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The tennis court is Fritz’s business. Everywhere else, though, is his girlfriend’s zone. Riddle has risen alongside Fritz in the five years since they started dating, becoming a public figure in every realm of their lives outside of the white lines. She is strikingly styled in his box during matches, and her presence invites frequent check-ins from the broadcast cameras. On the grounds of tournaments, she gamely greets the so-called tennis girlies who approach her to confess their adoration. She hosts free local Pilates classes in the week leading up to major tournaments. (“Usually, they book out in, like, 30 seconds,” she tells me.) Riddle films content for TikTok and Instagram in the players’ lounges, appraises local hotels, explores the restaurant scene in tournament cities, and gives previews of new merchandise available for sale at the tournament gift shops. When she went to the Italian Open in Rome this year, she used it as an opportunity to give her YouTube subscribers a pocket history of the papal conclave. For the past three years, the All England Club has contracted her to make a series of fashion videos for the Wimbledon tournament, and at the US Open, she works with Grey Goose to promote the Honey Deuce, the brand’s signature US Open cocktail. So Riddle, too, experiences an excess of professional pressure when she arrives at a Grand Slam tournament. She is one of the sport’s biggest ambassadors, speaking directly to all those millions of untapped potential fans who don’t know the scoring conventions of tiebreaks but think that tennis skirts are fun. And she’s in high--performance mode. Last night, her flight from LA, where the two share a home, was delayed eight hours because of a plane-refueling issue, but she bears no trace of post-travel harriedness. Her platinum hair is blown out to perfection and drawn into a meticulous ponytail, her makeup is just so, and her navy-and-white checked puff-sleeve minidress is wrinkle-free. As she settles onto the couch in the lounge of their oversized hotel suite, she holds a posture taut enough to please a Victorian. She apologizes for the mess in the room, of which there is virtually none. Riddle is one of those vigilant travelers who likes to unpack the moment she arrives. At the top of her to-do list for the evening is calling down to reception to request 30 clothes hangers. When Fritz ambles into the room, the contrast between the two is striking. He is six feet five inches of pure lank, and moves with a boyish slouch. He has a teenage mumbliness that seems impenetrable at first, but when he’s talking about any number of his preferred subjects—Japan, video games, anime, his strategies for feeling confident during a tournament—he lights up. “Look at that outfit,” Riddle squeals proudly as he flops down next to her, assessing his matching tracksuit. “I like the sage green. I hadn’t seen that color before,” she tells him. “It’s decent,” he admits. “We’re very opposite,” she says. “The devil couldn’t reach me, so he gave me a type-B boyfriend.” It is tempting to assume that an influencer girlfriend filming reels and perfecting her contouring routine in the background of the elite-athlete grind would present a serious distraction for someone in Fritz’s position. But Riddle takes her job as Fritz’s partner just as seriously as she takes her brand partnerships, and she imbues his life on the road with an added layer of discipline. Fritz, who was raised outside of San Diego, is on the road 35 weeks a year, and she is with him the majority of that time. When she is there, Fritz sticks to early bedtimes and healthy eating. “Sometimes I can do that on my own; sometimes I can’t,” he says. “I think we were on a long stretch of feeling like Morgan needs to be with me to have a good result. And then this year, I had a couple of solid weeks by myself,” he says. “You did!” Riddle says. Because of her appearance and her role as a WAG, Riddle is sometimes dismissed as an interloper, but her proximity to Fritz and the game has instilled in her an obvious passion for tennis and an eagle-eyed understanding of her boyfriend’s style of play. She is invested in his success out of love—and the more he wins, the more her following grows. Fritz was scheduled to play matches in the US Open’s revamped mixed-doubles format. With his massive serve and powerful baseline game, he is not that fond of doubles, but he enjoys it as a warm-up to the main event. “It gets the competitive juices flowing,” he says. “I think doubles helps him work on his net game too,” Riddle adds. “My net game sucks,” Fritz admits. “That’s the thing,” Riddle reminds him. “It helps you practice.” Plenty of professional athletes end up with influencer girlfriends—Instagram is a highly effective dating app for overscheduled superstars who live on the road most of the year. Fritz and Riddle’s relationship doesn’t fit neatly into this cliché, though. When the pair met, Riddle—a Minneapolis native with an English degree from Staten Island’s Wagner College—was working as a media director at a video game nonprofit. Fritz, meanwhile, had already been married and had a child while still a teenager. (He and his ex-wife divorced in 2019, when he was just 22 years old.) In 2020, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Riddle received a message on Raya. “He said, ‘Hi, gorgeous,’ ” she remembers. Fritz looks sheepish as she recounts this. “No, I didn’t say, ‘Hi, gorgeous,’ ” he says. Riddle corrects the record. “He said, ‘Hi, you’re gorgeous.’ ” She’d never followed tennis and had no idea who he was. After a bit of back-and-forth, she agreed to a date, and suggested an activity: She wanted him to watch Ari Aster’s Midsommar with her. “I think he’s still traumatized from it,” she says. “I’m a big horror-movie buff.” As the pair got more serious and the ATP Tour resumed its schedule after a pandemic hiatus, Riddle joined Fritz on the road while keeping her nine-to-five job, taking advantage of the remote-work boom. The strain of the arrangement eventually prompted her to quit her job after two years. But rather than look for another remote nine-to-five, she decided she would turn her life as a tennis girlfriend into its own kind of career. She announced in one early video, “Okay, my boyfriend’s playing in the Australian Open today; I need to pick out an outfit.” By the morning, the video had 1 million views. “Right from the jump, it was like: Here’s my life dating a tennis player. This is what it’s like traveling the world 35 weeks out of the year,” she says. “Tennis WAGs in the past were relatively private,” she says. “Not only WAGs, but players too—the travel, the hotels, the players’ lounges, it was very walled off to everyone. All those private spaces were really private, and I started blasting them on TikTok. People were interested in it.” One of her earliest clips, posted on TikTok in 2021, seized on the aspirational glamour invoked by the worlds of WAGdom and tennis. It was Riddle sipping from a chalice, soundtracked by Britney Spears’s “Lucky” and overlaid with text that confirmed that, yes, her life was fabulous: “when you start dating a professional tennis player and literally all you do is travel the world, dress cute, drink champagne and go to tennis matches,” the text read. Fritz was on board with the plan immediately. He’d seen how difficult it was to work a normal job while traveling, but he also didn’t want her to be bored and aimless out on tour with him. Riddle’s new business as a tennis-adjacent content creator solved a number of problems at the heart of any pro athlete’s relationship. “I’d much rather have Morgan travel with me and do what she’s doing: one, push the sport of tennis, and two, make money doing it,” he says. “At least she’s making something of…” “The cards I was dealt,” Riddle says. Then she puts the arrangement in refreshingly plainspoken terms: “Might as well capitalize on it.” “Morgan knows not to do anything that could be a distraction to what I’m doing,” he says. These boundaries don’t preclude Riddle from engaging in light trolling, or touching third rails in the tennis world. When Fritz played Alexander Zverev at Wimbledon in 2024, Riddle posted a photo of her boyfriend on Instagram and encouraged her followers: “cheer loud ladies.” It was understood to be a subtle allusion to Zverev’s trail of domestic-abuse allegations, a subject about which tennis governing bodies and announcers have been curiously quiet. Though her posts garnered so much attention that she later felt compelled to take them down, Fritz triumphed on the court, coming back from a two-set deficit to defeat the fourth-ranked Zverev. (Zverev complained about the excessive cheering from Fritz’s box.) “Sometimes,” Fritz says, “if it’s not a distraction, she’ll ask me to do some kind of trend. Most of the time, I’ll be like, ‘That’s kind of cringe. I don’t want to do it.’ ” “He won’t lip-synch for a video,” Riddle says. “That’s his number one rule.” “Nooooo chance. I will see that everywhere on social media.” Fritz is under enormous pressure to build his own personal brand, but it doesn’t come as naturally to him as it does to Riddle. “The social media part is something that causes me a good amount of stress, because I’m pretty lazy,” he says. “I feel bad about not doing as well as I can on TikTok or posting stories, stuff like that. It’s tough because in order to have really good content, you have to be thinking about it a lot, and putting a good amount of time into that.” The tour itself has built-in limitations. “A lot of the tournaments are saying, ‘You either have to have won a Slam or have 1 or 2 million followers to even be allowed a videographer on tour, which I think is absurd,” Fritz says. Only a small handful of active tennis players have met this criteria, like Carlos Alcaraz, who starred in his own Netflix documentary series at the age of 21. “How are you ever going to have a million followers if you don’t have someone capturing decent content to build your brand?” Fritz wonders. “I’ve gotten multiple copyright strikes against my account when I post videos of him,” Riddle says. “In the last three years, the tournaments and the tour have gotten really strict with where you can film and where you can’t. I’m not allowed to have a camera in the box anymore, whereas a couple of years ago, none of those rules were in place.” “The people who make those decisions are thinking one way,” Riddle says, “and I’m thinking, Okay, think about the fan girls, the people who create memes. That’s what builds a cult following in a sport. It’s frustrating, and it’s archaic.” Over the past five years, the content-industrial complex has dramatically shifted focus away from scoreboards of various sports and onto its peripheral lifestyle elements. A vast collection of juicy, reality-television--adjacent Netflix docuseries have drawn in new crowds of casual fans, generating cults of personality and branding opportunities for athletes in the worlds of Formula 1, golf, football, surfing, tennis, basketball, and soccer. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, has tilted the drama in the NFL away from the field and toward the spectator suites during broadcasts. When Netflix began filming Break Point, its documentary series about tennis modeled after the breakout success of Drive to Survive, the producers made a canny decision to give players’ personal lives nearly as much airtime as their on-court dramas. Spouses and partners were even recruited as talking heads in the episodes, Riddle among them. “I didn’t know they wanted to use WAGs until they showed up to the hotel room with cameras, and I happened to be there,” Riddle says. “I do think that partners on tour have a big impact, and they’re part of the team, so it’s nice to be recognized for that.” That season, 2022, the Netflix crew was following Fritz during the biggest win of his career, at Indian Wells, an ATP 1000 event that is sometimes described as the “fifth Grand Slam.” At the tournament, Fritz defeated Rafael Nadal despite having suffered a potentially season-threatening injury the day before. Riddle, a content strategist to her core, recognized that she and Netflix shared the same goals. When she set out to formalize her WAG-fluencing, she had an objective beyond capturing her best angles or telling followers where to get the best iced matcha in Miami. “I started making content with the mission to bring young people to tennis,” Riddle says. “I know a lot of people who are kind of on TikTok, and the younger generation really doesn’t follow tennis.” Another early video was a 90-second explainer about the structure of the ATP Tour, in which she argues that tennis is relatively “unknown” and “uncool.” This was a contentious assertion that drew the ire of tennis fans, who flooded her comments with remarks like: “Uncool and unknown? Girl, have you been living under a rock?” The backlash was great enough that Fritz broke form and waded into the comments himself. “For anyone disagreeing with the fact it’s ‘relatively uncool in USA’ let me know how often tennis is talked abt on sportscenter or espn,” he wrote. It is one thing for a fashion influencer to deem a professional sport “unknown”; it’s another thing for one of its top competitors to assert the stark reality. Fritz was born in the San Diego area to two former tennis pros who thrust him into the sport early in his life. He had no sincere fantasy of becoming a pro tennis player, and continued to compete in a variety of different sports until high school. Tennis was the one that stuck. Anyone who argues that tennis holds a serious place in the average American household is “in denial,” Fritz tells me. “To be honest with myself, I didn’t even like to watch tennis that much growing up. I just played. Playing tennis, I broke probably every record possible in high school tennis during my freshman year. Nobody cares. Tennis was not cool at all.” Break Point wouldn’t become the smash success Netflix hoped it would, and the streamer canceled it after two seasons. Fritz explains that the show failed in part because the producers couldn’t get adequate access to players and match footage. “The tour tried to give Netflix the best access they could, but at the end of the day, they couldn’t go in the locker rooms. There’s lots of stuff going on there,” says Fritz. “It was tougher at the Slams than at the other tournaments. The players also don’t want the cameras to be on them all the time.” “There are these more private, uppity connotations around tennis. With the F1 show, the drama is aired out,” Riddle adds. “In tennis, it’s not in the zeitgeist of the sport. I don’t think the show was able to pull that sort of energy—there were a number of blockages that made it difficult for that production team.” Still, the show was a boon for both Fritz’s and Riddle’s personal followings. After its first season aired, Fritz didn’t detect an uptick in tournament attendance so much as a newfound notoriety on the street. “What I would notice was people coming up to me who recognized me not as a tennis player but as the guy who was on the TV show,” he says. “I thought that was different.” In this way, Fritz says, “I think we’re moving in the right direction.” “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. “There’s a lot of stuff to look forward to that we can’t do now, that we’ll be able to do once I’m retired,” Fritz says. This offseason, they have an epic tour of Japan planned. Fritz is an anime obsessive, and he recently persuaded Riddle to watch Attack on Titan in full. “She got me to watch horror movies, and I got her to watch anime,” he says. “Would you say that Attack on Titan is one of the best shows you’ve ever watched?” The couple are already in talks about where they’ll live in retirement—whether it’ll be LA or Miami. For now, much is still determined by Fritz’s son, who lives near LA. Fritz has a wistful desire to pass the sport on to him. “I would love to be a tennis dad,” he says. “Planning on training WTA players,” Riddle says winkingly, alluding to her hopes for daughters. “I’m sure if…when…we have kids, they will probably play tennis,” he says. “With my son, I’ve definitely given him lessons. I’d love to be the tennis coach. But with all the travel, with tennis, I’m just not there yet.” As for his son’s regard for Dad’s game? “He’s pretty unimpressed by me being number four in the world.” Carrie Battan is a GQ correspondent. A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Courtship With Taylor Fritz and Morgan Riddle” PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Thomas Whiteside Styled by Spencer Phipps Hair by Ramsell Martinez using Bumble and Bumble Makeup by Jo Strettell using Hourglass Cosmetics Manicures by Emi Kudo using Opi Set design by Lizzie Lang at WSM of CA Produced by Helena Martel Seward
