Madison Keys’ Australian Open win: An overnight tennis success story 16 years in the making

MELBOURNE, Australia — With another crazily brave surge at the end in Melbourne, Madison Keys became a 16-year overnight success.

The wrenching struggle to meet the expectation that arrived when she won her first WTA Tour match at 14. The heartache and regrets she weathered for the seven years that have passed since her only other appearance in a Grand Slam final.

It all dissipated in a flurry of crushing groundstrokes that rolled over Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1 and the two-time Australian Open champion who has been rolling over just about everybody else for the past year. With an inside-out forehand that attached itself to the corner of the court, Keys was free and into one of the great tear-filled hugs — with her husband and coach, Bjorn Fratangelo — that this tournament has ever seen.

On a breezy night on Rod Laver Arena, Keys, 29, beat Sabalenka 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 to win the first Grand Slam title of a career that once looked like it would be full of them.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” she said as she clutched the silver trophy, a major winner at last.

All these years later, there is a whole generation of tennis fans who weren’t alive or can’t remember the breathless buzz that was spreading about the girl from the Midwest honing her game at Chris Evert’s academy in South Florida in 2008.

“From 10 years old, she had more power than anyone her age, easy power,” Evert wrote in a text message Saturday morning. “On a good day, she could beat anyone, but on a bad day would make lots of errors. Hadn’t figured out how to harness the power yet. At 14, in her first pro tournament, she beat a top 80 player.”

Evert can still see the 114mph ace she hit. Then, Keys was coming for tennis. Instead, tennis sort of came for her. At first, the buzz empowered her, but then it became something like a panic.

“If I don’t do it, am I considered a failure?” she said in her news conference of what she had wondered for many of those 16 years until the final ball Saturday night.

There were big moments on the way. She made the semifinals of this tournament a decade ago, when she was still a teenager; two years later she made the U.S. Open final and entered the court as a solid favorite. She was playing against Sloane Stephens, a childhood friend she grew up with at Evert’s academy. Keys was there, but not really. Tight and tentative from the start, she won three games in all and lost the second set 6-0.

Two years ago, she was twice within a tiebreak of getting back to the final in New York. Sabalenka was the brave one that night, breaking Keys’ heart once more.

Last summer she appeared to be cruising into the Wimbledon semifinals, leading 5-2 in the deciding set against Jasmine Paolini. Then her hamstring popped. As the years passed and as her 30th birthday ticked closer, she began to confront the challenge of being content with a career that might end without a Grand Slam title, the one thing she and every other player want more than everything else.

“As I had gotten older and gotten close and it didn’t happen… It was almost a panic,” Keys said.

Fratangelo asked her what she wanted out of the rest of her career. Easy answer, of course. But she understood that was far beyond her control. In every Grand Slam, there are going to be as many as seven other players who will have a lot to say about whether a player will win or lose.

Together they came upon the mindset that there was something that mattered more than that. Leaving the court with no regrets after every match, the reward for playing with the kind of courage and conviction that allows someone to sleep at night no matter what the scoreboard shows.

Earlier in the week, Fratangelo explained how they had landed on her approach to the game. For years, she and other coaches had been trying to harness her power, reining it in with some control. That worked a decade or so ago, but now almost everyone has big power. Maybe the best path to the waterfall was to make hers even bigger, and if that meant living with some errors and some losses, so be it.

“It had to be up to her to kind of buy into that,” he said. “She did, and now it looks amazing.”

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When Keys reflected on not having to wait anymore, she knew she had to go through all of the adversity to understand what it had and had not meant. What ended with the final started back in Florida, at Evert’s academy, but to realize it all Keys had to go through it. She entered therapy, she said. In Melbourne, she went through three of the best in the world.

Here’s what her scoreboard ended up showing:

A quarterfinal against Elena Rybakina, the world No. 7. was even midway through the third set after Keys saved multiple break points in its second game. Keys blasted away and knocked off the 2022 Wimbledon champion.

A semifinal against Iga Swiatek, the No. 2 seed, five-time Grand Slam champion and the best female player through the past three years, was even closer. Down 8-7 in a deciding tiebreak having been match point down in normal time, Keys hit an ace and an unreturned serve before claiming her own match point with a final big swing that Swiatek couldn’t return onto the court.

“After that match, I told myself I could actually win on Saturday,” she said.

And then the final against Sabalenka, everyone’s favorite all tournament. Keys played the first set from the moon, blasting serves and groundstrokes to overwhelm her opponent. Sabalenka, who has built her own big-match toughness in the last year, recovered to seize the momentum and win the second.

After a third set with no quarter, Keys was a game from the trophy with Sabalenka trying to prolong the match into a deciding tiebreak. Before the final, Keys spoke of her admiration for Sabalenka’s ability to lean into the tennis she wanted to play in the biggest moments. Facing her on the other side of the net, Keys leaned in as she never had before.

Every serve that came at her she pounded back. She missed one long; she barely got her strings on another. But all the others sent Sabalenka scrambling, especially the last one that landed an inch from the baseline. Keys took control of the point, waiting for that last forehand that was past Sabalenka before she could even move for it.

When it was over, Keys had knocked off three top-10 seeds consecutively. She had beaten three of the four best players of the past two years, and far and away the two best in the world in consecutive matches.

“Bear with me, I’m absolutely going to cry,” she said as she began to speak to some 14,000 fans in the packed stadium.

After 16 years, the overnight sensation was ready for her success.

(Top photo: Vincent Thian / Associated Press)