People had been telling Madison Keys that he had the game to win older since it was a girl. “Probably 11, 12,” he said on Saturday. “It was obviously destined to be the construction of trust and all that.” A look at the power of their game, and it is easy to see what made them think that way.
The arrival of Keys to the semifinals of the Australia Open 2015, at age 19, only solidified that prophecy. During the next decade, sometimes he approached that important title, a final, four semifinals, but the job never finished. Some of those losses on the road were discouraging and nervous despite the good clues. Other younger players appeared on the tour and achieved what he allegedly should. “So I think it almost seemed that it happened to be something positive to something that was almost, like a little panic of ‘Why didn’t it happen yet? Why didn’t I have done, is it?” Keys said. “If I do not, do you consider me a failure?”
Keys said he went to therapy, specifically not on sports therapy that focuses on routines and mentality on the court, but in therapy to discover how he thought about herself. “Honestly, I think that if I had not done that, then I would not be sitting here,” he said, referring to the press conference for the 2025 Australian Open Champion, with the Trophy sitting in front of her. It would be difficult to imagine a more satisfactory conclusion for a long-standing persecution than his triumph 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 over the two-time defender Aryna Sabalenka on Saturday. All about this tournament, the decisions of the low season of Keyys, the opponents he defeated, his style of play in the final minutes, suggested to a player who had achieved clarity and the self -deceased won with effort.
This was the 46th appearance of Keys in a specialty; In the modern era, only two women (Flavia Pennetta and Marion Bartoli) had appeared more before obtaining their first important titles. It had not been considered a favorite to win any of those, including this tournament, where it was the seed number 19. In general, it was seen as a deadly floating in the raffle, a player on the periphery that could disturb anyone in a given game , but lacked consistency to defeat seven of them in a row. As if the group gods wanted to demonstrate a point, embarked on one of the most twisted roads to a title: he had to defeat four seeds of the 10 best in Melbourne, including the two best players in the world in the last two rounds.
In the semifinal against sown No. 2 IGA Swiatek, Keys played what, to my eye, was easily the best game of his career until that moment. He designed an escape against one of Tour’s most steels, despite being broken in the decisive set, facing a Swiatk party point with 5-6 and behind much of the tiebreaker. What makes the keys dangerous is their ability to open defenses without prior notice, placing hard and plans shots on the court. In tense moments, this game plan felt fragile. These balls would begin to sail a lot, or she could grow and play more conservatively, hoping to extract an error. Against Swiatek, Keys found an ideal balance of control and power, which adheres to his true style even through the nerves. She said in court after she didn’t even realize that she had been at a starting point; She “passed out.”
Doing all that again in the final, against the twice champion, was another question. The seed No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, fishing for a Truey, had won 20 consecutive games in Melbourne, dropping only two sets in that period. He had become the best practitioner of the game of the game oriented to that Keys was trying to play. Sabalenka had won four of his five previous clashes, and his last meeting in a specialization was particularly painful for Keys: the 2023 US Open semifinal, where Keys won the first 6–0 set, served for the game in the second set, and even led by a break in the third set, but it was still lost. Upon entering its end, Keys said he had begun to see Sabalenka as a model for his own success: “The only thing he really wanted to be better was not to play more passive at great points and really, honestly, just trying to Emulate the way he trusts in his game and the way he pursues it. “
One thing that has helped the keys to take advantage of their power under pressure is a change of out of season. His coach and husband Bjorn Fratangelo, a former player among the first 100 who had made an exchange of mid -career rackets, had urged her to make some adjustments. In the 2024 season, they found a little more control in their game and relieved their wrist pain by changing intestinal strings to polya strings, and changed a more “open” string pattern. He changed another team for this year: Wilson had been her racket sponsor since she was a girl, and the contract concluded at the end of 2024. The keys changed to a Yonex frame and discovered that she made the balls land on the court.
Tenists are understandably quite cautious for changing their team; Much of his sport is to find the feeling of a particular swing and then deepen that muscle memory in the course of decades. Even when they are supposedly using “new” rackets, they usually use their old rackets with a paint work so that their sponsor can sell the newer models. But Fratangelo thought his wife should change for the last phase of his career. Keys’s agent, Max Eisenbud, was less convinced, but told the tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg that he also began to take it seriously when his player took his new racket to a heating tournament in Adelaida in early January and won the qualification. Despite all conservatism around Gear, there is a counter -argument: Keys was professional in 2009, on his 14th birthday. After 16 years of an approach, why not throw the dice?
“Obviously, I am at the last point of my career. He simply felt like, why not, for many more years I have, be willing to adapt and be a little more open to change?” Keys said after his semifinal victory. “Doing that is a bit liberating, because I think that for a long time I felt that I was so close doing it in a certain way. I just kept falling short. But in my head it was, ‘if I do it that way, maybe it happens.”
Fratangelo said his wife fell in love with Yonex’s frame within 10 minutes of using it. Keys, not a great team for his own admission, said he struggles to articulate what loves the new racket, but the word “trust” cultivates a lot in his comments. She said she has helped her on the days when she does not feel the ball too well, since she gives her “ability to manipulate things with my racket and my hands and a little more security.” That is critical because in the course of seven games in a major, there will surely be some days when it is more difficult to find the rhythm. Keys resisted five three -set games in this race, including the final against Sabalenka.
Keys began that fight for the title in a scorching way, playing even better than in the semifinal, breaking the Sabalenka service twice and almost handling it for the third time. Then the keys became somewhat more tentative in the second set. She trusted a non -threatening setback in stages in which she could have committed to the complete power, and her movement became a bit slow. Sabalenka, exploiting that with his fall of fall, level the game. My general mood while looking at her in these last two rounds was of disbelief, and that only intensified in that third decisive set. For a long time I had seen his fight in these scenarios, and I was still waiting for each third ball to fly a lot. On the other hand, at each situation, she fashed and found a winner of another world, as if that were the option and obvious choice.
While served at 5-5, 30-30 in the third set, the keys faced a dangerous moment. Sabalenka broke a return to his feet, but Keys barely moved, remained strong on his legs and put a right blow of the open posture, just as strong, without being realized, reflecting the total confidence in his selection of shooting. Keys kept the service from there and then broke the service in the next game for the title. He was one of the best finals for an important final in recent memory. There was no nervous game and with tense weapons on both sides of the court, only two of the largest batters of the tour freely balanced and fight for the initiative. This time, Keys managed to reorganize the hierarchy. After she hit her last ball, a right -wing winner out and hugged her opponent, the television broadcast could not decide whether to show keys crying with joy or Sabalenka breaking her racket on the bench.
In a new touch in this year’s Australian Open, a player’s staff can sit in the court sections, allowing them to talk to their players more easily during a game. Throughout the tournament, Keys clearly comforts himself in the presence of her husband-Slash-Coach and the words of encouragement. All in the player’s box cried at the end of this race. Many of his colleagues have been equally happy. It is one of those rare cases in which the success of a player seemed to serve as a time to feel good for the entire tour, because, like a fable, he demonstrated something more widely resonant about human resistance and adaptation.
I especially liked Keys’s words about learning to play under pressure, from his press conference after the championship, which I will quote in its entirety:
I think that for a long time in my head, I had the idea that people could ignore their nerves or doubts or something and simply a little tunnel vision tennis.
In the past, if I ever had nerves or something, I would not usually play so well. Then he began to reach the point where when his nerves arose, he was thinking, Oh, no, now I’m going to play badly. This internal panic would almost begin.
For some reason, it was something like this moment of bulb in which I really began to buy: I can be nervous and I can still play a good tennis. As, those things can live together.
So I stopped fighting, trying to move away the feelings and pretend that they are not there, and simply accept them and really tell me that they are fine and that they are totally normal to be there, and I can still play tennis.
I think that day after day, and simply accept that it will be uncomfortable, you will be nervous, there will be thousands of people looking at you, but you can still do it and then start to do it, it simply began to give me more confidence.
These adjustments obtained the keys to their first important title after 16 years of trying. No one is too old to change.