With his win over Casper Ruud in the final of the Rome Masters, aka Italian Open, Jannik Sinner extended one of the most remarkable runs in tennis history, six Masters 1000 tournaments in a row to gain the “golden Masters” (all nine 1000-level tournaments, just below the majors that make the Slam circuit) at only 24 years of age, the youngest in history.

Sinner’s only sore point since lifting the trophy last November at the Paris Masters (he also won the ATP Finals the following month in Turin) was his five-set loss to Novak Djokovic in the semis of the Australian Open, where he was the defending champion. Djokovic, who has won at Oz a record 10 times, went on to lose the final in four sets to Carlos Alcaraz.

Sinner beat Casper Ruud in the quarters at last year’s Italian Open, 6-0, 6-1, and went on to lose the final to Alcaraz, who dropped out of the clay season with a wrist injury several weeks ago and, in all likelihood, will still be out when the French Open begins in a couple of weeks. Sinner will be the no. 1 seed, and Alcaraz’s absence will be mentioned, as he beat Sinner at Paris in the final last year in one of the all-time thrillers played at Roland-Garros.

However, the competition is what you find, and the luck of the draw comes in many forms.

The leading player on the women’s tour is having a poor clay season and did not get anywhere near the final at Rome, but that surely takes nothing away from the one who won.

For in fact, you can make the case that the star of the Rome show, officially the Internazionali BNL d’Italia, inaugurated in 1931 in Milan with Bill Tilden lifting the trophy, was not the 24-year old phenom from Italian Tyrol but Elina Svitolina, the 31-year-old Ukrainian star, who won here twice prior to her marriage to France’s Gaël Monfils, motherhood and maternity leave, and the invasion of her country by Russian armies.

Winner in 2017 and 2018, Miss Svitolina played her last three matches this year against higher seeds, needing three sets each time and each time taking the first set with superior offensive play, dropping the second as her opponents — Elena Rybakina, Iga Świątek, and Coco Gauff — upped their own offensive games, and fighting through the deciding third set with tenacity, precision, and superior defense, as shown by repeated breaks of their service games. (RELATED: The Australian Open and the Politics of Words)

Precision and defense characterize Miss Svitolina’s game; at five-eleven, swift and agile, she is quite capable of slugging it out with the big hitters of the women’s tour, but you will also see her using more varied tactics than many other women these days, most spectacularly her elegantly constructed winners from cross-court shots and approaches to the net.

Like any athlete, Elina Svitolina savors her triumphs; she never forgets, either, that she represents a country that is fighting for its survival. The Svitolina family’s hometown of Kharkiv — actually a large city, practically within sight of the Russian border in Ukraine’s northeast — has been bombed not quite to rubble.

The Ukrainian people’s determined stand shows why one cannot reproach the Ukrainian tennis players for refusing to shake hands with Russian opponents at the conclusion of a match, in violation of a time-honored tennis tradition. Sports should stay out of war and politics, but that is easier said than done when all the men — there have been no Ukrainians on the men’s tour since the war began — are at the front.

Miss Svitolina’s compatriot, Marta Kostyuk, who led the Ukrainian charge at the Madrid Masters during the previous fortnight, fully endorses the icy demeanor. Miss Kostyuk, 24, beat Russian teen phenom Mirra Andreeva in the final and did not offer a handshake, any more than she had Anastasia Potapova in the semis. Mirra Andreeva lives in France. Miss Potapova plays under the Austrian flag, having expat’ed and naturalized to Austria recently, but the Ukrainians take a severe line on this, saying the expats must publicly denounce the Russian aggression.

Russian players cannot be held responsible for the regime running their country (or leading it to perdition, according to one’s viewpoint); many are expats. Few, if any, criticize the war: doing so carries heavy risks for family members who remain in Russia. Before blaming them for quiescent attitudes, ask what you would do in their position. In truth, it is not clear why sports establishments (including the International Olympic Committee) do not permit Russians to represent their country: they compete as “no-flags.” What does that accomplish? Still, the Ukrainian women’s cold shoulders can be seen as a dignified way to remind spectators that after the show, they, living in freedom and peace, might appreciate their comfort and security, perchance consider how they can share it. After all, they can speak out, pressure their own government, donate to rescue organizations. More do, indeed, than is widely assumed, just as many people, in person and in kind, contribute to the Israeli cause.

There have been no Israeli players — men or women — on the tour since the wars began in 2023, a point few reporters seem to notice.

The current top player on the women’s tour, Aryna Sabalenka, who won the Sunshine Double Masters (Indian Wells and Miami) but has been uneven thus far on clay, is from Minsk, the capital of Russia-allied Belarus. Her position is not to respond to any questions about the war or to make an issue of handshakes or flags.

On the other hand, she has criticized the Slam circuit for its payment policy, which she says is unfair to players. She and others who have seconded her criticism say that at the four Slams, each of which is a big money-maker, the players get a considerably lower percentage of the gross than do, for example, NBA players.

There may be something to this, notwithstanding the structures of the NBA or NFL and the Slam circuit are completely dissimilar, but when winning the French or U.S. Open brings you five million dollars, a neat sum in these inflation-plagued times, and when losing in the first round brings you enough money to keep pursuing your chosen dream (or at least your chosen career), the complaint begins to emit the stench of greed.

Now, greed in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing economically, for remember, “’tis not from benevolence the baker bakes your bread, etc,” but still, that’s a lot of bread and greed as opposed to striving for the old uplift and betterment, well, you know what I mean. Elina Svitolina, for her part — and she is one of the bigger winners in career prize boodle — puts a lot of her dough into a foundation that helps kids, wounded war veterans, and much else. Aryna Sabalenka (one of last year’s five-millionaires at Flushing Meadows) does not have a foundation, but she is known for her charitable profligacy, to the benefit of orphans, health initiatives, and other projects. Coco Gauff, who is among the players who seconded Miss Sabalenka’s complaints about prize money, has a major foundation that supports youth sports in underserved neighborhoods as well as colleges like Howard University that historically have predominantly enrolled black students, most of whom are not trust fund babies like all those white kids at Harvard and Dartmouth. Haha, just kidding, I know every student at every Ivy is there strictly on merit.

The fact is, once you get into this, you realize most tennis players who have reached the comfort stage in prize and endorsement earnings have either established foundations or are active in philanthropic gift-giving. Roger Federer has a tennis-and-education foundation that focuses largely on African countries. Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf are famous for their school-building initiatives. Jannik Sinner, young as he is, already has established a foundation to help kids in need.

Some will say this is due to the tax laws. To which I reply, damn straight! The best thing the tax laws can do is reverse the trend (at least in the U.S.) to make it more difficult to reduce your tax burden by means of your own philanthropy. The money is much better spent by Andre Agassi’s charter schools than by the U.S. Department of Education

Moreover, you have to keep in mind the Slam circuit is not run by sports venture capitalists like Larry Ellison (owner of Indian Wells, the first of the Sunshine Double masters), but by philanthropies, such as the USTA or the FFT or Tennis Australia (Wimbledon is a private club, but the tournament is owned by a charity). I say more power to people like Larry Ellison, and I am also aware that top execs at the tennis federations, including ours, are accused of demanding excessive compensation for themselves.

Maybe if they did not pay themselves well, the players would not demand ever higher purses? I allow that’s a fair notion on its face, but what you gonna do, complain at city hall? Do you know who the mayor of New York City is? A comrade of the fellow just won the Paris city hall. As to Melbourne and London, go figure how you are going to get them to argue with their local nonprofit grifters, including in sports — if that is what they are. But are they?

Execs expect the wages they figure they can get; why shouldn’t players? The way things are going, the high wages earned by sporting establishment types and top players, which have reached peaks undreamt of in the days of Pancho Gonzalez, Mickey Mantle, and Frank Gifford, and even far more recent champions, are causing ticket inflation. This year, already, you cannot get seats to watch tennis tournaments without spending the month’s grocery money. Baseball, football, since we mention Mantle and Gifford, maybe, but that is because their stadia are much bigger and there must be at least some affordable — to use a fashionable term — seats, though it is not sure how much you can see from them, and then keep in mind you might still get hit by a hundred-dollar hot dog.

In the normal order of things, assuming we remain a free republic and not an oligarchy of greed, professional sports will price themselves out of competition with, say, high school or college baseball and neighborhood tournaments such as the one recently held a few streets away from where I am sitting, and where, for a donation, you could get a hat. You couldn’t get a seat because there was no room to set up more than a few benches and chairs near the courts. So you enjoyed the nice day in the park. The donations might, or might not, go toward resurfacing them, depending on how the neighborhood civic leaders decide to use them. These civic leaders are called the Friends of Rose Park, and they are pro bono. They might also want to improve the nearby baseball diamond on which under-12’s learn to play baseball, which, as American kids, it is their birthright. The tennis was excellent. It was not at Elina Svitolina’s level, but it was fine. And she got the best reward, a note from her other half:

“What a season, what a week, what a player,” wrote Gael Monfils on a communication gadget called Instagram. “But above all, what a woman. An incredible mom to Skai, an exceptional athlete, a soul like no other. I’m so proud of you, my love. Of your strength, your calm, of everything you carry quietly day after day. You inspire me, every single day. Enjoy this, soak it all in. You deserve every second of it. I love you.”

Now there’s a prize.

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