The Overnight: Where does Tennys Sandgren goes from here?

The game gets an unlikely new star—Hyeon Chung’s mom

How long will it be before we see kids around the world putting on little rectangular glasses before they walk onto their local tennis courts? After watching Hyeon Chung become the first Korean player to reach a Grand Slam semifinal at the Australian Open, they may want to try it even if their eyesight is perfect.

Chung has made himself into a star over the last 10 days in Melbourne. Just as Li Na did in the same arena at the beginning of this decade, he has extended the sport’s reach into another Asian country. Also like Li Na, he has managed to make one of his relatives famous in the process. With her, it was long-suffering husband Dennis; with Chung, it’s his mother, Kim Young-mi. After Chung introduced her to the crowd in Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday, her two-armed heart salute—it also means "fight" in Korea—went viral.

“The Professor,” Chung has been called, and he has been appealingly down to earth in all of his interviews. But he also has a confidence and swagger that belies his studious look. When he was asked how he survived three hours with Novak Djokovic on Monday, Chung chuckled and said, “I’m younger than Novak, what do I care?” And when he drilled a winner to go up two sets to none over Tennys Sandgren in their quarterfinal on Wednesday, Chung flapped his arms in the universal “You got to get up!” signal as he walked, backwards, to the sideline.

That swagger should serve Chung well. It has already helped him close out one of his idols, Novak Djokovic, in straight sets, and it helped him avoid tripping as he crossed the finish line on Wednesday. While their match only went three sets, Chung-Sandgren may have been the most entertaining contest of the men’s event. Both guys served big, gunned their forehands judiciously, ran down seemingly ungettable balls, and raced to the net as soon as they could. If this is the kind of tennis that Melbourne’s quickened courts are going to produce, the sport should be all for it.

Serving at 5-3, 40-0, triple match point, Chung appeared to be on his way to the semis. But Sandgren had one more punch left in him, and he nearly connected. He came up with a crosscourt forehand winner to save one match point, and a reflex volley winner to save another. Up break point, he and Chung played the point of the tournament, a long, cat-and-mouse rally that included an exchange of slice backhands so delicate and careful that they made the crowd crack up.

“I think last game many things come together,” Chung said, when he was asked what was going through his head at the end. “If I win one more point, I make history in Korea. Something I thinking like that. I have to think about the [post-match] ceremony, something.”

“Anyway, I have to stay calm because the finish—the match is not finish yet, so I’m just trying to stay calm until the finish of the match.”

Another player may have broken under the pressure, but Chung endured it and survived. That’s as positive a sign for his future as his win over Djokovic was.

Peak Angie and Simona

What a difference a year can make Down Under. At this stage of the Australian Open 12 months ago, Angelique Kerber and Simona Halep were long gone. Halep, the fourth seed, had been bounced in the first round, in straight sets, by Shelby Rogers. Kerber, the defending champion, had been run out of Rod Laver Arena by Coco Vandeweghe.

Now the German and the Romanian are set to meet in a high-stakes semifinal. With their easy quarterfinal wins over two dangerous opponents, Madison Keys and Karolina Pliskova, Kerber and Halep completed their 180-degree turns from a year ago. For the moment, each woman seems to have cleared her biggest mental hurdle.

Kerber may have played better against Keys than she did in any match in 2016, when she finished the season No. 1. Instead of letting the American dictate as expected, Kerber grabbed the initiative by stepping forward and punching her down-the-line forehand into the corners; it’s a shot that Keys said later is deceptively difficult to handle. By the end of the first set, Kerber was so dialed in from that side that she put two straight forehands smack on the sideline for winners.

Match Point:

According to Kerber, the key at this tournament, and so far this season, has been learning to forget everything around her again. The rankings, the expectations, the position she holds in the sport: Being No. 21 in the world, rather than, No. 1, has allowed her to shut all of that out of her mind and simply swing a racquet again.

“I’m not thinking about the records and head to heads,” Kerber said of her mindset against Keys. “Every match starts from zero. It’s a new tournament...From me, it was not that I was looking on her side. I mean, like I said before this tournament, I’m just focusing on me and every single day.”

Kerber began the day session in peak form, and Halep finished it the same way. After her 6-3, 6-2 win over Pliskova, the Romanian wasn’t afraid to say how pleased she was with her performance.

“I think it was a great match, the best this tournament,” Halep said, “I started slow a little bit. Then I got used to the rhythm. I got used to everything. I played very well.

Halep went down 0-3 to begin, and faced a break point to go down 0-4. But Pliskova threw her a lifeline by missing a few second-serve returns. On other days, Halep might not have been ready to grab for that lifeline. She might have already begun to rush from one point to the next. But not in Melbourne, not after surviving a twist in her first match and coming back from the dead in her second.

“After I took the first game,” Halep claimed, “I said that I can come back.”

Halep’s game rose with her belief. She played Pliskova the way you have to play her, by refusing to give her cheap points on her serve, and hitting with angles and shape from the baseline, rather than trying to out-gun her. That takes patience, something that Halep doesn’t always have after a slow start. On Wednesday she did.

Tennis is better when up-and-down talents like Kerber and Halep are on upswings. Now, in the semis, we’ll see whose peak is higher.

A Tale of Two Tournaments

That’s what the 2018 Australian Open was for Tennys Sandgren. On-court, the Tennessee native had by far the best 10 days of his athletic life. After spending the bulk of his career at the Challenger level, the 26-year-old showed himself and his peers that he can play with anyone. He won his first match at a Grand Slam, and then won three more. He beat a Top 10 player, Dominic Thiem, over five sets. When he finally lost, in an entertaining, hard-fought three-setter to Hyeon Chung, he was given a long ovation as he walked out of Rod Laver Arena. He added more than $300,000 to his bank account and shaved 40 spots off his ranking. When Sandgren talked about his game on court and in the interview room, he came across as personable and interesting.

Off the court and away from the tennis talk, things didn’t go so smoothly. By the time he reached the quarters, the glare of the spotlight had found its way to Sandgren’s Twitter account. There he had described the “collective evidence” around the debunked alt-right Pizzagate conspiracy theory as “too much to ignore,” and retweeted a video from a student who attended last year’s notorious white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

When asked about his tweets, Sandgren said, “Look, who you follow on Twitter I feel doesn’t matter even a little bit.” While he says he finds some alt-right content “interesting,” he says he doesn’t support it.

“I support Christ and following him, and that’s what I support.”

Sandgren, in what he said was an effort to “move forward,” later deleted most of his tweets, and after losing to Chung he read a statement accusing the media of putting “people in these little boxes so that you can order the world in your already assumed preconceived ideas.” He said he would only take questions about the match.

Sandgren had to disavow the alt-right because alt-right content doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Now that he’s done that, and tried to eliminate the distraction of his Twitter account, where does he go from here? What does he believe and support?

“I’m going to go home and enjoy time with my family, turn off my phone, really reflect on the last two weeks,” Sandgren said on Wednesday. “Reflect where my life has gone to, where I’m at, where I am in this stage at 26, who I am as a person, who I want to continue trying to be, where I want to go in the sport, where I want to go as a man.”

Sandgren discovered better things about himself on the tennis court over the last two weeks. Let’s hope, now that the spotlight has found him, he can do something similar off it.

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