The family business: Cruz Hewitt debuts where his father won, and he is far from the only one

Twenty-two years. That is how long it has been since Lleyton Hewitt won the title in Washington, and this week his son came through qualifying into the main draw of the same tournament. Cruz Hewitt is 17, ranked outside the top 600, and plays Marcos Giron in the first round. It is his first ATP main draw, and it is a smaller novelty than it sounds. The tour is thick with players whose surname arrived before they did.

The way he got there was not the stuff of legend: both of his qualifying opponents retired hurt, so he reached the main draw without finishing either match. He had earned the look three weeks earlier at Wimbledon, where he went through the boys' draw without losing a set and then lost the final to an American qualifier, Jordan Lee. He has also learned early what the name costs, in the shape of two Australian Open qualifying wildcards, two first-round exits and a running argument about why a teenager ranked that low keeps being handed them.

One result on his record says more about all of this than any of that. In Canberra, in the last week of 2024, in a first qualifying round nobody was watching, he lost to Brandon Holt, whose mother is Tracy Austin, a US Open champion at 16 and again two years later. Between the parents of the two players on court that afternoon sat four Grand Slam titles. Between the two players themselves, a place in a Challenger draw.

The rest of the tour is no different, it is just further along. Alexander Zverev, world No 2 and the Roland Garros champion in June, is the son of two Soviet players, and his older brother Mischa Zverev spent a decade on tour and reached the top 25; they met twice, once in a qualifying round when Alexander was 16 and once on the main tour four years later, and they split it. Ben Shelton is in the top 10 and travels with his coach, who is his father Bryan Shelton, a two-time winner in Newport in the early nineties. Casper Ruud is coached by his father Christian Ruud, who spent ten years on tour and reached one final, in Bastad, and lost it, while Casper has fourteen titles and three Grand Slam finals. And Petr Korda won the 1998 Australian Open, his wife Regina Rajchrtova played the women's tour, their son Sebastian Korda won Delray Beach in February, and their two daughters went into golf, where Nelly Korda has been world No 1.

The best sibling story on tour belongs to Buenos Aires. Francisco Cerundolo and Juan Manuel Cerundolo are the only brothers or sisters inside the top 50 of either tour this week, which makes their father Alejandro, a tour player long before he was their coach, the quietly most successful parent in the sport. They have met twice and Francisco won both. Greece goes three deep, with Stefanos Tsitsipas in the top 60 and his brothers Petros and Pavlos near the bottom of the top thousand, all sons of a mother who played the tour herself. Russia has two sets of sisters. Polina and Veronika Kudermetova sit within twenty places of each other just outside the top 100. The Andreevas are nowhere near each other: Mirra Andreeva won Roland Garros in June at 19 and is in the top five, while her older sister Erika is outside the top 200, though she has taken one of their two meetings.

Further down the lists the surnames get heavier than the rankings. Nicolas Jarry has had a wretched year and has dropped out of the top 700, and he is also the grandson of Jaime Fillol, the best Chilean player of his generation, a top-15 player in the mid seventies and one of the founders of the ATP, who now picks the Chile team his grandson plays in. Leo Borg has spent his whole career being asked about his father. Bjorn Borg won five straight Wimbledons and six French Opens, took his last major at 25 and was gone from the sport before he turned 27. Leo grinds around No 550 in Challengers and keeps turning up, which is its own kind of answer.

The women's list reads the same way. Elizabeth Mandlik is the daughter of Hana Mandlikova, who won four Grand Slam titles. Clara Tauson, now in the top 30, was first put on a court by her uncle Michael, who played the tour for Denmark. And Anouk Koevermans, inside the top 250 and playing full seasons, is the daughter of Mark Koevermans, who played more than 200 tour matches for the Netherlands and won a title in Athens in 1990.

None of it approaches the Williams sisters, and the strange, good thing about this summer is that both of them were still playing. Venus Williams played the grass season at 46. Serena Williams came back at Wimbledon and lost a three-setter on Centre Court, her first singles match since the 2022 US Open, four years after the sport had finished saying goodbye to her. The sisters played each other 33 times and Serena won 20 of them. Nine of those meetings were Grand Slam finals, four in consecutive majors across 2002 and 2003, a stretch in which the only thing standing between one sister and a trophy was the other one.

The families that went deepest are all a generation or more back. Three Maleeva sisters, Manuela, Katerina and Magdalena, were coached by their mother in Sofia and all three reached the top 10, which no other trio of sisters has managed. Barcelona sent out three Sanchez children: Emilio Sanchez, Javier Sanchez, who played each other a dozen times on tour with Emilio winning most of them, and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, who won four Grand Slam titles and reached No 1. The Austins put four siblings on the circuit, and in 1980 Tracy and her brother John Austin won the Wimbledon mixed doubles, the first brother and sister to win a Grand Slam title together. Marat Safin and Dinara Safina are still the only brother and sister who have both been ranked No 1. John McEnroe played his brother Patrick McEnroe three times and won all three.

Which leaves the family that is easiest to walk past. Rita Agassi played the women's tour through the late seventies, from a first match at 13 to a single title, in Erie in 1981, before the family's attention moved on to her younger brother. In 1984 she married Pancho Gonzales, by then in his fifties, one of the great players of the years before the Open era and still good enough after it started to win nine more titles, beating Rod Laver in a final at 42 and Jimmy Connors in another at 43. Her brother, Andre Agassi, won eight Grand Slam singles titles and married Steffi Graf, who won 22. Thirty in one household. There is exactly one other address in tennis with that number, and Venus and Serena Williams share it.

Feature, 28 July 2026, sources: api-tennis; Jeff Sackmann datasets; The Championships, Wimbledon