“It’s great that there is new blood always,” Jakub Mensik said with a smile at the Australian Open in January. “We can see that tennis is moving on. We can see new names in the tournaments. For fans, for tennis, for everything, it’s really great.”
The 19-year-old Czech sounded very sure of himself as he spoke those words in January. The first three months of the season, and especially the Sunshine Double, have shown us why. Joao Fonseca, Jack Draper, Arthur Fils, Learner Tien, Jiri Lehecka, Alex Michelsen, Coleman Wong, Jerry Shang: Virtually every week, it seems, we see a breakout performance on the men’s side. We may look back on last fall’s Next Gen Finals, which featured many of the young names mentioned above, as an event that lived up to its name and launched a generation.
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Before Miami, the one guy from that tournament who hadn’t quite broken out in 2025 was Mensik himself. Since upsetting Casper Ruud at the Australian Open, he hadn’t won two matches in a row at a tour event. But a good week at a Challenger in the Dominican Republic set the stage for an even better 10 days in Miami. He edged Jack Draper in two tiebreakers in the second round, and, on Thursday he straight-setted Fils, his fellow Next Genner, 7-6 (5), 6-1.
