Serving up the glamour: how the tennis WAGs became off-court royalty

Because: the wives and girlfriends of tennis players are seemingly too aesthetically perfect to have to tolerate irritants like rain. And these women are currently in the spotlight like never before: their moods, facial expressions and outfits painstakingly dissected by members of both the sports and fashion media. There was Netflix’s Break Point (tennis’s answer to F1’s Drive to Survive) – and then Challengers, the Luca Guadagnino-directed feature film, which casts Zendaya as the trophy, Queen Bee of the tennis wives. A tennis-pro turned pro-wife pulling the strings of her husband’s professional sporting career. His triumphs? Her personal victories. The losses? Well, she feels it too.

It’s something Ayan Broomfield, Francis Tiafoe’s girlfriend of 10 years, knows a thing or two about – the pair met as junior players, before injury forced her to take a back seat in the sport. ‘When I first started travelling with him [Francis], that was our thing. We’re talking tennis, we’re talking strategy, we’re trying to break down the game,’ she says. Then they had to ‘reel it in’ after it became ‘too much’. ‘It’s not just a tennis relationship […] based on how he’s doing and his results,’ she emphasises.

Zendaya serving up #TennisCore on the publicity leg for Challengers

Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images

Zendaya’s character – apparently based on Federer’s wife, Mirka – is, to a degree, dramatising the real lives of Broomfield and Riddle – not to mention Louise Jacobi, the flaxen-haired Chicago-born girlfriend of British No 1 Cameron Norrie and Paige Lorenze, the business mogul and bombshell girlfriend of World No 14 Tommy Paul. Collectively, they could be a cheerleading squad – glamorous, fine-tuned and committed.

Like Zendaya, these tennis WAGs aren’t simply waiting on the sidelines. They are making things happen for themselves. Louise Jacobi, now on her fifth year on the tour and technically Kim Sears’ successor (as the partner of a British No 1), laughs when I put the ‘WAG’ term to her. ‘I still remember the first time… I’d just started dating Cam and somebody was like, “What’s it like to be a WAG?”’ she says. ‘I was like, oh my god, I never thought about that… I think it’s kind of ridiculous but I guess… that is what I am,’ she resolves over the phone from Monaco, where her and Cameron moved last year. Riddle, similarly, has no issue with the label. ‘I’ve always embraced it,’ she shrugs. ‘I was an English major, there’s this phrase of language called pejoration which means you take an objective word, and it becomes negative through association. So I think because WAG is something that’s feminine […] people subconsciously look down on it,’ she says over Zoom from Paris where Fritz has just edged into the third round – despite the diabolical weather.