👋 Welcome back to The Daily Theory, our morning rundown to help you stay on top of your favorite sport. I’m Allen McDuffee, your guide to all things tennis.
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Let’s tennis!
Three Points
🎾 Reading the tea leaves: On Thursday, the U.S. Open released the singles draws for this year’s tournament. Invariably, that leads to a lot of prognostication about who has the easiest path to the quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals. But if there’s anything we here at Court Theory HQ have learned over the years, it’s that everyone has their own battle, and no path is exactly easy anymore. Still, you should have a look at the women’s and men’s draws for yourself.
- Note: Be on the lookout for the Court Theory U.S. Open Guide coming out a little later.
🎾 Final round: Pushed back by a day of rain, today is the final round of U.S. Open qualifying. If you’ve never watched the qualifying round of a major before, I highly encourage you to catch one or two today. This is meaningful, emotional stuff for these players. Many have never qualified for a major before. All of them need that first-round prize money. And, because of that, you’ll see some of the most inspired tennis there is to witness. Here’s the schedule, and it’s all on ESPN+.
🎾 Final prep: Several top players — including U.S. Open seeds — are in action today in Monterrey, Cleveland, and Winston-Salem for the semifinals of the last U.S. Open warm-up tournaments. That’s not much turnaround time with a Sunday start. Presumably, with three days of first-round matches for the first time this year, finalists will be afforded a bit of rest before they kick off their U.S. Open campaigns.
And, that’s game.
On The Radar
Matches we’re monitoring today:
Monterrey - WTA 500 (Hard)
- Alycia Parks vs. Diana Shnaider (Semifinals)
- Marie Bouzkova vs. Ekaterina Alexandrova (Semifinals)
Cleveland - WTA 250 (Hard)
- Ann Li vs. Xinyu Wang (Semifinals)
- Sorana Cirstea vs. Anastasia Zakharova (Semifinals)
Winston-Salem - ATP 250 (Hard)
- Yunchaokete Bu vs. Botic van de Zandschulp (Quarterfinals)
- Sebastian Korda vs. Marton Fucsovics (Semifinals)
- Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard vs TBD (Semifinals)
Be sure to keep up with the final day of U.S. Open qualifying.
📺 Learn how to watch today’s action over at Tennis Watchers.
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Read, Watch, Listen
- For Racquet, Court Theory friend Caira Conner has the stunning story of Joe Lynskey, a man who was pushed in front of a subway train and lived, slowly making his way back to the tennis court.
- Court Theory reader Lia Picard writes an essay for Vogue about learning to play, learning to lose, and learning to embrace the uncomfortable.
- Taylor Fritz has a different challenge this U.S. Open than he did last, and the degree of difficulty keeps rising.
- A look into how one group is trying to cut light pollution, including at the U.S. Open.
- Novak Djokovic throws out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, and it ain’t bad at all.
- Somebody had to do it: The Ringer writes up the guide to the American men trying to end the major drought.
