{"id":354918,"date":"2025-11-04T11:54:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T11:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/354918\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T11:54:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T11:54:11","slug":"aryna-sabalenka-nick-kyrgios-will-play-battle-of-the-sexes-tennis-match-organized-by-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/354918\/","title":{"rendered":"Aryna Sabalenka, Nick Kyrgios will play \u2018Battle of the Sexes\u2019 tennis match organized by agency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women\u2019s world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> will play men\u2019s world No. 652 Nick Kyrgios<\/a> in a tennis match labeled as the fourth Battle of the Sexes in the sport\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Organized by Evolve, the agency which represents both players, the match will take place December 28 at the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai. The past few months have been scattered with trash talk from both players, with Kyrgios claiming that \u201cwomen can\u2019t return our serves\u201d and that he would win 6-2 on a podcast with top-15 player Alexander Bublik this summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll try my best to kick his ass,\u201d Sabalenka said in a news conference at the U.S. Open.<\/p>\n

Kyrgios\u2019 fire was tempered in the announcement of the event, his highest-profile appearance on a tennis court since this year\u2019s Australian Open. The 2022 Wimbledon finalist. returned from a full wrist reconstruction at his home Grand Slam, and has played just three competitive matches since. Sabalenka won the women\u2019s singles title in Melbourne, and has played 59 matches since, winning 49 and lifting three trophies, including the U.S. Open.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the world No 1 challenges you, you answer the call,\u201d Kyrgios said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got massive respect for Aryna; she\u2019s a powerhouse and a true champion. But I\u2019ve never backed down from a challenge, and I\u2019m not just here to play \u2014 I\u2019m here to entertain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sabalenka and Kyrgios\u2019 match comes more than half a century after the most famous \u2014 and politically consequential \u2014 Battle of the Sexes in tennis. Billie Jean King<\/a> beat Bobby Riggs in three sets in an iconic meeting in 1973, which helped to increase the spotlight on the rising women\u2019s game and helped lead to the establishment of the Women\u2019s Tennis Association.<\/p>\n

Tennis has since become the leading women\u2019s sport in the world, with revenues, sponsorships and prize money that dwarf its equivalents across basketball, soccer and other team and individual sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have so much respect for Billie Jean King and what she has done for the women\u2019s game,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m proud to represent women\u2019s tennis and to be part of this modern take of the iconic Battle of the Sexes match.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kyrgios, who in 2023 pleaded guilty to common assault of his ex-girlfriend Chiara Passari before the charge was dismissed in an Australian court, has been criticized for his commentary about women in tennis. In September 2024, Kyrgios was criticized for writing \u201csecond serve\u201d under a picture of himself and Jannik Sinner\u2019s then-girlfriend, top-40 WTA player Anna Kalinskaya.<\/p>\n

He was fined $10,000 in 2015, after on-court microphones picked up the Australian telling Stan Wawrinka that Thanasi Kokkinakis had \u201cbanged his girlfriend\u201d during a Rogers Cup match in Montreal, Canada. Kyrgios later apologized for the remark on Facebook, writing: \u201cMy comments were made in the heat of the moment and were unacceptable on many levels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first Battle of the Sexes match was played between Riggs and Margaret Court in 1973 \u2014 won by Riggs in two sets \u2014 before King\u2019s famous win later that year in the match that is most commonly associated with the label.<\/p>\n

A third, between Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova in 1992, was won by Connors in two sets.<\/p>\n

\u2018It is not clear what is at stake\u2019<\/p>\n

The previous iterations of these sorts of stunt took place when the politics of tennis meant that they could mean something. Bobby Riggs spent the lead-up to his match against Billie Jean King playing up to his part as the notorious tennis chauvinist, and then lost.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, Jimmy Connors beat Martina Navratilova not long after he\u2019d made a run to the semifinals of the U.S. Open, and Navratilova was still winning Grand Slams.
Serena Williams had plenty of opportunities to stage another version. She passed.<\/p>\n

It is not what is at stake in this match. Women and men mostly seem to have moved beyond discussions of athletic superiority and focused more on matters of equal pay and marketing throughout the sport. The U.S. Open\u2019s star-spangled mixed doubles event was predicated on the singular appeal of the best players in the world, men and women, playing on the same courts in competitive encounters. It is something that tennis holds over almost every other sport.<\/p>\n

Kyrgios has criticized women\u2019s tennis for years, deriding its lack of star power, save for a handful of women he deems of note. If Sabalenka loses to a player with one of the most lethal serves in the sport \u2014 if his wrist holds up \u2014 then it is not hard to anticipate the timbre of criticism, however much of it is in bad faith, that will follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka will play men\u2019s world No. 652 Nick Kyrgios in a tennis match…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":354919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[392,62,222,1464,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-354918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-sports-business","11":"tag-tennis","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115491298586288204","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}