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Every August, Michael Lewis goes on a pilgrimage. He boards the Long Island Rail Road from his home in Port Washington, New York, and rides to one of the tennis world’s holiest sites: Flushing, Queens, the home of the US Open. “I still get excited every time I walk into the Open,” Lewis said. “I just love the thrill.”
Lewis has been a tennis reporter, his dream job, since 2013. Freelancing for regional and local publications, he’s carved out a niche writing about up-and-coming pros for their hometown papers: Tommy Paul for North Carolina’s Daily Reflector, Coco Gauff for the Palm Beach Post. But he’ll be the first to tell you he doesn’t do it for the money—fifty or seventy-five dollars is about what he charges for an article. In recent years, he has made most of his income ghostwriting books. “This is all a labor of love for me,” he said.
There was a time when Lewis would have been one small piece in a cadre of media figures covering a sport that is played by more than twenty-five million people in the US and worth billions worldwide. (The four Grand Slam tournaments collectively generate more than 1.5 billion dollars a year, according to The Athletic. The global market size for tennis equipment alone is estimated to be around four billion dollars.) But the reporters who cover it today are barely keeping up. “It’s way more fragmented than it used to be,” said Matt Roberts, the cohost of The Tennis Podcast, a membership-backed podcast with about fifty thousand listeners per week.
Jon Wertheim started covering the sport about twenty-five years ago, at a time when, as he recalls, outlets like the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, and the Tampa Bay Times would send reporters to cover Wimbledon in person. “That’s laughable right now,” Wertheim said. While major outlets still cover tennis’s biggest tournaments—The Athletic, which is owned by the New York Times, is one of the only US publications that sends reporters to all four majors, plus other tournaments—there’s less mainstream coverage of the sport beyond the Grand Slams. In its place has emerged a passionate, albeit niche, landscape of independent journalists and tennis-focused sites, which tend to rely on freelancers. Wertheim now makes a living with a lot of what he calls his “side hustles”: He is a senior tennis writer at Sports Illustrated, a commentator for the Tennis Channel, and cohost of a Vox Media tennis podcast with former world No. 1 Andy Roddick. “That’s how a lot of people are still covering the sport. They’re doing a little bit of everything,” Wertheim said. “People have gotten a lot more enterprising about how to stay in the sport, because you’re not going to be a tennis writer at a newspaper.” Michigan-based Colette Lewis, who has run the junior tennis blog Zoo Tennis for two decades, agrees. “The only way that tennis journalism is going to survive is if the people that love tennis keep being willing to do the work,” she said.
The dwindling number of dedicated, and well-funded, investigative reporters covering tennis means there are fewer critical eyes on the sport, and a lot of modern-day stories potentially getting missed—or at least harder to cover. In 2020 and 2021, Ben Rothenberg, who now writes the tennis newsletter Bounces on Substack, reported that one of the world’s top players had allegedly abused his ex-girlfriend; the player is now suing him for defamation. Rothenberg last year crowdfunded more than thirty-five thousand dollars to afford a lawyer. (The case is ongoing; Rothenberg stands by his reporting.) He and other tennis reporters point to a number of other topics that they think warrant more coverage: match fixing, abusive coaches, the use of banned substances, the sport’s powerful governing bodies, Saudi Arabia’s growing presence, and player efforts to seek a larger share of tournament revenue. “There’s definitely stories that are being lost because of a more anemic press presence,” Rothenberg said.
Avid fans still seek out tennis coverage, but a lot of what they find is lighter, more athlete-friendly fare—as has been the case across sports media. The gap left by mainstream outlets has been a boon for lifestyle-oriented tennis publications like Racquet and The Second Serve. And players, who once relied on news outlets to help build fan bases and obtain endorsement deals, now increasingly share their personal stories directly on social media, or through documentaries or docuseries where the subjects or their agents often retain creative control. Matt Futterman, a New York–based senior tennis writer for The Athletic, describes these projects as more akin to “commercials for themselves, rather than a distant, objective view of their experience.” Still, the veteran sports journalist Sally Jenkins thinks it’s a good thing that tennis players—like athletes in other sports—are increasingly in control of their own narratives and content. “It’s nice to be an interlocutor,” Jenkins said. “But ultimately, athletes own themselves.”
The journalists who cover tennis, even critically, say they view the job as partly about making the sport better. “We want the absolute best for it. We are voices for the sport, but we’re also not going to just be praising it all the time,” Roberts said. “If something needs calling out, then we need to call it out.” Rothenberg worries that, without more tennis in major mainstream publications, it will be harder to attract audiences that are newer to the sport or don’t know anything about it. “I’m not exactly sure how they would find us,” he said. “When they go to those traditional homes of tennis, they’re going to get less than they ever have before.”
The heightened challenges and pressures of tennis are what draw the sport’s remaining reporters to covering it. Unlike football or basketball players, who get paid salaries regardless of how well they play game to game, tennis players make money only when they win matches; on the court, they succeed and fail alone. “It’s a brutal life, and it pays off for a handful of people,” Futterman said. He compares tennis players to gladiators and a good tennis match to an opera. “Seeing them try to survive and thrive in that environment, under incredibly stressful circumstances, is quite a drama to watch,” Futterman said. “You get to see a lot of the human condition when you’re covering tennis.”
Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to more accurately reflect the circumstances of Ben Rothenberg’s crowdfunding campaign.
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