Madison Keys, left, won the Australian Open women’s title while Jannik Sinner, right, claimed the men’s championship. MARTIN KEEP/AFP via Getty Images (Keys); REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (Sinner)
ET
For one Aussie Open singles champion, it’s a milestone she worried would never happen—but evidence of what’s always lurked inside.
For the other, it’s the latest trophy in what’s already a fairly gaudy collection.
First, the milestone. Madison Keys has been a professional tennis player more than half her life—the Illinois-born right-hander made the leap on her 14th birthday, and though she managed to crack world top 10 and reach a final at the 2017 U.S. Open, a major tournament victory continued to elude her as she closed on her 30th birthday.
The journey from preteen prodigy to tour packfill can be soul-crushing. What once looked close in the rearview began to fade in the distance. Keys endured injuries and interruptions and watched as younger players beat her to career goals. She grew haunted by that lone finals loss.
She didn’t try to downplay it: losing ate at her. She made money, she won other titles, but never capturing one of tennis’s four majors continued to follow her like a cloud. She worried about the opinions of others, what people would say if this former women’s tennis wunderkind never broke through on the biggest stage.
“A pretty heavy burden to carry around,” she called it.
That kind of burden defeats a lot of players. But Keys did the smartest possible thing, a bit of wisdom that eludes even veteran talent: she let it all go.
She said farewell to the worry, torment and critiques from the cheap seats. She stopped obsessing over what others said, what her career arc looked like. She committed to therapy—“lots of therapy,” she said—turned the noise down, got healthy, changed her racket, and leaned into the coaching of her husband, Bjorn Fratangelo.
It liberated her. An unlocked, unburdened Keys began playing the tennis of her life. She played what she called “brave” tennis, which is another way of saying: she started going for it. She let loose with her considerable power—Keys can hit it as hard as anyone on tour, or harder—and stopped agonizing about making mistakes.
Let’s get to what happened in Melbourne. Keys, the 19th seed, won this tournament by knocking off the world No. 2 and No. 1 players in succession. There were no short cuts to this one. She handled back-to-back three-set thrillers against a pair of opponents (Iga Swiatek in the semis and Aryna Sabalenka in the final) with a mantle’s worth of major hardware. Sabalenka was the back-to-back Australian Open champion, a ferocious talent who’d seemed to learn how to tamp down her baseline errors.
Madison Keys won her first career major title. Photo: Vincent Thian/Associated Press
Playing bravely, hitting through the ball, taking chances when needed, Keys didn’t wait for Sabalenka to blunder. On Saturday she took the match straight at her. It worked, 6-3, 2-6, 7-5.
“If she can play consistently like that…not much you can do,” the deposed champion said.
There’s a lesson here: these elite tennis players, they’re all astonishing talents. What makes the difference between success and “failure”—and failure is in quotes because to compete at this level can’t ever be considered a failure—is often unseen details that happen at the margins. It’s seldom purely physical. It’s mental, often.
It’s not skill. It’s belief.
Keys knows. That’s the recognition you saw come over her face as she sat in a chair after her victory, that cathartic mix of tears and laughter which arrives with finally reaching a childhood dream. The burden was now a vapor, gone skyward. This Australian Open was Keys’s forty-sixth major tournament appearance. She always had it in her, but she’d waited so long.
Now she believes. Look out.
Onto the men, where defending champion Jannik Sinner pushed through second-seed Alexander Zverev on Sunday, 6-3, 7-6(4), 6-3, to win his second Australian title and third major at age 23.
Phew. That’s what I think watching Sinner at this moment. When the lean Italian baseliner leans into a forehand, taking the ball on the rise and coming over the top, it’s as devastating a shot as tennis has right now.
What do you do against a shot like that? Watch it usually.
Zverev played well in Melbourne, and benefited from a short day in the semis after Novak Djokovic retired after one set, but even he seems to know there’s significant airspace between where he is, and where Sinner now flies.
It doesn’t help that Sinner keeps getting better. He’s sprinkling more movement and variety (drop shots, etc.) into his game, and his serve (he faced no break points Sunday) should only improve. Sinner, the winner at September’s U.S. Open, is now 80-6 since the start of 2024.
Yikes.
Jannik Sinner won his third career major title. Photo: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images
If Sinner’s able to translate his hard court domination to clay and grass—and it feels like a matter of when, as he’s reached the semifinals at both the French and Wimbledon—his grip on No. 1 will only strengthen. At the moment, only Carlos Alcaraz (four major titles, 6-4 lifetime against Sinner) hovers as a generational rival.
Sinner’s only other concern, it appears, is Sinner himself. His lean body continues to be susceptible to cramping—he briefly tightened up against Zverev, and in the semis against American Ben Shelton—but that should be fixable. Great players tend to sort out hydration and recovery and what it takes to endure these best-of-five endurance fests. Ask Djokovic, who was similarly beset early in his now legendary career.
Also looming and serious: An appeal by the World Anti-Doping Agency of Sinner’s doping positive drama from last year. In late summer, the International Tennis Integrity Agency found Sinner without “fault or negligence” for a pair of positive tests for the steroid clostebol after Sinner’s team testified it was an accidental transmission from a trainer who’d been treating a cut with a spray containing the banned substance.
The case drew criticism for its tidy resolution—nothing was known about Sinner’s case until the no fault or negligence declaration was announced—and whether or not Sinner deserved a stronger penalty because of “strict liability” standards, which hold a player ultimately responsible for a banned substance positive.
WADA’s appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport will be heard later this spring, and, if successful, could result in a lengthy suspension for Sinner, right before Paris and Wimbledon. Sinner continues to maintain he never intentionally took a banned substance and hasn’t wavered in his account of how it happened.
Potentially, it’s a real mess for tennis. Or simply a speed bump in Sinner’s staggering career start.
