The U.S. Open looked like a fun game to Racquet magazine.
The company hosted a raucous rooftop party at Rockefeller Center with at least seven corporate sponsors, where guests juggled Shake Shack burgers out of Ciroc goblets, and they celebrated the release of a new issue guest-edited by former Esquire magazine writer David Granger and featuring Andre Agassi on the cover, an AI-generated image of the champion absurdly draped in pastel pink feathers.
The event saw the magazine’s executives network with current and potential business partners, including Fila, Rolex, BNP Paribas and the Saudi Arabian Tennis Federation, and a few weeks earlier they had played and won a doubles tournament at the prestigious grass-court country club in Queens.
But behind these victories was a year of turmoil and change, including a dispute between the company’s two co-founders that culminated in a lawsuit.
On one side was print magazine editor David Shaftel, who wanted Racquet to grow steadily and sustainably in its niche media sector, and on the other was publisher Caitlin Thompson, who wanted Racquet to move “aggressively and ambitiously” into the ever-bigger business of tennis, she said.
She saw merch collaborations and hyped-up parties as a financial life raft for her unprofitable print products, and dreamed of opening branded tennis clubs with Soho House-esque membership plans around the world.
In the battle for Mr. Luckett’s soul, business won: Mr. Thompson ousted Mr. Shaftel from the company in November.
Their rift was no secret. In a Defector article after Shaftel’s resignation, he called Thompson’s vision “too grandiose and unrealistic” and said he had “lost confidence in her leadership.” She said she hoped “we can still find a way to work together somehow.”
But their lawsuit, filed this spring and kept secret until now, exposes deeper rifts, with Shaftel calling his co-founders “a complete disaster” and accusing them of “plotting to oust me,” while Thompson, in court documents, accuses Shaftel of stealing “confidential and proprietary information” and starting a rival tennis magazine that “mimics” Racquet.
Beneath the accusations of breach of contract was a fundamental difference in vision, and Thompson’s thinking reflected a broader trend in the media industry: publishers positioning themselves as lifestyle brands, not just content publishers.
Email newsletter Air Mail now operates stylish boutiques, as does National Magazine Award-winner Highsnobiety, which actually sees itself as more of an ad agency. Traditional media is also realizing the value of physical events: Vogue World, an international showcase of magazine talent and advertisers, is open to anyone who buys a ticket (in New York, prices ranged from $130 to $3,000). Most magazines are no longer just magazines.
“If it’s a hobby and you don’t mind losing money, it’s not that hard to have a magazine,” Thompson, who previously worked as a reporter for major media outlets, said in an interview. “I didn’t leave the Washington Post or Time or any magazine to do an art project.”
Launched in 2016 with $55,000 in funding from Kickstarter, Racquet offers a cultural perspective on the world of tennis. The quarterly 120-page publication is packed with essays from established writers on art and fashion, and comes in stylish coffee-table packaging.
Racquet has invited tennis fans (and anyone interested in tennis) into a world where players share their passions: the issue guest-edited by Naomi Osaka, for example, featured an article on sports manga and a conversation between musician Dev Hynes and artist Takashi Murakami.
Today, the magazine’s circulation is low, about three times a year, with a circulation of about 5,000 copies. It is primarily funded by the services of a creative agency; Luckett lends his sensibility to other companies by collaborating on products (such as a $2,400 watch with Maurice de Mauriac) and events (such as an Evian party where Maria Sharapova played tennis on a pleasure boat). When Gucci asked Luckett to photograph a new collection of tennis wear, the Italian’s budget covered most of the magazine’s costs; photos from the shoot appeared on the front and back covers.
“She’s the epitome of Tyler Brûlé,” says Thompson, the celebrated founder of Monocle, a pioneering publisher that blended editorial and advertising. Brûlé is an inspiration to Thompson, 44, who describes herself as a “nerd athlete” and played Division I tennis in college while studying magazine journalism. She wears tennis skirts to work and counts powerful editors as mentors and friends. (“She just wants to get things done,” says Vanity Fair’s Radhika Jones.)
In October, the Racquet team will be in Portofino, Italy, shooting a campaign for Seeds, a sportswear brand from the Loro Piana family, for a fee that Thompson says will be “mid-five figures,” as he will be competing in the brand’s friends-and-family tennis tournament. Racquet is also actively pursuing space for a permanent indoor court in New York, around which it plans to host events and build offices and a multimedia studio.
The company is also expanding into South Korea through its first international licensing deal, aiming to draw more young recreational players – or “Korean tennis hipsters,” as Thompson calls them – into the professional world.
“My goal is bigger than a media company. My goal was to make an impact in sports,” she said with a hint of confidence. “I’m not going to apologize for wanting to do something bigger.”
The issue, with Gucci on the cover, sold 5,000 copies at $30 a pop and was Luckett’s first since Shaftel was fired from the company in November. In May, he sued Luckett in New York for breach of contract.
According to Shaftel’s lawsuit, Thompson used a “smear campaign” to remove him from his position and convince investors, a majority of the preferred stockholders, to vote for him to take sole control. Shaftel’s lawsuit also alleges the “wrongful seizure and conversion” of his stock. He claims he was paid just $400 for a one-third stake in the company.
In his complaint, Shaftel described Thompson’s management as “incompetent” and “overly ambitious.”
According to Shakhtel’s lawsuit, the partners’ troubles worsened in May 2023, when Thompson overspent by $250,000 at the French Open. (The loss arose because she verbally received contracts from sponsors but never signed them.) It happened again three months later at the U.S. Open, Shakhtel’s lawsuit says.
Thompson responded with a countersuit in June, alleging that Shaftel violated non-competition, non-solicitation and confidentiality agreements. He also accused Defector of making derogatory comments about Lacquette that caused the company to lose potential partnerships, including a television contract.
“It’s true that we had a different vision for how to grow the business,” Shaftel told The Times.
He launched Second Serve, another tennis and culture publication, after leaving Racquet. “I run the company that I want to run and she runs the company that she wants to run,” he said.
Second Serve’s core strategy is editorial: It’s a newsletter, “an independent tennis magazine, not a tech start-up,” Shaftel says. (Open Tennis magazine is photography-focused and comes out in print biannually.) “Taking on these ancillary projects and ventures is great, as long as it’s subordinate to the core strategy.”
Mr. Shaftel was a popular editor, and several of Racket’s contributors followed him to Second Serve, including former New York Times freelance reporter Ben Rosenberg and Defector co-founder Giri Nathan, who wrote Racket’s popular newsletter.
In his lawsuit, Thompson accused Shakhtel of stealing Racquet’s newsletter subscriber list “to promote a competing business.” Some Racquet subscribers received unsolicited e-mails in January with the subject line “Welcome to Second Serve,” according to the complaint. Shakhtel declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing ongoing litigation.
The two men said they wanted to resolve the lawsuit, which they hope will happen this month. Thompson said he doesn’t mind that racquet players have competition. “If they come out and play well, it makes me play better,” he said.
But recovering from the breakup wasn’t always easy.
Racquet and former contributor Rothenberg were sued in Germany over an investigative article he wrote about Alexander Zverev, now ranked No. 2 in the world, in 2020. The magazine later withdrew from the case due to confusion over the service of process.
Around that time, Lacquette dropped its support for Rosenberg’s defense, forcing him to pay some of the costs out of his own pocket, because Rosenberg’s public comments about Zverev went beyond the scope of the article, Thompson said.
“She never said anything like that to me,” said Rosenberg, who believes Luckett stopped endorsing him primarily because he began writing for Second Serve. He noted that Thompson informed his lawyer of his decision the day after his first byline was published.
Despite the turmoil, Thompson remains optimistic about the magazine: He wrote his undergraduate thesis at Esquire and asked Granger to edit issue 25 of Racket, Granger’s first full-time return to magazine editing since being fired by Esquire in 2016.
“Nothing is going to replicate what a magazine was once able to do,” Granger said. “I think it’s an ambitious and fantastic outlet for people who really love sports.”
Thompson really loves tennis, even though she used to hate it. After her final collegiate match, she said she put down all her equipment and walked off the court.
She learned to play as a child with her grandmother on the dusty courts of suburban Arizona.
A few years later, she was back playing tennis on New York City’s cracked public courts, where she’d meet some of her future business associates, including Steph Chan, who, after a career in finance and mergers and acquisitions, officially became managing partner of Racquet in November.
“The brand itself was so strong,” said Chung, who helped secure a deal with NBC this summer for a racket-hosted podcast about the French Open and the Paris Olympics. “There just wasn’t the proper discipline in the contract negotiations and the contracts.”
Chong and Thompson said the company broke even last year and expects to be in the black this year, which would be the first time it has done so.
