Meet the WAGS Holding Court in Men’s Tennis

In March, after getting knocked out of the Indian Wells Open in the semifinals, Carlos Alcaraz, the 22-year-old “future of tennis,” went to Mexico to chill and train. On Instagram, he posted a slideshow of his trip, including several photos of his mom carrying a large tote bag that said dairy boy, a tennis ball sailing between the words. The bag—part of Indian Wells’ official gifting to top players—was not made by the tournament’s laundry list of sponsors, nor by a tennis company at all. Dairy Boy is a Connecticut-inspired clothing brand by Paige Lorenze, the girlfriend of Tommy Paul, an American tennis player currently ranked No. 12 in the world.

“We made two sweatshirts, a hat, and a tote bag for Indian Wells, so that’s super, super exciting,” Lorenze says in a YouTube vlog documenting the days before the tournament. She films herself in a car, as Paul drives wearing the Dairy Boy Indian Wells Collection’s washed green sweatshirt. “I had [Tommy] in mind when I picked the colors.” In the 18-minute-long video, she folds Paul’s tennis clothes; picks him up from practice; explains why he dropped out of the Acapulco Open (stomach issues); dissolves her lip filler; gets Botox, a manicure, and a lash lift; and then tries on outfits her stylist pulled for the tournament. The video has more than 100,000 views.

Technically speaking, Lorenze is a tennis WAG—the acronym made popular by the sneering British press in the aughts to refer to soccer players’ dolled-up, hard-partying wives and girlfriends. The phrase “doesn’t bother me,” says Lorenze over tea in Monaco, on the third day of the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters. “Though I think it’s lame when people try to use it like, ‘Oh, you’re just a WAG.’ ” Paul wasn’t in town for the tournament. About three weeks before it started—after Lorenze had committed to traveling there, both to watch him play and to participate in this story—he withdrew. “He’s not a clay-court player,” she explains. “Tommy enjoys rest a lot, and it’s good for his tennis.” She came anyway.

On social media, Lorenze is one of the most followed tennis WAGs. At tournaments, fans go up to her. This is a new development in the tennis world. In 2006, when David Foster Wallace published a long New York Times essay about the ecstasy of watching then 25-year-old Roger Federer play, he offhandedly mentioned Federer’s “unusually steady and mature commitment to the girlfriend who travels with him (which on the men’s tour is rare).” That’s no longer unusual or rare. If the piece were written today, Wallace would have to name the girlfriend, because fans would already be following her on Instagram. (Mirka Vavrinec became Federer’s wife, his PR manager, and the mother of their four kids.) Now, ahead of big tournaments, The U.S. Sun regularly publishes stories like “Meet Wimbledon’s stunning Wags”; the Daily Mail has countered with “Meet the US Open’s STUNNING tennis Wags.”

The Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters, in early April, marks the start of tennis’s clay swing, which ends in late May with the French Open. In those six weeks, players will likely travel from Monte Carlo to Barcelona to Madrid to Rome to Geneva to Paris. Tennis’s “offseason” is not a season at all, but four weeks in December. For the sake of comparison: Basketball and football players get about four months off.

Before Ivana Nedved met Sebastian Korda—who, at 24, is ranked No. 23 in the world—she had never watched a tennis match. Since they started dating, in 2021, she’s been on the circuit with him almost full-time. In the first three months of this year, she had already taken nearly 30 flights. They just got their first place together, in Florida, but they spend only about six to eight weeks a year at home. They never know how long they will stay in a city—maybe one day, maybe two weeks—because it depends on how long he keeps winning. As soon as he loses a match, “you’re just like, now I gotta think about how I’m gonna get to the next place,” says Nedved.

As if to prove how unpredictable schedules can be, about 40 hours before the W photo shoot, a WAG with a large Instagram following canceled her trip to Monte Carlo because her boyfriend had withdrawn from the tournament due to injury. And it turns out that when Nedved and I are chatting in the lobby of the Hôtel de Paris, Korda is playing; the time when we’d agreed to meet a week prior was, coincidentally, the exact start time of Korda’s first-round match. (Players are given their time slots in the late afternoon the day before.)

“I can’t wait to check the score,” Nedved tells me. “I’m so nervous.” She shows me her newest accessory: an Oura ring to track her heart rate during matches. Nedved says she watches every one of Korda’s matches, even the ones she doesn’t travel to, and even if they fall at 3 a.m. for her. “I talked about this with his coach, actually. He always tells me, ‘Just sleep, because there’s nothing you can do.’ And I was like, ‘No, I just gotta be up.’ ”

Korda lost his match in straight sets.

The first round of Monte-Carlo played out over three days. While Lorenzo Musetti, the boyishly handsome 23-year-old Italian (ranked No. 16) warmed up at the Monte-Carlo Country Club, did his deep breathing exercises, and changed the grips on his rackets before his match, I got coffee with his partner of nearly three years, Veronica Confalonieri. They live in Monaco—as do many of the top European players—with their 1-year-old baby, Ludovico, who had been sick for a few days. “I slept in the living room with the baby because he was screaming,” says Confalonieri. “I worry, because if Lorenzo doesn’t sleep, it’s very bad.” Musetti’s match wasn’t even given a specific start time, just designated as “second match on Court Rainier III.” Musetti would begin playing whenever the previous match finished. This means it was just about impossible for Confalonieri to plan her day. “It’s a very specific life,” she explained.

At 1:30 p.m., Musetti’s match finally started. Confalonieri rushed from coffee to watch him play Yunchaokete Bu, ranked No. 73. After losing the first set, Musetti barely won the second. The broadcast camera kept cutting to Musetti’s player’s box, where Confalonieri—an Italian former graphic designer who happens to look like the heroine of a Fellini film—sat behind his coaches, expressionless, and calmly clapped when he won a point. He won the third set, 6–3, advancing to the next round.

Tennis is the only professional sport where coaches and WAGs sit together in the audience. They’re perched in the player’s box, a few feet from the baseline. This means a tennis player often, if inadvertently, looks at their significant other between points. “When I’m at the match, I’m like a statue,” says Nina Ghaibi, the fiancée of Félix Auger-Aliassime, a lanky Canadian ranked No. 27 in the world. “In my head, it’s really the opposite.” The 24-year-old Auger-Aliassime is known for being a logical and composed player—Ghaibi says he has no rituals or superstitions before matches, not even a preferred meal. She tries to mirror his calmness in the player’s box, even when “it starts to feel like the world is on your shoulders watching a point,” she says. “If he starts losing, and I start cheering extra, he’ll read that as stress. Then maybe it would bother him more than help me.”

Ghaibi took me to watch Auger-Aliassime practice with Alexander Zverev, a grunting German ranked No. 2 in the world, at the tournament site. Practice is open to fans, and a group of middle-aged people pushed in front of us to get a better look, evidently unaware that it was at the expense of a player’s fiancée. Ghaibi took photos of Auger-Aliassime, not for her Instagram but for his. She isn’t exactly private—she appeared in Break Point, the 2023 Netflix docuseries about the tennis circuit. But “I never really considered posting about tennis, because it’s genuinely not my world,” explains Ghaibi, who is a competitive equestrian. “I don’t feel any urge to make that part of my own identity.”

The next day, Auger-Aliassime was upset by Daniel Altmaier, a German qualifier ranked No. 67.

Tennis WAGs fall into two categories: those who don’t have publicists and those who do. Nedved, Confalonieri, and Ghaibi are in the former category. Lorenze and Ayan Broomfield, the girlfriend of Frances Tiafoe, an American ranked No. 16, are in the latter. Broomfield and Tiafoe have been dating since 2015, the year he went pro. After playing college tennis at UCLA, Broomfield competed in a few tournaments on the entry-level pro circuit. In 2020, while playing a match in Egypt, she got a call from a producer on King Richard, the biopic of Serena and Venus Williams, who wanted to cast her as Venus’s body double for the tennis scenes. It prompted her to pivot to “the entertainment and the social media, off-court side of tennis,” she explains. After Tiafoe’s 2022 breakthrough at the U.S. Open, Broomfield joined him on the circuit nearly full-time for a year to “help him try and fulfill his dreams and goals.” Meanwhile, on social media, she posted about many of the tour’s more glamorous moments: dinners thrown by tournament sponsors, makeup routines for Grand Slams, meeting Justin and Hailey Bieber at the U.S. Open.

At the W photo shoot, Broomfield showed me a 15-minute-long YouTube video she made at the Miami Open. She had hired a cameraman to follow her around the tournament, because “I think athletes should show more of their life. That’s why people are so invested in Serena and Venus and their story—it’s about who they are and where they came from and their background, more so than the actual tennis.” The video includes some highlights of Tiafoe’s match, and a long sequence of Broomfield rallying with Tiafoe while wearing three Cartier Love bracelets. Much of the video focuses on her preparing and doing press for Ayan’s Aces, a project inspired by her own viral TikTok about the Australian Open having diversity on the court but not in the audience. She had the Miami Open, as well as various brands including Cadillac and Lacoste, give about 100 seats over the tournament’s two weeks to women of color.

Tiafoe eked out a close victory in his first match of Monte-Carlo, then lost his second. While he headed to the Barcelona Open, Broomfield went to Coachella on a brand trip with Alaska Airlines.

Lorenze brought her own camera to the W photo shoot. Within two days, she had posted a “48 Hours in Monte Carlo” vlog on YouTube. (Post–photo shoot, in a robe in her hotel bed, she tells the camera, “Today was super, super fun.… I’m really excited for you guys to see the photos and the interview!”) Lorenze was already an influencer when she started dating Paul, in August 2022. (They met because a few weeks before the U.S. Open, Paul liked some of her old Instagram posts—“Nothing that was sexy even remotely, just the most wholesome pictures.”) She joined him on the circuit full-time for a year, posting TikToks of her drinking champagne at Wimbledon, wearing Prada for the Australian Open, and taking a private plane to the Mexican Open. “My Instagram grew a lot, my YouTube grew a lot, everything grew a lot,” says Lorenze. “I’ve gained a lot from tennis, I won’t lie.”

A few days before Monte-Carlo, Daria Saville, who is ranked No. 132 on the women’s circuit, posted a TikTok lamenting that “tennis aesthetics are in right now.… Female tennis players are not getting those brand deals. It’s actually WAGs who fit into the aesthetics rather than us sweaty tennis players.” As she gua shas her eyebrows, she adds, “Do marketing teams think tennis players are too niche compared to a WAG? Sorry if I came across salty AF.”

Lorenze saw the TikTok. “I’m really good at creating content and visual stories, and you’re really good at playing tennis,” she said, as if addressing Saville. “I have to be clickbaity, like, ‘Come with me to my boyfriend’s tennis match.’ I don’t really want to say that, but that content performs better than me just making aesthetic videos at a tennis match. It’s all a game.”

Ironically, in Monte Carlo, the cameras were trained on the “shy” Confalonieri for much of the time. A prudent gambler wouldn’t have put money on Musetti making it to the end of the tournament, and yet he steadily advanced to the semifinals, where he played Alex de Minaur, ranked No. 7. The first set was disastrous for Musetti. He lost, 6–1, and it started to drizzle. Most of the audience left. The broadcast cut to Confalonieri using her jacket as a makeshift umbrella. Then, after a brief rain delay, Musetti locked in and took the second set. The third went to a tie-breaker.

Often, Musetti literally roars after a big point, but when he hit a forehand down the line for the match, he slumped over his racket and heaved. Less than 24 hours later, he would lose the championship final to Alcaraz, but in that moment it was his victory. His ranking went from No. 16 to 11, and he earned $557,687. He blew kisses to the crowd. Then the camera cut once again to Confalonieri, who was quietly crying. A video of her hugging him and kissing his face was eventually posted on the ATP Tour’s official Instagram. It has about 150,000 likes.

Hair for all talent by Ramona Eschbach at Total World; makeup for all talent by Stephanie Kunz at Total World.

Special thanks to Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo.

Dog Model: Ultra; Prop Stylist: Louise Coste; Produced by Paf Paf; Producer: Laura Herrero; Staff Production Manager: Erwan Sangan; Staff Production: Thomas Cesari; Photo Assistants: Paul Jedwab, Sacha Kammerman; Retouching: Output; Fashion Assistants: Ruairi Horan, Ambrine Marouani; Production Assistant: Louise Coste; Hair Assistants: Romain Duplessy, Manon Martin; Makeup Assistant: Giulia Sterza. Collage, top row, from left: Matthieu Mirville/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock; Hannah Peters/Getty Images; Ivana Nedved; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images. Second row, from left: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images; VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images; Diana Zapata/BFA.com/Shutterstock; PA IMAGES/ALAMY. Third row, from left: TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images; Javier Garcia/Shutterstock; Ivana Nedved; Jean Catuffe/GC Images; Veronica Confalonieri. Fourth row, from left: Javier Garcia/Shutterstock; Chris Putnam/Future Publishing via Getty Images; Matthieu Mirville/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock; Jean Catuffe/Getty Images; Veronica Confalonieri; Berzane Nasser/ABACA/Shutterstock. Bottom row, from left: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; Graham Denholm/Getty Images; PA Images/Alamy; Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for Lacoste.