I know Pereira's story has been mentioned before. But it's bears repeating....

edition.cnn.com/2016/07/26/tennis/teliana-pereira-tennis-brazil-olympic-game-rio-2016/index.html

And particular kudos too to Didier Rayon, for letting the kid of the court maintenance guy have some court time and then taking her under his wing when she turned out to be talented and motivated.

Congratulations to Reilly Opelka, last year's Junior Wimbledon champion, WR 837, has just beaten Kevin Anderson WR 28 6-7(5) 6-3 7-5 in Atlanta.

Went to look again at the Atlanta tournament, and it's also interesting in that the whole top half of the draw is now from one nation: in the quarterfinals John Isner plays Taylor Fritz, and Donald Young plays Reilly Opelka. (The bottom half had only one American, Jared Donaldson, who is also still playing). I can't recall ever seeing that in a Tour level tournament, though I'd be surprised if it hadn't happened in a French, Spanish, Russian or US tournament* at some point. The necesssary combination of a large number of players from one country, a relative lack of other players, and an uneven draw, though, can't be that frequent.

*The closest this year were actually in Sao Paolo(three Spaniards in the bottom half of the QFs) and Washington (three US players in the top half QFs). Last year, Moscow had three Russians in the top half QF. Don't have time to look further!

Spectator wrote:

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Wonder who the first tennis player will be to have a 25 year playing career ...

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 Leander Paes?

You're all quite correct, insofar as Daniel Nestor played his first ATP/ITF match in 1989 and Leander Paes in 1990 - and Martin Navratilova started playing in 1973 and retired in 2006. I should probably have specified that I was thinking about singles only. Nestor stopped playing singles ten years ago; Paes in 2008. With Martina Navratilova in singles, it's an interesting question. It looks as if she played continuously from 1973 to 1994 ... then stopped singles ... then came back to play at Eastbourne in 2002 and at a few tournaments in 2004. So at one level, she had an over-thirty-year singles career, but there's a gap of about ten years in the middle.

In terms of the longest period of (relatively) continuous play in professional singles among active players, the winners each played one professional tournament in September 1997: Roger Federer and (a little less expected) Feliciano Lopez. So both of them have actually had longer singles playing careers than either Nestor or Paes. But they have a while to go before topping Navratilova.

Gail Falkenberg won a 1st round match at a $25K in April this year, 31 years after entering her first pro tournament, so she has just 2 years to go to beat Martina.

What makes this even more amazing, she didn't start playing pro tennis until she was 38!

brendan wrote:

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Last year when Tommy Haas made a comeback I noticed he had a CH of 2 so looked up who else was around at that time and noticed that as well as Fed, Tommy Robredo was up there too and I just looked up his stats and saw his first pro tournament was November 96.  I'm assuming that Haas has now given up the ghost.

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 That's really curious. When I checked the ATP site, Robredo's first tournament was listed as being in 1998. But you're quite right: the ITF has him playing in1996. And I'd forgotten about Haas - and since, as per the ITF, he started playing tournaments in 1993, he tops the list on 22 years! I wonder if the question mark is around 'Satellites'  Robredo's and Haas' earliest tournaments are all Satellites ... which the ATP doesn't seem to count, and ITF does.

If Satellites count then I'd need to go back and redo  the lists - as I'll have missed the earlier tournaments for all the long-lived players.