Hark! It's another year-end list. This one lends a happy 10-pack of the best quotations in tennis. Now, not all of them were worded as if they're prose to tattoo on your body—we'll leave that to Stan Wawrinka and Samuel Beckett—but they wax poetic in that they're inspirational, thoughtful, and/or droll. With that in mind, let's get to these well-landed words, strung out like so many holiday cards on a length of garland:
10
"It’s unbelievable, twice in Roland Garros finals, twice facing Rafa. Now facing Novak here, he’s the king of Australia; so I’m always facing the kings of the Grand Slams in these finals. ... I really hope also that I win my maiden Slam when they're still around because it just counts more."
—Dominic Thiem, looking ahead after dropping the 2020 Aussie Open final to Djokovic, eight times a Melbourne champ
9
“In a few years, it’s going to be every major without them.”
—Thiem again, on Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer's outages during a US Open event in which he indeed won that "maiden" Slam