The 2026 U.S. midterm elections are only nine days away, which is welcome news to the millions of Americans who are weary from inundation with infinite irritating texts asking for donations. If you live in a media market with a competitive gubernatorial, senatorial, or congressional race, the sheer relentlessness of the bombardment is beyond oppressive and obnoxious by this point.
This year in Ohio, a state which might be shifting back from red to purple, there’s been considerable attention on the advertising in the governor’s race between Democrat Amy Acton and Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. As you may have seen, that contest gained national attention last week because of Ramaswamy’s grotesque use of Acton’s estranged mother in an attack ad against her. Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter after her then-husband, Acton’s stepfather, was indicted for raping her when she was 12 years old.
“There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials,” former President Barack Obama said of the Ramaswamy controversy at a rally in Cleveland on Saturday. “And I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody could run an ad like that.”
The rebuke for Ramaswamy’s attack against Acton has been near universal across civil society; even the incumbent Republican governor in Ohio, Mike DeWine, said that the ad was “deeply, deeply troubling” and “wrong,” urging the Ramaswamy campaign to take the ad down.
That’s all well reported and terrible. But I’m writing about this race on Bounces because of what Democrats have lobbed back in the other direction, an attack that I’ve never seen before in a political campaign.
A group called “Ohioans for Lower Costs,” funded by the Democratic Governors Association, rolled out a new ad that paints Ramaswamy as dangerously out of touch with Ohio voters. Prominently featured second in their list of arguments against him, and delivered with disdain: “His favorite sport is tennis.”
The ad then closes with more images of Ramaswamy playing tennis, making it clear that “tennis player” is the lasting impression that Democrats want viewers to have of this candidate to hammer home his undesirability.
Ramaswamy had previously made his own campaign video this summer of himself discussing policy in between highlights of his playing tennis on a private green clay court somewhere.
Even though I appreciate seeing one-handed backhands in the wild, this video was, in my professional opinion, profoundly dorky, off-putting shit. The way he said “slice” and you knew a slice was coming…corny as hell. The little satisfied exhale at the end after the smash? Good grief.
Many Ohio voters apparently agreed with my assessment. I corresponded on Saturday with a staffer working for Democrats in Ohio who said that focus groups of voters had been alienated by Ramaswamy’s tennis connection.
“People thought he came across like a jerk and arrogant, and they found him playing tennis while explaining his policies distracting,” they said. “It was a bullet point in the memo from the pollster: it alienated voters in every group.”
While it’s specific aversion to Ramaswamy, it’s also a remarkable temperature reading of how tennis is viewed in America right now as a pendulum swing of sorts from the discourse last month in New York. There, many people wanted to attend the U.S. Open because it made them look rich and fancy in an aspirational way that they could show off on social media.
But when it comes to an election in a Midwestern state—particularly at a time when voters report feeling worse off economically than they were a year ago—that same association that tennis has with out-of-reach wealth is a considerable liability for Ramaswamy. Acton had previously hammered Ramaswamy for attending the U.S. Open last month when he was spotted in the crowd at a Tommy Paul match, claiming that he went there “jetting off in his private plane to watch the US Open in VIP seating with his billionaire friends.”
“Instead of talking to voters who know his scam policies will raise costs for our state, he fled to his favorite city with his fellow billionaires at the U.S. Open after flying his private jet to NYC,” Ohio Democratic Party spokeswoman Katie Seewer said on the party’s website.
Even unofficial critics, like comedian Nimesh Patel in 2023, have used tennis to mock Ramaswamy.
Once he became a recognizable figure from his failed presidential run in the 2024 Republican primaries, Ramaswamy has often been spotted at tennis tournaments. Giri Nathan wrote at Defector about sitting near Ramaswamy at the 2024 U.S. Open final:
During the men's final, I watched an elderly Indian man with a Proud Boy haircut—I didn't know guys from this demographic got this haircut—stand up and walk over to shake the hand of Vivek Ramaswamy, tennis lover and humiliated presidential candidate. Ramaswamy stared at the Jumbotron during changeovers, and as increasingly obscure celebrities were highlighted, he uttered the names of those celebrities with his wife, evidently awaiting his own turn on screen, which never came. He spent almost an entire set of tennis workshopping the caption of a photo of himself.
A year earlier, Ramaswamy had tried to parlay his U.S. Open attendance into a hot take that was barely half-baked. While he was still campaigning for president—in the same half-hearted, sycophantic way that the rest of the field in that 2024 Republican primary was doing—Ramaswamy had attended the 2023 U.S. Open. In a TV appearance soon after, he came up with an impressively terrible idea for how the disruptive protesters at the Coco Gauff vs Karolina Muchova semifinal should’ve been handled, one so bad that even the host on Fox Business couldn’t abide it.
Ramaswamy has been unapologetic about his love for tennis. But as he’s learning, even in Ohio, a state home to one of the world’s biggest tennis tournaments in the Cincinnati Open, tennis doesn’t play well.
In Ramaswamy’s defense on this general point, I think that’s unfair. I think it’s OK to love tennis! I, certainly, have never thought of less of someone just for playing tennis or being a tennis fan—and I thank you all of you tennis fans for subscribing to Bounces, furthermore.
I also recognize that the way his opponents are using tennis against him is a way to “other” Ramaswamy, to make him seem somehow stereotypically less masculine, or perhaps un-Ohioan and un-American.
“It’s bc there is something effete and painfully “try hard upper class” about tennis being one’s favorite sport. An American man’s favorite sport is football, bball, hockey, (in the past 10 years, maybe answering “MMA”), some even soccer - but not tennis, ffs.”
It’s not lost on me that there’s a surge in Indian-American boys playing tennis right now, also: in the Boys 18s singles draw in Kalamazoo this summer, of 192 names, about 30—roughly 15 percent—appear to be of identifiable Indian or otherwise subcontinental origin.1 That’s a huge percentage! There are a ton of Indian American kids who love and play tennis, and I don’t think it should make them or their families seem “less American” to do so.
Ramaswamy also seemed to recognize this perception, so a few days after attending last month’s U.S. Open, he cravenly made a new sports-based ad, this time in a batting cage. Dressed for golf and not exactly looking like a Silver Slugger, Ramaswamy tried to make himself look more American via baseball, and despite only showing himself making contact, I think he struck out pretty badly.
How Good a Tennis Player is Vivek Ramaswamy?
Cosplaying as an athlete has been part of Ramaswamy’s public profile, even when sticking to his sport of choice. Longtime Bounces readers may remember I wrote two years ago about Ramaswamy entering a professional tournament—an ITF $25k in Ohio—and about how he always films his tennis videos from an angle where you can’t see where his balls are going.
Ramaswamy accompanied the announcement with a video of himself hitting inside the venue of this week’s $25,000 ITF Futures event in Columbus, the Ty Tucker Tennis Center.
It would’ve been a fascinating audit of Ramaswamy’s tennis ability, but he didn’t post up. Ramaswamy was ostensibly busy with running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with Elon Musk at the time, but one of Musk’s first moves toward “efficiency” seemed to be dumping Ramaswamy on Inauguration Day. He has not subsequently announced entry into any professional tournament.
Before and after that stunt, Ramaswamy reliably posts his tennis videos from an angle where you can’t see where the ball is going when he hits it, so it’s tough to get any true sense of if he’s a good player or not.
As I wrote in 2024: “Swinging as hard as you can with frantically frenetic footwork is something nearly anyone can do for a 15 second clip for social media—keeping up anywhere near that effort over a whole match would be something to see, which is why tennis recruiting video guidelines tell prospective players to do exactly the opposite of what Ramaswamy has done.”
The 41-year-old Ramaswamy’s tennis bona fides have been the subject of some scrutiny, but there’s no doubt he was a decent tennis player in his youth. I dove deep and trawled newspaper archives and found mentions of Ramaswamy’s youth tennis dating back to 1997, when he started showing up in 12-and-under tournaments around Cincinnati.
The next year, he won a local 14-and-under tournament.
He was listed as the No. 1 “Novice” 14-and-under player by the Greater Cincinnati Tennis Association.
He had a one-handed backhand back then, too, but his hair was much better.
As he reached high school, however, his results were less impressive. He played well for his school team, St. Xavier, but the reports have him topping out at No. 3 singles for the school, albeit putting up a very strong record against the third-best players from other schools.
(Also, it’s such a shame that local media no longer covers high school sports this robustly nearly anywhere in America.)
By his senior year, Ramaswamy was barely getting mentioned in local tennis coverage; he only showed up once in coverage I found, as part of a doubles pairing.
To be clear, none of this is anything to be ashamed of; Ramaswamy is almost certainly a better tennis player than I ever was, for starters.
But somewhere along the way, Ramaswamy’s tennis background became overinflated—presumably sourced from Ramaswamy himself.
In 2015, a slurpy piece in Forbes described Ramaswamy as having been “a nationally ranked junior tennis player whose serve could hit 120mph.” That claim sounds immediately dubious, and it doesn’t help the sniff test that the article also described him as “young, handsome and charming” and “any parent’s dream,” for context.
A 2022 profile in The New Yorker, after Ramaswamy had pivoted to politics and published a book called “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam” also repeated the claim that Ramaswamy was “a nationally ranked tennis player.”
But I can find no such proof of Ramaswamy ever having been a tennis player of any national note or relevance. All of the media coverage I found of his youth tennis playing was localized to newspapers in Southwest Ohio; he never gained any mention elsewhere that I’ve discovered. The only evidence I’ve found of anything regional was Ramaswamy showing up as being ranked 48th among 16-and-under players in the USTA Midwest Section, according to a 2002 yearbook.
Ramaswamy has a UTR profile which has a decent amount of activity, most recently last January, and a rating of ~9. According to the site, among men over 40, he’s ranked somewhere outside the top 22,000.
This guy isn’t awful at tennis, by most fair assessments. But he certainly sucks in many other ways.
I reached out to the Ramaswamy campaign, the Democratic Governors Association, and a few of Ramaswamy’s former teammates seeking comment for this article, but have not yet heard back at time of publication. Russ King, Ramaswamy’s high school tennis coach, could not be reached because he passed away in 2024, but he did reminisce about Ramaswamy in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer a year earlier:
His tennis coach remembers Ramaswamy debating politics with him in the front seat of the van, with Ramaswamy taking the conservative side and King taking the other side...
…some of the views he’s heard from Ramaswamy [as a presidential candidate] have surprised him, particularly his comments on climate change. Ramaswamy in the first Republican debate said that the “climate change agenda is a hoax.” He has said the country should abandon what he called the “climate cult” and unleash fracking, coal and nuclear energy to spur economic growth.
Those comments don’t jibe with what King remembers of his long-ago debates in the tennis van crisscrossing Ohio. “I can’t believe that he believes that there is no global warming,” King said. “I think he’s trying to summon the Trump Republican conservatives.”
If anything, Ramaswamy’s lifelong love of tennis may be the one authentic thing about him. Still, if the sport still contributes to him losing this election, I’m all for it.
Thanks for reading Bounces! This article is free because of public interest around an imminent election, but I appreciate any free or paid subscribers! and Bounces Box #003 is now live! —Ben
Bounces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, avoid FOMO, and support my journalism in tennis, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
If I lived in Ohio I could care less if my politicians played or loved tennis I’d be more upset by the fact that he dragged out a women who turned her back on her children and stayed with a pedophile just to try and pin his opponent as a “liar” it’s disgusting and vile.
His baseball swing was so atrocious I could take an 8 year old out and they would look more athletic.
I wonder whether the USTA's increasingly aggressive embrace of celebrity and influencer culture is actually becoming counterproductive. From Billie Jean King's battles for equality through to the extraordinary achievements of the Williams sisters and Frances Tiafoe, one of the great stories of the Open era has been tennis's gradual democratization, its emergence from the country club into a genuinely more inclusive sporting culture.
Yet the US Open increasingly seems to be selling not the sport itself but proximity to wealth, celebrity and conspicuous consumption. Even the Williams sisters' appearances at the Met Gala, inspiring as their success undoubtedly is, can reinforce an image of tennis as an exclusive lifestyle rather than an accessible game. The distinction between a culture of aspiration and one of conspicuous consumption matters.
Meanwhile, public courts remain desperately inadequate in many communities, opportunities for children from less privileged backgrounds are still constrained, and ordinary fans are being priced out of the US Open itself. To be fair, the USTA continues to invest in grassroots programmes, but there's a growing contradiction between its stated commitment to accessibility and the image of tennis it's so enthusiastically promoting.
The danger is that a sport which spent decades dismantling its social barriers is now busy erecting new ones, albeit with a rather more fashionable guest list.
If I lived in Ohio I could care less if my politicians played or loved tennis I’d be more upset by the fact that he dragged out a women who turned her back on her children and stayed with a pedophile just to try and pin his opponent as a “liar” it’s disgusting and vile.
His baseball swing was so atrocious I could take an 8 year old out and they would look more athletic.
I wonder whether the USTA's increasingly aggressive embrace of celebrity and influencer culture is actually becoming counterproductive. From Billie Jean King's battles for equality through to the extraordinary achievements of the Williams sisters and Frances Tiafoe, one of the great stories of the Open era has been tennis's gradual democratization, its emergence from the country club into a genuinely more inclusive sporting culture.
Yet the US Open increasingly seems to be selling not the sport itself but proximity to wealth, celebrity and conspicuous consumption. Even the Williams sisters' appearances at the Met Gala, inspiring as their success undoubtedly is, can reinforce an image of tennis as an exclusive lifestyle rather than an accessible game. The distinction between a culture of aspiration and one of conspicuous consumption matters.
Meanwhile, public courts remain desperately inadequate in many communities, opportunities for children from less privileged backgrounds are still constrained, and ordinary fans are being priced out of the US Open itself. To be fair, the USTA continues to invest in grassroots programmes, but there's a growing contradiction between its stated commitment to accessibility and the image of tennis it's so enthusiastically promoting.
The danger is that a sport which spent decades dismantling its social barriers is now busy erecting new ones, albeit with a rather more fashionable guest list.