The Broader Tennis Landscape, With Ahmad Nassar

The PTPA executive director on the Rybakina-WTA situation, 1000 events, doubles, and more.

After publishing the main part of my interview with PTPA executive director Ahmad Nassar on the subject of the lawsuit yesterday—and thank you to all of you who have read and reacted to and shared that—there was still some overflow left over from our conversation that I’m bringing to you here as a follow-up.

After discussing the lawsuit, we covered various other various current tennis topics that I thought were relevant to the PTPA and the role it is seeking in the sport.

These subjects included: the WTA’s action against the coach Stefano Vukov against the wishes of his player, Elena Rybakina; the unpopularity of the expanding lengths of 1000-level events; the WTA’s new paid maternity leave program; the U.S. Open using singles rankings for mixed doubles entries and the increasingly separate population of doubles specialists; and the lack of equal pay at combined ATP-WTA 1000-level events like Rome, Canada, and Cincinnati.

This part of our conversation below is only available to paid Bounces subscribers.

Thanks to the hundreds of you who have already subscribed to support the tennis journalism I do here, and I hope more of you can take the leap to join us for this and lots more tennis reporting to come in the future!