A Very Florida Day With Tommy Paul, Who’s Helping Lead American Tennis Back to Glory

“It’s so blue.” Tommy Paul is scanning the middle distance as we idle aboard a 36-foot Yellowfin boat about half a mile off the coast of Boca Raton, Florida. It’s late afternoon on an early April day, and the Atlantic—which is usually tinted a little darker and greener here—is gemstone radiant, as if the light is somehow coming from underneath it instead of high above.

Our crew for this excursion: Paul, the American tennis star; his girlfriend Paige Lorenze, the entrepreneur and content creator; his agent and close friend Chris McCormack; a captain, a deckhand, a photographer, an assistant, and me. We are looking for signs of fish—seaweed patches (“weed lines”), a pack of agitated gulls, or the quicksilver flash of a tail—in the hopes of chasing and hooking something.

“It’s sometimes hard when it’s like this, though, because the fish can see the lures a little bit better,” warns Paul.

The athlete looks entirely at home at sea, his foot on the gunwale, face extra sunblocked. He’s sporting a trucker hat and rubber Xtratuf boat boots with socks. He’s also wearing a sand-hued button-down with a nautical rope script detail across the shoulders with gray checked trunks, both from Burberry; Paul has just joined the ranks as a brand ambassador for the British luxury label alongside the current world number five tennis player Jack Draper. It’s a glitzy appointment, yet out here—away from the circuit, the endorsements, and the buzz—Paul only has today’s hoped-for catch on his mind. He’s in his element, or as he calls it, his “Happy Gilmore happy place.”

Paul—who was born in New Jersey and mostly raised in North Carolina before relocating to Florida at 14 to train—goes about as far back with fishing as he does tennis. “When I was young, it was either tournament weekends or fishing weekends,” he recalls. “We’d go to Morehead City in North Carolina. When I moved here, I started pond fishing—they have great freshwater fish here—and then I got back to surf fishing, and as soon as I could afford my first boat, I bought one.”

Paul, 28, turned pro when he joined the ATP Tour in 2015. He was 18. (As a high school junior, he won the French Open boys’ title.) He had something of a party phase in his early 20s, which was depicted in an episode of the now-canceled Netflix docuseries Break Point. But that era is long behind him and, these days, he’s completely locked in. Currently ranked number 12 in the world, Paul has secured an Olympic bronze medal (in doubles in Paris, alongside Taylor Fritz—his longtime friend and opponent, and another top-ranked American currently slotted at number 4), an Australian Open semifinal, four career titles (three of which came in 2024), and over $10 million in prize money.

If Paul’s profile and stats haven’t risen more quickly, it’s in some part due to the age group he’s in: He’s caught in the purgatory generation between the “big 3” of Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal and a much-hyped, highly winning younger phalanx led by Carlos Alcaraz, 22, and Jannik Sinner, 23 (American Ben Shelton, 22, is in this upcoming bracket too). Paul’s corps—including Daniil Medvedev, 29, and Alexander Zverev, 28—is excellent, but it has been somewhat eclipsed in the limelight by those bookending them.

Yet with Roland-Garros—a.k.a. the French Open, played on clay, or “dirt,” as Paul puts it—approaching, and a string of good results on the surface so far this year, Paul may just be hitting his stride. He stands out for a mix of sustained, God-given talent (he’s arguably the most naturally athletic American man on tour, and definitely the fastest) and an understated humility that seems to suit him more with age. He’s the least flashy, most undramatic player in the top 20—Casper Ruud, the Norwegian, might be the only real comparison in this regard—and he plays with an honest “I’ve got work to do” approach.

On top of all this, Paul is demonstrably patient. It’s a skill no doubt fostered by his hours spent out on the water—and if tennis and fishing have one thing in common, it's all about sticking with it until striking at the right moment.

Back on the boat, an opportunity presents itself. We’re about to halt our surveillance and head up to relax on the bow, where Lorenze is already lounging, when one of the rods bends in the shape of a fingernail moon. Paul leaps, clunky Xtratufs and all, to grab it.

“That’s got to be a wahoo. Dude, this is a big fish,” he says, the reel shrieking as he gets settled.

“It could be a sailfish,” says the captain.

After a few minutes, Paul has not made a lot of progress.

“I’ve gained, like, 10 yards. What the hell did we hook? I’m flexing with everything right now,” he says, forming a sweat.

“It’s fighting like a shark,” says McCormack.

“I felt some large head shakes,” Paul says, slowly turning the coil. “Paige, you want to crank on this?”

“Yeah,” says Lorenze, laughing. “But maybe do a little more work first.”

“He sees the boat,” says Paul, pausing after a while longer. “He doesn’t want to come any closer. The suspense is killing me. I’m ready to know.”

Thirty minutes after the bite, a thick, chrome-sheathed fish with citrus edges on its scythed tail comes into view. It’s a yellow jack, and an insanely large one at that—like nothing Paul has ever seen. It’s about the size of his torso, and its goofy eyes, set in its bullnose head, appear to acknowledge it has lost the match before Paul tosses it back in.

“Let’s ask Chat what the state record is,” jokes Paul. “That might’ve been it.”

Lorenze, 27, and I get to talking while the guys organize things after the frenzy of the monster jack. She herself lives a public life, with over a quarter million followers on YouTube and nearly a million on Instagram. Lorenze’s original ambition was to be a professional skier—she’s also an equestrian, and grew up with a bit of tennis too. She is warm and funny (she jokes about wanting some rosé on the boat), and she’s definitely more Type A than Paul. Now, she has parlayed her online presence into founding two popular brands: Dairy Boy and American Charm, clothing and homeware lines, respectively, that each distill the spirit of nostalgic New England suburbia—its gingham checks, monogram prints, and soft, meadow-light palettes included—to products with accessible, what she calls “mass,” price points.

“There is, like, a sort of secret sauce to it,” she says, explaining her success. “Understanding that you have to build a community first before expanding is key. In my opinion, everyone who has an engaged audience should be making a business out of it.”

She looks at Paul, who is untangling a fishing line.

“I think of all the American guys, Tommy is the most quiet in terms of self-promotion. I’m pushing him in general to create content because I see the value in it, and I want him to make the most of his career. There’s an entire side of Twitter that goes nuts for him! And sometimes I also wish he would involve the crowd a little bit more,” she says. “But there’s also a lot of strength to that. He’s so modest, and…not shy, but not boastful. My favorite thing about him is that he’s humble, and so gracious, and not cocky. And I love the way he treats other players.”

Some tennis players have an exaggerated flair (like the Danish star Holger Rune, who loves to spar a bit with the chair umpires), others conduct the stands with flourish (like Alcaraz and, more recently, the ascendant Brazilian João Fonseca), some turn up their gamesmanship when it’s needed (Djokovic, famously, and Iga Świątek on the women’s side), and a few seesaw between their highs and lows (the Russian player Andrey Rublev is an exceptionally nice guy off the court but has made himself bleed by smashing a racket into his legs in anger during matches).

Paul, meanwhile, plays the game straight, with almost a poker face masking his grinding will.

At the Madrid Open in late April, Paul’s first clay court match in Europe in 2025, he played the much-discussed Fonseca, saving multiple match points held by the Brazilian without so much as a frown—or a smile, for that matter. In Rome and on the same aspect a few days later, Paul coolly fended off a comeback by Tomáš Macháč, another younger name with buzzy aura (and very short shorts, but that’s another story) before going on to reach the semifinals, where he nabbed a set off of the world number 1, Sinner. “Clay is a special surface, in a way. I grew up playing on it,” says Paul, explaining that most American youth train on hard courts. “I like how on clay you can give your opponent a little more space and still work your way back into a point.” (“Dirt” usually plays the slowest of tennis’s treatments, the third being grass.)

As chill as he appears, Paul has a hard-headed competitiveness to him. “When he was around eight years old, he had to constantly be reminded to put his racket away,” Jill MacMillan, Paul’s mother, tells me over text message exchange after the fishing trip. “I’d find it laying outside all the time. Eventually, it went missing. He assumed I was going to get him a new one, but I wanted to teach him a lesson, so I handed him an old wooden racket that was hanging on the wall for decoration and told him he’d have to play with that all summer. It was probably from the ’70s, and I’m sure it hadn’t been restrung in decades…. I thought he would lose interest and quit, but he played all summer with that thing! He never complained, not even once. And eventually, I bought him a new racket.”

Paul, McCormack, and I are at a restaurant in Deerfield Beach, having said our goodbyes to the fishing group (including Lorenze, who needed to prep for a trip to Connecticut) back at the marina. The place is called The Whale’s Rib, and it’s a classic Sunshine State greasy spoon, with tons of epoxied nautical wood, reddened barflies in their Guy Harvey tees, and the slightly humid afterburn of a thousand drinks spilled on the floor over the years. Paul loves this extremely Florida locale. “But I haven’t brought Paige here, yet,” he admits. “First date goes to GQ.”

Paul tells me that while we were out on the boat, Reilly Opelka—the current men’s world number 95—briefly FaceTimed to say hey. Many of the top US-based guys on tour are close. Paul acknowledges the pressure that’s often mentioned by pundits and the media for American men to reclaim the apex of the game (none has won a Slam since Andy Roddick in 2003, though Fritz came close last year, by reaching the US Open final), but says his mindset is more immediate and less grand in scale.

“I think the coolest part about our group—and when I talk about our group I mostly mean Reilly, Frances [Tiafoe], and Taylor [Fritz]—is that we’re such different people but we really are good friends,” says Paul. “I just installed snook lights on the dock at Reilly’s house, and I’ve got a ton of his art collection on the walls at mine. But with me making it to the tour, I have them to thank for a lot of it, and I think they would say the same with me in the picture. We’ve known and played each other since adolescence. And we’re more concerned with our one-on-one stats on the competitive side than how we do as a group. If I am losing head-to-head against one of them, all I’m thinking about is that I have work to do. I don’t like to look too far ahead.”

Paul does, however, like to look back.“In my mind, tennis was cooler in the ’80s and early ’90s than it is now,” he says when asked about the recent Hollywood-ification of the sport, from the film Challengers to the uptick of star sightings at various tournaments (à la Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at the US Open last year)—not to mention the ATP Tour engaging influencers like Ollie Muhl for its own social content. “I’m happy it’s huge now, but I just wish more people would look back at how cool it used to be. We have great personalities in it now, but there were some incredible entertainers back then. Agassi. McEnroe. Sampras. The whole tour was American driven, too, which was the coolest part. Having good tennis players in the US is important for the sport, and not just for US tennis.”

As we head out, I ask Paul—who drank a Miller Lite and ate a mahi-mahi sandwich at the restaurant, and is headed home to eat fish tacos that Lorenze is preparing—if there’s anything he wants to improve when it comes to health and training this year.

“I’ve tried so many times to cut out candy,” he says. “I’m addicted. I won’t be able to sleep without it. I want it as fake as it gets. RFK Jr.’s nightmare.”

His favorite?

He grins. “Swedish fish.”