When Karue Sell really rips a serve, it sounds like a tactical shotgun, the ball kicking up shoulder high. His backhand is like a precision laser carving up the baseline.
To the casual observer, he’s the mustachioed version of Roger Federer. Yet he lives in a world far different than the one the Maestro glided through on the way to 20 Grand Slam singles titles.
So far this year, Sell’s tournament winnings have added up to less than half the annual minimum full-time salary in California. Federer’s net worth exceeds $500 million.
A native of Brazil, Sell lives with his wife, Sarah, and their two dogs in a rental house near the mall in Torrance. He travels the world to play in second-tier tennis tournaments run by the Assn. of Tennis Professionals and International Tennis Federation. With the ATP, he competes on the Challenger Tour, the namesake of “Challengers,” a recent Zendaya-starring film that highlighted the difficulties of life as a middling pro.
A former UCLA tennis standout, Sell is making his second run at a professional career. He moved to the United States from Jaraguá do Sul, Brazil, at 18, and still competes internationally for his home country. A few months months before he gave up playing professionally six years ago, Sell’s ranking peaked at No. 371.
Now he’s 30 in a sport filled with younger players. But since he went full-time in January, Sell has competed in 21 Challenger and ITF men’s World Tennis Tour events on four continents, winning twice. He started the year at 858th in the world. Could he crack No. 371?
Prize purses are only part of how Sell earns a living. He’s also a social media star who has leveraged his persona and tennis skills to build a YouTube audience of nearly 150,000 followers, helping him to secure brand partnerships and financial stability.
His well-produced lessons are popular with amateur players who are drawn to his his blunt charm and direct way of teaching and who respect that he had a previous pro run of his own.
Sell is serving up a new way to success for talented pro tennis players who have elite-level skills but aren’t quite good enough to crack the top 10 or win Wimbledon.
For several years, Sell worked mainly as a coach. He made tennis training videos, gave lessons to amateurs and was former world No. 1 Naomi Osaka’s practice hitting partner, including when the Beverly Hills resident won her second U.S. Open trophy in 2020.
Then last year, Sell made a list of the pros and cons of returning to the tour. The list hangs on the Sells’ refrigerator to this day. The pros won out, partly because he was excelling in the smaller competitions he had started entering, and partly because of the success of his tennis videos.
Beyond creating a niche for himself as an influencer, he’s living every tennis nerd’s dream, traveling the world and sharing courts with some of the best players in the game.
Sell’s journey has become the source material for his popular “Turning Pro at 30” YouTube series, which features match playback, post-match analysis and behind-the-scenes footage. He can hardly walk 10 yards at a tennis event without someone stopping him, asking “Are you Karue?”
“We love his videos,” one fan, 13-year-old Ella Ramos, said after taking a picture with Sell at a tournament in Las Vegas last month. “It’s just cool how he took a break and now he’s building his ranking back up.”
Former teen phenoms such as Rafael Nadal — who announced that he will retire next month after a legendary tennis career that saw him win his first professional match at 15 — have long dominated the sport’s upper echelons. The Challenger tour, founded nearly 50 years ago, offers an alternate route to the top 100 for talented players who take longer to develop their skills and start winning consistently.
With more experience and better financial and emotional support than he had during his first pro run, Sell has managed to achieve what almost no one has: restarting a dormant tennis career from scratch and succeeding. “I’m on the back nine of my tennis career,” he says after a recent practice session.
Now it’s just a matter of seeing how many aces he can hit.
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As this new phase of his tennis career blooms, Sell is simultaneously building a mini-empire online, and his viewership has grown as he’s moved up the rankings. By June he had cracked the 400s, ending the month at No. 462 in the world.
He’s got a natural swagger on camera, and he produces approachable yet intimate content littered with gems of tennis knowledge. As a tennis podcast host put it during an interview with Sell last month, he is “a YouTube tennis sensation” who’s “arguably the most famous personality on tennis YouTube.”
Sell is aware that his time as an active professional player is limited — Pete Sampras retired at 32, Andre Agassi at 36 — and he’s leveraging his skills to ensure he can transition smoothly into a post-tour career after his body breaks down or he tires of the grind.
“There are lots of parts of this that I don’t like. I don’t like the tour at all,” he says. “I like playing tennis, I like playing matches, I like the practice. But I really don’t like the lifestyle, the traveling around living out of a suitcase.”
Unlike many other players at his level, Sell has multiple funding sources that help cover training, travel and living expenses. Chief among them is a partnership with MprooV, a self-improvement platform co-founded by his former UCLA tennis teammate Clay Thompson. Sell also has an online merch store where he sells signature strings and clothes. Plus there’s his content creator partnerships with brands including a sports drink company and a therapy app.
The diverse income streams have helped insulate Sell from the financial uncertainty many face on tour, as typified by a character in “Challengers” who lives out of his car while chasing elusive pro tennis glory.
“Right now, I have the freedom to play, which is really great,” Sell says. “I don’t know how guys do it” without financial backing.
Before he decided to go pro last year, Sell says, he felt like he was hitting well with friends — including at least one top 100 player — so he entered some lower-stakes competitions. He started winning matches, including the respected Ojai Tennis Tournament in April 2023.
Another factor in his atypical career has been the thriving Southern California tennis community, which has nurtured generations of stars from Sampras to the Williams sisters.
Even with his growing celebrity, Sell still sometimes coaches people in person.
People like Bob, a former junior player in his 60s who Sell’s up hitting with at 7:30 a.m. one recent Saturday at South End Racquet & Health Club in Torrance. Much of the lesson is taken up by long, hard-hitting rallies between the two of them, interspersed with Sell’s chides and words of encouragement.
“Don’t open yourself up so much. Throw the shoulder first,” Sell says, critiquing his charge’s forehand. “There it is,” he adds as Bob makes seemingly minute changes to his mechanics.
“You need to stay balanced,” Sell tells Bob during a break. “You’re always in motion, but you’ve got to stay balanced, too.”
Sell mainly practices at Redondo Union High School, hitting the royal-blue hard courts by 8 many weekday mornings.
One afternoon in late August — on the heels of his win at a $25,000 ITF tournament in Londrina, Brazil — he is laboring away under the marine layer, cycling through dumbbell exercises, agility drills and torturous rounds of medicine ball manipulation.
“Well, that was awful,” Sell deadpans to his coach, Andrew Mateljan, dripping sweat after a particularly intense set of modified push-ups. “You’re overestimating my athleticism.”
But three days earlier, Sell had hit a new career-high ATP ranking: No. 329.
Last year, Sell reached out to Mateljan, the founder and director of the Laguna Beach Tennis Academy, to improve his fitness, a must if Sell wants to get past some of the next-gen players.
“I saw the potential and I like to invest the time into him because he can play at a high level,” Mateljan, 35, says.
Sell also calls on a rotating cast of freakishly talented friends to help keep him sharp.
There’s Gustavo, a college player Sell hits with when he’s on break, and some former Bruins teammates, including Thompson and Marcos Giron, the latter Sell has known since they met as teenagers at the Junior Orange Bowl in Florida.
Sell traveled to tournaments last year as a coach for Giron, who is the most accomplished of the crew. When they hit together on the Redondo Union High courts one blue-sky afternoon last month, Giron was ranked 45th in the world, hot off his first ATP title in Newport, R.I., in the summer.
Giron, a 31-year-old from Thousand Oaks ticked off his busy calendar the last few months — Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the Olympics, the U.S. Open. It’s the kind of itinerary that could be on the horizon for Sell if he continues his rise. Already, there’s buzz building about a potential Sell appearance in Melbourne in January, though there’s a long road between now and the Australian Open.
Sell has spoken out about the low pay, long season and heavy physical toll of the Challenger and ITF tours. Giron agrees the lifestyle is difficult.
“Karue is a good player and he’s been good for many years,” Giron says. “Everybody thought he’s got the ability, but the tour is brutal.”
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Sell strikes a discordant frame against the middle America bedlam of Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.
As tourists stumble by with tall cans of Bud Light Lime and cigarettes in hand, Sell’s tattooed, sinewy limbs stretch a matching Lacoste tee and shorts, with the requisite crocodile emblems and matching bright-red shoes.
Sell’s not here in Vegas to gamble or party. He’s here for tennis, and when he arrives around noon on Sept. 10 at the Darling Tennis Center, 10 miles northwest of the Strip, it’s 101 degrees.
Sell’s got the late match today, so he has to wait for the prior one to end, the score ticking by slowly on his phone. Sell stays fueled by drinking water with a sports drink powder mixed into it and picking at a protein bowl.
This is what it takes to make one’s dreams come true against such long odds. These mundane tasks and long hours of repetitive training culminate in competitive outbursts where careers are made and broken.
To keep progressing, one has to stay ahead of the thousands of others scrambling to get a toehold in the sport.
This afternoon in Vegas, when he finally takes the court, Sell has what it takes. He goes down love-30 in his first service game, but comes back to win it before breaking his opponent, Strong Kirchheimer, the next game. He never looks back on the way to a 6-1, 6-2 rout that takes just 66 minutes.
There’s a clear way to reach the top 100, and that’s by winning, consistently, against great players. It’s a meritocracy in that the very best reap the bulk of the reward, while the rest jockey for position, trying to grit through to the next tier.
An ITF championship or two is the best many players ever do. Even that’s a dream. But Sell has bigger ambitions.
“Don’t sell him short. Karue Sell with an epic third-set tiebreaker, takes out the eighth seed, Juan Pablo Ficovich, and books a spot in the quarterfinal,” the announcer intones after Sell ekes by his next opponent in a long three-setter that ends in a wild 13-11 tiebreak.
The following day, Sell breezes past fellow former UCLA star Kaylan Bigun in straight sets.
Sell comes out strong against Altadena-born Tristan Boyer in the semis, winning the first set 6-4 as his wife and coach cheer him on from the stands. But he can’t quite close out the match.
Boyer is seven years his junior, and Sell struggles to return Boyer’s oppressive flat serve, winning only the first game of the second set. He regains his confidence and they go 6-6 in the third before Boyer wins the tiebreaker 7-4 with a second serve down the middle.
Sell’s run in Vegas is over.
He and Mateljan are back on the courts at Redondo Union three days later, doing a post mortem of his performance in Vegas: his low volleys, his training regimen, his ability to read the ball. Then it’s back to work, with hours of resistance bands, rallies and serve practice.
Sell headed into his next tournament — a Challenger in Antofagasta, Chile — with some extra confidence. On Sept. 23, he reached another milestone when he broke the top 300 for the first time. His ranking: 299.
“A year ago I was still posting lessons on YouTube. Now I have a 2 … in front of my ranking for the first time,” he posted on Instagram to mark the occasion. “What a ride.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
