“Taylor Swift was at his finals match last year,” Riddle says. “The Netflix show, the Challengers movie, every possible brand dropping some sort of tennis line, the tennis culture on TikTok—there’s such a pop culture moment around it. And I think all those factor into making it cooler, per se.”
“I get a lot of tennis outreach,” Riddle adds, “and a lot of brands now host suites at the site too: hair-care brands, makeup brands, lifestyle brands. Five years ago, that was not the case.”
Having a partner like Riddle allows Fritz to outsource some of these extracurricular opportunities on someone who knows what she’s doing. But he has his own expertise as well, particularly when it comes to fame: He’s been exposed to keyboard warriors since he was a teenager and endured his fair share of death threats from angry gamblers who’ve lost money on his matches. He recounts to me with an air of levity the variety of sentiments he’s gotten online: “Kill yourself”…“I hope your family dies”…“I’m going to find you,” he says. “The big lesson I’ve learned is: Who cares. Stop caring. And that’s what I kind of tell Morgan: Stop caring.”
“It’s new for me,” Riddle says. “I have people in this sport who hate seeing me on their TV screens, and I think that will always be the case,” she says. “What can you do?”
The criticism, it must be said, mostly comes from people who hate her literally because she is blond and an influencer. It’s not as if she’s getting sloppy drunk and smoking cigarettes at matches. When I invoke this image, she gets the mischievous glint of a TikToker in her eye. “That’d be iconic,” she says. “I should do that.”
The US Open ended for Fritz with a quarterfinal loss to Novak Djokovic—ushering in some downtime, a mixed blessing. Since he was a kid, Fritz has had to prioritize tennis over anything else: friendships, travel, hobbies, pets. He seldom attends friends’ weddings, and he routinely declines invites to group trips. Riddle desperately wants a Chihuahua to tote around, Elle Woods–style. As a consolation, the couple have fostered 19 kittens together since 2021—it’s one of the first things they arrange when they spend longer than a week or two at home in LA.
