Open Mailbag and Open Draws
Asking for your questions and reacting to surprising results from China.
I have several tasty features for Bounces in various stages of baking, but as they continue to rise in their proving drawers I wanted to do a two-pronged post here today.
The first, and most interactive part is that I am reopening the Bounces mailbag once more for any and all tennis (or tennis-adjacent) queries you may have! All paid and free subscribers are encouraged to send in their questions, and I will answer them in batches throughout the remainder of 2025, hopefully with enough questions to do a first installment next week.
The mailbags we did last year (Part 1, Part 2) were a lot of fun, and I am sure y’all will deliver some more great prompts and ideas once more. You can send your questions as a message on Substack, a DM to me on Instagram or Twitter, or an email to me. (If you sent a question many months ago and I didn’t yet answer it, please send it again.)
Secondly, I wanted to marvel briefly at the remarkable slate of results in China overnight.
Tennis doesn’t yet have its own version of the glorious spoiler-free sports highlights emporium “Don’t Tell Me the Score”—which is how I always watch the Stanley Cup finals during Roland Garros—but the Tennis Channel app does have a section called “The Match in 15 Minutes” which condenses each match into a satisfyingly tapas-sized treat that I’ve been enjoying each morning along with my coffee and whatever late match might still be going in my waking hours.
This morning there were four semifinals to nosh on, and I would’ve predicted the result incorrectly in all four of them.
The Women of Wuhan
First at WTA 1000 Wuhan, Jessica Pegula avenged her loss in her exceptionally close (and exceptionally high-level) loss to Aryna Sabalenka in last month’s U.S. Open semifinals, coming back from 2-5 down in the third set to beat the top-ranked Sabalenka in a third set tiebreak.
Sabalenka, who had her own impressive fightback to save match points down 5-6 to force that final tiebreak, had previously been 20-0 in Wuhan, winning the title in her three previous appearances. This result for Pegula puts her into her seventh career WTA 1000-level final, and also should lock up her qualification as the fourth American into the field of this year’s WTA Finals, as discussed here this week.
Remarkably, Pegula’s last eight matches have all gone to a third set.
In the Wuhan final, Pegula will face one of her fellow Americans in that established leading pack this year: her longtime doubles partner Coco Gauff, who won the other semifinal 6-4, 6-3.
Third-ranked Gauff was the least surprising of Saturday’s winners on paper, since she was ranked ahead of her eighth-ranked semifinal opponent Jasmine Paolini, but Gauff was 0-3 against Paolini this year with losses in Stuttgart, Rome, and Cincinnati.
Gauff’s resilience remains her superpower, particularly this year: after various disappointing losses this year, she’s always putting herself right back into the conversation and back onto the podium. This will only be her fifth WTA 1000 final.
Pegula leads the head-to-head 4-2 over Gauff; this will be their first time meeting in a final.
Les Cousins Dangereux
If you had told me a couple weeks ago that two first cousins would meet in the final of ATP 1000 Shanghai, I would’ve been completely stumped as to whom that could possibly mean. The only pair of cousins in men’s professional tennis of whom I had previously been aware were Emilio Nava and Ernesto Escobedo, and Escobedo had retired from the tour this past March.
But it turns out that Monaco’s Valentin Vacherot, whom before this week I had only ever watched during a second-round match against Grigor Dimitrov in Monte Carlo this year—is the first cousin of ATP No. 54 Arthur Rinderknech, a player probably best known for his upset win over Alexander Zverev in the first round of this year’s Wimbledon.
After Vacherot and Rinderknech both started winning a few rounds in Shanghai a week ago, mention of their relation grew more and more frequent, in a tone that kept reminding me of this classic Vine.
But the odds that a family reunion would occur in an ATP 1000 final in this era of tennis would have still seemed perilously low.1 Though there were upsets in other pockets of the Shanghai draw, these two sons of sisters both had to do a lot of the heavy lifting to blaze a path.
Beyond the odd coincidence of their cousinhood, both of these guys are independently implausible finalists. A couple of months ago, Vacherot’s ranking of 253rd was too poor for him to even make it into the qualifying draw of the U.S. Open.
Last week he still needed some help to get a spot in the Shanghai qualifying draw, which definitely wouldn’t have happened without the Masters 1000 level expanding to 96-player main draws. 204th-ranked Vacherot went to Shanghai still needing several guys to withdraw for him to have a chance to even get a spot in the qualifying draw. Here’s a look at the other guys in his league, colored in green, who also made it into Shanghai qualifying as alternates.
As L’Equipe’s Quentin Moynet shared, Vacherot had told a college teammate from Texas A&M that he was going to try for Shanghai “because a sick run can come any second.”
Vacherot was a couple points from having his run end before achieving even mild sickness, nearly losing his second qualifying match against 119th-ranked Liam Draxl in a second set tiebreak. But once he made it into the main draw he started felling seeds: No. 14 Alexander Bublik, No. 20 Tomas Machac, No. 27 Tallon Griekspoor, No. 10 Holger Rune, No. 4 Novak Djokovic.
That loss for Djokovic, who again was struggling physically once reaching the business end of a tournament, must be especially painful: imagine being just two wins from the biggest title of your season, and only needing to beat Vacherot and Rinderknech, only to fall short.
Rinderknech had his own path of five seeds to scatter before meeting his cousin, taking out No. 28 Alex Michelsen, No. 3 Alexander Zverev, No. 15 Jiri Lehecka, No. 12 Felix Auger-Aliassime and No. 16 Daniil Medvedev. Though he’s far more established than his cousin, Rinderknech had never before advanced past the third round in his 21 previous main draw appearances at the Masters 1000 level.
The final scenes of Rinderknech’s semifinal win over Medvedev—whose own resurgence in China has been notable over the past month—were a remarkably lumpy casserole of emotions, with Medvedev ranting at umpire Mo Lahyani as the two cousins embraced.
“In the best dreams, we couldn’t have dreamt about this,” Rinderknech said in his on-court interview.
The sheer randomness of these two cousins—and former Texas A&M teammates—meeting in the final only makes marginally more sense when stepping back to look at this year in men’s tennis. Rinderknech, if he wins, would be the second guy ranked 54th to win a Masters 1000 title this year.
Thanks for reading Bounces! Please send in those mailbag questions! -Ben
The Cerundolo brothers, 21st-ranked Francisco and 87th-ranked Juan Manuel, would have seemed like the only vaguely plausible option.