The sport of tennis, while eternally one of our favorites, seems to have its hands full these days. The season, which stretches from January through November, is far too long; and the points system, which requires players to play in far more tournaments than their bodies and their psyches can often tolerate, is in need of reform. And while the season essentially peaks with the year’s final Grand Slam—the US Open, which concludes in September—the late-season swing through Asia often finds players running on fumes, if not sidelined by injuries.
Why, then, are six of the game’s top players—Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Alexander Zverev, Novak Djokovic, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Taylor Fritz—in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the Six Kings Slam exhibition tournament, which began today? It’s quite simple, really. “Show me a tournament where you can go play three matches—well, for the top two seeds, two matches—and potentially make $6 million,” Fritz said yesterday.
And while we won’t begrudge a player’s right to make a living, we—along with scores of tennis-watchers around the world—do take issue with the tournament’s AI-generated promo image, seen above. Squint your eyes and maybe look at it from a distance, and everything seems more or less okay. Then look closer: Why does Sinner (far left) look like he’s been mashed up with a young Matt Damon, and why are he and the Alcaraz-like figure above him gripping the same racquet? Why does Djokovic look oddly like a young Al Pacino? And those are the better likenesses. We’re guessing that the top-middle figure is Zverev and the far-right figure is Tsitsipas, but the guy in front on the right? He could be anyone—and he seems to be playing racquetball. To overstate the obvious: It’s shocking that a tournament with the resources to offer a $6 million purse didn’t think of second-guessing such an obvious failure of AI.
(In actual news from the real people playing the tournament, though, Tsitsipas and Zverev are both out after today’s first round, leaving the intriguing semifinals of Sinner-Djokovi and Alcaraz-Fritz tomorrow.)
