Wendy Laird

Given our two-week Tennis Garden residency, we can confidently report that the 2025 tournament went off without a hitch—unless you count swirling winds that sometimes stopped play, but Tennis Paradise can hardly be held accountable for that. 

The first few days here at the tournament were for the die-hards. The ones who watch streaming matches all year, who know the players at every level—way below the top 100—and want to watch them try to play their way into the main draw of the BNP Paribas Open. By the weekend, all that changed.

The best part about having. A sport is that it can be pastime and workout and outlet. A reason to travel and a welcome distraction at home.

I’ve been to Wisconsin exactly two times. The first visit was during graduate school, when a fellow journalism student who, like me, was missing skiing something fierce, planned a trip for the two of us up to Wisconsin. There’s good skiing up there, we were told by Chicagoans who didn’t know any better. So we of the Cascades and the Rockies drove two hours north from Evanston, IL to ski a “mountain” with a 200-foot elevation.

Is one of SoCal’s many attempts to gamify a thing that’s already a game a gateway to tennis paradise?

During Our Plague Year, the Sport Has Been Released From the Bonds of Performance