Amanda Anisimova, reluctant prodigy, faces Aryna Sabalenka and her relationship with tennis

The comeback trail in tennis has gradually become a freeway, and this year it became as crowded as the I-5 in Los Angeles during rush hour. The returning players left the game for all sorts of reasons, some sobering (devastating injury), some joyous (child birth), some ominous (burnout).

It’s hardly surprising that, with the likes of Naomi Osaka, Elina Svitolina, Rafael Nadal, Paula Badosa and Caroline Wozniacki resuming careers recently, Amanda Anisimova—who reached the fourth round of the Australian Open on Thursday, and is on a collision course with defending champion and No. 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka—has largely been lost in the shuffle.

It isn’t the first time.

In 2019, Anisimova reached her career-high ranking of No. 21 at just 18, after reaching her first Grand Slam semifinal at Roland Garros. But even in that remarkable year, by September she was overshadowed by two other breakout talents: 15-year old Coco Gauff, and the surprise US Open champion, 18-year supernova Bianca Andreescu.

Now a well-traveled 22-year old, Anisimova is just fine with life in the slow lane, although it may become difficult for her to avoid the spotlight that once fixed her in its merciless glare. Anisimova is returning from an eight-month hiatus due to burnout. It is not her first. One of the main reasons she has struggled is that, despite having been heralded as a future Grand Slam champion from the age of 16 (when she won the 2017 US Open girls’ title), she has always felt the gravitational pull of ordinary life vying with the desire to succeed in tennis.

“They're just both very different sides to life,” Anisimova said in Melbourne, after winning her first-round match. “I don’t mind the day-to-day life because I do like being at home, I get really homesick when I’m on the road. That’s something that I struggle with a lot.”

The dichotomy Anisimova faces is the same one that led to the premature retirement of another, more famous tennis prodigy, Ash Barty. But if Anisimova hasn’t enjoyed the same measure of success as Barty, she has also had to grapple with more powerful mitigating circumstances.

The greatest—and most heart-wrenching—of those was the unexpected loss of her father and earliest coach, Konstantin Anisimov, who was just 52 when he died of a heart attack on August 19, 2019. The tragedy occurred during his youngest daughter’s spectacular emergence (Anisimova has an older sister, Maria Egee), just a week before the start of the US Open. Grief-stricken, the dark-horse contender withdrew from the tournament. Anisimova played just three more matches over the rest of that year, losing two of them.

That December, Anisimova was still reeling from the loss. She spoke with the New York Times of her terrible autumn, telling Christopher Clarey, “It was really hard to, like, leave my house.”

It’s difficult, and potentially insensitive, to speculate about how Anisimova has been shaped by that early experience of tragedy. What this reporter knows for sure is that there’s a stillness about Anisimova now, whereas at Roland Garros years ago she was more outgoing, a vivacious, self-aware teen with a go-for-broke game. Reflecting on how her game had evolved from the junior days, she told me: “In juniors, I would play without a brain. I'd go for stupid shots all the time.”

She was being too hard on herself, which is a luxury reserved for the gifted. Even then, her baseline game was seamless, classic in roughly the same way as the games of Chris Evert or, currently, Belinda Bencic or Jessica Pegula. If there was a secret sauce, it was Anisimova’s ability to use the entire court, creating and exploiting severe angles with the oppressive power of her relatively flat, powerful drives. Those qualities are still foundational for her.

“She's one of these players that's really, really uncomfortable for my style of play,” Badosa said, after Anisimova leap-frogged over her in the third-round. “She's real aggressive. She doesn't give you a lot of rhythm. She finds the winner very easily. Very flat ball.”

Anisimova struggled in her return to tennis after losing her father. In 2020, she went just 11-9, three of those wins coming in the first week of the tour year. Her ranking dropped as low as No. 86 by late 2021, but rose again to No. 22 over the following year. It was a great sign—until Anisimova crashed in 2023. She said this week in Melbourne that she was already struggling mentally in the fall 2022.

After going 3-8 in 2023 (including qualifyinf matches_, she decided in the spring to take another sabbatical.

“It took a long time for me to make that decision,” Anisimova said, after her win over Badosa. “Obviously it's a big decision to step away from the game at any point. . .[But] it just didn't seem like I would be able to push through it because I just wasn't enjoying it, and I was just, like, ‘I just need a break from all of this.’”

The allure of a life with roots made it easier for her to stop. During her time off last year, Anisimova dabbled in art dealing, she went hiking and studied, both online and in person at Nova Southeastern University. But as gratifying as she found her life away from tennis, Anisimova has never forgotten that she is an elite athlete.

Anisimova still hit the gym daily during her layoff. Despite the stress she needed to escape and the quiet life she sought, she understood that being an athlete is critical to her identity. The stress and pressure turned her away from the game but, she said,.“I definitely wasn't going to be losing that part of myself.”

Uncoupling her love of an athletic way of life from the vagaries of a career in tennis seems important to Anisimova.

“Sometimes when I'm going through a training block,” she said, “I'll ask my coaches, ‘Can you give me one day where I just go to the gym on my own, where I'm not being told what to do?’”

Anisimova seems intent on keeping it pure. She enjoys the athletic life but seems wary of chasing the fame and celebrity that once seemed her destiny. She appears calm and watchful, wise beyond her years in ways that are difficult to express.

“For sure, it's a nice feeling winning matches,” she admitted. “Being in that high-stress environment is unlike anything else. . . [But] I'm just here for the journey right now, seeing how much I can progress. I think I would take it with whatever outcome I would get. I am happy with the wins, and I really hope that I can build on from it. But I'm trying to just stay settled.”

There’s a different story behind every single comeback in progress. Amanda Anisimova’s may be the most compelling of them all. Sometimes it’s the most extraordinary people who crave ordinary life.