments and you don’t even recognize the flags,” Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated executive editor and tennis guru, told me. “That’s the number one factor, baby!” said Nick Bollettieri, former coach of Agassi and Maria Sharapova, among others. (I’d never been called “baby” so many times in my life as during our interview.) “A few years ago, baby, only three or four countries played tennis. Now it’s the whole world!”

It’s true: a recent review of the ATP’s top-ranked 50 players found them hailing from 24 different countries. In many places, tennis is one of the most popular sports after soccer. In the U.S., it competes with Big Sports’ big three—basketball, baseball, football—not to mention ice hockey and skateboarding, and soccer, too, each with an endless amount of cool pros that kids see wash through their social media feeds. Is American men’s tennis losing potentially world-class athletes to other pastimes? “It’s really hard to tell an eight-year-old kid to hit a thousand tennis balls rather than go play soccer with [his] four best buddies,” Wertheim said. And that’s assuming you can get him away from Minecraft.

But there’s yet another layer of trouble. Tennis may feel like a surplus sport here, but our country is vastly populated. “The numbers are just so much thinner than you’d expect from a country of 300-something million people,” Ben Rothenberg, host of the tennis podcast No Challenges Remaining, said. Suggesting that the compass arrow of blame can shift to other points.

First off, tennis is hard to play well. Some sports, in addition to requiring an intelligence about the game, need blessings of speed and strength (football). Others need skills acquired through infinite practice (golf). Tennis, like basketball, needs everything—skill, speed, endurance—but also requires a boxer’s mentality, to endure hardships alone, which in tennis includes a lot of losing.

But let’s say a kid enjoys the game and shows aptitude. Can their family find a place to play? Can they afford lessons? What if he or she’s not a white kid in a wealthy suburb—will they find the sport accessible? “People growing up in low-income areas, as I did,” Tiafoe said, “people there know it was that Williams sisters’ thing, and that they’re amazing—but they’re only two people. It’s a lot easier to pick up a basketball and go to a hoop. If we can make tennis that accessible, then we can compete.”

And then there’s the money. For the Big Three and their colleagues in the upper ranks, tennis is extremely lucrative, but that falls off significantly if you’re outside the top 10, not to mention if you’re not in the top 50. Compare it to basketball. According to Forbes, in 2021 LeBron James will earn $96.5 million, and Roger Federer $90 million. The parity stops there. The average salary of a player in the NBA, with a little over 500 athletes under contract, was $7.5 million in 2020-2021. The top 500 earners in pro men’s tennis for the same period, per records published by the ATP, made an average of $246,583. And that needs to pay for overhead like coaching and travel. Unlike NBA players, who operate in a union, tennis players are self-employed, responsible not only for their own success but their own infrastructure, with no salary guarantee. According to the ATP, the current 500th-ranked men’s tennis player, Shreveport’s Ryan Harrison, age 29, earned $14,814 in prize money playing singles and doubles at tournaments this year. “In tennis there’s this huge income inequality,” said Wertheim. “The top guys can end up as billionaires. The guy across the net might be stealing extra apples from the buffet. The money is really jarring.”

Here’s a question several experts brought up: Why does earning potential seem to influence the U.S. men’s game more than the women’s? Not that children pick their hobbies based on compensation, but is it because female athletes don’t have as many highly lucrative potential paths? The average salary in the WNBA for 2021 was $120,648. Based on 2020 prize money earnings published by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), the top 500 earners in pro women’s tennis averaged $171,540. For now, women’s basketball just doesn’t have the same financial allure as the NBA. Meanwhile, Osaka set an earnings record for female athletes—earning more than $50 million off the court in 2021, according to Forbes—for the second straight year. “Some of the best young [female] American athletes are playing tennis because they’re fairly compensated—even ludicrously compensated—versus playing pro soccer or basketball,” Louisa Thomas, who covers sports for The New Yorker, explained. “For guys, they have more choices. It’s a little bit of a tired idea, but it’s not wrong.”

Then there's a lack of status. Multiple players described a weird facet of being a professional tennis player in the U.S.—a problem if only for the endurance of healthy egos—where guys can be the 250^th or 400^th best player in their sport worldwide, and still get knocked at home for their achievement. This is a nation that simply doesn’t appreciate what it takes to be Thai-Son Kwiatkowski from Charlotte, North Carolina (currently ranked 223), or Sekou Bangoura from Bradenton, Florida (401). Chicago’s Donald Young, ranked 386, from a career high of 38 in 2012, commented, “I remember being 40 in the world, and [a man] asked my mom, ‘What’s he ranked?’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, he’s 40.’ He’s like [dismissively], ‘Oh, that's pretty good.’”

A few other theories that may be true, but feel thin: Tennis doesn’t have any good video games. Fine, but would that get kids on the court? Americans lack a star to make the sport seem cool, the way Tiger Woods transformed golf. Okay, but does gender-fluid Gen Z really need a boy to do that, when we have Coco Gauff doing collabs? Do kids need an American to admire when Australia’s Nick Krygios still packs stadiums? (Style sidebar: Why won’t Nike sell me a Kyrgios jersey?) “The teenagers [at Carson], they’re watching Instagram and YouTube videos all day long,” Sam Querrey told me. “They’ll see Kyrgios do a tweener or some cool shot, then go out and practice it. Basketball has big dunks, football has amazing catches. Kids are asking, ‘How can I do cool things?’”

Finally, one thing that kept popping up in conversations, to explain the petering-out of American greatness, was the potential “softness” of U.S. players compared to their global counterparts or previous generations, or The Big Three. Simply, that this generation would rather play Call of Duty than hear the call to do drills. “We hear the Americans getting called soft all the time,” one USTA coach lamented out of the side of his mouth.

During my day at the Carson Training Center, I saw none of it. Everyone, all ages, was in warrior mode, pounding fuzzy balls like it was therapy-by-pugilism. I wandered away from Fritz’s practice and watched a trio of 15-year-old boys hit groundstrokes. All of them appeared to be sponsored by clothing and racquet companies. Was the tall boy a future Sampras? Was the speedy one a future Chang? They started practicing serves and one boy was moving oddly: front leg locked, weight back, arms swinging straight. I might have been watching John McEnroe at the French Open, I thought. “Unfortunately, one of the kids’ dad decided to change his serve over the weekend,” Erik Kortland, their coach, told me later. “Dad called it ‘the 1984 serve.’ Myself and the other boys were joking around with him, saying ‘You probably want to serve more like 2020 as opposed to 1984.’”

“We have the recipe, the right mix, it just hasn’t translated into a Grand Slam champion yet,” said Gavin Johnston, a member of the player development staff, as we toured the facilities. “I’m 100% sure it’s going to work out.”

I wasn’t so sure myself, but felt ungracious saying so, and left the action to find a men’s room, which is how I stumbled on a movie set—not such an odd thing in L.A., but still. A film was being shot in a clubhouse nearby. On my way past, I asked a security guard what they were filming. Wrapping up the new Will Smith movie, he said, King Richard, the biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Which made me think: you could argue that the most successful man in contemporary American men’s tennis got there without playing a single point himself.

I wanted a simple theory, a single villain to blame. Somebody to condemn beyond our shores. I said as much to Martin Blackman, a former pro, currently the General Manager for Player Development at the USTA, who summed it up thus: “Four or five things happened in the late ’80s. Tennis became an Olympic sport. The wall in Berlin came down. Countries began investing in their tennis federations. College began to recede as part of the professional tennis pathway. That all happened from the mid ’80s until the end of the ’90s. And we really didn't react to it as a federation.”

Which blew my mind. Because if Blackman is right, and I believe he is, then perhaps the true villain behind the downfall of pro men’s tennis in the United States is Otto von Habsburg. Aka, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary. Aka, former head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Aka, deceased sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece. That piece of shit.

Von Habsburg was born in 1912. As a child, he was readied to be emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. In his twenties, he fled Nazism for the United States, then returned to Europe after the war and eventually became president of the International Paneuropean Union, the organization behind the Pan-European Picnic, a peace demonstration in August 1989. Von Habsburg’s idea was to open the border gate between Austria and Hungary—one of the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soon, the Cold War was depleted. The USSR disintegrated, freedom rocked the Eastern Bloc, and over time, as Blackman noted, sporting success in Eastern Europe, Russia, and beyond, would offer not only prestige but a golden path out of difficult circumstances.

Growing up in Serbia, Novak Djokovic at one point lacked safe places to play and practiced inside an empty swimming pool, and look at him now. Money, medals, pride? Tennis. At this year’s Australian Open, Martina Navratilova noted that, by her count, 53 of the 128 men competing appeared to come from Slavic lineage.

To be a tennis fan today is to be a fan of international tennis. Since the twilight of Roddick’s career, a couple American men have carried the flag valiantly, principally Isner. But if you only cared about watching U.S. dudes, you would’ve quit being a tennis fan long ago. So, thanks a lot, Otto von Habsburg. You made global tennis possible. You made American men’s tennis impossible. We’ll give you credit for both.

Hear me, friends: All is not lost. In fact, all is looking pretty exciting. Yes, there exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times—I didn’t write that, Edward Gibbon did, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I think he was onto something. Recreational tennis in the U.S. surged during the pandemic, probably thanks to social distancing; participation increased by 22 percent. The bigger picture is also improving. The United States currently has 14 men in the top 100 pros, which is better than Spain (11), France (10), Italy (9)—it’s better than anybody.

At the same time, Rafa is losing his hair, Roger his footwork, Novak his temper. Of the three, Djokovic seems the most likely to continue the rampage—he won the first three Grand Slams of the year and is the favorite in New York—but even his heart eventually will start to grasp for other sources of affection. All of which makes for a big opportunity for younger players, as compared to the generation (or generations) before them. “I feel bad for a lot of the best players that came up in the last 10 years,” Fritz told me. “[The Big Three] are so good, and people had to play against them in their prime.” Of course, whether any Americans join the cadre who take advantage remains to be seen. “That’s what’s cool about all sports—seeing people in an uncomfortable environment,” said Tommy Paul, another Next One (currently ranked 54).

For those who care, here is one thing that everyone I spoke to agreed on: All we need is a champion, then this stupid conversation ends. At the same time, tennis needs to be more accessible, more enticing. Less directed by fusty olds and more open to experimentation: in media, in marketing, even in the game. Stop shushing people for talking during matches! Train the children on clay! Sell me a goddamn Kyrgios jersey! The men’s game needs a 21st-century Broadway Vitas to loom large in the culture, a guy who can grab a Slam trophy and host Saturday Night Live, or just a decent Instagram Live, frankly. “We need stars that can operate in the modern promotional ecosystem,” said David Shaftel, the founding editor of Racquet magazine. “It comes down to the intersection of the right player with the right attitude.”

“We could sure use a shot of adrenaline in the men's game,” said McEnroe. “We've been struggling. Europe has been dominating for years and years.”

“A lot of factors contributed to the game becoming more global and putting more pressure on American dominance,” Blackman told me. “[But] I see them as challenges, not excuses.” Greg Sharko, the ATP’s stats guru, pointed out that at the various smaller tournaments leading up to this year’s U.S. Open—Atlanta, Washington, Toronto, et al—American men reached finals in five consecutive weeks, which hadn’t happened since 2005. “We won the 2018 and 2019 World Championships, 14-and-under boys, which is exciting,” said Kent Kinnear, the Head of Men's Tennis at USTA Player Development. “We have three in the top 10 ITF juniors. We have three in the top eight for the race to Milan (the ATP's "Next Gen" Finals). So, we're excited, but it's tough. It’s incredibly competitive out there, and we need to keep doing everything we can and as strategically as we can to break through.”

At this year’s Open, who will make it out of week one? Who will make it to a quarter, a semi, and dare we ask for more? The biggest hope is probably Opelka, who was the runner-up recently in Toronto. But what about Mackenzie McDonald (ranked 61), who played in his first ATP final this summer? What about rising newbie Jenson Brooksby (ranked 99)? I’m in multiple group chats about tennis, and questions flood the brainpan. Does Fritz have what it takes to fill Sampras’s Air Oscillates? Will Tiafoe finally attain a Slam semi or more? Is perhaps Opelka, who is sponsored by an art gallery, of all things, visits museums with Venus Williams on his days off, and pals around with painter Friedrich Kunath, something more than just a seven-foot-tall servebot?

Fans who follow the men’s game have learned not to take such questions too seriously. Glory didn’t leave the U.S., it grew beyond it, and still can be claimed. Frankly, with the Big Three gradually exiting, and new players hammering at the door, the men’s game right now is thrilling to watch. And with a variety of personalities to get excited about, maybe fans will be inspired to pick up a racquet themselves. “Tell people, get your ass out and play, baby!” Bollettieri shouted at the end of our interview. “It’s all about playing the game.”

Rosecrans Baldwin’s latest book is Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.