David Shaftel was a features writer for the New York Times and the Financial Times. Caitlin Thompson had held digital roles at TIME and the Washington Post and was scouting podcasts for a Swedish company. They were both tennis obsessives, and they were both tired of the way tennis was covered — the corporate gloss, the all-white attire of the country-club scene, the tightly controlled messaging of athletes who said nothing because they had been trained to say nothing. In 2016, they launched a Kickstarter for a quarterly print magazine that would treat tennis the way The Paris Review treats fiction. They called it Racquet.
The first issue appeared without fanfare at the 2017 US Open gift shop: a bright red cover with an Impressionist painting of Yannick Noah hitting a forehand, dreadlocks flaring. It looked nothing like any tennis publication that had ever existed. Inside, the essays asked questions that tennis media had never thought to ask. How should tennis smell? Why is the sport important in Lolita? What can a professional player learn from Philip Roth? How was Arthur Ashe like Muhammad Ali? The New York Times's T Magazine called it a publication of literary bona fides. Stephen Malkmus of Pavement compared its energy to that of self-printed xeroxed fanzines from the nineties but noted that the layout and photography betrayed a knowledge of the art and fashion magazine world. Billie Jean King said she loved its in-depth variety across all elements of the sport.
Racquet was built on the premise that tennis had always been embedded in the arts, in hip-hop, in fashion, in skateboarding — and that this side of the sport had been obscured by corporate tournaments and the country-club establishment. The magazine existed for the tennis fan who might not know they were a tennis fan, alongside the diehards who wanted to see their sport elevated. Contributors included playwrights, novelists, an actor (Jason Biggs), and professional players like Andrea Petkovic. In 2020, Repeater Books published Racquet: The Book, collecting the best essays from the magazine's first four years.
Beyond the magazine, the Racquet world expanded into podcasts, pop-up events, and the Racquet House — experiential gatherings at major tournaments in Palm Springs, Paris, and New York that blurred the line between publishing and hospitality. The ambition was to build not just a magazine but, as Shaftel wrote in his first editor's letter, a complete media company around the culture of tennis. Whether that ambition proved sustainable or cautionary is a conversation still unfolding. What is not in dispute is that Racquet changed how tennis is written about, and that it did so by insisting the sport deserved the same literary seriousness that baseball and boxing had always received.
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