“In spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell.”
—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
1.
Driving an 18-wheeler west out of Truckee at 80 miles per hour, you crest Donner Summit at the precise moment the sun hits the horizon. You’ve gone from dusk to blinding light in a half second and barely see the pileup 50 yards ahead. “Oh, God, no!” you scream.
You don’t believe in God.
The dream breaks. You wake in Yucca Valley. It’s Tuesday, March 3, 2026. Today, you will drive to the tennis tournament in Indian Wells, attending as a journalist, but on the sly, having been denied media credentials for three years running. Your editor observes that you’ve been triple-bageled by the tournament’s marketing junta: In tennis terms, that’s losing three sets 6–0, 6–0, 6–0. The editor assigns a “gonzo-style” dispatch anyway, because fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. You scramble for tickets and semi-affordable lodging. Seats for the first weekend are already being scalped. Your budget could cover the semis and finals, but only if you go without food for two weeks and camp in the desert. Instead, you shuttle between three Airbnbs over six days, paying an average nightly rate you’d prefer not to discuss. You purchase a nosebleed seat for Saturday’s afternoon session at an outrageous sum, having no idea who will play.
The 52-year-old tournament has gone by many names. Now, it’s the BNP Paribas Open. Most people just call it Indian Wells. The event and its venue, the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, are owned by Larry Ellison. He rescued both in 2009, spending $100 million to buy them and purportedly another $200-plus million remaking the venue, raising the purse, and establishing parity between men’s and women’s prize money.
Ellison’s marketers—the same ones who refused you a press pass—have proclaimed the grounds “Tennis Paradise.” Long before Ellison arrived, the event’s founders, Charlie Pasarell and Raymond Moore, were already calling it “the Fifth Slam,” an attempt to place Indian Wells alongside the U.S. Open, the French Open, the Australian Open, and Wimbledon.
It’s also the first stop in the so-called Sunshine Double, with the Miami Open commencing even before this one ends.
So you’re off to Indian Wells—the Fifth Slam, Tennis Paradise, Sunshine Double Part One—via surface streets named for dead entertainers. You arrive at a massive greensward of watered turfgrass. You park across from a Mercedes coupe, its owners sitting on lawn chairs and eating apple slices, an umbrella for shade propped against a front tire.
Wrought-iron byways and metal detectors funnel you toward a steel-ribbed drainage culvert tunneling under Miles Avenue directly into the grounds. The entire affair is made up to look like a framed flowered arch, with geraniums, chrysanthemums, interlocking pavers underfoot, and a “Welcome to Tennis Paradise” sign curving above.
As you step into the tunnel with daylight on the far side, anatomical metaphors come to mind. So do Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Divine Comedy. It’s weird and claustrophobic. You congratulate yourself for having considered and then rejected a heroic dose of psychedelics. One of Tennis Paradise’s 1,300 volunteers, some of whom travel from Canada for the privilege of working gratis for one of the world’s wealthiest men, scans the QR code on your phone. You hear a pleasing beep.
Pinch yourself: You’ve penetrated Tennis Paradise.
2.
You’ve purchased a $10 grounds pass for this, the last day before main-draw match play begins. The pass entitles you to roam the premises, watch practice sessions and qualifying matches, and visit Stadium 1 (the world’s second-largest tennis forum—16,100 seats) and Stadium 2 (8,000 seats and pricey eateries like Nobu, with its windows onto the court).
As the built environment opens to azure sky, you hear balls being struck and the squeak of rubber atop a sand-laden surface called Laykold, which turns tightly felted Dunlop balls into Chia Pets. Players’ grunts echo like birdsong, distinctive enough to warrant the development of an ID app.
You’re constantly reminded that you’ve breached Tennis Paradise: not by the exotic flora and Edenic trimmings, but by the barrage of branding insisting you’ve arrived.
You stop to get your bearings, which you will do frequently. Fortunately, the tournament app, which contains a map, schedules, and directions to the Lululemon pop-up, is quite good. The problem is that you came here to forget about the things that that little nerve center of a phone wants to report, such as an inexplicable war in Iran and the Ellison family’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Venus Williams is around somewhere, having accepted a wild card spot. She’s not currently practicing, so you navigate to a small grandstand overlooking Practice Court 2. You’re watching the Americans Tommy Paul and Alex Michelsen batter amber balls at each other. Paul is considered one of the best raw athletes on tour. He wears a New Balance camo trucker’s cap (and he’ll be wearing camo-colored shoes in Miami), appealing to a rarefied market segment: Bass Pro Shops meets Tennis Warehouse.
People gather in creaking bleachers, politely saying “Sorry, excuse me” as they scrape by, maintaining a hush as players practice. One stout middle-aged man lowers himself onto the edge of a folding chair, skids off, and crashes to the floor. The crash—both the sound and the scene—clashes with the exquisite gentility of the setting. The concerned young couple beside him ask if he’s OK. He is. He stands quickly as though nothing happened, finds the chair, and sits quietly. His eyes drift upward. Perhaps he contemplates the geological knot demarcating the junction of California’s Transverse and Peninsular Ranges; could be he’s examining the high brow of the Santa Rosa Wilderness and the smaller, granite-studded ridges stairstepping to the valley floor just beyond the Tennis Garden: savage country embracing a manufactured oasis, one of Indian Wells’ emblematic images.
A rangy gray-haired fellow sits to your right, his Bermuda shorts revealing skinny, sun-spotted calves. White Hoka running shoes hang over the riser. He explains Carlos Alcaraz’s all-court game to a woman in a navy sundress and white Nike cap. She scrolls through her phone and uh-huhs him. You notice a worrying mole on his left calf. You consider telling him to have it looked at. You don’t.
3.
The session ends. You move toward the middle of Tennis Paradise, which looks more like a desert palazzo than a sports complex: tan-rust stucco walls; terra-cotta roofs, alcoves, and courtyards. Two white sail canopies, 38,000 square feet of sun protection, stretch above the commons. Grandstands and scaffolding everywhere, wrapped in forest-green construction mesh stamped with court numbers. And the 29 courts themselves: the custom-purple playing surface sitting directly opposite the yellow of the tennis balls on the color wheel.
You smuggle energy bars in your pants and refill the empty bottle the tournament allows with Brita-filtered water ($0) at one of several filling stations. You ignore the Grab N Go shack and its Veroni Aperitime ($24) and Owl’s Brew Boozy Tea ($19). In fact, you bypass the 40-plus food vendors until your last day, when you pay $24 for a small Chinese chicken salad and discover meat bits resembling rehydrated backpacking food.
Stadium 1 at plaza level is open to mere grounds pass holders, as is the staircase leading to courtside seats. No one stops you. Allez. The 39-year-old French showman Gaël Monfils is hitting with the American Marcos Giron; they are followed by the young French hotshot Arthur Fils paired with Spain’s Alejandro Davidovich Fokina. Kids from one of El Centro’s high school tennis teams sit beside you, many of them hoping to snag Monfils’s signature on the huge Dunlop balls the Tennis Paradise Shop sells for $36. Meanwhile, Monfils and Giron are putting on quite a show, trading blistering ground strokes.
“You realize that’s the same size as the ones we play on, right?” a tall high schooler with black curly hair says to the young guy on his left.
Maybe several hundred folks watch the practice. Most choose seats on the shaded side of the court. Not you. Many wear sweaters; you’re sweating and reapplying sunscreen. The sun sinks below the stadium walls, and the climate immediately changes. Fils’s and Fokina’s balls pop off their rackets, the sound of domestic ferocity.
So there you are, sitting in a cushioned stadium seat that will sell for four figures in the following days. You are watching tennis’s elite, their decorum and politeness masking a sport every bit as brutal as mixed martial arts. Meanwhile, your brother drives in from Phoenix; buys two days of entry for less than a poke bowl, taro chips, and a lemonade; and chats about your family’s dysfunctions, which is itself a family dysfunction.
This is Indian Wells predawn, and it’s the best version: stellar tennis up close, breathing room, grounds still pristine, all served up for $10 a day.
By Wednesday, it’s sipping whiskey with breakfast. By Friday, it’s blitzed before noon.
4.
Your days assume a predictable rhythm. Wednesday’s matches commence at 11 a.m. Wednesday (Veroni Charcuterie Day) seems twice as busy as Tuesday; Thursday (Indian Wells Residents Day), twice as busy as Wednesday. It’s exponential population growth in Tennis Paradise.
Images and players blur: TaylorFritzArynaSabalenkaJackDraperArthurCazauxTaliaGibsonJoaoFonsecaAnnLiAlexde-MinaurAlexanderBublikAlexandraEalaAlexanderZverevAlexeiPopyrinVictoria/Jimenez-Kasintseva. Food and spent bottles carpet the bleachers; invisible workers clean the leavings. Between courts, you hear Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, French, Tagalog, and other tongues drifting through the dust-flecked ether. Five women wearing yellow Brasil soccer shirts, visors, and black tights huddle under an oak, making plans in Portuguese. A raucous cheer explodes from Stadium 4 as Giron wins his match. A plane overhead towing a “Novak x Incrediwear” banner noxiously whines while a bearded man in driving moccasins bitches about Garmin avionics.
Heat and sun burn your tongue. You sit at an umbrella table with four older women in floral-print dresses. They eat ice cream cones; one reaches for her inhaler. The wind gusts at 30 miles per hour. The rope that hoists California’s grizzly bear flag slaps against its pole; garbage is on the wing, and palm fronds shudder.
The Ethan Quinn–Reilly Opelka match inside Stadium 1 plays on a yacht-size video panel mounted outside the stadium, a Rolex clock above. A crowd gathers. Opelka bests Quinn in two tight sets. Elders spectating from the lawn struggle to rise from the ground. Surely some of them once sprawled on blankets in Golden Gate Park, at Woodstock—hippies who replaced the flowers in their hair with BNP Paribas Open ball caps. Now they need somebody to lean on.
Some join the Tennis Warehouse queue to shake hands with Novak Djokovic himself; others wait hours for the Lululemon activation. Much prized: the La Roche Posay sunblock swag and promotional cups of Fage yogurt. The scene will repeat daily, except the commons congeal and the lines lengthen and the lawns grow brown. Metaphors and analogies accumulate in your notebook.
You search for tickets to tomorrow’s Tommy Paul–Zizou Bergs match in Stadium 2: The tournament has quietly eliminated general admission, requiring reserved seats. Nothing under $290.
Dusk now.
“Yeah, I read you, I read you, I read you, I read you loud and clear,” a tournament custodian tells you when you ask about the mountain of trash he is wheeling out of Stadium 4.
“But that’s what it is, Brad. It’s just, people really don’t want to consider garbage in a way. Yeah, they’re like, it’s trash. Like, when you say garbage, like, it’s a waste. But no, honestly, it’s not a waste. For me, it’s not a waste, right? For me, for myself, it’s not a waste. But for other people, it’s—what will you call it?”
“An inconvenience,” you say, but want to say, “Below them.”
“Yeah, that’s it, an inconvenience.” He’s worked every day of the week, and he’ll work all day today, even going overtime by two hours.
“They’re more than happy with what I do, and I’m more than glad for what they give me,” he says. He glances at the Fage blueberry Greek yogurt you’ve filched.
“Say, what you gonna eat?”
“It’s yogurt.”
“Yogurt. Like Yoger—like Yogi Bear. You remember that?”
“Every Saturday morning,” you say.
5.
Friday (Spotlight 29 Casino Day) dawns. You’re only eight-tenths of a mile from Tennis Paradise. But you’re exhausted, and not physically. So you purchase a Tennis Channel subscription and simul-stream three matches while quaffing Nespresso shots. Nobody sneezes on you. You are far more locked into these matches than you’d ever be spectating in person. You stream Paul-Bergs that night; Stadium 2 looks mostly empty.
Watching mediated tennis exposes its corporate flywheel: access journalism, nested financial interests, even players hitting their marks, all to goose “the product.” World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka has been making news all week. On Tuesday, her Brazilian boyfriend proposed on bended knee while cameras rolled and thrust a 12-carat oval-cut diamond ring in her general direction. She said yes. (The footage appeared on Instagram with a backing track within hours: 1.3 million likes.) She’s also brought her lapdog, Ash, to a Tennis Channel desk interview. Analyst Chris Eubanks collects kisses from the dog, and the studio anchor, Steve Weissman, goes in for the kill.
“Thank you for bringing Ash to our desk and enhancing our lives today.”
You are in psychic pain. You are taking one for the team, the team being whoever reads this piece. It also occurs to you that you’re being a dick, basically.
6.
A tennis court’s border lines total 480 linear feet—480.66 if you count the little center hashes. Tennis’s main rule: Don’t cross the border.
And yet those borders have no walls; we’re not playing squash, after all. Which is to say that Tennis Paradise, which sits near the ecotone between the desert floor and the surrounding mountains, is a permeable membrane. Bees swarm and sting. Moths rise from the dust. Grasshoppers invade. Even COVID-19 once crossed the lines. Then there is the wind. Cool coastal air funnels through the San Gorgonio Pass like a Hot Wheels accelerator, sending the balls veering off course, often to comic effect. Extreme heat, courtesy of the Anthropocene, bakes the courts’ polymers and boosts surface temperatures 10 to 30 degrees.
While writing for Sports Illustrated, Jon Wertheim once floated Indian Wells as a logical U.S. Open site. One of Indian Wells’ founders dismissed the idea out of hand: The average highs in September hover around 104 degrees. A nonstarter. Yet as the climate warms, March in the desert begins to flirt with the same numbers. On the day of the final, temperatures peaked at 98 degrees in Palm Springs; five days later, 108 degrees. Unplayable? Certainly uncongenial.
7.
Observed, Tennis Paradise and Environs
Inside the grounds
Southern live oak, date palm, overseeded tournament turf—introduced, all.
Irrigation: recycled wastewater and Coachella Valley groundwater recharged with imported Colorado River water.
Colorado River headwaters snowpack, April 1, 2026: record-shattering lows.
Outside the grounds
Creosote. Burrobush. Sand verbena. Brittlebush. Chuparosa.
Irrigation: 0 gallons/year.
Overhead
White pelicans, thermaling. Ravens. Monarch butterfly. The damnable plane towing the “Novak x Incrediwear” banner.
Underfoot
Pallid-winged grasshopper. Two desert stink beetles, one crushed.
8.
When you purchase the Saturday-afternoon nosebleed seat, you have no idea that Alcaraz will anchor a lineup that includes Djokovic and Elena Rybakina. You can now flip the ticket for two times the investment, but you won’t, because you’ve never loved a tennis player as much as you love Alcaraz.
First, it was Richard “Pancho” Gonzales. Then, it was Arthur Ashe. For a while, it was Björn Borg, who was nearly as beautiful to watch as Gonzales and Ashe. You stopped following the sport for years and picked it up again during Roger Federer’s final seasons. You loved Federer so much that after the 2019 Wimbledon final, you became physically ill and slid into a mild tennis-related funk for months.
Soon enough, you discovered a rawboned ginger named Jannik Sinner, a skier turned tennis player from Italy’s Südtirol. Sinner hit the ball hard and possessed the sangfroid of a downhill racer. You liked him. Soon, rumors began circulating of a prodigy from Murcia, in Spain’s southeast, named Alcaraz. The hype was real. Alcaraz was happy and unguarded, endearingly uncalculating, at least off the court. Hours before his first Grand Slam win in 2022, at the U.S. Open, he tweeted three emojis: brain, heart, and eggs: cabeza, corazón, y cojones.
As of this spring day, the 22-year-old Alcaraz has won seven Grand Slam titles, including the rare career Grand Slam, and is ranked No. 1; Sinner, at 24, with four Grand Slam titles, is No. 2. Their rivalry, dubbed “Sincaraz,” is fierce, but it’s Alcaraz who regularly seems to defy Newtonian physics. You and everyone else hope to see a little of that today.
Instead, it’s late Saturday morning (Emirates Day) and you are stuck in a line of maybe 70 cars. It’s taking nearly an hour to turn right onto Warner Trail from Fred Waring and into the grass lots. Everyone is playing cricket, politely waiting their turn, until a man driving a gleaming black Hyundai Palisade with Washington plates darts into a gap several cars from the right turn. The driver gives a cheerful little post-ratfuckery wave.
The grounds are mobbed, queues upon queues to gain the outer courts. Children everywhere, with their tennis balls. The food concessions do a brisk business, as do the beer garden and the charcuterie veranda. A band plays “All Along the Watchtower.” A young Latino man scans you into Stadium 1, and you climb to the second-to-last row on the shaded, north-facing loge, which tilts like a ski jump toward the court. You’re in time to see Rybakina, a Grand Slam winner and the world’s No. 3, best the surging American Hailey Baptiste in three sets. A pause for refreshment. Long entrails of people wind toward the water dispenser and the usual women’s-restroom crawl; for a moment, the two lines touch.
9.
The sound system bleats Bruno Mars and Guns N’ Roses while the Jumbotrons roll the same Tennis Channel ads you’ve learned to mute. Dancing during the changeovers, often cringe, sometimes corybantic. The perfume of petunias, antiperspirant, and grilled beef (Camphor’s Le Combo, $50). Adult beverages all around, including Tennis Paradise’s signature drink: the Drop Shot, basically a tequila spritzer dyed green, topped with a couple of pineapple balls ($27).
Djokovic, whom you wouldn’t normally characterize as a warm-up act but who has become one today, enters the stadium, taps his heart, and raises an arm. As the match begins, a couple scoots into the seats in the row below your knees. The woman, wearing a paisley crop top and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat with a black grosgrain band, is slurping a Drop Shot through a straw. She hits the ice and sucks hard and produces a gurgle. She grins. Her friend laughs, so she gurgles again.
“Fault!” chirps the electronic line system. She flinches. “Stop it,” she says to no one in particular. She’s slurring her words.
Her friend, a thin man with a designer mustache and wire-rimmed photochromic glasses, is buried in his phone, as if the match were happening there.
The sound system cranks during the changeover. Gusts eddy through the structure. People twitch in four-four time to the drinking song “Fireball.”
Three of the couple’s friends appear in the aisle. The woman in paisley squeals, pops up, does a little shoulder-shimmy dance to celebrate. Two big men and a woman in white. They crowd the row.
A boy sits alone in the middle seat, ball cap pulled low. Two empty seats on one side, two on the other. His family is gone for the moment.
“Are you saving these? What’s happening?” Paisley asks.
One of the men points at the seats before the boy can answer. “Just go over there,” he says to his friends, his intention clear: to evict the child.
The boy stands tentatively, moves to the end seat. The four friends sit.
Djokovic has dropped a set, but he’s doing what Djokovic does: He mounts a comeback.
“Fault!”
Paisley jumps again, hand to chest.
“Douche!” one of the men says, louder than he means to. He clamps a hand over his mouth, body shaking, beer sloshing. His friends laugh too.
For a moment, nothing but silence and the sound of a single ball percussing off two sets of strings, shoes screeching on Laykold like a violin bowed behind the bridge.
“Fault!”
Paisley squirms. “Stop it.”
The boy’s mother and sisters return, pausing at the aisle. The group of five gets the message and files out, already scanning for another opening.
Djokovic wins the match.
10.
The bent space-time Alcaraz moment comes in the seventh game of the second set against the Bulgarian veteran Grigor Dimitrov, whose game so closely resembles Federer’s that Federer himself said that watching Dimitrov play Sinner made him wonder how he’d have fared against the carrot-topped phenom he never faced. Of Alcaraz, Federer said that their mindsets were closely aligned. So you figure you’re watching Federer playing Federer: pure counterfactual bliss.
Alcaraz easily wins the first set. At 3–3 in the second, he’s up 40–0. Dimitrov swats Alcaraz’s serve back near Alcaraz’s feet; Alcaraz picks it up on a half volley and flicks the ball deep up the center. Six crosscourt forehands and two down-the-line backhands ensue, all crisply struck, all displaying both players’ exquisite footwork. Then Dimitrov loops one into Alcaraz’s strike zone.
It registers in your throat before it reaches your brain. With casual thuggery, Alcaraz takes the ball on the rise and angles a forehand so sharp and fast that Dimitrov applauds the point before the ball passes him by. Sixteen thousand spectators gasp. Dimitrov smiles, gives Alcaraz a low five as he crosses to his chair during the changeover. Alcaraz is grinning too.
One summer day, you notice your father’s Spalding tennis rackets, metal ones, sitting on a bookshelf. They’re strictly off-limits, but you unsheathe one from its cover. He’s never encouraged you to take it up. He’s rarely around anymore. The closest wall is a mile away, the cultured cinder block of an elementary school. You fish some balls out of the duffel bag and walk. You resolve to hit 20 straight forehands, then 30, then 40, then 50, then try for 100, and begin from zero when you screw up, which is often. Balls carom. Your hand blisters. The hitting becomes obsessional, and so does hitting with style. Alone against the wall. Dusk and fatigue descend.
You try not to conflate your ability to strike the ball beautifully with your self-worth, but you fail.
“I’m super disappointed and sad with my performance,” the Polish superstar Iga Świątek tells an interviewer after crashing out of Miami in her first round. “I carry a lot of expectations, and I can’t fulfill them right now. I need to get rid of them, because my game hasn’t been good enough to have any expectations.… Tennis feels complicated in my head—but I know it’s supposed to be simple.”
You know that one.
11.
You are walking, now running, back through the tunnel, through the arch, onto the thirsty turf—waning gibbous moon, creosote, chuparosa, the thorny ocotillo, the sphinx moth. Figures stagger through the purpling night, their arms aloft, Diogenes with their fobs searching for the last honest Lexus. Automobiles call their owners home, but all are lost. Somewhere above the Joshua tree, manzanita, and whitebark pine: In spite of the tennis, you go.•
