For 26-year-old Madison Keys, the 2022 tennis season has been nothing short of a rebirth.
Yet over the years since, the young woman who stood so tall on the court was weighed down by her own expectations. Then came the coronavirus pandemic and the solitude that made the itinerant life of tennis pros even lonelier as tournament protocols shrank her permissible world to tennis courts, airplanes and hotels.
After a covid-19 diagnosis prevented Keys from competing in the 2021 Australian Open, it triggered what she recently described as “a kind of panic” over feeling as if she had fallen woefully behind in the chase for ranking points and titles just as the season was getting underway.
“It just felt like it was just another brick on top of another brick,” Keys said during a post-match interview at the Australian Open. “Everything got a little bit heavier and heavier and harder to deal with.”
As a result, the prodigy who had turned pro on her 14th birthday tumbled out of the top 20 in 2021 and kept tumbling, out of the top 50 and the top 75, landing with an ignoble thud at 87th.
Though the tennis season is barely four weeks old, for Keys it has represented a triumph of hard work and newfound perspective.
In the past month, she has managed to crawl out from under a dark cloud of her own making and win as many matches (11) as she did in all of 2021.
Her latest victory clinched a spot in the Australian Open’s semifinals — seven years after she last reached the final four in Melbourne — and a date with world No. 1 Ashleigh Barty.
Congratulations poured in upon Keys’s 6-3, 6-2 rout of 2021 French Open champion Barbora Krejcikova on Tuesday — from longtime mentor Chris Evert, who co-owns the tennis academy where the Illinois-born Keys trained as a teen; Martina Navratilova, who, like Evert, won 18 Grand Slam singles titles during a Hall of Fame career; and fellow American Sloane Stephens, who defeated Keys for the 2017 U.S. Open title.
Barty paid tribute as well.
“It’s so nice to have Madi back playing her best tennis,” Barty said after trouncing Jessica Pegula 6-2, 6-0, to reach the semifinals. “She’s a top player; she deserves to be at the top of the game.”
No one is smiling bigger than Keys.
“This truly is the most fun I’ve had — and the least amount of hair-pulling-out stress,” Keys said with a laugh during her on-court interview at Rod Laver Arena.
What made the difference in her resurgence, Keys has explained, was a dramatic shift of mind-set. She decided to toss out the traditional metrics of tennis greatness and go back to what she loved about the sport as a child — playing from the gut and heart.
“I decided to try enjoying tennis once again and take [off] some of that internal pressure that I was putting on myself,” Keys said. “It was honestly freezing me. I felt like I couldn’t play at all.”
In letting go of the extreme expectations she placed on herself, Keys gained a freedom in her game — one that enables her to reset after a sloppy patch in a match rather than seize up with stress. That freedom also has helped her be more judicious in her shot-making and approach rallies less like a home run derby, in which the goal is to crush every ball, and more like a game of chess, in which a few strategic shots set up the masterstroke.
“[I’m] really just trying to be a lot more measured and just play within myself a little bit more — not necessarily trying to hit a winner,” she said. “If it happens to be a winner, then it happens to be a winner.”
Only Barty has posted more dominant results in the tournament to date. A two-time Grand Slam champion, Barty has yet to concede a set in her quest for her first Australian Open title, routing one opponent after another. The latest casualty was Pegula, Keys’ good friend and compatriot, whom Barty dismissed in 63 minutes.
In several respects, Keys has been equally impressive in reaching the semifinal. She has ceded only one set over five matches, and she has done so while facing tougher opponents than Barty. That, of course, is the consequence of being unseeded and having to face higher-ranked players in the early rounds. So far, Keys has knocked off three: No. 11 seed Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion; No. 8 seed Paula Badosa; and, on Tuesday, No. 4 seed Krejcikova.
Now comes her biggest hurdle — the top-ranked Barty — in a semifinal worthy of a final.
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