Tennis.com Lived And Died With The Internet

A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll find a link to the news archive: all the articles on the website, still online for the moment. 

A scrap of an explanation rested on the second page of an FAQ, stating that the website “evolved into a dedicated scores, and tournament information destination. For the full Tennis Channel experience—analysis, and original programming—visit tennischannel.com or the Tennis Channel app.” (Tennis Channel owns tennis.com.) 

Tennis was the standard-bearing publication about the game for decades. Pete Bodo, among the longest-tenured and most influential tennis writers alive, spent 50 years of his career there. Bodo wrote magazine profiles at the beginning of his career, getting to know the players and delivering accurate, poignant portraits of them to the public. His 1994 tennis tome The Courts of Babylon is studded with raw, startling anecdotes about players, like Ilie Nastase charging his German opponent in the locker room after a match at the 1976 US Open with a cry of “Fuck you, Hitler!” By the time the site folded, Bodo had shifted to part-time, but continued to write columns and features for tennis.com right up until the end of the website.