WASHINGTON — Scenes from a mid-summer tennis tournament.
A former world No. 1 who remains one of the biggest stars in the sport asks the owner of the event if he can help her hold a cookout on the first day of competition, so she can mingle with the fans that she doesn’t see enough at other events.
A man faces a boy for whom he used to serve as a tennis big brother in the round of 16.
The biggest local hero goes out in the first round on opening night, while the biggest star of the moment among the American men celebrates like he has made the Wimbledon semifinal after he survives a three-set scare with a qualifier and occasional practice partner.
Some of that and plenty more happened this week in Rock Creek Park in northwest Washington, at a tournament that in recent years has found a sweet spot. It balances sports and socializing; accessibility and fanciness; intensity in the moment and a sense of freedom ahead of what’s coming down the pike in a few weeks, plus healthy doses of surprise that can help everyone through the dog days of summer.
Why Naomi Osaka is having the best Wimbledon of her career
Ava Wallace
On Sunday around 11 p.m., four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka texted Mark Ein, the Washingtonian entrepreneur and sports investor who owns the tournament, to ask whether he could set up a summer cookout. Osaka wanted to show some love to the people who had shown her plenty, at a rare event on the tennis circuit where she sees the crowd diversity she wishes she could see week in, week out.
“There’s not much diversity on the tour, and when I came here yesterday — yesterday was my first time — I just saw so many beautiful Black women there. And they were all coming up to me and embracing me and I just felt so welcomed and loved,” Osaka said during an interview with Racquet Theory.
Ein got some of the local food trucks he brought on site for the event to give away food for the cookout, and for an hour on a sultry Monday evening, Osaka chatted on a plaza near the entrance to the grounds where some version of this tournament has taken place for the past 53 years.
No sponsor involved. No VIP ticket required. Just show up, grab a burger and chat with one of the biggest crossover sports stars in the world about tennis or motherhood or fashion or even the weather — which, in maybe the biggest surprise of all, turned crisp and clear and cool following a Noah’s Ark storm Tuesday night.
The U.S. capital, Osaka said, feels like her kind of environment, and the tournament’s location in a park in the heart of the city has allowed it to become a multicultural event instead of the homogeneous affairs that so many tournaments are.
That’s long been the ethos, going back to when it was just a men’s competition beginning in the early 1970s.
“Great players in a park, that was always the model, and it still is,” Donald Dell, who created this tournament — and helped create the ATP Tour — with Arthur Ashe in 1969, said in an interview.
As a 500-level event, two rungs below the Grand Slams, the highest-ranked stars don’t tend to pitch up. But the D.C. Open is the only event in that category at which men and women play in the same week. This year, the tournament shrunk its men’s draw from 48 players to 32, eliminating byes for the seeds and creating a series of stacked first-round matches.
Alex de Minaur vs. Stefanos Tsitsipas. Rafael Jódar vs. Arthur Fils. Those wouldn’t be out of place at the first weekend of a major, the former duo in the recent past and the latter duo the present and most likely the future, too.
“Very tough draw,” Fils, the 22-year-old French star continuing his climb back from a nagging back injury, said after losing to Jódar, Spain’s breakout phenom of the men’s season so far. Jódar, 19, has reached the semifinals after ousting the returning Lorenzo Musetti of Italy in the quarters.
Frances Tiafoe, the hometown favorite who wants to win this tournament more than any event that isn’t a Grand Slam, had his hands full with Térence Atmane of France, a semifinalist at the Cincinnati Open last year. It didn’t go well, as Tiafoe lost in three sets.
It was the start of an early bloodbath for American men. After Tiafoe, Tommy Paul lost his first match as a married man to Kamil Majchrzak of Poland. A couple of hours later, Learner Tien lost to wily French veteran Adrian Mannarino.
De Minaur showed up Monday after his wedding to fellow pro Katie Boulter, and a mini-honeymoon that included 13 days of not playing any tennis. The Australian limped into his news conference with a wry smile on his face after getting past Tsitsipas in three sets. He was facing a 12-1 head-to-head going in — and it wasn’t in his favor.
“For the spectators, for the viewers, it’s obviously better, because you’re going to get stacked draws,” de Minaur said. “You’re going to get potential first-round clashes that are brutal.”
The women’s side had its share of that, too.
Alexandra Eala, the rising talent from the Philippines who fully announced herself to the wider sports world with a run to the fourth round at Wimbledon, had to survive a first-round match against Zheng Qinwen, an Australian Open finalist and the 2024 Olympic champion. Eala prevailed in three sets. Her reward was a round-of-16 duel with Leylah Fernandez, the defending D.C. Open champion and 2021 U.S. Open finalist.
Alex Eala celebrates after defeating Leylah Fernandez at the D.C. Open. (Nick Paciente / Sipa USA)
Eala won, then she defeated Elina Svitolina to set up a semifinal against Osaka. Fernandez, whose mother is Filipino Canadian, found herself answering questions about the up-and-comer with whom she shares some heritage.
“She’s trusting herself, trusting her shots, her patterns, and a lot of her balls are going in,” Fernandez said in her news conference of Eala. “She’s progressing well. Whatever she’s doing with her team is working.”
Ein said the early matchups are only part of why the tournament seems to have hit its stride, after some down years in the 2010s when the previous owner, the not-for-profit Washington Tennis and Education Foundation, struggled to find the capital necessary to make the DC Open a high-quality event.
The future of the tournament remains a vexed question locally. The D.C. Council has approved $10million in funds to renovate the tennis precinct, and Ein has submitted plans for the site, but the land is under federal management and questions remain about who will manage the center year-round.
The tournament added two sessions and 15,000 tickets to the market this year and sold out. Bleacher seats in the top rows of the 7,500-seat main stadium were going for $100 on the secondary market in the middle of the week.
Ein said the tournament will sell about half of the tickets for next year before this week is out.
“People have no idea who is going to be playing next year, but they’re still making summer plans around this,” he said. “They really want to be here and be a part of this.”
“This” is a happening that sometimes feels like a summer festival in a local park where there just happens to be some tennis going on. Ein brought in local popular food destinations, including Roaming Rooster, Duke’s Grocery, which he swears has the best burgers in the city, and the King Street Oyster Bar. The fancy people get access to fare overseen by chefs from Michelin-rated restaurants including Jeremiah Langhorne (The Dabney) and Tatiana Mora (Mita).
That doesn’t happen in a local city park every day.
Neither does this: Ben Shelton, the world No. 8, was a break down in the third set against Martin Damm, a qualifier ranked world No. 104, before climbing out of the hole. When he finished off the comeback, Shelton pumped his fists and flexed his arms around the court. He put his finger to his year, asking for more noise from the crowd. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, watched from courtside.
Shelton had spent nearly a month sitting on a first-round loss at Wimbledon, where he was the No. 4 seed and frittered away a golden opportunity to go deep in the year’s most important tournament.
“It’s huge to start with a win here and just start building your match count moving into the U.S. Open,” Shelton said in a news conference when it was over. “If you’re out early in two or three of these tournaments, you can struggle in terms of confidence or the level that you are playing at going into the Open.”
The win earned him a match against Ugo Humbert of France, a second consecutive left-hander who thrives on hard courts. Shelton lost the first set, but figured out that he could frustrate his French opponent with offspeed balls, the kind of patient matchplay he has found hard to come by in recent times. He won in three sets, but another lefty, Alejandro Tabilo of Chile, proved his undoing — again in three sets.
De Minaur had it a little easier, but still with plenty of oddity, in his second matchup. He played Cruz Hewitt, the 17-year-old son of Lleyton Hewitt, the former world No. 1 who is a mentor and Davis Cup captain for de Minaur. De Minaur has known the boy, who lost the Wimbledon junior final a few weeks back, since he was in single digits.
Alex de Minaur (left) has known Cruz Hewitt (right) since Hewitt was a small child. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
He spent the 24 hours leading up to the match scanning social media and seeing pictures of the two of them when Cruz was a small boy, including one when de Minaur was receiving the Newcombe Medal in 2018 as Australia’s outstanding elite player. Cruz was nine.
De Minaur zipped to a 5-0 lead, downshifted, then won 6-2, 6-3 and delivered a big sweaty hug at the net.
“I’ve known him for years and years,” de Minaur said in a news conference. “We’ve played. I’ve stayed at Lleyton’s house plenty of times. We’re very, very close, so it was a pretty cool moment.”
De Minaur knew he was bound to play Hewitt eventually. He didn’t expect it this week, but tennis karma made it so — Hewitt got walkovers in both qualifying matches then beat a lackluster Marcos Giron of the U.S. in the first round, making him the youngest player to win a main-draw match in Washington since Kei Nishikori in 2007. It was yet another moment in a week that has brought plenty of them, beginning with Osaka’s cookout, which just might be the start of something.
“I want to do another one in New York just because I really love that city,” said Osaka, who is half-Haitian. “The Caribbeans are there, and I just love feeling like I’m in the islands.”
