No Challenges Remaining

The most talked about TV show in the tennis world during this long stretch of indoor entertainment, without doubt, has been the Netflix comedy "Never Have I Ever," narrated by John McEnroe and featuring Sendhil Ramamurthy as the tennis-loving father of protagonist Devi Vishwakumar. Sendhil doesn't just play a tennis lover on TV; the dude seriously plays and knows his tennis, and we're delighted to...

The New Yorker's Louisa Thomas is back with us to discuss the comprehensive piece she published about the state of tennis in these tumultuous last five months, " The Fractured World of Tennis Amid a Prolonged Pandemic ." Louisa and Ben discuss the notion of self-centeredness and tennis and how players are trained by people to potentially hurt those same people, how tennis' structure reflects both...

Well, tennis is back, folks! But at the same time, tennis continues to go away. What to make of it all? To help make sense of it all, Ben is rejoined by Reem Abulleil and Tumaini Carayol who also have been (virtually) covering the WTA's return event in Palermo this week. Is the tour set to succeed? And how do we think this sort of virtual coverage will change our work? We also discuss the cancella...

Journalist Glenn Greenwald , creator of The Intercept, joins Ben on this episode to discuss his longtime admiration of Martina Navratilova, the documentary project about that admiration he has been working on, and the hurdles that he's run into along the way as Navratilova has incurred the wrath of activists, as Glenn wrote about here at the Intercept . We discuss Navratilova's sudden fall in LGBT...

Mark Ein, owner of the Citi Open ATP tournament in Washington, joins NCR for a third time this year to share what went into the decision this week to call off his tournament, after months of previous optimism that holding it might be possible even amid a pandemic. Ben and Mark discuss the uncertainty of the moment regarding travel, why now was the time to make the decision, and what challenges the...

As sports work towards a mid-pandemic return across North America, Ben is joined by a veritable constellation of media stars across the landscape to discuss how things are progressing across various arenas, and what their successes and struggles might indicate about what's in store for the tennis tours as they plot out a mid-pandemic comeback. The panel: Helene Elliott , sports columnist for the L...

The fall out from the Adria Tour coronavirus cluster took an unexpected trip to the dance floor within a week later, with video surfacing of Alexander Zverev partying in Monte Carlo just days after being repeatedly exposed to the disease (and promising to follow health protocols) enraging people around the sport in tennis and severely damaging trust in tennis players. To discuss the ramifications,...

Two programming alerts for you here, one sort of a bummer but the other one super-duper. Firstly, we decided that the US Open roundtable episode we recorded after the press conference in New York had become instantly outdated when the positive tests started rolling in from the reckless Adria Tour, so we made the tough decision not to publish it since it was feeling obsolete. In much happier progra...

Between the recording and posting of an episode about the U.S. Open going forward, a big tennis news item dropped on Sunday: Grigor Dimitrov announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 after participating in the Adria Tour events, making this the most high-profile known incidence of coronavirus in tennis yet and casting a pall over the sport's plans to go forward with tour events soon. Ben...

The U.S.T.A. confirmed today that it plans to hold the U.S. Open in its regular dates, albeit without fans and with players and their teams kept in a isolated bubble. The Western & Southern Open will also be played, but at the U.S. Open venue rather than in Ohio. But before those, the first tournament back on the ATP Tour will be the Citi Open in Washington DC. To talk about what it's taken to get...

For our second episode of the week, Ben is joined by Patrick Mouratoglou , the coach of Serena Williams, founder of the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy , and most recently the creator of the Ultimate Tennis Showdown , a tennis event with lots of new ideas on rules to make tennis more appealing to a new, younger audience. Patrick discusses the need for more open displays of emotion in tennis, how to mak...

Ben and Courtney are delighted to bring you a conversation they had last month with Sandra Zaniewska , a rare former WTA player who now coaches on the tour (or did before the tour stopped, anyhow), working first with Petra Martic and now with Alize Cornet. We discuss finding meaning during the shutdown, her own journey through the sport as a player and a coach, how coaches can cope with this stopp...

Ben and Courtney are joined by The Guardian's Tumaini Carayol to discuss his reporting on Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff , two young stars who have emerged as leading voices among players as America is gripped by protests following the murder of George Floyd. How are these two women using their voices? What sort of shift might this represent in the public persona of Osaka, particularly? Are there any...

At the suggestion of a few listeners, we thought it might be useful to alert listeners on this main feed when we upload a Patreon-only episode . And Ben and Courtney just put up their biggest Patreon-only yet, with over two hours across all sorts of topics, mostly non-tennis though with a few decided tangents into the sport we find ourselves without currently.  This is our fifth Patreon-only episo...

Four years after we launched NCRvision into this world , we're finally able to bring some closure to the adventures of our 26 heroic songs inspired by tennis, and to enjoy a whole lot of fun side quests along the way!  We've counted the 411(!) ballots that our listeners cast, and we reveal the finishing order of the songs from 26th to champion, having a whole lot of fun along the way. We start wit...

The 2020 Eurovision Song Contest final was slated to be held today in Rotterdam, but alas 'twas not to be given the coronavirus situation around the continent and the world. The world is a far less glittery place than it should be.  But fear not if you're missing that song contest fix! We're reairing our beloved NCRvision Song Contest from 2016 here for your renewed enjoyment. There's also a purpo...

In light of recent developments, Ben is joined by a Novak Djokovic superfan, Katrina aka @returnwinner , to talk about her journey as a fan of Novak's from the beginning to now. We talk about what drew her to Djokovic initially, her journey as a fan of a less popular player, and what she most admires about Djokovic. Then, pivoting to more recent developments, we discuss Djokovic's frustrating fall...

As the world works from home, we thought it might be useful to give you perspective from the folks who work remotely in tennis even under normal circumstances: the world feed commentators. Ravi Ubha , veteran journalist and commentator, talks about what it's like to call matches that happen around the world from a small studio in England, how to prepare, how to create atmosphere, and more. If you'...

For another perspective on life without tennis from someone inside the sport, Ben is joined by NCR favorite Mike Cation , co-host of the Behind the Racquet podcast , who shares his experiences now that his commentary work has ceased indefinitely with the sport halted due to coronavirus. We discuss the impact of the current moment on both financial and mental health, how lower-ranked players might...

The tennis world is stopped, but it got suddenly busy on Wednesday with Roger Federer expressing a view that he'd like to see the ATP and WTA tours merge into one organization after decades of being side-by-side but separate. More curiously, Rafael Nadal, not a supporter of equality measures in tennis, quickly endorsed this idea. What is going on? Ben is joined by Reem Abulleil try to figure out w...

With the traditional European clay swing and the grass court circuit both off the calendar for the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the next possible start line for the sport is the summer hardcourt stretch in North America, on which the first big combined event would be the Citi Open in Washington. To discuss how the tournament is preparing and thinking currently, Ben is joined by Citi O...

To enhance our discussion and understanding of NCR Book Club selection Venus Envy , Ben and Courtney are joined by Jon Wertheim to chat about his experiences writing the book and how he looks back on it, two decades later. How has the tour changed since? How will history remember Anna Kournikova? And what is the current state of tennis in the publishing world? If you'd like to support our show, pa...

Ben and Courtney are delighted to bring you the long-awaited first discussion of the NCR Book Club, chatting about one of our favorite tennis tomes:  Venus Envy by Jon Wertheim , which covers the 2000 season on the WTA Tour We discuss the colorful characters, what's changed in the sport in the last two decades, and how the book is a great snapshot of a moment on tour which is often sanitized or gl...

To distract you all from the bizarre world in which we live, Ben introduces you to one of the more unusual characters from the tennis ecosystem: the courtsider. (For more of an explainer on what courtsiding is, you may want to read this piece first ) Brad Hutchins, author of the book Game, Set, Cash , reminisces about his time on tour as a courtsider, the highs and lows of that job, and what it's...

This tiny update is mostly to alert followers who track our show primarily through this feed that Ben and Courtney got together earlier this week to record an episode about what quarantined life is like . Since it didn't have tons to do with tennis, we put it on our Patreon page for supporters there. But since we were told many people had missed it and would have liked to have known it was there:...