Madison Keys reveals difficulties of traveling as a newly-crowned grand slam champion
Professional tennis players are generally well-accustomed to traveling with an excess amount of luggage and oversized baggage as they fly around the world from tournament to tournament.
However, flying back to the United States from Melbourne, Madison Keys had one item she had never previously tried getting onto a plane before: a grand slam trophy.
Specifically, the sizeable women’s Australian Open trophy, which Keys won on Saturday by stunning two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka to clinch her maiden slam title.
“The trophy had to go under the plane,” Keys told CNN Sport’s Don Riddell. “It’s a little too large to go in the overhead bins and there weren’t enough seats to actually put it on the plane with us, but it made it in one piece.
Madison Keys won her first ever grand slam title. David Gray/AFP/Getty Images
“I’m happy to have my eyes on it again!”
To say Keys’ success in Australia had been a long time coming would be an understatement.
Since breaking onto the tour just after she turned 14, Keys has been touted as one of the USA’s leading hopes to win a grand slam title.
She reached a career-high of world No. 7 in 2016 and it was around that time that Keys looked most likely to go all the way in one of the four slams. There was an Australian Open semifinal appearance in 2015, a heart-breaking final defeat at her home US Open in 2017, and French and US Open semifinals in 2018.
It was then, however, that the deep runs at grand slams dried up for Keys. Between the 2018 US Open and 2022 Australian Open, she made just one slam quarterfinal and people began to wonder whether her best chance of winning had already come and gone.
Keys, who has now matched her career-best ranking of world No. 7, candidly admits those doubts also went through her mind.
“I think I also thought that I should have won one of these by now, and I think that it was slowly starting to become a little bit of a mental block for me and a burden,” she says.
“Finally freeing myself of that burden, I was actually finally able to win one. It’s not so much that it mattered less or that I didn’t want it anymore, but I think I finally was able to separate my self-worth from winning and losing tennis matches.
“I think before I was wrapped up in that it was really kind of debilitating at times, especially in the big moments and big tournaments that mattered. So I think being able to kind of separate that and be proud of my career and what I’ve done so far, gave me the freedom to really just go after it and be able to win a slam.”
Keys defeated Sabalenka in the Australian Open final. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Now, around three weeks before her 30th birthday, Keys has become the fourth-oldest woman to win their first grand slam title in the Open Era.
Her Australian Open glory capped a whirlwind couple of months for Keys, who also recently got married to her partner and coach, Bjorn Fratangelo.
Keys jokes that the wedding is still “definitely at the top of the leaderboard” as her favorite experience, ahead of winning the Australian Open, calling the big day “truly the best weekend of my life.”
She added: “But being able to win a grand slam and share that experience with my husband is probably a very close second. He also played professionally for a really long time, so the first six years of our relationship, we didn’t get to see a whole lot of each other.
“So it’s definitely a huge perk that we actually get to spend time together and being able to really be a team and work together has been so much fun.
“And now to just achieve one of the highest honors in our sport and us being able to do that together, I mean, it’s not something that most married couples get to do.”
Keys made it sound as though constantly living, training and traveling with her husband is always plain sailing, but she admitted that isn’t the case.
“I definitely think the worst part is having to admit to him that he’s right, um, a lot of the time,” she joked.
Source: edition.cnn.com