Bill Simons
Before tennis was a profession, before it was a passport, a brand, or a spectacle, it was a dream.
For Pancho Segura, that dream took the shape of boats.
As a boy in Ecuador, he would watch them pull away, slipping beyond the horizon, carrying with them the possibility of another life – one larger, freer, less predetermined. America, from that distance, wasn’t a nation so much as a promise. You didn’t need to know its contradictions. You only needed to believe it might take you in.
Segura eventually made that journey. He arrived – small, fierce, improbably skilled – carrying with him not just his rackets but his hunger. His story, like so many in tennis, wasn’t simply about winning matches. It was about crossing borders, learning new codes, and remaking oneself without fully abandoning where you came from.
In that sense, Segura wasn’t an exception. His was an early chapter in a larger American story. Thirty-one years after he landed in Florida, he gave my stepmother – whose forebearers arrived on the Mayflower – a series of tennis lessons at Carlsbad’s La Costa Resort: $75 apiece.
Tennis, along with soccer, is the most international game we have. And that has always been part of its magic for me. It’s familiar terrain. My extended family includes a Dutch writer, a Greek lawyer, a Slovokian nuclear scientist, a Mexican scholar, a Vietnamese dentist, a Canadian weaver, a Japanese financier – and, for balance, a Spanish rogue.
More to the point, I love the mix of cultures in tennis press rooms – chatty Croatians, somber Russians, brainy Brits. I love the spontaneity of covering a game that carries you everywhere. One week you’re alone in a 16th-century inn in Seville, the next you’re sharing an Airbnb in London with China’s leading tennis writer. Then you’re in Australia in a tiny high-rise apartment with Korean lovers who debate forehands at breakfast.
On court, the global scope is even clearer. Li Na – with the comic timing of Lucille Ball and groundstrokes to die for – kick-started a tennis revolution in China. Indian Sania Mirza inspired millions of Muslim women as she won Wimbledon and US Open doubles titles.
Then there’s Frances Tiafoe, a happy, broad-chested warrior whose parents emigrated from Sierra Leone and who bunked down with his dad in a janitor’s closet at a tennis center. Years later, Tiafoe lit up locker rooms and Ashe Stadium alike, playing midnight matches that felt less like sport than communal release.
Or consider Jessica Pegula: daughter of a mighty billionaire, yes – but also the daughter of a Korean infant who was left on the steps of a Seoul police station. Tennis has a way of holding contradictions without apology.
All of this – boats, borders, accents, sacrifice – might sound grand and far-flung. But isn’t this, in its way, the core brilliance of America? For me, this came into focus one summer on an ordinary subway that carries fans to an extraordinary tournament: the US Open.
On the platform, waiting for the arrival of the 7 train, a man wearing a T-shirt that read “God Rested on the Seventh Day” sang a devotional version of Ave Maria. At first, it seemed out of place. Then again, on that train, nothing really is.
A Juilliard student with dark, dreamy eyes poured her soul into Bach on a cello. A bow-legged man in a green kilt offered bagpipe tunes. The No. 7 train was the one that emerged from anonymity to infamy after Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker sneered, “Imagine having to take the number 7 train to Shea Stadium,” and let loose with a mean-spirited rant that revealed far more about him than about the people he feared.
When the boxy train pulls into the station, it feels innocent enough. You squeeze in beside a middle-aged woman absorbed in an introductory chemistry text and a teen in battered sneakers chewing a sandwich that’s clearly too spicy. Across from us, a proper Brahmin gentleman in a gray suit and bow tie calmly studies the financial pages. The train snakes through Manhattan’s tunnels, bursts into the murky daylight of Queens, and eventually delivers you to the wide boardwalk leading toward Ashe Stadium.
If you’re averse to grit, diversity, and in-your-face urban intensity, steer clear of the 7. But if you fancy humanity – unscripted, jostling, alive – hop on. It might be the best couple of bucks you’ll ever spend. For me, that train felt like America in motion.
And that was precisely the America that Martina Navratilova sought as a refuge.
The courageous, unflappable eighteen-year-old gave tennis its first great migration story – a cloak-and-dagger tale straight out of the Cold War. Nothing in the history of sport quite equaled her escape. As a brilliant young Czech prodigy – strong-willed, high-strung, and increasingly independent – Martina ran headlong into the limits of a system that feared autonomy far more than it valued excellence. The Czech Tennis Association tightened its grip on her travel, her earnings, and even her voice. She understood what authoritarian systems teach their brightest citizens: chances narrow quickly.
In 1975, she walked into an immigration office in Manhattan and said, “Help. I need to defect.”
Her courageous choice didn’t just change her life. It opened a door.
Years later came Hu Na, a little-known player who had refused to join China’s Communist Party. When she traveled to Santa Clara, California, to play in the 1982 Federation Cup, she fled her hotel and went underground for eight months before ultimately defecting.
Shortly thereafter came another Czech – gaunt, relentless, armed with a pulverizing forehand and broken English. Ivan Lendl arrived not as a defiant rebel but as a worker, remaking himself in American gyms and on American courts, turning discipline into dominance. Where Martina’s story was dramatic, Lendl’s was methodical. Together, they rewired American tennis from the outside in.
Soon, migration became an essential thread in the game. Maria Sharapova’s father, Yuri, set off on a journey that began in the shadow of Chernobyl, passed through Siberia and landed in Florida. He arrived with $700 in his pocket. No English. No safety net. He took his seven-year-old daughter to tennis lessons on the handlebars of his bicycle, pedaling toward a future that seemed unlikely – and then inevitable.
While ten-year-old Anna Kournikova left Moscow for Nick Bollettieri’s Florida academy, Victoria Azarenka’s grandmother worked two exhausting jobs in Belarus. When her overwhelmed granddaughter, a young WTA phenom based in Arizona, complained of the rigors of the tour, Granny delivered a bracing message: Be real. You’re a tennis player. You’re privileged. Get going.
Naomi Osaka’s Japanese mother slept in cars and rose before dawn to do survival work in a new country; Sofia Kenin’s father, speaking only Russian, drove a cab in New York. Amanda Anisimova’s beloved Russian father died far too soon, leaving talent and grief intertwined. Learner Tien’s parents survived the Vietnamese war.
There were times when the world coming to America unsettled the tennis establishment – moments when the arrival of foreigners was treated not as enrichment but as threat. Crowds were slow to embrace Navratilova. Authorities failed to recognize Osaka’s talent and refused to provide financial backing. When all four finalists at the 1984 US Open were Czech natives, alarm bells rang and a reckoning followed. An American player-development program was rushed into existence.
For decades, American parents have complained bitterly that foreigners were receiving coveted collegiate scholarships that should have gone to their children. And yet the game continued to prove, year after year, that talent and grit transcend borders.
There was, for instance, the Yugoslavian-American Seles family – one of my favorite immigrant clans. Monica emerged at Roland Garros tossing flowers to the crowd, part ingénue, part force of nature. After she was stabbed in the back in Hamburg, her courageous return inspired many. Yet cruelty lingered at the margins. I remember reporters whispering snidely about her mother in the Oakland Coliseum press room, noting that she tucked chicken sandwiches into her purse. What they missed was devotion.
Along with Wayne Bryan, benign Jim Evert and not-so-benign Richard Williams, Monica’s father Karolj was my favorite tennis dad. He drew scores of cartoons for his daughter, using ink and imagination to bring comic relief to the grind. He would speak with me endlessly about Monica’s glory. His thick Hungarian accent was often impenetrable – but his joy was unmistakable.
This wasn’t migration as an abstraction – it was migration as family labor.
Even the most iconic American champions were shaped by this current. Michael Chang, who, like Frank Sinatra, was born in Hoboken, did for Asian-American tennis what “The Chairman of the Board” once had done for Italian-Americans: he gave permission. He showed that tennis could be a pathway to American expression, confidence, and success.
Pete Sampras – stoic, understated, and so American in his demeanor – was the son of a Greek immigrant. His rival, Andre Agassi, carried an even heavier inheritance. Andre’s father, Mike Agassi, was a failed Iranian Olympic boxer whose loss in a Helsinki ring ignited a sense of grievance and injustice that would shape his son’s destiny. He’d grown up in Tehran in an apartment shared with thirteen family members, and then emigrated to Chicago, where he worked as an elevator operator before heading west to Vegas, where he became an MGM greeter.
Mike hung a tennis ball above Andre’s crib, and set about forging a champion – with obsession, fear, love, and unwavering hope. What emerged was not just a great player, but perhaps the most charismatic American tennis champion of our era – an avatar of contradiction, rebellion, vulnerability, and reinvention.
Raisa Gorbacheva once told Chris Evert that tennis would bring the Russian and American peoples together. It was an idealistic vision that history denied. Still, tennis demands coexistence. It puts accents, habits, and histories into shared space. Implicitly, it teaches empathy – and with it, understanding.
That’s why, when immigrants are caricatured or dismissed – when Haitians are reduced to lies, or Somalis flattened by fear – I think of tennis’ rebuttals. I think of Arthur Ashe standing up for Haitian immigrants. I think of Naomi Osaka returning joyfully to Haiti, not as a savior but as a daughter.
And when Africans are reduced to stereotypes, I recall Ons Jabeur, the Tunisian who generated so much delight that she was dubbed the Minister of Happiness. Or I think of Cameroon, which gave tennis one of its most humane champions: Yannick Noah – joyful, generous, impossible to diminish.
From Pancho Segura watching boats to Martina knocking on the FBI’s door to Agassi bopping a tennis ball above his crib, American tennis has been shaped by strangers – people who arrived with accents, habits, fears, and dreams that didn’t always fit.
America didn’t always welcome them gracefully.
But my sport was built by them. Without them, it would not be the game we love.
