Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge
I’d been promised the future of tennis was in the desert.
From the stands of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched as the eighth seed, Abdullah Shelbayh, was given the most dramatic of entrances. Inside one of the stadiums in King Abdullah Sports City, which features a sprawl of soccer fields and indoor arenas across nearly 4 million square meters, an announcer summoned a brief list of the player’s accomplishments, first in Arabic and then in English. The music swelled. Bright white lasers illuminated the lines of the court before the screen at the other end of the stadium opened up to reveal a player tunnel, from which Shelbayh emerged, looking awkward and confused as spotlights swirled around him and the volume of…
