Two Players, One Roller Coaster

“I played so well,” Ana Ivanovic said, with wistfulness in her words, after losing 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 to Madison Keys in the third round at the Australian Open on Saturday. Ivanovic led by a break in each of the last two sets before fading down the stretch, but under the circumstances it was hard to argue with her assessment or fault her effort. Ten games into the match, Ivanovic's coach, Nigel Sears, collapsed as he walked to her player box and had to be hospitalized (he was later said to be in good health). Ivanovic nervously watched the episode unfold from the court, but after a 50-minute delay she gathered herself and played on.

Whether the situation with Sears distracted or drained Ivanovic is hard to say; neither she nor Keys gave full press conferences afterward. But Ivanovic was the on verge of tears as she watched Sears being attended to in the stands, and was on the verge of them again as she walked off the court in defeat. Ivanovic is no stranger to roller-coaster matches, but in this one she went to greater emotional heights and depths than usual. When she broke for a 3-0 lead in the third, she let out an impassioned shriek and smiled all the way to the sideline. Ivanovic had, it seems now, peaked too soon. Perhaps she wanted it too much.

And, perhaps, her opponent had something to do with her defeat.

“She came back strong with a very powerful game,” Ivanovic said of Keys. “I thought the third set she served better than me...She came out with some firing strokes toward the end of the match.”

“I really wanted to win and have the chance to come back,” Ivanovic said. “The crowd was just really amazing.”

The obvious extenuating circumstances aside, it was, in the end, exactly the type of unpredictable match that many had predicted from these two. The 20-year-old Keys hasn’t ridden quite as many roller coasters as the 28-year-old Ivanovic yet, but give her time. Keys, while she doesn’t suffer from Ivanovic’s service-toss woes, has been just as hit-and-miss over the course of her short career. And she was again on Saturday, when she finished with a very Keysian 44 winners and 52 errors, compared to Ivanovic’s 21 and 23. For better and worse, Keys was the one driving this roller roaster.

That’s how it will always be for Keys, a rangy and explosive six-footer who regularly hits her forehand harder than the men on tour. One of her returns against Ivanovic was clocked at 94 m.p.h., and it came off a serve that wasn’t even hit with much pace. Earlier this week, Chris Evert ran into Keys’ new coach, former pro Jesse Levine, as he was icing his wrist. When she asked what the problem was, he said, “Have you ever hit with Madison?”

As Levine found out when they began practicing together in the off-season, Keys is all about power, whether it’s coming off her racquet or her opponent’s.

“There’s been a couple times when he hits super, super spinny or whatever,” Keys said of hitting with Levine, “and I’m like, ‘You can’t do that. No one hits like that. Please stop.’”

Since then, though, Keys and Levine have said and done all the right things, and she has held up well under the pressure of defending semifinal points at a Slam for the first time. But it's just the start, according to Keys, who has made "consistency" the watchword for her season. After a 2015 in which she excelled at the majors but was dogged by injuries just about everywhere else (Keys withdrew or retired from nine events last year with a variety of ailments), she says the goal for 2016 is staying healthy and “just going out and giving everything that I have that day, and doing the absolute best that I can.”

Keys’s coaching switch from Lindsay Davenport to Levine was the first step; Davenport, who has four children and a commentating job with the Tennis Channel, couldn’t travel with her full-time. It was hardly a surprise that Keys recorded many of her best results—Australian Open semifinals, Wimbledon quarterfinals, U.S. Open round of 16—with Davenport at her side, and that she was only sporadically successful elsewhere. This year, Levine will be with her the whole way.

Keys wants to improve her consistency from week to week, but also from set to set. In the past, when her shots began to land out, they’ve tended to keep landing out; there was a sense that her forehand missiles were either going to find their targets, or they weren’t. Keys knew she could belt the ball past anyone, but when it came to beating more experienced opponents, she didn’t have the same confidence. Now Keys has embarked on the long process of turning herself from an outstanding hitter into an outstanding player. Part of doing that, according to Levine, is learning to treat bad patches of play not as causes for despair, but as challenges to be overcome.

Has Keys’ maturation process begun in Australia? In her three matches so far, she has come back from a set down twice, and from set-point down once.

“I definitely have been working working a lot on the mental side of my game,” Keys said after her three-set win over Yaroslava Shvedova on Thursday. “Being able to kind of stay a little bit more composed through whatever is going on on the court, just figure some stuff out when I’m not playing, you know, perfect tennis.”

Keys has shown flashes of patience in Melbourne. Once she fell behind to Ivanovic, she relaxed and began to point-construct her way back into the match. But her first instinct is still to try to end a point with one swing, primarily because, more than any other WTA player, she can end a point with one swing. Keys can also, unlike virtually any other WTA player, send a kick serve over her opponent’s head. All of this leads to the double-edged sword that we might call “the inevitability syndrome.” With her physical gifts, it would seem to be only a matter of time before she blows the rest of the field away. Evert, whose brother, John, once coached Keys, say she expects her to be a Wimbledon champion within the next five years.

“2015 was a great year, and I did a lot of really good things,” said Keys, who understands the pressure that comes with potential. “People are going to try to measure me up to what I did then. But for me, it’s a new year. Last year doesn’t really matter.”

As Keys and thousands of other former prodigies know, there’s no such thing as a “can’t miss” young player. But if Keys can learn to miss a little less often, anything is possible.