If you eat a deep fried Big Mac before a match and then play terribly, is it the ref’s fault?

No.

What if you break a string, don’t notice, and lose the next point because you’re now waving around a hand-held trampoline? Ref’s fault?

Negatory ghost rider.

But that’s precisely what happened during a match between Djokovic and Kei Nishikori in Rome a few years back.

Novak didn’t notice he had broken a string (how is that even possible), and was about to serve. But as he stepped up to the line, Mohamed Layhani started yelling from the chair, Your racket! Your racket Novak!

It took Novak a second to figure out why Lahyani was yelling at him, until he looked down at his racket and saw the busted string in the mains. He chuckled, threw his hands up in (fake) apology to Nishikori, and jogged to his chair to grab a new stick.

Meanwhile, Nishikori stared at the sky in disbelief — having just witnessed gross preferential treatment for the World No. 1. I don’t speak Japanese, but I can lip-read the F-bomb in pretty much every language.

So why exactly are we reliving an umpire-unforced-error from 8 years ago? A few reasons:

You have no choice muahaha.

But also — it's a good reminder that tennis isn't actually just two people and a net. The umpire, the crowd, the weather, the altitude, the court speed — there are a lot of characters in every match, and any one of them can flip the script.

In a team sport, there's infrastructure for managing all of it. A coach calls timeout right when the other team goes on a run. A teammate picks you up. Someone absorbs part of the weight.

In tennis, that mechanism is you. Entirely, completely you.

The crowd is hostile? You manage it. The wind is swirling? You adjust, between points, in 20 seconds, alone. The umpire makes a call that makes your blood boil? Walk back to the baseline and hit a first serve.

So when people call tennis an individual sport, they usually just mean: no teammates. But the more interesting version of that is this — every external variable in the match lands on your shoulders to handle in real time. The characters don't go away. You just have to deal with all of them by yourself.

The best players aren't just the best at hitting tennis balls. They're the best at handling everything else too.

Who is the tallest ATP player to become World No. 1?

A. Marat Safin

B. Marin Cilic

C. Juan Martin del Potro

D. Daniil Medvedev

Find out at the bottom!

Tournament directors after a day of When am I going on? Has my opponent checked in? Where’s the bathroom? Please don’t put me on the far court. Are we playing Ad?

Some of the best tennis content I found on the internet this week…

🛎️ What Ben Shelton is saving up for, one of his 2028 goals, and why he strings his crosses 3 lbs tighter than his mains

🤮 Eva Lys’ biggest dating icks

🧱 How have we gotten this far into the clay court season without watching a highlight reel of the most insane shots on clay from the king himself?

D. Daniil Medvedev

At 6’ 6”, Medvedev became the tallest player to reach World No. 1 back in 2022.

Do you think he’ll get back there? Or maybe he’s waiting for a growth spurt to break his own record at 6’ 7”?