No Challenges Remaining

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 its strengths and weaknesses, the fast-approaching U.S. Open, and much more, including, inevitably, Nick Kyrgios. It's a wide-ranging story and a wide-ranging chat, and we think you'll enjoy it. Also, please go get Louisa's new book, Losers, for yourself and/or everyone you know!  If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!

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 cancellation of Madrid and the new rules document from the U.S. Open, as well as the decision of defending champion Rafael Nadal to skip this year's event. And then as a bonus at the end, you'll hear Dayana Yastremska discuss her unexpected turn as a recording artist. (Apologies for some of the audio issues on Ben's track as this issue goes on, we did our best to make it sound decent) If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you

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 sports circles, the notion of cancel culture, and also Glenn's longtime love of tennis and what he makes of the modern game. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!) As always, thanks for following us on Twitter and subscribing/reviewing on iTunes on iTunes or whatever your podcasting app/platform of choice may be.

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 U.S. Open still needs to clear in order to go ahead. Also, could a radical reimagining of the traveling tour structure which tennis has had allow for a more viable product during this global crisis? And what might that look like? If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!) As always, thanks for following us on Twitte

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 Los Angeles Times; Ava Wallace, reporter for The Washington Post; Lindsay Gibbs of Power Plays; and Caitlin Murray, author of The National Team. We think you'll have a real good time listening and learning. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that, including a new episode since last posting featuring Courtney discussing her love of The Last of Us! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you

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, and the notions of a code of conduct, Ben is joined by NCR's Middle East correspondent Reem Abulleil (please do support her Patreon as well!) to talk about what the tours can and can't do, the corrosive effects of selfishness in tennis, and more.  Should tennis continue on without putting super rigid restrictions on personnel behavior in place? And if tennis has to do so much in a pandemic that it stops being fun, should it just stop all together? Big, bleak conversations are had here, but we also had a lot of fun. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the s

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 programming news, we have some very fun stuff rolling onto our Patreon now: games of tennis-themed Codenames with Ben, Courtney, Blair Henley and Nick McCarvel! We had a TON of fun with our friends, and hope you'll have just as much watching the three-part video series, the first round of which is up now. To access these shows, and for the hook up on how to play this tennis-themed game with your own crew of tennis-loving friends, please join the 200+ wonderful listeners who are backing us on our Patreon.  If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launc

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 is kindly rejoined by Reem Abulleil and Tumaini Carayol to have another discussion of what the Dimitrov test result means for the sport, both in terms of lessons to be learned from what went wrong at the Adria Tour (seems like a lot!) and what it might mean for events like the U.S. Open which had optimistically planned on forging ahead. Can be players be trusted to behave responsibly enough to keep a fragile thread of optimistic hope intact? If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out o

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 there, and what comes next for the tournament, Ben is rejoined by tournament owner Mark Ein to discuss how his tournament is preparing, what challenges lie ahead, and what an event could look like this summer. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on

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 make tennis more competitive in a crowded entertainment marketplace, his thoughts on the U.S. Open's proposed rule limiting player support personnel to one person, what his charge Serena Williams has been doing during this shutdown time, tennis-wise, and lots more.  If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks

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 stoppage, what she makes of Dominic Thiem's controversial comments, and her own nascent adventures in podcasting. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), following us on Twitter (discuss this episode with hasht

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 drawbacks to athletes speaking out? And how might the stoppage change social awareness in the sport? If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), following us on Twitter (discuss this episode with hashtag #NCR2

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 episode, and backers to our Patreon can access all episodes and other discussion threads and posts. We're currently at 192 backers--just eight short of 200?--and would love to have your support. And we think it's a deal worth your while if you enjoy Ben and Courtney talking (which hopefully you do if you're reading this). Hope everyone is well out there! And thanks to our G.O.A.T. backer J.O'D!

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 with a recap of the show and an interview with Eurovision expert William Lee Adams who lends his expert eye to our field. Then we have tons and tons of montages of bonus songs, interviews of artists, and more surprises along the way. Hopefully you'll have as much fun with the way this whole NCRvision journey wraps up as we have had putting it together. Thank you again for your votes, and for your patience. Getting this done was a major undertaking, and we're very relieved it is finally complete. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an

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 purpose behind this reairing: to get you refamiliarized with the songs for when our results show finally drops later this month! You're going to love it, we promise. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), fol

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 into the fray of faux-wellness charlatans, and how we should react to a favorite having some undesirable traits. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), following us on Twitter (discuss this episode with

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'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), following us on Twitter (discuss this episode with hashtag #NCR255!), and subscribing/reviewing on iTunes on iTunes or whatever your podcasting app/platform of choice may b

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 be especially affected, and on the strains of exhibition match ideas which are popping up in all sorts of various places. We also discuss payment ideas, for players and coaches alike. These are tough, weird times, but there is comfort to be found, for sure, in knowing just how many people are in this together. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank

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 what's happening here, where it's coming from, and what it might mean for the futures of the tours. We have a lot of questions and a lot of suspicions. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many listeners who have already given their support! (And thank you to G.O.A.T. backer J O'D!)  As always, thanks for liking us on Facebook (leave comments on the episode thread! Engage with other listeners!), following us 

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 Open owner Mark Ein, who gives his insights and perspectives about how tennis might return after months away, and in what form. Though the event is still months away, there's lots of ideas and contingencies already floating around, and Mark walks us through several different scenarios which should help to illuminate this murky landscape more clearly for listeners. If you'd like to support our show, particularly as our normal work has disappeared along with the sport, we've launched an NCR Patreon where you can do just that! Check out our five tiers and see which might be right for you! And thank you to the many lis