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The story
On August 28, Kei Nishikori lost to Rei Sakamoto in the US Open qualifying final, bringing an end to his run at Grand Slam tournaments. Nishikori built a résumé that included becoming the first Japanese man to reach a Grand Slam final, at the 2014 US Open, and came within a whisker of winning a major — but this time he couldn’t clear the last hurdle of qualifying just to reach the main draw. On 5ch’s Geinou/Sports Express+ thread, some hailed him as “a legend on the level of Otani or Hachimura,” while a broader discussion unfolded around why tennis results rarely make domestic news in Japan, and how that ties into soft tennis’s dominance in school club activities.
Sports Hochi
August 29, 2026, 4:49 AM
◆Tennis ▽Final day of US Open qualifying (28th, New York, USA)
Source: hochi.news / Original article here
What people said
No other sport is like this.
Hardball tennis is a minor sport in Japan — soft tennis (a Japanese variant played with a soft rubber ball, huge in schools) shares some of the blame.
Back in the corporate-team Japan League era it apparently got decent coverage.
The common view is that the league actually held players back from going overseas.
Shuzo (Matsuoka) was the one who broke that mold and went abroad.
The Japan League still exists today, though.
Feels like you're only considered a "real" player once you shine at a Slam.
At this rate it'll stay a minor sport forever.
That's not really true — it's just that the most athletically gifted people don't go into tennis in the first place.
If anything, Hachimura gets way too little coverage in Japan.
Is it because he's half-Japanese?
So who else is there at Nishikori's level then?
Pretty much only Jiro Sato from the early days.
You mean the guy behind the famous line "this shot is one of a kind"?
He was entered for mixed doubles beforehand but ended up not playing.
Makes you wonder how players ranked outside the top 100 even make a living.
That's just armchair theorizing.
Nobody like that has actually shown up, so it doesn't mean anything.
"We might never see another one" — that's the armchair theory right there.
Tennis just doesn't pay well. It's nothing like Otani or Hachimura, who are the elite of the elite.
If only he'd beaten Wawrinka that time.
Nishikori just had bad luck — he came up during the era when the greatest four players in history ruled the sport.
And now the tennis kings are retiring right along with him.
Nishikori probably couldn't have handled guys like Becker, Lendl, or Edberg either.
If anything, making the US Open final was pure luck —
he just didn't have the nerve to close it out.
The current world No. 1 is Italy's Sinner,
and Italy has three players in the top 20.
Uh, who's that…?
Italy's strong in F1 too — they're doing well in everything except soccer.
In F1, 20-year-old Antonelli is leading and looking like a near-lock for this season's title.
In Italy, Sinner and Antonelli are far more popular than the Serie A soccer players.
Looking back, it's such a shame he couldn't win the 2014 Madrid Masters or that US Open final.
Especially Madrid —
he was completely dominating Nadal, then had to retire with a back injury.
Well, I guess that's part of what made him great too.
Who'd have thought he'd dominate a prime Nadal — the guy who made even Federer look like a kid on clay.
Looking back, if only he'd grabbed even one Grand Slam title.
That was the biggest "so close" moment of Nishikori's career.
But Nadal was retrieving everything so relentlessly that Nishikori had to push himself to the point of injury — so honestly, that result wasn't bad luck, it was just how it was always going to go.
those looks work in his favor.
In Italy he's known as the "swimming uncle" (a nickname from a viral clip of his over-the-top enthusiasm).
Shuzo's interview with Sakamoto nearly turned into an on-air disaster.
Among students, soft tennis has way more participants — public schools are almost all soft tennis.
By high school, even public schools start having more hardball tennis clubs, but switching over from soft tennis is basically like switching to a whole different sport — the racket, the ball, and even how you grip the racket are all different.
It's rare to find a sport as purely "school-club-only" as soft tennis.
but honestly it's not that relevant.
Kids whose families can only afford public-school-club-level soft tennis were never going to make it anyway.
Kids aiming to be top players are already being sent off to study at IMG Academy at that same age.
You'd need athletic ability good enough to say "it's not that relevant"
in the first place to make it big, though —
both in technique and mindset.
Starting out
after picking up soft tennis habits
is still tough, I'd think.
That group photo in suits was so cool.
Background and Key Points of This Story
The US Open qualifying rounds decide who earns a spot in the main draw — lose the final round, and you’re out. Kei Nishikori, who once climbed as high as world No. 4 and became the first Japanese man to reach a Grand Slam final at the 2014 US Open, had to enter this year’s tournament through qualifying, and his loss in that qualifying final reflects both his fall in the rankings and the twilight of his career. On the thread, the view that he’s “an Otani/Hachimura-level legend” clashed with the counterargument that “tennis just doesn’t attract the most athletically gifted talent in the first place, so it’s not a fair comparison.” Others pointed to soft tennis’s dominance in school club activities as a structural reason why hardball tennis results rarely make news in Japan, broadening the discussion into the sport’s underlying popularization issues.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Express+) thread “[Tennis] Kei Nishikori: “The last candle has been snuffed out” — curtain falls on his final Grand Slam as he’s eliminated by Rei Sakamoto in the US Open qualifying final.”
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