The most famous woman in men’s tennis

In Toronto, one of several women who approached Riddle between Fritz’s sets thrust out her wrist, flashing her Lottie racquet bracelet.

This lifestyle is not one Riddle could have imagined for herself three years ago, when she didn’t even know the rules of tennis.

“I genuinely did not have any friends who were interested in tennis, I had no friends who watched tennis, I had no friends who played or wore cute tennis clothing,” says Riddle, who still does not regularly play tennis. She does, however, watch a lot of tennis now, and wear a lot of cute tennis clothing.

‘She’s got a plan’

“I’ll be honest, I was very apprehensive,” says Grace Barber, a senior producer at Whisper, the sports production company that created Riddle’s fashion series for Wimbledon. Barber knew little about Riddle before being assigned to produce Wimbledon Threads.

“I just assumed that because she’s, like, really hot and got loads of followers and is Taylor’s girlfriend, she’s basically coasting,” says Barber, who used the phrase “train wreck” to describe her expectations for the project. She was wrong, she says: Barber found Riddle to be hardworking, funny and self-aware while filming the series, which largely consists of interviews with attendees describing their outfits.

“She’s got a really clear directive, creatively, of where she wants to go,” she says. “She’s got a plan.”

The series has already been commissioned for next year’s Wimbledon, provided that “he’s still playing and she still wants to do it,” Barber says. In July, after Fritz was eliminated in the tournament’s second (of seven) rounds, the production sped up its timeline, conscious of avoiding online criticism over why Fritz’s girlfriend was still working at Wimbledon when he was not.

And here is where things can get complicated: in the tennis world, at least, Riddle’s exposure is still partly tied to her boyfriend’s success.

Many fans who take selfies with Riddle know her from Break Point, the Netflix series that follows the highs and lows of several rising tennis stars. On the show, Riddle cheers for Fritz in full preppy, doll-like glam – and, slightly less glamorously, eats take-away with him in their hotel bed – while his story line devolves from a great victory over Rafael Nadal in Indian Wells, California, in 2022, to a surprising defeat in the first round of the US Open later that year.

Fritz has since failed to advance past the third round of any grand slam tournament. As such, the Break Point crew hasn’t spent much time with the couple for the scheduled second season, Riddle says. It’s her understanding they won’t be featured again unless he has a big win.

Netflix aside, the difference between winning grand slams and not can be financially stark – even for top players such as Fritz, who has already earned $US12.9 million ($20 million) in prize money throughout his career, along with sponsorships from Nike and Rolex. According to Forbes, winning the US Open in 2021 translated to $US18 million in endorsements the next year for Emma Raducanu, who now models for Dior. After Carlos Alcaraz won his US Open title last year, he signed high-profile deals with Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton.

Still, Riddle has prioritised financial independence in a way not all WAGs do. Barber, who is the wife of a professional golfer, says she had seen younger women set aside their career goals, tempted by the lifestyle of financially supported world travel.

“For the first year or so, it’s like a fairytale,” says Barber, who is now in her late 30s. “But it’s not your dream. You want to be supportive to the person you love, but you know how quickly time passes, and suddenly it’s been 10 years and you have no career of your own and you’re bored of living out of a suitcase.”

Riddle has found a way not to be bored – funnelling most of her creative energy into a YouTube channel she started this year for longer form vlogs – while also supporting herself. Her income from one TikTok is about five times what she made in a month at her previous 9-to-5 job, she said. (She was formerly a media director for an organisation that brought video games into children’s hospitals.)

“I’m really happy with what I’m doing, and I’m making good money,” she says. “People are allowed to make all the judgments they want. A lot of times people have assumptions about me, but then they watch my YouTube, or they listen to me on a podcast, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I was wrong’.”

‘Not a bad deal’

Riddle and Fritz met in Los Angeles in 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, on the private dating app Raya.

At first, Riddle did not try particularly hard with Fritz, she says. On their first date she suggested they watch Midsommar, a fairly disturbing film she had already seen. She loves horror movies and figured that if he couldn’t handle some gory Swedish strangeness, they weren’t a good match. (In turn, he later got her to watch anime.)

Riddle had just moved to California earlier that year and was living adjacent to influencers, having befriended members of the Hype House, but she wasn’t yet one herself. She had been raised in Minnesota by a public radio executive and a guided tour fisherman, and had studied English at Wagner College on Staten Island in New York.

Fritz grew up near San Diego, born to two tennis players. (His mother, Kathy May, was ranked 10th in the world in 1977.) He joined the professional tour at age 17 after winning the junior US Open. Fritz had grown up fast: by the time he met Riddle, at 22, he had already been married, fathered a child and got a divorce. But because of COVID-19, he was, for the first time in his career, on an extended break from tennis.

Fritz knew his nomadic life would eventually resume, so he broke it down for her.

“I prefaced it,” Fritz says, sitting in their hotel room in New York, the week before the US Open. “I was like: ‘Look, this is not how it’s going to be. I don’t have this free time. I’m going to be travelling, like, every single week’. But I also said, ‘You know, it’s not a bad deal – you can travel all over the world, if you’re up for it’.” She liked the deal. And he liked having her around. They moved in together after dating for just a few weeks.

“She’s very on me about eating healthy, getting lots of sleep,” says Fritz, who seems shy off court, but like many players, talks a lot to himself and his team while on court. “It’s the little things that create a healthy routine for me, and that helps me perform better.”

When they met, he was ranked 24th. Now he is ranked ninth. But Riddle knows how ugly her DMs and comments section – already a place where she is denigrated by some fans for dressing up at matches, selling tennis merch and generally having opinions about the sport – would become if those numbers were reversed.

“If his ranking had gone down, they’d say it’s my fault,” says Riddle, who sometimes wears an evil-eye bracelet on her wrist, given to her by Lilly Russell, the wife of one of Fritz’s coaches, who travels with the team and “knows how much” she takes online.

Power couple

“Power couple,” read the caption on a photo of Riddle and Fritz as they walked around Wimbledon in June. Earlier that month, they both became memes after a Paris crowd loudly booed Fritz, who had just beaten a French player. He shushed them with a finger to his lips, like a kindergarten teacher; Riddle was seen smiling devilishly behind her pink camera.

She knows she is always being watched. But she is also always watching, able to sense when Fritz needs encouragement, while also keeping her cool during tense moments. Most cameras can’t see when her knee is bouncing.

“The only time I really get nervous is when I see him getting nervous,” Riddle says. She knows his tells, like looking at his nails or fiddling with his racket strings. He doesn’t often smash rackets – a stereotype of frustrated players – but when he does, he’ll break them over his knee. The first time Riddle saw it happen, “I was like, ‘This guy is psycho’.”

Tournaments can be chic; sometimes there are champagne tents and Ralph Lauren-decorated suites and celebrities sitting courtside. During the US Open, Fritz and Riddle stay at the posh, wellness-oriented Equinox Hotel New York – he has a partnership with the hotel – and take a Blade helicopter to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre in Queens.

But sometimes they are indescribably boring. On Fritz’s final day in Toronto, Riddle and I spend a full hour watching a court be dried, inch by inch, by vacuum-like machines after a rainstorm. The day before, we were being sunburnt. Now it is windy and chilly, and Riddle texts Fritz, who is waiting out the delay in the locker room, to ask to borrow a jacket. She hopes it isn’t ugly, she says.

“Welcome to the glamorous life of being a WAG.”

At one point during the delay, Riddle considers greeting Alex de Minaur as he quickly passes by but decides against it. De Minaur, the top-ranked Australian player in the world, is playing Fritz later that day – a match de Minaur would win. I thought of this moment later, when a couple of tournament regulars described tennis WAGs to me as “political wives,” diplomatically representing their partners around the grounds.

But Riddle had become a kind of ambassador for the sport, too. Her behind-the-scenes explainer content is a gateway drug for some people, like Jaiden McDonald, the young woman who approached Riddle with her mother in the grandstand. Within a few months of seeing Fritz and Riddle for the first time, she went from ambivalence towards tennis to making a PowerPoint presentation of her US Open predictions. She watches Riddle’s YouTube videos every single week.

During the rain delay, I search Riddle’s name on X, formerly known as Twitter, and find fan art of her and Fritz as Barbie and Ken. It isn’t the first time she has seen the comparison.

Riddle, who has a Barbie-themed iPhone case, has decided to lean into it: when Fritz appeared on a magazine cover in July, Riddle commented “hi ken!” on his Instagram.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.