MELBOURNE – Be brave.
Go for it.
Those were the mantras Madison Keys turned to as she confronted the most significant points of her tennis career, trapped in the cauldron of a third set that was tied at 5-all, 30-all in the Australian Open final against two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka on Saturday.
No reason to be anything but aggressive now, Keys thought. No reason to try to wish there weren’t nerves accompanying the moment. No reason to worry — as the American long did along the journey from prodigy at age 12 to major champion less than a month before her 30th birthday — about what would happen if things didn’t quite work out.
“I just kept saying, ‘Be brave.’ And, ‘Go for it.’ I kind of just kept repeating that. That was really my goal for the day — to just be proud, no matter a win or a loss,” Keys said in an interview with The Associated Press after winning her first Grand Slam title with a 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 victory over the No. 1-ranked Sabalenka in Rod Laver Arena.
“I went after it, every single point. And if I missed it and I just didn’t execute, I could live with that. I didn’t want to have any sort of regret that I was passive and I missed. (Then) it could have been something where I thought: ‘I should have done something else,’” Keys said, her hands clasped as she recalled what transpired about two hours earlier. “So I kind of just kept saying that, over and over.”
She spread the credit for her achievement. To the team around her, including Bjorn Fratangelo, a former player who has been her partner for years, her coach since mid-2023 and her husband since November. To her therapist, with whom she spoke or texted frequently over the past two weeks. To her friends on tour who lifted her up when she needed it.
They all believed in Keys, she said, and now, lately, she believed in herself, too.
At her post-match news conference, Keys discussed at length the ways in which her outlook changed.
She used to be concerned about never living up to the hype that accompanied her from before she was even a teen and only increased when she made her first appearance in a Grand Slam semifinal at Melbourne Park at age 19 (she lost to Serena Williams). She used to think nothing about her tennis career would matter if she never managed to claim a major trophy. She used to assume the sport’s best never felt jitters like those hampering her during her first Grand Slam final at the U.S. Open at age 22 ( she lost to Sloane Stephens ).
Eventually, Keys let all of that go. It was OK not to obsess over others’ opinions. It was OK if she never won a Slam. It was OK to face the nerves, because, after all, that’s how the greats succeed — they feel discomfort but play through it.
“I was nervous my entire career. So is Novak (Djokovic). So was Roger (Federer). Everybody has been,” Fratangelo, a former player who looked on with reddened eyes as Keys accepted her trophy, said during the tournament. “It’s just how you deal with it. And she’s starting to deal with it in a better way.”
That was the case throughout her run, which featured five three-setters and four victories over top-10 seeds (No. 1 Sabalenka, No. 2 Iga Swiatek, No. 6 Elena Rybakina and No. 10 Danielle Collins ), including a trio of major champs (Sabalenka, Swiatek, Rybakina). No woman had defeated the top two players in the WTA rankings during one major since 2009.
Swiatek used the word “brave” to describe the ways Keys played while saving a match point before coming through in their final-set tiebreaker.
“To do it that way,” Keys said at her news conference, “I think, really, I thought to myself after the match that I can absolutely win on Saturday.”
She was so good at the start and down the stretch against Sabalenka.
From 5-all, 30-all, Keys claimed six of the last eight points. She hammered first-strike forehand winners on consecutive points to hold serve, then earned the lone break of the third set, closing it out with — fittingly — yet another forehand winner.
“If she can play consistently like that, I mean, it’s not much you can do,” Sabalenka said.
Keys was brave.
She went for it.
“My first semifinal here feels like it was forever ago. I mean, I honestly felt like I was a different person then. But I think that that kind of happens when so many things have happened throughout the past decade,” Keys told the AP. “It’s just kind of all accumulated to get to the point where I was finally able to just go out and play some really good tennis and walk away with a Grand Slam.”
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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
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