Irresistible Madison Keys fights her way to fairy-tale win at Australian Open

MELBOURNE – At the end of a match dipped in grit and tension, emotion was finally allowed to spill free. A broken racket lay on the floor and two formidable women were weeping. One had won 92 points, the other 91. The defending champion, unseated, wept under her towel. The new champion, triumphant, cried in the arms of her team. This is what a first Grand Slam title means.

In an unlikely and popular victory, Madison Keys, the 19th-seeded outsider, upset the two-time winner Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 in the Australian Open women’s final. It might take a month before her joyous smile escapes her face. A 12-year-old prodigy who struggled with expectation has finally found victory and validation at 29.

“I have wanted this for so long,” she said.

Then she cried some more.  

Hang in there, coaches have always told those who fall short. Don’t quit. Your time will come. After a while this sounds like a tedious platitude, but then suddenly, from nowhere, a beaten-down athlete arrives to prove those words true and claim her place in history.

Keys has been to 45 Grand Slam events before this Open, been to an Australian semi-final in 2015, been to a US final in 2017, striven, fallen, had her heart stepped on, confidence bruised, and yet here she was, trophy in hand, having beaten the world No. 2 Iga Swiatek and No. 1 Sabalenka in succession. Sport never gets old in the miraculous stories it tells.

Keys’ story is inspirational yet instructional, of how dangerous it is to single out very young players as likely Grand Slam champions.

This labelling, she said, “obviously was meant to be confidence-building, (but) as I got older and I had gotten close and it didn’t happen... it kind of feels like, ‘will this ever actually happen? If it doesn’t happen, I didn’t live up to what everyone told me I should have done’.

“It kind of almost felt like it went from being something positive to something that was almost, like, a little bit of a panic of, ‘why hasn’t it happened yet? Why haven’t I been able to do it?’ It really started to kind of weigh on me more where it was, ‘what if I never do it? If I don’t do it, am I considered a failure’?”

The answer, eventually, she smiled and said, was “lots of therapy”.

If Keys has a strong sense of herself, she has a robust arm as well. Tennis might have once been a genteel garden party distraction, but now two powerful athletes were exchanging artillery fire. Of 183 rallies, only six went nine shots or more. The margins were tiny but Keys incredibly had the edge: she hit the same number of winners as Sabalenka (29), made two fewer unforced errors (31 to 33) and broke just once more than her rival.

It was a match compressed really to one set, the third. In the first, Keys came out like a boxer seeking an early knockout, her strokes hit so cleanly that they hummed as they flew. Sabalenka started the match with a double fault, had three more in the first set and was broken three times. This was a player in need of a spanner.  

But champions can do mid-journey repairs and reset their brains. And so Sabalenka, her rhythm retrieved, went from four winners in the first set to 13 in the second, seized it 6-2, and victory looked imminent. Yet Keys refused to bend. Instead she flew.

A changed racket (Wilson to Yonex) has helped her and so has a husband (Bjorn Fratangelo, a former French Open junior champion) who coaches her. Sometimes the perfect jigsaw just requires a patient wait for the right pieces. This event she won four three-set matches and perhaps her will hardened. In the semis she won 7-6 in the third, here it was 7-5. The underdog holding on for dear life is a beautiful sight.  

Keys had her highest percentage of first points won (85) in the third set and hit her most forehand winners (seven). The tiring, emotional heat of competition is an uncomfortable place, but an anxious player has understood that “I can be nervous and I can still play good tennis”. Then she demonstrated she can. A baby cried in the crowd and a fellow shouted “eye of the tiger”. The crowd loves Sabalenka but the Keys fairy tale was irresistible.

Handshake done, Sabalenka broke a racket but it was just despair being let go and then respect took its place. She joked with Keys later and spoke warmly of her. “She fought for it. In the final, she was playing really aggressively.” As Keys said later, champagne glass in hand: “I just kept telling myself, be brave, go for it, just kind of lay it all out on the line.”

Grand Slam champion is a tag that can’t be erased. It’s there already on a board, in the record books, in her head. Before the match, the Daphne Akhurst Trophy, named after a young Open champion who lost her life at 29, arrived on the court in a polished Louis Vuitton case. But it left, fittingly, in the sweaty, skilful hands of an American who is truly an original work of art.