Features

Building a community, one pàdel club at a time, is what the Londoners behind Gayns are up to. From drills to pàdel explainers, kinship comes first.

Spanish player Martita Ortega—known as La Doctora on the professional pàdel circuit for her dazzling game as well as her active medical practice—is a breakout star in the PPL. Her on-court prowess has taken her to the heights of the game: in 2019, Martita became the youngest player ever to achieve a number-one world ranking, and her high-energy pàdel play has netted her more than 10 international titles. Racquet sat down with the Madrileño at the beginning and end of the PPL season to find out more. 

At Wilson’s SoHo flagship, …Anyone for Tennis? hosted Off the Wall, a panel bringing together fashion, media, and music to reframe tennis as a shared language of culture and play.

Agnès Ricart is a multimedia artist from Spain who—close Racquet readers will confirm—has been a staple in our visual vocabulary for the better part of a decade. Alongside classic Racquet illustrations such as Medvedev flipping the bird at the collected crowd at the US Open, Naomi Osaka's masked protest during COVID and even a protester using a tennis racquet to clear a cannister of tear gas. Her work is vivid and cheeky, and can be seen across the world from The Guardian to Die Ziet to the Economist. We asked her to bring to life an ode to the tennis ball in our latest issue, and to sit down for a Q&A about her artistic practice.

Stické tennis was invented in the 1870s in England, i’s a hodge-podge of tennis, squash, and real tennis. The game disappeared after the First World War. Just two courts are still playable. Yes, stické is the world’s most obscure racquet sport.

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keefe

These days, American college tennis is barely that: American

Sure, game-play conditions may vary, and a maintained court is more enticing for actual play, but as purely aesthetic fascinations, the inherently satisfying rationality of court design endures. 

Frenchman Arthur Fils—the charisma bomb—is back and looking better than ever.

Our Managing Editor Wendy Laird is on the grounds and has Dispatches from the Desert coming in on a regular basis: Today the BNP Paribas Open is over. Long live the BNP Paribas Open.

There’s something wonderful about seeing “closed for the season” on a hotel’s website. They’re just four words, but they say so much: we don’t wring every penny from this property; this location has a “season;” this hotel values your experience far too much to stay open during sub-par weather. “Closed for the season” has a lot of sexy indifference to it; it makes you want to visit even more.