Madison Keys on Her Australian Open Win: ‘I Was Most Surprised by My Emotions’
The whole thing played out like cinema. In the deciding set of the Australian Open finals on January 25, Illinois-born, Florida-raised Madison Keys, the 19th ranked player, steeled herself against her opponent, Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, the formidable No. 1 women’s tennis player in the world. The air was warm in the Melbourne twilight. The crowd was electrified (and, somewhat rare for tennis, pretty evenly split in their support). Keys’s husband and coach, Bjorn Fratangelo, watched stoically from courtside. Many in the States, having woken at witching hours to watch, clutched their blankets.
After splitting sets and staying even though the third, Keys brought victory to within a single point. Sabalenka made her first serve, and Keys hit a deep, nearly baseline-kissing return. Then, on the sixth shot of the rally, Keys power-feathered a forehand from the middle to the outside past Sabalenka. It was a clean winner.
The underdog—who turned pro in 2009—had done it, winning 6-3, 2-6, 7-5. She had taken her first major, also known as a Slam (of which there are four in pro tennis—the others being the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open), after coming close once previously, but never quite crossing the finish line. Keys shrieked in delight, tears welling in her eyes and smiling widely as she approached the net, while Sabalenka smashed a racket in frustration. Keys’s slow-burn story is so known, and admired, that even the commentators could be heard sniffling.
“I was most surprised by my emotions,” Keys tells me three days later from New York City, where she’s making the media rounds after her big win. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever really cried happy tears on a tennis court before.”
The happy tears were a long time coming. Expectations for the Orlando-based Keys were set high when she was just a teenager. She trained at the Evert Tennis Academy, an elite development school founded by the former pro Chrissie Evert in Boca Raton, where she drew fans and the eyes of tennis watchdogs.
At just 16 years old, Keys, now 29, won her first match at the US Open. By 17, she was ranked in the top 100; at 18, she beat her first top 10 player, the Chinese star Li Na. Two years later, after defeating Keys, Serena Williams predicted that Keys would one day be the top-ranked player in the world.
Keys did go on to reach a Slam final, at the U.S. Open in 2017, but lost to her friend and fellow American player Sloane Stephens. Keys was able to break through to the semifinals at the 2018 and 2023 U.S. Opens (along with the 2018 French Open), but struggled with self-doubt as the years progressed, once wondering aloud at a press conference: “If I never win a Slam, will people consider me a failure?”
She credits therapy with helping her work through the weightiness of that ultra-high standard. “Therapy helped me, and I would say I started to see improvement last year. I had done a lot of work, and it was kind of slow progress, but it eventually started giving me more and more confidence,” Keys tells me. “I kept telling myself, ‘I’m looking for progress, not perfection.’” She also realized that improving her mental health had benefits off-court too: “It’s not just about tennis. It’s about trying to be better as a person, and not, you know, trying to just be better at the performance.”
Keys also notes that through therapy—what she calls her “brain dump”—she has been able to decompress and let things go. “It was a surprise to me sometimes, sitting in a session, some of the things that I would say—I didn’t even know I was holding onto,” she explains.
Tennis is a mental game and overthinking can cause catastrophe. At the tour level, where everyone is physically elite, winning often comes down to who has the most mental fortitude. So I ask her if she’s a player who is always analyzing, or if she forces thoughts away and lets her training and instinct take the lead. “I think it’s almost a balance of the two,” Keys says. “I like to go up to the line having a plan, even if it’s just the first two balls. But I think after that, once the point starts, I’m going to just react.”
Whatever was on her mind in the moment, it worked, and Keys is now enjoying the limelight. “Lil Wayne DM’ed me,” she says, laughing. “We had some back and forth. I never knew he was a women’s tennis fan.”
The win in Australia boosted her ranking–she’s now No. 7 in the world, tying her all-time best position in 2016. Before continuing on with this year’s schedule (the next Slam is the French Open, in May), she says she’s excited to sleep in her own bed, make her own coffee, and let it all sink in. She’ll also spend time on Pinterest, “creating mood boards for different imaginary homes that I don’t have,”she says, laughing. “If I have a mountain house, this is the whole design; if I have a beach home or a Hamptons house, this is what it’s going to look like.” (That said, she will use some of her Australian prize money—about $2,200,000—for home improvements: “My husband is going to be devastated to learn we’re about to start phase two of renovations,” she says.)
She emphasizes that her life off-court comes first. “I want to be a happy, well-rounded person,” she says. “And I think, if I can do that, then tennis just becomes easier.”
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