Joel Drucker -

Joel Drucker

Executive Editor

Joel Drucker is one of the world’s leading tennis writers. Over the past 40 years, his work has appeared in Tennis.com, Tennis Channel, HBO, CBS, TNT, Racquet, The Second Serve, Racquet Sports Industry, the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. His acclaimed book Jimmy Connors Saved My Life was named by Esquire among the six best tennis books of all time.

Historian-at-large for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, Drucker also co-hosts the podcast Three – The Show with Gill Gross and Amy Lundy. A lifelong student of the game, he has worked closely with many of tennis’s great minds—including Pancho Segura, Vic Braden, Martina Navratilova, and Patrick McEnroe—and served as technical editor for McEnroe’s Tennis for Dummies.

A 2024 inductee into the Northern California Tennis Hall of Fame, Drucker lives in Los Angeles.

Notes on Tour

Jimmy Connors Saved My Life: Part 3

A rare photo of Mom with Two-Mom, Gloria and Bertha. Gloria's Connors' instructional style is the nucleus of her son's story. How she taught the game pervades the core of everything that made her son succeed, from technical to emotional...

December 2015

Notes on Tour

Jimmy Connors Saved My Life: Part 2

Gloria Connors with the young Jimbo: What is a visionary? If indeed all action begins with a thought, then the seminal thinker in this story is Gloria Connors. But it's hard to call someone so narrowly focused a visionary. Supposedly...

November 2015

Notes on Tour

Jimmy Connors Saved My Life: Part 4

What was the real meaning of my quest to understand Jimmy Connors? The night at the 1990 U.S. Open when Jimmy Connors requested I write a proposal to become his ghostwriter, I asked him what autobiographies he liked. He confessed...

January 2016

Notes on Tour

Jimmy Connors Saved My Life: Part 1

Jimmy Connors saved my life: how could that be? Jimmy Connors saved my life. With a snarl and a grunt and a backhand and a squeaky pair of shoes, he saved me--from, what? Predictability. Mediocrity. Irony. Unhappiness. Connors saved me...

October 2015

Features and Notes

New Federer Biography that Can Help You Play More Like Roger

In the halls of an imaginary Tennis University, there surely is a department known as "Federer Studies." No player in tennis history has been so extensively dissected. Instructors have devoted thousands of hours picking apart his strokes, from the ultra-smooth...

December 2021

Features and Notes

The Lessons of Pancho Segura

Coaches are the missing link between inquiry and understanding – none more so than Pancho Segura, the Hall of Fame coach and player who was ranked number one in the world for three years. In the last installment of Caroline...

July 2018

Strategy

The Dangerous Doubles Syndrome

Could doubles be suffocating your development? I have a belief that could strike at the core of recreational tennis. I believe that strictly playing doubles, recreational players might be suffocating themselves into mediocrity. Here are three examples that bring that...

February 2018

Notes on Tour

Three Timeless Principles from Jimmy Connors

What did Jimmy mean when he said I would have learned "the game"? One of the more inspirational moments I ever had with Jimmy Connors took place nearly 20 years ago. It was a spring day in 1996. He and...

April 2016

Strategy

Confessions of a Tennis Disruptor

From an early age my disruptive style was never appreciated. The concept of disruption is enjoying a new cultural appreciation. Once upon a time disruption was viewed negatively: "World War I disrupted a long peace." Now it has become an...