Laver Cup and the Exhibition Controversies in Tennis

Events like Laver Cup work desperately to shed the label, but what is so bad about an "exhibition" in tennis, anyway?

The 2025 Laver Cup in San Francisco (Photo via Yuma)

As the Laver Cup wraps up its eighth edition today in San Francisco, I want to discuss something that’s become a controversial and downright dirty word in tennis. The appropriateness of this word vis-a-vis the Laver Cup is deeply debated, as it also was around last month’s U.S. Open mixed doubles fiesta, as both those events try to steer clear of what they see as its stigma:

Exhibition.

What is an exhibition? What isn’t an exhibition?

It’s not an easy or simple thing to answer for folks in tennis, as you can tell from this example of my asking Casper Ruud to delineate it. He quickly found himself tangled up in all sorts of contradictions, and he didn’t even get to go nearly as deep into the weeds as we will here.

Professional tennis famously operates in all sorts of hazy shades of gray, and so I wanted to try to put this broad, amorphous, stain of a term into sharper focus at Bounces.

Over more than a month, I’ve been talking to lots of players about what an “exhibition” is, reading various definitions, rifling through rulebooks, and trying to establish my own criteria for what makes a tennis event an exhibition event.

In the end, I created 12 different metrics I came up with, and applied them to 19 different events, trying to make something quantitative out of something qualitative.

Within this 5,000+-word deep dive, you’ll find loads of player quotes, lots of angles, and the grandaddy of all Bounces tables. Come read along and please share your own definitions, guidelines and verdicts!

Thank you for subscribing to keep this sort of work going at Bounces! -Ben