Red Wings Legends Who Got Their NHL Starts Elsewhere: Part 2
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New York Times
3 minutes ago
- New York Times
Tennis fathers and sons: Stefanos and Apostolos Tsitsipas, and other ways to coach
Editor's note: July 2024, 2025: This feature has been updated following Stefanos Tsitsipas' decision to split with Goran Ivanišević and resume his coaching partnership with his father, Apostolos. When Goran Ivanišević, who coached Novak Djokovic during 12 of his 24 Grand Slam title runs, decided to work with Stefanos Tsitsipas in spring 2025, he was effusive. Tsitsipas, a two-time major finalist undergoing a steep decline in form, could be a top-10 player again. He had the tools. But Ivanišević also had one condition. Advertisement His father, Apostolos, who knows Stefanos perhaps better than anyone in tennis, could not be part of the coaching team. So that's what happened. Ivanišević signed on for a trial period. Tsitsipas played three matches at two events, losing two of them. Ivanišević criticized his preparation. Tsitsipas spoke obliquely about wanting his team to be like a family. And then it was over, with Tsitsipas resuming his partnership with Apostolos and the intimate knowledge that comes with it. That's one advantage of being coached by your father. But the disadvantages have also been on full display in the past year – and probably a good deal longer – courtesy of world No. 29 Tsitsipas,and his complicated relationship with his father. They broke up as coach and charge in early August of 2024, following an ugly confrontation during Tsitsipas' loss to Kei Nishikori, the world No. 576, at the National Bank Open in Montreal. Tsitsipas told his father, who has never been shy about getting in his ear during matches, to leave his seat in the middle of the loss. Then he blamed Apostolos for his career stagnation and his struggles with his forehand. The next day, he announced that his dad would remain his travel companion but would no longer coach him. Apostolos took a different view. He did not accompany his eldest son to that year's U.S. Open, choosing instead to work with his youngest boy, Pavlos, who is battling his way through the sport's Futures circuit. He had been coaching and traveling with Stefanos for the past 10 years. 'I just need to move on now,' Tsitsipas said during an interview last month at the West Side Tennis Club in New York's Forest Hills district. The club was the home of the U.S. Open until the short move to Flushing Meadows in the 1970s and Tsitsipas was there to practice for the Ultimate Tennis Showdown, an innovative and lucrative competition established by Patrick Mouratoglou. Advertisement 'I need to grow up as well and take decisions based on my own gut feeling,' he said. Just under a year later, his gut is telling him to go back to his dad. It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to know that relationships between fathers and sons are often complicated in the best of circumstances, before factoring in the tensions and logistics of professional tennis. Roughly 10 months of living out of suitcases and hotel rooms; the monotony of daily practice and physical training; the sometimes touchy process of reexamining the losses that can pile up. That's a pretty good recipe for friction, even with the most perfect coach and the most emotional player, let alone the possible landmines of the fraught father-son dynamic. And of course, all of this usually unfolds during late adolescence and early adulthood, a period of life in which growing boys generally don't want their dad joysticking them. They don't want to be told what to eat, when they should sleep, and how they should have done something that they messed up. When Alexander Zverev, Ben Shelton, Casper Ruud and Tsitsipas too play matches, there will be several crucial moments that will all play out the same way — in one sense. They will look up at their support team in their box. They will meet their coach's eyes and they will know exactly what they are saying to each other, even though no actual words will need to be exchanged. Why would they? The message will be coming from the person who has known them longer than just about anybody else, who can speak to them with nods, tilts of the head, or a widening of the eyes. 'Some players, if they have their parents as coaches, there's a lot of arguing,' world No. 3 Zverev, whose father, Alexander, and elder brother, Mischa, coach him, said in a news conference after he beat Brandon Nakashima in the fourth round in New York last year. 'There's a lot of, you know, not healthy stuff. I have to say that's not the case with us at all. We understand each other.' Advertisement Things can get a bit tense, like when Zverev was on the verge of losing an early-round match at the French Open last May. His head was about to explode. All he could think about was reaming out his team, including his father, for giving him a bad game plan. 'It's always the team's fault,' he said later after he had come back to win, even when the main players on that team are his father and brother. So why do it this way? Over the course of a decade, Apostolos Tsitsipas came to believe that only he could give his eldest son what he needed to succeed at the highest level. 'I can feel his mindset,' he said back in March 2024. 'I can feel when his mindset starts changing.' 'When the senses are there, he's present,' Apostolos said. Stefanos agreed with all this for years, even as he experimented occasionally with a second coach, such as Mark Phillippoussis. Then came the explosion in Canada. The two men talked that night. 'A tough thing that hurts,' Stefanos said of the breakup conversation. He compared it to a spouse breaking up with a partner. But it had to happen. He continued: 'I've been feeling more in control of my own emotions, of how I want things to be. That's what gives me the freedom of feeling, more free, more alive. I can really pinpoint what I want and what I don't want.' How uncomplicated this might have seemed had Tsitsipas won some matches at the year's final Grand Slam. Then it's a clear and correct decision. Instead, he lost in the first round, struggling to find the drive and desire to respond when the unseeded Thanasi Kokkinakis, the world No. 86, overpowered him. Tsitsipas still had no regrets about his coaching decision, though. He needed something a little less complex, win or lose. Until he didn't. When talking to sons who have hired their fathers and stuck with them, their relationships somehow seem devoid of that complexity, which ordinarily comes with the territory. 'I can almost sense what he's feeling,' Christian Ruud, a former touring pro and father of three-time Grand Slam finalist Casper, said during an interview in 2024. Advertisement Casper said he sees his dad as more peer than parent. Christian is 52 now and was 26 when Casper was born. A young father, who somehow still seems young in the eyes of his Gen-Z son. He gets the jokes between Casper and his contemporaries. When on tour, they pass much of their downtime playing golf, competing in a season-long competition with each other and one of Casper's friends. That usually includes an annual 600-mile (1,000km) drive from Cincinnati, venue for an ATP Tour event in the middle of August, up to New York City for the U.S. Open. They stop along the way at the best courses they can find. That may be the only setting in which Christian seems a little older. He plays from the white tees now. Casper and his pal play from the tips. 'I look at him more as a friend,' Casper said of his father during an interview in New York last year. 'It's not an easy balance, but we've been able to do it really good so far.' That's a little different from the Zverev clan. Having his dad and brother around can make him a little less homesick, Alexander said, before joking he only needs tennis-specific doses of family time. 'Off the court, I just spend zero time with my father, so that's a starting point,' he said. 'We have enough of each other on the court.' Christian Ruud coached his son through his childhood, but Casper needed to be in a warmer climate, with better players than those in their native Norway. He spent the better part of three years training in Alicante, Spain, with a coach named Pedro Rico. Rico was unable to become his full-time traveling coach, so he asked his father if he would take the reins again. It wasn't an easy decision: Casper has two sisters. But Dad decided to give it a go. He can sense when his son will win a match, Christian says. He sees an aura of confidence around him. It's probably invisible to everyone else because Casper has one of the better poker faces on the tour. Christian can also sense the nuances in his son's looks of frustration. There's the look of annoyance at an opponent who is hitting the lines on every point, about which Christian can do little. Then there are the times their eyes meet when a game plan isn't working, to which Christian can respond with a signal. Advertisement When matches and practice are over, the more indirect lessons begin — cards, golf, movies, sometimes followed by a serious talk about what they have just watched. At some point this will end, Casper has said. His father has other children and a wife, Casper's mother, whom he wants to pay a little more attention to. But for now, they have this. Ben Shelton and his father Bryan are just getting started — or should that be getting started again? Bryan coached his son through childhood and then in college at the University of Florida. He missed Ben's first year on the tour, while he was finishing up his work at Florida, then joined him full-time for the second half of 2023. Ben has said it's far easier now than it was when he was in college, where he was one of 12 players. He felt then that his father would go out of his way to show there was no favoritism, at the expense of his leg muscles. 'I'm running more sprints than everyone else when I do something wrong or show up late,' he said then. 'If I lose a match, it's a bigger deal than everyone else. He had to do that to keep the team in the right place.' Now his father (Ben has occasionally called him 'Big Dog'), doesn't have to do that. Making him run extra sprints is the job of his fitness coach. Plus, if Ben wants to go out to dinner with friends on the road, his father is perfectly content to order room service and watch golf on his computer, or read. Again, seemingly so uncomplicated. Even more so after Ben had to spend his first eight months on tour without his father, the college coach who had given him such a hard time the previous couple of years. 'I really started to appreciate everything he was bringing to the table for me,' he said. 'I was missing it during that time.' Additional reporting: Charlie Eccleshare
Fox News
3 minutes ago
- Fox News
Ravens coach John Harbaugh pushes back on reporter for negatively questioning Trump White House visit
Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh defended his recent meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House when a reporter confronted the coach about it on Wednesday. Harbaugh and several family members — including his brother, Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh — were invited to the White House earlier this month. During his media availability at Ravens training camp on Wednesday, a reporter framed a question on the visit around Trump's previous comments criticizing Baltimore as a city. The Ravens coach criticized the reporter for the framing of the question and insisted that he "roots" for the president. "How you framed that question — I would have framed that question like: 'You got a chance to go visit with the president, man. What was that experience like?'" Harbaugh said. "It was amazing. It was awesome. And I promise you I root for our president. I want our president to be successful just like I want my quarterback to be successful, and I want my team to be successful, and it was an amazing experience. It's not often you get invited, and you get a chance to do something like that as a family." Harbaugh went on to recount his and his brother's experiences meeting former Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. "And that's the fourth president [I've met]. Now, Jim has met seven [presidents]. Jim has met seven presidents, so he's got the lead on me. I think he pointed that out; did you guys notice that? He's got seven; I've got four. "So, I had a chance to meet President [Barack] Obama twice. Incredible experience. I had a chance to meet President [Joe] Biden when he was vice president in Iraq, and I spent a lot of time with him in Iraq, which was amazing. "And then [when I was] 24 or 25 years old, Jim got invited to the White House to meet President [Ronald] Reagan because he was a Heisman Trophy candidate, and we got to go as a family, so I met President Reagan. I have a picture in my office of that. So those are moments that I definitely cherish, and it means a lot." Meanwhile, Jim Harbaugh spoke positively of the visit during a press conference last Wednesday. "There's a lot of gratitude there to be invited to the White House to meet the president with my family, my mom and dad. President Trump was just great to my mom and dad. That meant so much. My brother John; his daughter Allison; my two daughters, Addie and Katie; and my sister Joanie; and my niece Ainsley. So, there's nine of us, and it was great," the Chargers coach said. "I mean, who gets invited to the White House with eight other family members and doesn't go? Nobody."
Fox News
3 minutes ago
- Fox News
Former US gymnast Dee Worley weighs in on USOPC gender rule change and impact of Simone Biles-Riley Gaines feud
Former American star gymnast Dee Worley tells Fox News Digital her feelings on the recent change by the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee to follow Trump's "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" executive order.
