[laughs]

You gotta do, uh, basically, you know, you gotta go and get your massage and talk to the media and, you know, do your, you know, kinda come down from this adrenaline rush of the match.

So I remember Agassi talking about this.

This is not new.

He remembers, you know, kind of the haunts of New York late night with his team, going into places at 4:00 and 5:00 AM.

That's not a good thing.

You know? I, I don't, and I don't think it's, uh ...

Who do you like?

And so what's been different-

And also, last thing I'd mention, Mary, last thing I'd mention was also that same day earlier, honestly, this is a small thing, but it was, I think, a very symbolic and beautiful thing.

Frances Tiafoe came back from two sets down, American player, beating a young American who'd never been in that situation before.

He completes the match, completes the victory.

He's celebrating for about two or three seconds, and then suddenly he realizes this kid, which he's quite close to, was really suffering.

And so he cuts off his celebration, goes over to him, and embraces him by the net And Alex Michelsen starts to cry in his arms, and it, it sounds a bit, a bit maudlin, but it was beautiful.

So, uh, the inevitable question, who is going to win this weekend?

Well, if Sabalenka can play the way she played today, and which I think she probably can, I, I kind of have to go with her again.

Yeah.

And he's, you know, he's a, he's a handsome guy and got a lot of charm and, and he's, uh, but he's a sh- he's a small player for the modern era.

He's about five foot nine, stocky guy.

Um, and he, um, he moves like, uh, like you need to move at that height.

And, um, and he is a shock, but a little bit less of a shock because of what's happened in tennis recently.

I mean, we had two guys, you know, reach the quarterfinals at the French Open ranked in the hundreds.

You know, we've had the quarterf- you know, qualifier Maya Valevska get to the finals, uh, as a qualifier at the French Open just recently.

Do you think she's gonna play in the US Open? Do you think she's gonna try to play really now, or was this just a one-shot?

Yeah.

So I saw, you know, hundreds of matches with Serena.

I watched her go through all these ups and downs through her career, and, um, you know, can be unpredictable.

So I suppose it was appropriate when she'd never used the R-word when she left in, in '22, that there would be, the door would be ajar.

But I was still very surprised that she decided to come back, especially in singles, without having played any matches in singles for almost four years, and she wasn't exactly thriving in singles before she left.

So I thought it was risky i- in a lot of regards, and I frankly was a bit mystified by the motivation for it.

She talked a lot about...

Yeah

A deserving winner, do you reckon?

Well, uh, he certainly has paid his dues.

I mean, he was...

It was now or never with Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz out of the field, [lips smack] um, in the second week of the Slam, with Sinner losing early in the second round and turned into now instead of never.

And I think, you know, Zverev, uh, you could see the emotion after he won and, and, uh, it was not an easy task because he had the pressure on him from the very early part of the tournament as the logical favorite.

And that can be tough in tennis, to hit the shots that you normally hit when that happens.

But that, that i- that is part of his story because there are sometimes heckles in the crowd against him, aren't there?

Yeah, the, you know, when he, when he got to the French Open semifinals in twenty twenty-two, um, his court case, they reached a, uh, a settlement that, you know, put an end to the German court case about those allegations.

Yeah.

Um, just because Sinner was number one.

He'd won 30 straight matches.

A lot of his, you know, biggest rivals are out of here, including Alcaraz with a injury to his wrist.

He was just dominant, dominant, so to go out in the second round is a huge shock, and against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, who's, like, ranked in the 50s, had had no wins of this type before.

And the, but the thing that really separates this is what you said.

It was just a reversal of fortune like I've, I've never seen in a big match, I don't think, where you're that dominant and then suddenly going to basically unable to perform.

Mm-hmm.

Um, how did that evolve over time, that rivalry?

You know, I always felt, not because of anything Roger ever said publicly, but I always felt there was more edge to that rivalry.

I learned in, in reporting the book, you know, it's behind me, you know, The Warrior, which really looks at all of Nadal's career and, and goes deep on the rivalry, especially with Djokovic, that there was more angst behind the scenes with, you know, Roger and Rafa than I think I'd realized at the time when I was reporting, especially between the camps.

Uh, I guess it's inevitable when you have that sort of, uh, jockeying for the number one spot.

But the Djokovic thing, because of the way Novak and his family a-approached his ambition and approached his climb, and let's face it, I mean, Roger and Rafa did not face the kind of adversity [chuckles] that Novak did growing up, trying to find a way in the middle of a war-torn pariah nation to be able to find his way in a country that also had very little tennis, uh, heritage or, or background to draw from.

So it's a very different scenario, and I think that those sort of worldviews and, and backstories kinda clashed in the case of, of Novak and Roger.

And also, you know, Roger had adapted and adjusted to this, in my mind, the presence of Nadal and, um, the reality of Nadal, which was not easy to accept that this other world-class genius is there to play against him.

He's like a, he's almost like a cultural icon.

Mm-hmm.

...

but to watch Medvedev who is, you know, he's a great player.

Uh, Grand Slam champion, stopped Novak Djokovic's Grand Slam few years ago in, in New York and is a great hardcore player.

And to see him struggling to that degree, it's just, you can't take your eyes off it in a way.

And then to see Coco Gauff who in some ways should have felt liberated from winning the French Open, um, getting that second major and kind of getting that self-imposed monkey off her back, um, she's really struggling.

You know, she'll be teary, tough with the pressure, just hired a new coach.

Yeah.

Hmm.

... and kind of do it in a, uh, you know, uh, official sort of way and an acceptable sort of way socially.

So really, part of the reason it became popular back in the 19th century was because men and women were playing together, which is a funny thing.

But now let's, let's fast-forward to a whole different era.

You know, now you're trying to look for eyeballs and, and all the rest, and, uh, no, no big stars have played, you know, mixed doubles for ages.

Used to be big back in the '60s and the '70s.

Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors played together and when they were, when they were an item and, uh, Billie Jean King played it a lot, Margaret Court.

Yeah.