Tennis Coming Back Slowly With Exhibition Matches

Tennis Coming Back Slowly With Exhibition Matches
The small-scale events could create a road map to help the men’s and women’s tours return.

Tennys Sandgren, who was on a roll before professional tennis shut down, has had enough of video games and self-isolation in his home near Nashville, Tenn.

“I’d play tennis in a hazmat suit, just to go compete. I’m itching,” he said on Wednesday night.

Such extreme measures will not be necessary, just a 12-hour road trip next week. Sandgren plans to drive to West Palm Beach, Fla., to play in the UTR Pro Match Series, the first top-tier tennis exhibition in the age of the coronavirus, and hardly the last.

Sandgren, an American who had seven match points in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open in January before losing to Roger Federer, is set to play May 8-10 against Matteo Berrettini of Italy and the rising Americans Reilly Opelka and Tommy Paul.

Berrettini, ranked eighth, was a surprise semifinalist at last year’s United States Open. Opelka is ranked 39th, Sandgren 55th and Paul 57th.The matches, to be played on a private hardcourt and broadcast on Tennis Channel, will be singles only, with no live spectators and just one match official to respect social-distancing requirements.

“We’re trying to bring pro tennis back on linear TV, and we’re doing it in a way that is super safe,” said Mark Leschly, the chairman and chief executive of Universal Tennis, the tennis rating and organizational platform that is backing the event.


It is part of a wave of competitions that are trying to fill some of the void created by absence of the professional tours, the ATP and the WTA, which have shut down for at least four months because of the pandemic.

The International Tennis Series, a package of men’s round-robin events primarily involving players ranked well outside the top 100, has been streaming on ESPN3 since mid-April from another private Florida court. Most of the matches have been streamed with a single fixed camera and without commentary, as passing traffic and the players’ mutterings provide most of the soundtrack.


Dustin Brown, a flashy German pro who once upset Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon but has slipped to No. 239 in the rankings, will take part this weekend — with a group of lower-ranked players — in the first of a series of German exhibition events at a club in the town of Höhr-Grenzhausen.
Patrick Mouratoglou, the Frenchman who coaches Serena Williams, announced a series of events called the Ultimate Tennis Showdown that would begin later in Mayat his tennis academy near Nice. Mouratoglou said that 10th-ranked David Goffin had committed to the first event along with Alexei Popyrin, a promising Australian who is ranked 103rd and whose father initially had the idea for the series. It is being designed to appeal to a younger audience with in-match coaching and fewer restrictions on player behavior than at tour events.