Three of the four men’s main-draw wild cards the Cincinnati Open awarded Friday went to players who will not be back, giving next month’s Masters 1000 event a farewell-tour subplot underneath one of the strongest fields on the calendar.
Grigor Dimitrov, Stan Wawrinka, Jack Draper and Gael Monfils were granted direct entry into the singles draw, which begins main-draw play Aug. 13 at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio. Wawrinka and Monfils are each competing in the final season of their careers. So is Kei Nishikori, who was handed one of five qualifying wild cards for the two-round qualifying event on Aug. 11 and 12.
Wawrinka, 41, will make his 15th appearance at the tournament and his first since 2024. The Swiss won three major titles and reached a career high of world No. 3, and he has spent 2026 collecting the kind of ceremonial invitations that tend to follow a retiring champion around the calendar. Monfils, 39, announced last October that this season would be his last. Cincinnati will be his 14th and final visit, to a tournament that produced one of the most memorable results of his late career.
Dimitrov is the only former champion in the group. The Bulgarian won the 2017 title at Mason for what remains the lone ATP Masters 1000 trophy of his career, beating Nick Kyrgios in the final. He has spent much of this season working back toward the level that once carried him to world No. 3.
Draper is the outlier in a batch otherwise defined by long careers winding down. The 24-year-old Briton is making only his second appearance in Cincinnati after reaching the quarterfinals on debut in 2024, and he owns a Masters 1000 title of his own from Indian Wells in 2025. A left-arm injury has cost him most of the past several months and dropped his ranking well outside the range that would earn direct entry, leaving him dependent on tournament invitations to rebuild before New York. He also holds a main-draw wild card in Montreal, and withdrew from last week’s Mubadala DC Open.
The qualifying wild cards lean American. Nishikori, 36, the 2014 US Open runner-up and a former world No. 4, will play the tournament for the last time. Mackenzie McDonald, the former NCAA singles champion at UCLA, makes his fifth Cincinnati appearance after reaching the round of 16 in 2023. Darwin Blanch, an 18-year-old American who won his first Masters 1000 match in Miami earlier this year, will make his tournament debut.
The last two spots went to local players. J.J. Wolf, a Cincinnati Country Day product who reached a career-high No. 39 in 2023, has been rebuilding through Challenger events after shoulder trouble kept him off the tour for more than a year. He has yet to win a main-draw match at his hometown event. Vignesh Gogineni, from nearby Mason High School, was a three-time all-Ohio selection who won a state singles title as a senior in 2022 on the same site.
The wild card announcement lands with the Cincinnati field already close to complete. Carlos Alcaraz is entered as the defending champion and is targeting the tournament as his first competitive event since April, when a right wrist injury ended his clay season and cost him the French Open and Wimbledon. Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic are both in, with Djokovic returning to Mason for the first time since 2023 after skipping Montreal.
That combination gives Cincinnati something the Canadian Open could not assemble. The Masters 1000 event in Montreal lost Sinner and Djokovic to withdrawals a week before its start and never had Alcaraz on its entry list at all. Cincinnati closes out the Masters calendar before the US Open, where main-draw play begins Aug. 30 in Flushing Meadows.
For Wawrinka, Monfils and Nishikori, the two weeks in Ohio represent one of the last chances American crowds will get. All three built significant chapters of their careers on North American hard courts, and all three will be gone before the swing comes back around next summer.
