Taylor Fritz is using the power of love to continue his run at Wimbledon.
The 27-year-old American tennis star admitted after his quarterfinal victory over Karen Khachanov on Tuesday that his recent success in the sport has coincided with dating influencer and content creator Morgan Riddle.
“There’s been a pretty constant results-and-ranking rise since we’ve been together,” Fritz said. “I think I would have to say she’s been a big help to me just kind of keeping me focused, having someone who cares and just pushes you to just do better and do the right things, be healthier.”
He also said Riddle, who’s been in attendance for the Grand Slam and was on hand for his four-set quarters win on Court 1, can be like a “mother” with him in the sense that she can help ensure he has a proper diet and sleep.
But Fritz realized maybe equating a mother and girlfriend wasn’t the best idea.
“Yeah, that maybe wasn’t the best choice of words.”
Riddle has dated Fritz since 2020 and has been public with their relationship.
In 2022, she even took to her Instagram — where she has over 400,00 followers — to share a 2021 note to himself after his Wimbledon loss that read: “Nobody in the whole world is underachieving harder than you, you are so f–king good but 40 in the world get your f–king s–t together.”
Fritz, while smiling, said Tuesday that the note, which has been re-shared widely, was never meant to be public.
Riddle, 27, hit back at critics earlier this year that believe she is just “capitalizing” on Fritz’s tennis success.
“I think historically, a lot of the older wives and partners on the [tennis] tour have been very private, heads down, in the box,” Riddle said on “The Squeeze” podcast. “They’re there to cheer on their partner and they didn’t have super public personas.
“… I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve been told by people on the tennis tour that when I was first posting TikTok [videos] a couple years ago, there was a clique of older wives on the tour and they would send my videos in their group chat and just make fun of me.
“So I definitely got a lot of backlash, both from within in the tennis community and the fans — I think because it was different. And I’m calling attention to myself. I guess people expected me to sit in the box, be relatively private and not capitalize on my partner’s career. And I kinda came in guns blazing. I was like, ‘well, f–k that,’ and posted whatever I wanted to.”
The fifth-seededFritz now has a date with No. 2 seed Carlos Alcaraz — the two-time defending Wimbledon champ — in the semifinals.
If Fritz were to win, it would be just his second Grand Slam final appearance after falling just short at last year’s U.S. Open.