Return Winners: The 2019 Charleston final

Madison Keys and Caroline Wozniacki faced off for the 2019 Volvo Car Open title.

With her powerful serve and groundstrokes, Keys has always possessed a game tailor-made for faster surfaces, with the bulk of her career results reflecting that. In 2018, only months after reaching her first Grand Slam final at the 2017 US Open, she advanced to a third career major semifinal at a somewhat-unlikely tournament, the French Open, one of the highlights of her season.

Starting off her 2019 clay-court campaign in Charleston, S.C., the American advanced to the final of the tournament, with perhaps her most impressive win coming against top seed Sloane Stephens in the quarterfinals—marking the first time she’d beaten her good friend. In the championship match, she’d face Wozniacki, the fifth seed who had been playing some of her best clay-court tennis in years.

Facing each other for only the third time in their careers, Wozniacki entered the final having never lost a set to Keys. Coming out firing with her returns, Keys threatened to break Wozniacki in the opening game and managed to do so in the third to take a 2-1 lead. However, Wozniacki—who won the tournament in 2011—broke right back and the two stayed on serve from there, pushing the set into a tiebreaker. Staying level with each other through most of it, Keys finally clinched the opener behind a backhand winner to put herself in the driver’s seat.

Early in the second set, the two players kept pace with each other, until Keys snuck in a break to take a 4-2 lead. Never threatened on her serve during the second set and with a 5-3 lead, Keys—the 2015 runner-up at the tournament—easily closed out the match, striking a forehand volley winner on match point to win her first title in nearly two years.

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With the win, Keys became the third American to win the title in the 2010s after Serena Williams’ back-to-back triumphs in 2012-’13 and Stephens’ victory in 2016.

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Keys won the title as the eighth seed, her second-lowest position in a draw from where she’d won a title. She was unseeded when she captured her first title in 2014.

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Wozniacki was seeking her first clay-court title since 2011, the last season of a three-year streak in which she had won at least one event on the surface.