It’s day four of the French Open and the rain has been biblical. Relentless. ‘Brutal,’ as Morgan Riddle, the partner of US No 1 Taylor Fritz, puts it. ‘It’s like full-on rain delays, there were no matches played yesterday at all,’ she says. Her Instagram stories summarise the goings on: rain falling on concrete set to B.J. Thomas’s Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head and a picture of the monitor with a view to all the tennis-less, crowd-less outdoor courts clad in Wotsit-orange, waterproof anoraks. It’s a far cry from the postcard pretty, Eiffel Tower-adorned vistas you’d expect from the French capital… and also not the weather you’d naturally align with the glamour-filled life of the Tennis WAG.
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’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.
‘I've worked tirelessly to try to turn around the connotations – having that title [WAG] shouldn't mean that we're any less than because we choose to support our partners.’ That’s a sentiment echoed by Lorenze: ‘I love supporting Tommy,’ she says, ‘[you can’t overemphasise] just how incredibly impressive they are to have reached this level in their sport.’
Broomfield, as a former player, didn’t warm to the term. ‘I think initially, I took offence to it,’ she says. ‘Because I think the connotation of WAG was a woman that didn't really have anything for herself and was just riding off the coattails of her significant other,’ she says. Lest we forget: the acronym WAG was born at the 2006 FIFA World Cup at Baden-Baden when the pitch-side photographs of Victoria Beckham et al made the frontpages. ‘But I think we're now working on tour, we're now making our own money… some of the girls are more famous than the guys, so it's like, we’ve found this new lane,’ says Broomfield.
Those in the know about tennis, know about Morgan Riddle. Riddle and boyfriend Taylor Fritz, the US No 1, are the fashion-forward, head-turning, pap-stealing new Posh ‘n’ Becks of the game. Next up? New York Fashion Week. Then? World domination. Deputy features editor Annabel Sampson tries to keep up
Too right: Lorenze, with her 615k Instagram followers (which is nearly 400k more than her pro tennis-playing other-half); brands Dairy Boy and American Charm; and business profiles in Forbes is ‘slaying in her lane’ as they say. Equally, Riddle, with her 290k Instagram followers and many brand collabs (including ‘Wimbledon Threads’, an insta-series she launched last year in collaboration with the Grand Slam), was dubbed ‘the most famous woman in men’s tennis’ by the New York Times. ‘I’m very entrepreneurial and I've always had a business mindset,’ says Lorenze, who has built an entourage around her: an agent, a manager, an assistant, a stylist and a publicist. ‘It’s a big team of women making everything happen,’ she says.
The tennis WAGs agree that travel is an indisputable perk of dating a professional tennis player. ‘If you’re dating a successful guy, a lot of the time they’re going to be travelling,’ Jacobi says. ‘With a lot of jobs, it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to be going on their work trips… so I think it’s a unique experience that you’re able to travel with them.’ The year kicks off in Australia with the Open, then it flows through to California for Indian Wells via the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters in Monaco, Madrid and Rome for the Opens, to London for Wimbledon… and it’s only July, just over mid-way through the year. The year edges closer to its conclusion at Flushing Meadows for the US Open… Broomfield’s favourite tournament. ‘The energy is unmatched,’ she says. ‘A couple of years ago, he [Tiafoe] made the semi-finals and that flipped everything on its head. So it’s always going to be a special place for us,’ she adds ‘And it’s where our anniversary fits, so every single year we spend it in New York.’
Since joining Cam on the tour Jacobi has had to re–wire her personality in ways. ‘I was a huge planner… I mean, I still love to plan… but it’s impossible,’ she says. ‘I’ll get invited to a wedding, it’s not like Cameron can plan ahead and come [given his training and tournament schedule]… he may be able to come last minute,’ she says, ‘but he’s never been able to go to a wedding with me.’ Equally: ‘it’s practically impossible to have your own career,’ says Jacobi, ‘unless you’re an influencer, which isn’t really my thing.’ Jacobi has had to find things which are project-based, such as the event she’s planning pre-Wimbledon, Wimby Wednesday, with fellow tennis wife, Susan Chardy, the partner of former French tennis pro Jeremy Chardy. ‘Cam and I decided a few years ago: I could go get a big job in New York, like what I had, but I won't really be able to see you… and then it's kind of like, what's the point of even being in a relationship?’ So collectively they made the decision ‘to take a break and to put his career first’ for now.
Despite Jacobi not courting attention, the British press are very interested in the glamorous blonde cheering on our country’s No 1 player – the television cameras inevitably find her in the crowds come Wimbledon. A proliferation of explainer articles exist online entitled ‘Who is Louise Jacobi?’. ‘I mean, yeah, it’s definitely something that I had to get used to… I never thought I would be in this position,’ she says. ‘I guess it just comes with the territory of dating him [Cameron], but it's certainly fascinating.’ Louise, unlike the other WAGs, states ‘friends over followers’ on her Instagram, only sharing tantalising snippets of behind-the-scenes WAG action from life on the tour.
So, given their peripatetic lives, where does one meet a professional tennis player? For Morgan, it was Raya. Paige, the US Open. Ayan and Francis were practical childhood sweethearts. But Louise met Cameron through mutual friends in New York. ‘A mutual friend, who used to play tennis at university, said, “I know some guys playing in the US Open and whenever they lose, would you be interested in going out that night and meeting some of them?”’ and the rest, as they say, is history. ‘I really went into it with no expectations,’ she shrugs. ‘I do now know our friends were interested in introducing Cam and I to each other, so I think it was a premeditated introduction.’
Certainly, the tennis-playing girlfriends have a strong community given their unique set-up. ‘It’s very much a family affair on tour, everybody’s families, children, wives and girlfriends are with them,’ says Jacobi. ‘The other weekend, I went with David Goffon's wife to St Tropez and when I was in Rome, I got drinks with Paige [Lorenze] and Nina Ghaibi [Felix Auger-Aliassime's girlfriend] – I try to meet up and keep in touch with with people where I can.’ Lorenze echoes that: ‘I have honestly become close with so many different girls on tour,’ she says, ‘I think we are all in such a unique sport and the schedule is so time-consuming.’
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Roland-Garros today, Wimbledon tomorrow – where it will be game, set and match to the tennis WAGs. This summer, the ball is in their court – and, everyone knows, the occasional focus on the off-court lives of these players is just as gripping.
