The thrilling women’s final Sunday at Indian Wells, in which 17-year-old Mirra Andreeva upset Aryna Sabalenka in a star-making thriller, was already going to be a tough act for the men to follow.

But when Jack Draper and Holger Rune walked onto the court next wearing the same blue-and-white Nike shirt and matching backwards white baseball caps, the deck was stacked even further against their match engaging audiences.

James Gray, a British tennis reporter at The i Paper who had been excited for Draper to have a breakthrough moment to propel him into national stardom, called the mirrored match “an incredible own goal.”

As pedants readily pointed out as complaints compiled, you could tell the two men apart with some concentrated focus: Draper was wearing darker shorts and red shoes; he also plays left-handed. But from the waist up, these two white guys in their early 20s looked identical and were indistinguishable at first glance from the high-mounted camera angle used to show rallies. It makes the match meaningfully tougher to follow without effort, and watching sports on television really shouldn’t require any effort on the viewer’s part. (The match, as it happened, was a 6–2, 6–2 rout for Draper in just 69 minutes.)

Showing up to a party wearing the same outfit as someone else is often seen as a mortifying mishap; in tennis, where a handful of apparel brands sponsor many of the top players, it’s often a contractual obligation to be on the biggest stage of your career in the same clothes as your adversary. 

With Nike, Adidas, Asics, and Lacoste scooping up players in bulk, the odds of a coordinated clash are high. 

The issue has been going on for decades. In her 2017 memoir Unstoppable, Maria Sharapova described the moment when she walked onto the court for her third round at Wimbledon in 2004 against Daniela Hantuchova, who was also sponsored by Nike: 

“How’s this for motivation? When we met for the coin toss, I realized: Shit! We’re wearing the same dress! To my horror, Hantuchova and I were wearing the same Nike dress. It was not her fault, but I absolutely hated it, and I’d make sure it never happened again. How? When it came time to sign a new contract with Nike, they included a clause that said I will have an exclusive outfit at every tournament I play—no other girls can wear it, not if they’re sponsored by Nike. But the irritation I felt that night added a nice, useful edge to my game.”

17-year-old Sharapova won that match and then that entire Wimbledon tournament, and thus gained the clout to request bespoke, proprietary outfits from Nike from then on. Other top Nike stars like Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Naomi Osaka have also gotten their own kits that stand out from the crowd.

But for the non-superstars in the cavalry who still want clothing contracts from top brands to supplement their incomes, being a matching mannequin is part of the deal. It can even happen to some highly ranked players. At the 2020 Australian Open, Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev were dressed in the same Adidas for a semifinal; they’d also both worn matching zebra shirts for a match four years earlier at the French Open. 

Some players who could command clothing contracts choose to pick out their own clothes to avoid looking like the rest. After years in Adidas and Lacoste, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova chose to start designing her own outfits this year. “It just feels like it’s mine, you know?” Pavlyuchenkova told me at the Australian Open this year. “And nobody else is wearing it.”

Fan favorite Hsieh Su-wei chooses to do her own shopping. 

“I decide to buy my own clothes,” Hsieh told me earlier this year. “Because sometimes if you wear the same as other girl, people cannot recognize you.”