The Cincinnati Open draw ceremony was set for 3 p.m. Tuesday, and the bracket that comes out of it will set the terms of the next 10 days. By then, the tournament had already been playing tennis for four and a half hours. Qualifying opened at 10:30 a.m. at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio, out on the side courts, with the last places in the field still unclaimed.
Qualifying runs Tuesday and Wednesday. The men who come through it join a 96-player main draw that begins Thursday and finishes Aug. 23, the last Masters 1000 of the North American hard-court swing and the final significant tune-up before the US Open. Qualifying is the least glamorous part of a tournament and, most weeks, the part with the most riding on it: two matches in two days, no seeding protection, and a main-draw place at the end of it. The Cincinnati Open has been staging it since 1899.
The tournament handed out five wild cards into that qualifying draw, and they are a different species from the four it gave the main draw. Grigor Dimitrov, Stan Wawrinka, Jack Draper and Gael Monfils were given direct entry — a former champion, two farewell tours and a comeback. The qualifying invitations, as they appear on the draw sheet, went to JJ Wolf, Kei Nishikori, Darwin Blanch, Vignesh Gogineni and Trevor Svajda. Between them they hold one Grand Slam final, one Ohio high school state title, two Ohio addresses and a great deal still to prove.
Wolf arrives in the strangest position of the five. He leads the USTA’s US Open Wild Card Challenge by 87 points over Michael Zheng after winning the Challenger 125 in Vancouver, which puts him one good week from a main-draw place at Flushing Meadows on merit rather than invitation. The men’s Challenge closes Aug. 16, so there is one counting week left. It is not this one. Cincinnati’s results are excluded from the Challenge for both fields, which means that whatever Wolf does over the next two days at the biggest tournament he will play all summer, it cannot move him a single point toward New York.
It can move him in every other way. Wolf is from Cincinnati, a Cincinnati Country Day School graduate and a former Ohio State standout who was Big Ten player of the year as a junior. He has twice reached the third round of the US Open and was ranked inside the top 40 as recently as 2023. A man playing qualifying 20 minutes from where he learned the game does not need a points table to explain why the week matters.
Gogineni is the other local, and his claim is nearer still. He won the Ohio high school state singles title in 2022 after reaching the final in each of the two previous years, and he helped Mason High School to the team title in 2019. Mason is where the Lindner Family Tennis Center sits. He graduated from Yale, where he earned All-Ivy honors playing No. 1 singles, and at 22 he was trying to qualify for a Masters 1000 in his hometown. It did not last. Otto Virtanen, seeded 19th in qualifying, beat him 6-3, 6-1 on Tuesday.
Nishikori’s entry is the one that should give people pause. He is 36, a former world No. 4 and the 2014 US Open finalist, and he will retire at the end of the season. This is his last Cincinnati Open, and he is playing it in qualifying — the same two-day scramble he would have skipped without a thought a decade ago. Wawrinka and Monfils, both also in their final seasons, were given the main draw. Nishikori was given the side courts.
The rest are less sentimental and no less interesting. Blanch is 18, won his first Masters 1000 match in Miami this year by beating Jan-Lennard Struff, and would be making his Cincinnati debut if he comes through Wednesday; he opens against 12th seed Aleksandar Vukic. Svajda drew the hardest assignment of the group in seventh seed Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. Wolf plays alternate Shintaro Mochizuki, and Nishikori meets 14th seed Francisco Comesana. Mackenzie McDonald, a former NCAA singles champion at UCLA making his fifth appearance here, is in the same draw without a wild card beside his name.
What none of them will say out loud is that a qualifying place is worth more here this year than it usually is. The field has been thinned badly: Jannik Sinner is out with a knee injury, Carlos Alcaraz is still not fit and is looking at Winston-Salem instead, and the seedings behind them were settled before the Canadian Open finished. A man who wins two matches on an outside court Wednesday afternoon walks into a draw with real holes in it, at the last event before a Grand Slam, in front of the biggest crowd he will see all year. That is the whole argument for qualifying, and it is why it starts before the ceremony does.
