👋 Welcome back to The Daily Theory, our morning rundown to help you stay on top of your favorite sport. I’m Allen McDuffee, your guide to all things tennis.
Let’s tennis!
Three Points
🎾 Simona Halep calls it a career: Halep, former number one who captured two majors ended her career before a home crowd on Tuesday. Following her match during an emotional on-court send-off, she called it as she saw it: “It’s a beautiful thing. I became world number one, I won grand slams, it’s all I wanted. Life goes on, there is life after tennis and I hope that we will see each other again. I’ll come to the tennis here as often as I can and of course I will continue to play – but to be competitive it requires much more and at this moment it is no longer.”
🎾 Building back: Jenson Brooksby didn’t look too sharp in his return to the tour at the Australian Open, winning just five games across three sets in the first round against Taylor Fritz. Choosing a major for his first event in two years may have been too big of an ask. But! After just one more match under his belt at a Challenger in Cleveland, the 24-year-old former number 33, showed up in Dallas and seriously challenged top 10 player Tommy Paul in the first round in three tight sets. All signs suggest there's much more to this topsy-turvy story that is to be written.
🎾 Redfoo heads to the Red Sea: Stefan Gordy, the tennis-obsessed singer from the band LMFAO and better known as Redfoo, is making his pro tennis debut. The 49-year-old was awarded a wild card into an ITF tournament in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Gordy, who is the former boyfriend of Vika Azarenka, has been a promoter of tennis for years and runs a tennis alternative called Timeball.
