There is an exceptionally strange moment tucked at the end of Day One of the Six Kings Slam on Netflix, which brought Taylor Fritz, Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Novak Djokovic (six kings of tennis, get it?) together on a navy blue court in Riyadh for three days of meaningless, but very lucrative, tennis.
Following his defeat of Tsitsipas—who towards the end of the match took a medical timeout to receive a back massage—Jannik Sinner gave an interview to the broadcast crew of Prakash Amritraj, Feliciano López, and Laura Robson. After batting a few balls into the crowd, Sinner says the normal stuff a professional athlete says when they have to talk about a thing they just won, and packs up his supplies to hit the locker room.
Before he can get out of the arena, a young man, wearing a white tunic and sandals, approaches Sinner and daps him up. Clearly a teenager and clearly a fan, he seems harmless enough. The camera lingers on the pair. The boy, clearly saying something, gestures with his right hand, moving to tap the Nike swoosh on the chest of Sinner’s jacket with his index finger. Sinner responds by leaning towards him inquisitively, his own hand lingering on the garment’s zipper, pulling it slightly down. Is the kid trying to get Jannick Sinner’s warm-up jacket? Is Sinner about to give it to him?
We never find out.
Sinner suddenly pats his chest and begins to shoulder his tennis bag, and we soon learn why his body language has suddenly changed. A beefy man comes into frame and puts his arms around the kid’s waist, violently spinning him away from Sinner and marching him out of view. If you’ve ever seen a linebacker try to wrestle a wide receiver in the opposite direction of a first down marker, you can visualize this interaction in your mind’s eye. Whatever was happening between the Sinner and the kid, the response was disproportionate and off-putting. Sinner grabs his Gucci duffel bag and walks away, seemingly acting as if nothing happened. It happened behind the backs of the broadcast team, but one gets a strong sense that if they’d seen it, they would have continued babbling on.
If you’ve ever seen a linebacker try to wrestle a wide receiver in the opposite direction of a first down marker, you can visualize this interaction in your mind’s eye.
This whole moment—an unaccounted-for variable, followed by sudden and swift repression that goes entirely unacknowledged—feels like an apt metaphor for the Six Kings Slam as a whole. The Six Kings Slam is part of Saudi Arabia’s larger, post-MBS culture-washing initiative, much of which in recent years has fallen under the rubric of Riyadh Season. The name sounds suspiciously like a Drake lyric, but I have no doubt that a quasi-never-ending festival featuring some of the biggest and most shameless names in sports and entertainment imported into a national capital to reassure global elites of Saudi Arabia’s status as a modern, cosmopolitan destination isn’t quite what The Boy was thinking when he rapped, “I want Saudi money/I want art money.”
Alongside the Slam, Riyadh Season 2025 features a WWE pay-per-view event, a pair of fight nights featuring incomprehensibly famous boxers, and a soccer tournament which I assume is somehow corrupt due to the teams all being Italian. There’s also The Fanatics Flag Football Classic, a flag football tournament featuring current and former NFL players such as Tom Brady, who at 48 years old is finally shitty at football; Saquon Barkley, the Philadelphia Eagles running back who was inspired by Peter Thiel’s Zero to One to invest in firms such as the defense company Anduril, the bet-on-everything company Polymarket, and the replace-your-workforce-with-bots company Cognition; Gronk, who someone I kinda know claims to have had sex with; and Tyreek Hill, a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins who is also a widely alleged domestic abuser.
My knowledge of the personnel involved in the Triple F Classic (nickname mine) informs my cynicism about the other sporting events. Lest you think Riyadh Season forgot about the non-sports fans in the crowd, this year’s edition also featured that comedy festival that all those uncanceled comedians played and then got re-canceled as a result, as well as an accursed MrBeast theme park.
Alongside the Slam, Riyadh Season 2025 features a WWE pay-per-view event, a pair of fight nights featuring incomprehensibly famous boxers, and a soccer tournament which I assume is somehow corrupt due to the teams all being Italian.
It’s easy to see how something like Riyadh Season, and the Six Kings Slam’s prominent place within it, might come as a natural consequence of something like LIV Golf, the upstart golf league which lured away many of the PGA’s biggest names due to the Saudis’ financial largesse. The once-amiable golf legend Phil Mickelson quickly became the face of the move, framing it as a players’ rights issue (namely, that golfers should be able to wear shorts and be paid more) that he jumped on while straight-up saying that the Saudis were “scary motherfuckers” who “execute people over there for being gay.”
While nobody actually watches LIV Golf, the league managed to capture enough of the PGA’s talent that it was able to strong-arm the PGA into agreeing to the framework of an eventual merger, which may or may not actually happen. And it’s been great for the players: Though guys like Pat Perez or Sergio García may now face eternal damnation, they’ve made millions in signing bonuses and guaranteed purses, and LIV’s miniscule audience allows them a modicum of dignity as they flop towards mediocrity.
If there’s a figure within tennis forced to fulfill the Phil Mickelson role at this year’s Six Kings Slam, it’s Carlos Alcaraz, the top-ranked player in the world who recently skipped an ATP event due to an ankle injury, yet chose to compete in the Slam despite still being kinda hurt. The Spaniard, who received a first-round bye and got placed directly into the semis, ultimately lost in the final round to Jannik Sinner, who won the Slam last year as well. “It’s a different format, different situation playing exhibitions than the official tournaments,” Alcaraz said, per the BBC. “We’re just having fun for one or two days and playing some tennis, and that’s great.”
If there’s a figure within tennis forced to fulfil the Phil Mickelson role at this year’s Six Kings Slam, it’s Carlos Alcaraz...
“I understand [the criticism], but sometimes people don’t understand us,” Alcaraz said, adding that an exhibition like the Slam is “not really demanding mentally [compared with] when we’re having such long [ATP] events, like two weeks or two and a half weeks.” This is the same player-empowerment tack that Mickelson himself attempted to take, minus the detours into saying the quiet part out loud. It is exactly what you want to do when playing an exhibition for millions of dollars worth of blood money: just pretend that the only thing people are mad at you about is some light hypocrisy. If I were this dude’s publicist, I would give him a gold star.
What feels different about the Six Kings Slam, however, is the involvement of Netflix as a media partner for this year’s event. Last year, the streamer aired a live exhibition between Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal dubbed the “Netflix Slam.” Perhaps the streamer simply wanted to give co-branding a shot.
Either way, Netflix has been eager to expand its live sports footprint. However, new entrant that it is, it’s had to settle for the incumbents’ table scraps: the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight that, despite its allegedly eye-popping viewership numbers (Netflix’s audience data isn’t publicly measurable, so you have to take it at its word) was universally derided and only barely not fixed; WWE Raw (not one of the pay-per-view events); two of the three NFL Christmas games (impressive-sounding until you remember that Thanksgiving, not Christmas, is the NFL’s holiday and that Netflix didn’t even get the Broncos-Chiefs game). It’s a Mickey Mouse event on a Mickey Mouse platform, but thanks to Netflix’s server farm game, the shame of those who participated will live forever online.
It’s a Mickey Mouse event on a Mickey Mouse platform, but thanks to Netflix’s server farm game, the shame of those who participated will live forever online.
Whether you’re a modelesque tennis player or a dead-eyed YouTuber, one of the underrated luxuries of wealth is the ability to say “no” to things strictly on principle. So why don’t more people actually do it? Perhaps, as W. David Marx argues in the afterward of his new book Blank Space, we need to introduce hard and fast social penalties against those who pull sell-out moves—like, for example, taking Saudi blood money in exchange for a few days of tennis. As we’ve seen from the arts community’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza, such moral pressure campaigns can genuinely change public sentiment. Despite being booked for the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny skipped out on playing shows in America on his tour this year—maybe we’re next.
To be honest, I’m not a huge tennis viewer. But even I could tell that Jannick Sinner waltzed his way into the grand prize. His first-round victory over a hobbled Stefanos Tsitsipas was almost an inevitability once Tsitsipas laid down to get his back worked on. Meanwhile, it’s undeniable that at 38, Novak Djokovic has maintained an unfathomable level of play—he’s made the semifinals of all four Grand Slam events this year. Unfortunately for him, he lost to Sinner in the semis of both the French Open and Wimbledon, and so it’s not exactly surprising that he lost to Sinner in the semis of Six Kings Slam, too. As for the final, well, it was Sinner against Carlos Alcaraz, which seems to be the way things go these days in real tournaments (they were also the final pairing of last year’s Slam). But again, Alcaraz was hurt. (And I know enough to say that if you totally hose your opponent in the first game and the announcers have to remind the viewer that anybody could still win this thing, they absolutely do not mean it and are trying to get the viewer to not turn it off.)
While seeing a billion-mile-per-hour serve coming at my face was initially thrilling in an end-of-Stagecoach kind of way, it quickly became confusing.
Attempts at viewer retention seemed to be a big theme of the Slam as a whole. The broadcast’s direction seemed less focused on capturing the action in the top-down manner associated with conventional tennis, instead attempting to give the viewer a visceral sense of what it would be like to play in one of these matches. Points were frequently shot from behind the backs of players; while seeing a billion-mile-per-hour serve coming at my face was initially thrilling in an end-of-Stagecoach kind of way, it quickly became confusing. This POV did not have the charm of 2024’s Challengers or even a humble VR headset.
It did, however, manage to emphasize one thing, which is that while Sinner was running around like crazy, whenever Alcaraz failed to anticipate where Sinner’s next shot was headed, he didn’t even make a show of trying to get to it. He just stood there while the viewer got a good look at his butt. As the match wore on, he eventually started jogging to reach stuff—he pulled off an impossible-seeming, lazily swatted no-look volley that elicited a gasp from the crowd, even if it went out of bounds—but his effort paled in comparison to Sinner’s.
There were a lot of close-ups between points, and whenever the camera cut to him, he retained the same blank expression, steeling himself to poke balls Sinner’s way before he, too, would be wrestled out of the frame.