It was late 2014, and TENNIS Magazine was planning its January/February issue. Traditionally, the year’s opening issue focused on the Australian Open, but this time we opted to go for a season-preview theme. With a change in course, there was some debate on how we were going to construct the magazine’s 60 editorial pages. But it was unanimous who would grace the most important page, the cover: Eugenie Bouchard.
The 20-year-old had taken tennis by storm earlier that year, starting at the Australian Open, where she reached the semifinals as the No. 30 seed. A “Genie Army” took notice of the starlet and invaded Melbourne—lofting teddy bears, rather than grenades, from the stands—and swelled in number as the Canadian went on to make her second Grand Slam semifinal at Roland Garros. She then topped both performances with a runner-up finish at Wimbledon.
“I was in a bubble,” Bouchard admitted to Tennis Channel on Tuesday at Roland Garros. “I didn’t realize what I was doing.”
Bouchard finally realized her accomplishments when she returned to Canada, where she was greeted by scores of cameras, media and fans at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport. From that point on, Bouchard's career was never the same. In her first match after the Wimbledon final, as the eighth seed and home favorite at the Rogers Cup in Montreal, she took a 6-0, 2-6, 6-0 loss to 113th-ranked qualifier Shelby Rogers. She’d lose her next match, in Cincinnati to Svetlana Kuznetsova. Bouchard would save face with sustained runs at the U.S. Open and Wuhan, and we chalked up her 0-3 mark at the WTA Finals to the grind of a long and successful season. Genie was our cover girl.