Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, Serena Williams returned to the Super Bowl, there was drama all over the Davis Cup, a reminder of the importance of styles, and a tennis nation’s strategy under the Grand Slam spotlight.

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A tale of two Super Bowls for Serena Williams?

Serena Williams danced at the Super Bowl for the second year in a row — and her appearances told the story of an unfinished reemergence into the tennis world.

At last year’s Super Bowl LIX, the 23-time Grand Slam champion, widely regarded as the greatest women’s player of all time, appeared during Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show performance of “Not Like Us.”

Television cameras twice cut to Williams crip walking, in a reprise of her dance on Wimbledon’s Centre Court at the London 2012 Olympics, with her appearance part of the 13-year feud between Lamar and rapper Drake.

Though neither has ever publicly confirmed that they dated, Drake claimed that he wrote “Too Good” about Williams in studio footage released in summer 2024. In an interview with Time later in 2025, Williams denied that her appearance was designed to assist Lamar in dissing Drake.

“That was sad, that anyone would ever think that,” she said.

This year, Williams appeared on a very different stage in a very different guise: a virtual platform for telehealth company Ro, advertising the effectiveness of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. In the advert, Williams delivered a voiceover saying she is “moving better” and “feeling better” thanks to the drugs provided by the company, at one point directly injecting a syringe into her arm. Her husband, Alexis Ohanian, is an investor in Ro and serves on its board.

Williams, 44, first said she was using GLP-1s last summer, in a series of interviews in which she said that she felt joint stress caused by her weight had prevented her from winning as many Grand Slam titles as she might have done. Since then, she has slowly raised the possibility of returning to tennis, while refusing to be drawn on how or when it might happen.

Williams reentered the tennis anti-doping testing pool last year, but she swiftly denied any return to tennis when that news emerged. Reentering the testing pool requires players to submit their whereabouts for an hour once a day, as well as opening them up to the possibility of random testing.

But this month, Williams changed position, refusing to rule out a comeback during an interview with “Today.” Before Williams’ Super Bowl appearance, American player Alycia Parks said she had recently practiced with her.

With Williams yet to be drawn on when she will return, if at all, and whether it will be on the singles court or the doubles court — the latter almost certainly with her sister Venus — her change in position at the biggest showcase in American sports is striking. Williams did not explicitly mention tennis, or any sport, in her Super Bowl advert for Ro, but her focus on movement and wellbeing in the context of her softening position on the possibility of a comeback was striking.

… And another step for Venus?

Meanwhile, Venus Williams, the 45-year-old, seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, appears determined to keep trying to win tennis matches at an age when most players have long retired. Last summer, Williams won her first singles match in two years upon returning to the sport at the D.C. Open, but she has not had a victory since.

Williams has received wild cards for four tournaments since her victory over Peyton Stearns last July, including the U.S. Open and the Australian Open, but has lost all four matches. She came incredibly close in Melbourne, leading Serbia’s Olga Danilović 4-0 in the third set of their first-round match before Danilović came back.

Now, Williams is playing a tournament for the first time: the ATX Open in Austin. Last week, organizers announced that Williams will play there later this month in a field that includes world No. 6 Jessica Pegula and world No. 20 Iva Jović.

Williams and Canada’s Leylah Fernandez won two doubles matches at the U.S. Open, and Williams is scheduled to play singles and doubles in Austin, with her partner to be decided.

In a statement released through the tournament, Williams said, “I’m so excited to be heading to Austin and playing my first ATX Open. The city has such great energy, and I’ve heard the fans are incredible.”

Venus may also look across some draws the next few months and find more inspiration. Former world No. 2 Vera Zvonareva, 41, appeared to be at the end of her career when a severe shoulder injury sidelined her between spring 2024 and December 2025. Instead, she has returned to the tour and is into the second round at the Qatar Open after coming through qualifying. Her first-round opponent? None other than Stearns, who is now 0-3 against players aged 37 and older the past eight months.

The big question remains whether her sister, Serena, will appear with her one of these days.

A banner weekend for the Davis Cup?

This time last year, the Davis Cup descended into farce and acrimony when Zizou Bergs of Belgium collided with Chile’s Cristian Garín at a changeover and set off a chain of events that led to Garín losing the match after being timed out. Chile’s Olympic committee called it “a shameful international incident.”

There have been no such incidents this year, but there has been plenty of on-court drama that only international team tennis — with home and away ties, and a slot just after a Grand Slam that sees many nations’ top stars resting — can provide.

Ecuador leading Australia on home courts in Quito, where the altitude and switch to clay from hard courts confounded James Duckworth and Rinky Hijikata against Alvaro Guillen Meza and Andres Andrade.

Chung Hyeon, the 2018 Australian Open semifinalist who saw Achilles and back injuries derail his career, and Kwon Soon-woo, whose ranking has been depressed by military service that prohibits his playing outside South Korea, stunning Argentina.

Austria and Canada coming from 2-1 down to beat Japan and Brazil, the latter coming from Liam Draxl seeing out a win over Gustavo Heide despite rolling his ankle in the seventh game of the deciding rubber.

Dhakshineswar Suresh Ekambaram, a college tennis star at Wake Forest, leading India to a sensational 3-2 win over the Netherlands, taking the deciding rubber despite a 290-place rankings deficit to opponent Guy den Ouden.

There is some discontent at the top of the sport about how the tennis equivalent of the World Cup platforms its best players come the finals, but the qualifiers are no less dramatic for it.

How did an outspoken player remind the sport of the power of styles?

Oleksandra Oliynykova’s powerful news conference and interviews took the limelight at the Australian Open. She first called on the sporting world to protect “women and children” in Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, and then criticized Belarusian world No. 1. Aryna Sabalenka, and Russian former world No. 1 Daniil Medvedev, for having engaged with or praised state-sponsored activities, or their countries’ leaders.

But before that in Melbourne, and then again last week at the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Oliynykova’s tennis did the talking. She gave defending champion Madison Keys a fright at the Australian Open, leading 4-0 and 6-5 in the first set of their first-round match. Keys delivered a flurry of winners to steal that set in a tiebreak, before pulling away.

Oliynykova then went to play her first WTA Tour main draw event in Romania, and reached the semifinals playing the same style: a potent mix of changes of paces, angles, at times improbable volleys — and moonballs.

Despite the long history of elite WTA players mastering the art of the moonball, Caroline Wozniacki and Angelique Kerber chief among them, sending tennis balls into the atmosphere still draws out the sport’s eternal, often cursed relationship between style and ethics. The most aggressive, conventional style should be the winner, because the player deploying it controls the outcome of points; the defender should lose because they do not play the right way, or so the theory goes.

This crystallized most prominently in last year’s French Open women’s final, when Sabalenka initially did not credit Coco Gauff for the win she had built amid swirling wind with a relentless defense.

But part of the reason this debate exists at all is that it works. Oliynykova did not just reach the semifinals at the Transylvania Open — she gave Emma Raducanu serious fits once there, completely disrupting her rhythm and forcing her to generate huge amounts of pace from deep behind the baseline just to extend rallies in a meaningful way. Oliynykova also threw in drop shots and much faster shots, keeping Raducanu on her heels.

She may have lost the match, but in doing so, it once again proved that styles make fights in tennis — and should be cherished.

How did a rising WTA phenomenon appear once more?

From Melbourne to Manila, and now Abu Dhabi and Doha — wherever she goes, Alex Eala is bringing the fans.

The rising Filipino talent was one of the biggest draws at the Australian Open, with Filipino fans cramming into the tiny Court 6 for her eventual three-set loss to Alycia Parks of the U.S. Then she took star billing in her nation’s capital, as it hosted a WTA 125 tournament one rung below the main tour.

Then came Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and now Doha, Qatar, where Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) make up significant proportions of the population. There are roughly 780,000 Filipinos in Abu Dhabi, and close to 250,000 in Qatar, representing around 7 percent of the population. The community’s prolific turnout at sporting events in the region is well known, with basketball games in Qatar sometimes limiting allocations for Filipino fans to avoid home advantage from being lost.

At the Abu Dhabi Open, Eala teamed up with Janice Tjen, who also received extensive diaspora support from Indonesian fans in Melbourne. They reached the semifinals, surprising No. 2 seed Zhang Shuai and Cristina Bucşa on the way, while Eala produced a stirring comeback against Aliaksandra Sasnovich in the singles, coming from 4-0 down in the third set to win 2-6, 6-4, 7-6(5) to win their second-round match.

For Eala, who said after her defeat to Parks that some parts of her first Australian Open were “overwhelming,” the art of being herself from point to point and representing her country is a balancing act. The crowds that roar her to victory can also bring their own pressures. She will get another chance to show what she can do in Doha, opening up against another rising talent, Tereza Valentová of the Czech Republic.

What did Elena Rybakina’s Australian Open mean to Kazakhstan?

When Elena Rybakina won her second Grand Slam title at the Australian Open last weekend, it was also a second major victory for Bulat Utemuratov.

Utemuratov, the Kazakh billionaire who has used his wealth to try to turn the country into a force in tennis, has spent much of the past two decades funding the construction of tennis centers. But after investing more than $ 200 million into facilities, coaches and the country’s tennis federation, which he leads, Utemuratov also decided to skip ahead in the development of potential stars.

He started offering Russian players who could not get sufficient support from its tennis federation funding in return for representing Kazakhstan.

Rybakina was one of those players. She switched in 2017. She is now a two-time Grand Slam champion. Alexander Bublik, who switched through a similar mechanism, cracked the men’s top 10 for the first time last month. Not a bad payoff.

During an interview after Rybakina’s three-set win over world No. 1 Sabalenka, Utemuratov said his project has also started to pay dividends more organically — which made him particularly busy on the day of the women’s singles final.

“We had one junior in semifinals, he played against a U.S. player, and then we had Anna Danilina in doubles,” Utemuratov said. “We were running between the matches and we really enjoyed that.

Danilina is another Russian native but the junior is Zangar Nurlanuly, 17, who is No. 9 in the ITF rankings. He lost to Keaton Hance of the U.S. in the semifinals, who lost against Slovenia’s Žiga Šeško in the final.

Utemuratov said Nurlanuly is just one example of the rise of tennis in non-traditional tennis countries in Asia. He said he watched a girl from Nepal play in an elite 14-and-under tournament Australia organized for the Asia-Pacific region.

He believes recruiting promising players from more crowded talent pools to represent countries where they were not born and have no prior connection in exchange for funding is an important part of the process.

“The main idea is to give a chance for a talented player to succeed,” he said. “But this year, we had in the main draw of the junior Slam three locally grown kids who were participating from Kazakhstan. We knew that we had to start from something.”

Kazakhstan could have used something more in its Davis Cup tie with Monaco over the weekend. The Monégasque team, led by Valentin Vacherot, stunned Bublik and Alexander Shevchenko in a 3-1 win, with Hugo Nys and Romain Arneodo triumphing over Bublik and Beibit Zhukayev in a nail-biting doubles rubber.

🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Félix Auger-Aliassime (1) def. Adrian Mannarino 6-3, 7-6(4) to win the Occitanie Open (250) in Montpellier, France. The Canadian defended his 2025 title.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Sára Bejlek (Q) def. Ekaterina Alexandrova (2) 7-6(5), 6-1 to win the Abu Dhabi Open (500) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is her first WTA Tour title.

🏆 Sorana Cîrstea (3) def. Emma Raducanu (1) 6-0, 6-2 to win the Transylvania Open (250) in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It is the Romanian’s fourth WTA Tour title.

🏆 Katie Boulter def. Tamara Korpatsch 5-7, 6-2, 6-1 to win the Ostrava Open (250) in Ostrava, Czech Republic. It is the Brit’s fourth WTA Tour title.

📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Adrian Mannarino moves up 19 places from No. 70 to No. 51 after reaching the Occitanie Open final.

📈 Sára Bejlek ascends 63 spots from No. 101 to No. 38 after winning the Abu Dhabi Open, a new career high.

📈 Titouan Droguet rises 30 places from No. 150 to No. 120 after reaching the Occitanie Open semifinals.

📈 Oleksandra Oliynykova reaches a career-high ranking of No. 71 after rising 20 places from No. 91.

📉 Denis Shapovalov falls 15 places from No. 25 to No. 40 as his Dallas Open points come off ahead of his title defense.

📉 Belinda Bencic leaves the top 10 after failing to defend her Abu Dhabi Open title due to illness, dropping from No. 9 to No. 11.

📉 Hubert Hurkacz tumbles 18 spots from No. 52 to No. 70.

📉 Ashlyn Krueger leaves the top 100, dropping 46 spots from No. 55 to No. 101.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP 

📍Dallas: Dallas Open (500) featuring Ben Shelton, Taylor Fritz, Learner Tien, Denis Shapovalov.

📍Rotterdam, Netherlands: Rotterdam Open (500) featuring Félix Auger-Aliassime, Arthur Fils, Alex de Minaur, Daniil Medvedev.

📍Buenos Aires, Argentina: Argentina Open (250) featuring João Fonseca, Francisco Cerúndolo, Matteo Berrettini, Sebastián Báez.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA

📍Doha, Qatar: Qatar Open (1,000) featuring Iga Świątek, Amanda Anisimova, Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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