We used to think about Stefanos Tsitsipas—not so much these days. What happened? This is a man who played in a Slam final just last season. And his buzziest feat thus far in 2024: falling out of the top 10, marking the first time since the ATP rankings were established in 1973 that there were no one-handed backhands in that elite tier. A neat factoid…also a nonideal reason for people to be talking about you. Tsitsipas first debuted in the top 10 back in 2019, a few weeks after his brilliant upset of Roger Federer in the fourth round at Melbourne—and his subsequent request that the entire stadium subscribe to his burgeoning YouTube channel. The patron saint of painful sincerity had been marinating in the top 10 for nearly five straight years before finally slipping out of it in February. The guy barely even posts to YouTube anymore. He has found love off court, with fellow pro Paula Badosa, but both of them are slumping. When it comes to on-court performance, Tsitsipas has not, as a wise Greek philosopher once prescribed, nourished his sensations very dutifully. He ended the 2023 season bowing out of his last tournament with a back injury so bad he struggled to get out of bed.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Once upon a time it looked like this talented player might take over the game from the Big Three, but instead a bunch of egregiously talented kids cut him in line. So blame Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who snuck in their Slams while this 25-year-old continued to roll his boulder, and then throw Holger Rune into that mix for good measure. Tsitsipas has also ceded ground to his long-legged contemporaries Daniil Medvedev and Sascha Zverev, who are staying competitive with the new blood in ways Stef hasn’t quite managed. There are some more curious names, too. I did not predict a day where Alex de Minaur would pass up Tsitsipas in the rankings, but that’s the current state of affairs. Tsitsipas is liable to dispense a win to anyone who wants one. Denis Shapovalov, playing with a protected ranking, wants a heartwarming win in Miami as motivation to keep going? Stefanos has got you: 6–2, 6–4, keep it up. (First top-20 win for Shapo since October 2022.) It feels a bit like tennis has grown around Tsitsipas as he sat relatively unchanged. The holes in his game have been public knowledge for years—dicey return game, the one-hander when rushed, a weak slice repertoire—and he hasn’t meaningfully patched them up.

If there were ever a place for a Tsitsipas rebound, it would be amid the crags and waves of the Monte Carlo Country Club, where he has won two 1000-level titles, even though that history hasn’t been enough to earn him an assignment this week, which he has sheepishly pointed out himself in interviews. Through three matches, Tsitsipas has looked like the natural he once seemed to be. He is an uncommon fusion: on the one hand, an all-court player who loves to follow his forehand to the net and carve up tough volleys; and on the other hand, a red-stained clay-courter to his core. The slower surface is good for his ground game, giving him extra time to solve some (if not all) the problems on his backhand side. He doesn’t mind diving for those stab volleys and getting dirty; he has endurance enough for the lung-busting points, and he can play with big spin when he wants to. There’s real value in players like Stef who can go a bit bolder and shake up what can feel like a monotonous clay swing ruled by the grindiest grinders.

As his third-round match against quasi-rival Zverev proved, Tsitsipas is far from a perfect player, but he is at least starting to look like the old Stefanos again. He’s still haunted by his own backhand, which far too often underdelivers in depth and bite, but that wing held up well enough to pull off a gorgeous running crosscourt pass to break serve and secure the first set. Tsitsipas rolled all the way to 5–0 up in the second set, too, before he fell into “a loophole of mistakes and errors,” as Zverev pushed his way to a tiebreak. There the Greek finally got his shit together, both in the micro (he won it 7–3) and the macro (he secured his first win over a top-five player since 2022), and in characteristically Stef fashion, he called this third-round straight-set victory “an adventure of a lifetime.” Okay, dude. Meanwhile he also just posted a vlog to his YouTube channel for the first time in a year—a sign of life if I’ve ever seen one.

—Giri on Danielle Collins’s tremendous run in Miami, from Defector.

—Venus Williams, published author. 

—Lots of fun action at the Billie Jean King Cup. 

—Rafa is trying to come back in Barcelona next week.

—Gorilla vs. Bear vs. TSS: Mix 1.