As TENNIS Magazine’s six-decade print run comes to an end, we invite you to join us at TENNIS.com

In late 1998, I started a new job at TENNIS Magazine. Four months later, in Key Biscayne, Fla., I did my first player interview, with a 17-year-old rookie named Roger Federer. He sported bleached-blonde hair, hailed from a country with little tennis tradition, and lost in the first round of the tournament to Danish veteran Kenneth Carlsen. On the way to Miami Beach for a photo shoot, Federer laughed the infectiously giddy laugh we know so well now, and told me he hoped would make it on tour someday.

Fast forward 24 years, and both Federer’s career and my job have come full circle. The November/December 2022 edition is the final issue of the print version of TENNIS, ending a 57-year run. The magazine was founded in Chicago in 1965—when racquets were wood, balls and clothes were white, and Grand Slam champions didn’t make a dime. It was “The Magazine of the Racquet Sports” back then, and tennis shared space with badminton and ping-pong. There was also a local focus. The inaugural issue featured a piece on the Milwaukee junior scene,and a tournament calendar for Central Indiana.

But grander ambitions were evident. The first words of that first issue were a lament that still rings true today: “Tennis remains a step child of the sports pages; doomed to occasional agate-type recording of tournament scores.” The editors said they could feel the early rumblings of a “tennis boom” in the United States, and wanted to give the still-niche sport the front-and-center coverage it would deserve.

That goal stayed the same for the next six decades. By the 1970s, with a new, curvy logo and a focus on nuts-and-bolts instruction, TENNIS was the voice of the sport’s recreational explosion. Snoopy and Johnny Carson graced the cover; Vic Braden and Dennis Van Der Meer schooled the masses; Arthur Ashe and Pete Sampras hung around the office, contributing their wisdom. In this century, one of the magazine’s most popular subjects of interest, Chris Evert, became publisher.

For the last 20 years, TENNIS has chronicled a new golden era and the superstars—Federer, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic—who have headlined it. At the same time, we’ve stayed true to our rec roots by tracking the latest innovations in instruction and equipment, and keeping our focus on the sport’s lifeblood—i.e., the millions of us who play it. That’s a lot to cover, so we’ve also spent the last two decades exploring the vaster pastures of the Internet, at TENNIS.com, the game’s most-visited website.

From now on, that’s where you’ll find the content you found in these pages. It’s a newer format with a (slightly) different name, but at TENNIS.com we can offer more coverage, in a timelier fashion, with a global viewpoint. What won’t change is our commitment to the goal that TENNIS’ original editors set: To give our sport the undivided attention it doesn’t get anywhere else.

Here’s hoping there are many more 17-year-old geniuses-in-the-making—with infectious laughs—in all of our futures.