game, set, match

US Open champ Iga Swiatek leads tennis superstars into North Texas for 2022 WTA Finals

Iga Swiatek is the No. 1 women's tennis player in the world.

Al Bello/Getty Images

UPDATE 10-29-22: The final eight singles players and doubles teams, and order of play, are now set. Find the match schedule and more at the WTA website.

---

Iga Swiatek is the No. 1 women's tennis player in the world.Fresh off her US Open victory, the world's No. 1 female tennis player, Iga Swiatek, will lead the top eight singles players and doubles teams into Fort Worth next month for the 2022 Women's Tennis Association (WTA) Finals.

The competition will take place October 31-November 7 at Dickies Arena, and tickets are now on sale.

The prestigious year-end finale has been moved to Fort Worth from Shenzhen, China, for one year only, WTA officials say. It's the first time the contest has been staged in North Texas, and the first time it's in the United States in 17 years.

“The Dickies Arena and the city of Fort Worth has a proven track record of hosting world class sporting and entertainment events, and we are excited to bring the WTA’s showpiece tournament back to the United States for the first time since 2005,” says Steve Simon, WTA Chairman and CEO, in a release. “This location and venue for the 2022 WTA Finals will provide a fantastic experience for players and fans alike and offer a fitting finale as another exciting season on the Hologic WTA Tour comes to a close.”

While the race to the top eight is still on, with several tournaments still to be played in coming weeks, both Swiatek and No. 2-ranked Ons Jabeur officially have qualified for the finals.

"I’m really excited to qualify for the WTA Finals this year for the second time in my career and I’m really looking forward to playing in front of the fans in Fort Worth,” Swiatek says in the release.

The top-ranked doubles team of Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova also has qualified.

"We are really looking forward to playing in Fort Worth in Texas and hopefully defending our title," Krejcikova says.

Two American stars, Jessie Pegula and Coco Gauff, currently stand at No. 3 and 4 in singles, respectively. Together, they are the 4th-ranked doubles team in the world. If they maintain these standings or climb higher, North Texas fans will get to seem them play.

Coco Gauff is one of the top-ranked singles and doubles players. Julian Finney/Getty Images

As of press time, the top eight singles players are:

1. Iga Swiatek (Poland)

2. Ons Jabeur (Tunisia)

3. Jessie Pegula (USA)

4. Coco Gauff (USA)

5. Caroline Garcia (France)

6. Aryna Sabalenka*

7. Daria Kasatkina*

8. Simona Halep (Romania)

As of press time, the top eight doubles teams are:

1. Barbora Krejcikova (Cze) / Katerina Siniakova (Cze)

2. Gabriela Dabrowski (Can) / Giuliana Olmos (Mex)

3. Lyudmyla Kichenok (Ukr) / Jelena Ostapenko (Lat)

4. Jessie Pegula (USA) / Coco Gauff (USA)

5. Elise Mertens (Bel) / Veronika Kudermetova*

6. Yifan Xu (Chn) / Zhauxuan Yang (Chn)

7. Demi Schuurs (Ned) / Desirae Krawczyk (USA)

8. Nicole Melichar-Martinez (USA) / Ellen Perez (Aus)

(*Per WTA style, players native to Russia do not have their country listed.)

Click here to follow the latest standings on the Race to the WTA Finals and here for the most up-to-date 2022 WTA Tour calendar.

All Session Tickets for the WTA Finals went on sale at 10 am Thursday, September 22, via Ticketmaster.

Single Session Tickets will go on sale at 10 am Tuesday, September 27, via Ticketmaster. (Venue presale is Monday, September 26 from 10 am-10 pm, CODE: SINGLES)

The WTA was founded by groundbreaking tennis legend Billie Jean King in 1983 on the principle of equal opportunity and has remained a global leader in women’s professional sports.

"The WTA is one of the world’s most recognizable and high-profile sports organizations, consisting of more than 1,600 players representing approximately 87 nations, all competing to earn WTA rankings, points, and prestigious tournament titles," the organization says. "The Hologic WTA Tour is annually comprised of around 50 events and four Grand Slams, spanning six continents and nearly 30 countries and regions with a global audience of over 900 million."

Keep up with the WTA at wtatennis.com.

celebrities sports-fitness

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film