The world’s best tennis players say something mysterious is going on with their balls

One of my favorite recent cultural acquisitions from the global mixing bowl of the professional tennis circuit is a Russian maxim about whining: “A bad dancer will even blame his balls for getting in the way.” On the tennis tours lately, it’s been many of the world’s very best tennis players complaining about tennis balls with increasing frequency. The balls are blamed after losses. The balls are blamed for injuries. The balls just aren’t what they used to be. Tennis players are prone to nitpicking by nature — it’s inevitable in a high-stress sport with margins of millimeters. But the increasingly unified complaints about balls have been rolling on for years now, with many veterans citing a change around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The balls are irregular and inconsistent, they say,