The last stop on the ATP calendar before the US Open is a 250-level tournament played on a university campus in North Carolina, and it has become the most closely watched event of Carlos Alcaraz’s season without him having entered it.

Alcaraz came out of the Cincinnati Open on Aug. 4, ending the plan that had shaped his summer. Cincinnati was where he was to return, where he was defending a title and 1,000 ranking points, and where his team had judged the conditions and the calendar position most forgiving for a first match back. The withdrawal removed the last Masters 1000 event from the schedule and left an absence that now stretches toward four months.

He has not played a competitive match since the Barcelona Open in April, when a right wrist injury ended his week and, as it turned out, his clay and grass seasons with it. Madrid, Rome, Roland Garros, Queen’s Club, Wimbledon and Montreal all went by without him. It is the longest injury absence of his career, and it has been managed with a caution his team has never publicly wavered from.

That leaves Winston-Salem. The ATP 250 at Wake Forest University occupies the strangest slot on the calendar — qualifying begins Aug. 16, which places the tournament inside the second week of Cincinnati and directly against the run-in to New York. Its 48-player draw is built for exactly this situation. The event has long marketed its court conditions and lighting as a deliberate match for Flushing Meadows, and it survives on players who need matches more than they need rest. Andy Murray has played it. So has John Isner. So, once, has Alcaraz.

That was 2021, when he was 18 and ranked outside the top 50, and he reached the semifinals. He has not returned since. As his ranking climbed the 250s disappeared from his schedule entirely, which is what makes the current speculation notable — a player of his standing does not enter a tournament at this level unless something has gone wrong with the plan above it.

Reporting in Spain has suggested his team is weighing a wild card request for the event. Nothing has been confirmed. Alcaraz has not spoken about it, no statement has come from his camp, and the tournament has not announced him. The wild cards at Winston-Salem are typically among the last entries revealed, often in the days immediately before play, which means an answer may not arrive until the middle of the month. Until then the report is a report, and the entry lists show him in one tournament only: the US Open.

The argument for playing is straightforward enough. Arriving at a Grand Slam without a competitive match since April is close to unprecedented for a defending champion, and the first rounds in New York are best-of-five. The argument against is the wrist. Wrist injuries have a particular history in men’s tennis, and the cautionary names attached to them are significant ones. Rafael Nadal, who broke his own wrist twice, offered Alcaraz advice on the subject earlier this year that amounted to a warning against haste. A 250-level draw played six days before a major would test the joint under match conditions for the first time, with no margin if the test goes badly.

The ranking consequences run underneath all of it. Alcaraz is the defending US Open champion and has 2,000 points to protect there, on top of the 1,000 he has already surrendered by missing Cincinnati. US Open seeding is set from the rankings published Aug. 24, which is after Winston-Salem finishes and before the main draw begins on Aug. 30. Whatever he does or does not play in North Carolina, his seeding is already largely determined by the tournaments he has missed rather than the one he might add.

There is a version of this where he skips Winston-Salem, arrives in New York cold, and the draw does the rest. There is another where a small tournament in North Carolina becomes the most consequential week of his year. Neither has been chosen yet, and the people who know are not saying.

The last public appointment of Roger Federer’s American August will be televised. Tennis Channel confirmed this week that it holds exclusive United States rights to the 2026 International Tennis Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which airs live from Newport, Rhode Island, on Saturday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. The ceremony will also stream through the Tennis Channel app.

Federer enters in the player category. Mary Carillo, the former professional who became one of the most recognizable American broadcast voices in the sport, enters in the contributor category. The two form the Class of 2026.

The television plan is built around the ceremony rather than bolted onto it. An on-site edition of TC Live begins at 6 p.m. Eastern with Martina Navratilova, Prakash Amritraj and Dani Klupenger. Brett Haber opens the ceremony itself. Brad Gilbert hosts a special edition of the network’s The Big T podcast from Newport on Saturday morning. Archival Federer programming runs across Tennis Channel, Tennis Channel 2 and the app beginning Friday, Aug. 28.

The date carries more weight than it first appears. Aug. 29 is the closing day of US Open Fan Week, which runs Aug. 23 through Aug. 29 at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The US Open main draw begins the following afternoon. American viewers who have already worked out their viewing plan for the Open itself now have a fixed point the night before it starts.

Federer is already on the New York calendar four days earlier. He returns to Arthur Ashe Stadium on Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 7:30 p.m. for a one-night exhibition alongside Andy Roddick, Andre Agassi and John McEnroe. A separate ticket is required for that event, and demand pushed resale prices well beyond face value within hours of release.

Newport gives the second appearance a different register. The Hall of Fame occupies the grounds of the Newport Casino on Bellevue Avenue, where the first US National Championships were played in 1881. The ceremony takes place on the Horseshoe Court, the grass center court where inductees are formally enshrined. A player who won eight Wimbledon titles will be honored on lawn, in the place the American game started, four days after playing on the hard courts that replaced it.

The Induction Celebration runs three days, Aug. 27 through Aug. 29. A cocktail evening at the Marble House mansion opens it on the Thursday. The Hall of Fame Celebrity Pro Classic follows on Friday afternoon, with Federer scheduled to play doubles on the grass alongside other Hall of Famers and invited guests. Fame Fest runs across the Friday and Saturday on the grounds. A red-carpet pre-show and watch party, new for this year, precedes the ceremony.

Federer was elected in his first year of eligibility. He won 20 major singles titles — eight at Wimbledon, six at the Australian Open, five at the US Open and one at Roland Garros — and took five consecutive US Open titles from 2004 through 2008. His 103 tour-level singles titles rank second in the Open era behind Jimmy Connors’ 109. He spent 310 weeks at No. 1, including 237 in a row, and is one of eight men to complete a career Grand Slam in singles. He won Olympic doubles gold for Switzerland in 2008 and singles silver in 2012.

He is also the first of his generation’s defining trio to be enshrined, which gives the weekend a valedictory quality the sport has not had to sit with before. Federer has spent his retirement talking about the players who followed him rather than the record he left, and two of the four men joining him on court in New York are already in the Hall themselves.

For American viewers the practical detail is the simplest one. The New York night requires a ticket and the Newport night does not. The induction is free to watch, it starts at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on the last Saturday of August, and it is the last thing on the tennis calendar before the season’s final major begins.

Updated Aug. 10, 2026: No further withdrawals have been filed on either entry list overnight, with qualifying due to begin. The running count on this page has been reconciled: thirteen players are confirmed out, six men and seven women. Gabriel Diallo, who retired from his second-round match in Montreal with a leg injury, is not included in that figure. He has not been replaced on the men’s entry list and neither he nor Tennis Canada has confirmed a withdrawal, so he is carried here as a doubt rather than an absence.

Updated Aug. 9, 2026: Karolina Muchova is out of the women’s draw, with Simona Waltert taking her place. Muchova, the Wimbledon runner-up, underwent surgery days after that final and has not named the injury. She has said she expects to be ready for the US Open, but she will arrive in New York without a competitive hard-court match, having also missed Toronto. That takes the running total to fourteen across both fields.

Updated Aug. 9, 2026: Jannik Sinner has withdrawn from the Cincinnati Open with a right knee injury. The world No. 1 announced the decision Sunday, saying he was not ready to compete and was turning his attention to the US Open. He was runner-up here last year and has not played since winning Wimbledon on July 12. His withdrawal takes the top-ranked man out of a draw that had already lost the defending champion. Full story here.

Updated Aug. 9, 2026: Two further withdrawals have been confirmed on the entry lists. Ethan Quinn is out of the men’s draw, with Lorenzo Sonego taking the place, and Jacqueline Cristian is out of the women’s draw, replaced by Maria Timofeeva. That takes the running total to twelve across both fields.

Updated Aug. 8, 2026: Jasmine Paolini has withdrawn from the Cincinnati Open, where she was runner-up last year. She announced it herself on Instagram on Friday. Taylor Townsend has taken her place in the main draw, moving in on her ranking and returning to the tournament the wild card she had been awarded on Aug. 3.

Updated Aug. 7, 2026: Holger Rune has withdrawn from the Cincinnati Open, and Daniel Mérida moves out of qualifying into the main draw in his place. Lorenzo Sonego was next in line and has since taken Ethan Quinn’s place.

The last significant tune-up before the US Open is going ahead without a growing share of the players it was built around. Thirteen men and women have come out of the Cincinnati Open singles fields since the entry lists were published, six from the men’s draw and seven from the women’s, with Gabriel Diallo a further doubt who has not yet been replaced. The heaviest losses at the top have come on the men’s side.

Rune came out on Aug. 7. The Dane has not played a competitive match since rupturing his left Achilles tendon at the Stockholm Open in October 2025, and Cincinnati had been the last realistic staging post for a comeback before New York. He had already come out of Hamburg, Roland Garros, Queen’s, Wimbledon and Montreal while working back from surgery, each time stopping short of a firm return date. He has not set one now either. Mérida, who had been expected to play qualifying, takes the vacated place.

Until Sunday the largest absence had been the defending champion.Carlos Alcaraz withdrew on Aug. 4 with the right wrist injury that has kept him off the tour since the Barcelona Open in April. He won the title here last year when Jannik Sinner retired in the first set of the final, and he was due to defend 1,000 ranking points. Mattia Bellucci replaced him in the field. With Cincinnati gone, the ATP 250 in Winston-Salem is the only tune-up left on his calendar before New York.

Three men had already gone before Alcaraz. Alexander Bublik, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina and Sebastian Korda all came out of the men’s field, with Marton Fucsovics, Adam Walton and Valentin Royer taking their places. Korda has since had surgery. Gabriel Diallo is also expected to miss the tournament after retiring from his second-round match in Montreal with a leg injury, though Tennis Canada has not given a timeline for his return.

The women’s field has lost seven, five of them detailed below and Jacqueline Cristian and Karolina Muchova added since. Victoria Mboko and Hailey Baptiste are both out for the entire North American hard-court swing with knee injuries, Mboko with medial collateral ligament damage sustained in a fall at Queen’s Club in June and Baptiste with an anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus injury from the second round of the French Open. Tamara Korpatsch and Tatjana Maria replaced them. Jacqueline Cristian also came out, replaced by Maria Timofeeva.

The fourth is Emma Raducanu, who is recovering from a stress fracture and has also been left off the US Open entry list. Maya Joint took her place in Cincinnati.

Jasmine Paolini is the fifth. The Italian reached the final here last year and was defending 650 points. She has not played since the Wimbledon quarter-finals and had already skipped Washington and Toronto with a left foot injury. She confirmed the Cincinnati withdrawal herself on Instagram on Friday, saying the focus is on being ready for the US Open. It is mathematically possible she leaves the top 20 before New York, though that turns on results below her rather than on the withdrawal alone.

What remains is still a deep field, though the women’s draw has now lost Muchova, Paolini and Mboko. Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff, Mirra Andreeva and Iga Swiatek are all entered, with Swiatek defending the title. On the men’s side Alexander Zverev, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton are all in, and Novak Djokovic returns for the first time since winning the title in 2023.

Jack Draper is a separate case. He remains on the entry list and has not withdrawn, but his participation is in doubt after he lost his opening match in Montreal while hampered by a recurrence of the bone bruising in his left arm that had already cost him most of the first half of the season. He holds a main-draw wild card, and reports since Montreal have him returning in Cincinnati, though no statement from the player or his team has confirmed it. Until a withdrawal is filed he counts as entered, not absent.

Replacements are drawn from the alternate list in ranking order until the draw is made. Once the draw is out, a late withdrawal is filled by a lucky loser from qualifying rather than by the next alternate, which is why the identity of a replacement can change depending on how close to the draw ceremony a player pulls out. Qualifying runs Aug. 11-12 with 48 men and 48 women competing for 12 main-draw places each.

The tournament opens with Community Weekend on Aug. 8-9 at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio. The main draw begins Aug. 13 and runs through Aug. 23. The US Open main draw starts Aug. 30.

Every withdrawal at this stage carries a second consequence. Points not defended in Cincinnati come off a player’s ranking on the Monday after the tournament, and US Open seeding is set from the rankings of Aug. 24. Alcaraz and Swiatek are the two defending champions here, and only one of them is playing. This page will be updated as further withdrawals are confirmed.

The French Tennis Federation had two US Open invitations to hand out this week, and it spent the men’s one on a farewell rather than a breakthrough.

The federation announced Wednesday that Gael Monfils and Leolia Jeanjean would receive the wild cards it controls at this year’s tournament. Monfils, 39 and ranked No. 347, is retiring at the end of the season and will make an 18th and final appearance at Flushing Meadows. Jeanjean, who has spent much of the season fighting through qualifying to reach main draws, takes the women’s place. Both go directly into the main draws, without playing a qualifying match.

The places are not awarded on form alone, and they never have been. The USTA, Tennis Australia and the French federation operate a reciprocal arrangement under which each host nation receives two wild cards at the other two majors and distributes them as it chooses. Wimbledon does not participate. American players took the French places at Roland Garros in May under the same agreement. The invitations are a diplomatic instrument as much as a sporting one, and the federation is free to reward a career rather than a season.

What made this year’s choice land awkwardly at home was who else was available. Arthur Gea won the Los Cabos title on Aug. 2, beating defending champion Denis Shapovalov 6-3, 6-4 in the final after taking out Francisco Cerundolo, then ranked 20th, in the quarterfinals. It was the first tour-level title of his career, in a week he had entered with three tour-level wins to his name. The 21-year-old climbed from No. 127 to No. 82 and into the top 100 for the first time. He will still have to play qualifying in New York, as he did at the Australian Open in January.

The reason is a matter of timing rather than judgment. Entry lists for the majors close weeks before play begins, and the US Open field was built on the July 20 rankings, which set the men’s direct-entry cutoff at No. 101. Gea was outside it. His rise came a fortnight later, too late to move him onto the acceptance list, which is precisely the situation a wild card exists to correct. The federation had one to give and gave it elsewhere.

The decision was not universally welcomed in France, where the argument has been less about Monfils’ record than about what the invitation is for. A French journalist publicly questioned the choice within hours of the announcement, and the case against is straightforward: a player in the middle of the best stretch of his career now faces three extra matches in late-August heat before the tournament proper begins, while a main-draw place goes to a man ranked 265 spots below him.

The case for Monfils is not difficult to make either. He reached the semifinals in New York in 2016, the best Grand Slam result of his career alongside his run to the last four at Roland Garros in 2008, and returned to the quarterfinals in 2019, losing a five-set match to Matteo Berrettini. He has said a final appearance at the tournament was one of the goals left in a season he has already announced will be his last. He is also entered in the mixed doubles alongside his wife, Elina Svitolina, in an event rebuilt around exactly the kind of name recognition he brings.

Federations have made this trade before and will make it again. The reciprocal wild cards are the only places at a major that answer to no ranking list, and they tend to go to players whose value is measured in attendance and attention rather than points. The USTA applies the same logic in reverse each spring in Paris.

For Gea, the practical consequence is manageable but real. Qualifying at the US Open runs three rounds, and players who come through it arrive in the main draw with matches already in their legs. He has done it before, in Melbourne, where he reached the second round. He also retains a narrower route in: withdrawals from the acceptance list between now and the draw move alternates up, and the men’s field has been unsettled all summer by injuries across the North American hard-court swing.

What is not available to him is the tournament’s own discretionary pile. The USTA holds eight main-draw wild cards, one of them going each year to the winner of the US Open Wild Card Challenge, a competition open only to Americans. The rest have not been announced, and they rarely travel far from home. Main-draw play begins Aug. 30.

Felix Auger-Aliassime withdrew from his hometown Masters 1000 in Montreal on Wednesday with a back injury, and by the end of the night the National Bank Open had lost the five highest-ranked men in the world. The Canadian, seeded second and the highest-ranked man in his half of the draw, pulled out roughly two hours before his second-round match against French qualifier Titouan Droguet.

He had arrived in Montreal two weeks early and trained without difficulty until Monday, when the pain arrived suddenly. Given an extra day when his opening match slid back, he tried to warm up on Wednesday and said he “basically couldn’t serve.” The decision, he said, was not complicated to make but very difficult to accept.

He said he would undergo tests to establish how the injury develops. Nothing has been announced about Cincinnati, which begins August 13, or about the US Open, where he reached the semifinals last year. Montreal would have been his first tournament since Wimbledon and his first since ending a decade-long partnership with coach Frederic Fontang, a vacancy he has said he does not intend to fill until after New York. He entered the week at a career-high No. 4, holding the highest seeding a Canadian has ever received at the tournament in the Open era.

His exit completed a collapse at the top of the draw that had been building for weeks. Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic withdrew before the tournament began, as did Carlos Alcaraz, who has not played since April. Alexander Zverev, the top seed and the reigning French Open champion, was beaten in the second round hours earlier by Tallon Griekspoor, the world No. 69, in his first match since losing the Wimbledon final. Six of the top 10 seeds are already out.

Most of that damage arrived in a single day. Daniil Medvedev, the fourth seed, lost in straight sets to Botic van de Zandschulp in the evening session, a second Dutch upset of a top-10 player within a few hours. Taylor Fritz, the seventh seed, went out to Argentine Thiago Tirante two days after lifting the title in Washington. Flavio Cobolli and Andrey Rublev had already fallen, Rublev after holding multiple match points in the third set.

What is left is a Masters 1000 without an obvious favorite. Alex de Minaur, Jiri Lehecka and Casper Ruud are the only top-10 seeds still standing alongside Ben Shelton, who opened his title defense with a straight-sets win over fellow American Jenson Brooksby. Shelton won here a year ago for his maiden Masters 1000 title and has now taken seven consecutive matches in Canada. The draw had been read as unkind to him when it was made. It no longer looks that way.

The clearing has been unusually good for American players. Alex Michelsen beat 16th seed Francisco Cerundolo, Learner Tien came through against Gael Monfils, Tommy Paul got past Valentin Royer and Frances Tiafoe recovered a set down against Marin Cilic. Brandon Nakashima advanced in straight sets. With three weeks until the US Open main draw, a hard-court Masters has turned into an unexpected points opportunity for a group of players who rarely get one at this level.

That is the part that will register beyond Montreal. Seeding at Flushing Meadows is set on the rankings of August 24, and a Masters 1000 shedding this many contenders in its opening week redistributes points that would ordinarily be locked up by the same handful of names. For the players still in, the reward is disproportionate. For those already out, the calendar offers one more event, in Cincinnati, to arrive in New York with any form at all.

For the tournament itself, in the second year of an expanded 12-day format built on the promise of more tennis and more access to the sport’s leading players, the first week has delivered the opposite. Auger-Aliassime was the last headline act it had left. He never hit a ball.