Emma Navarro keeps her eye on the ball at the Australian Open as the tennis spotlight shines brighter – Blogging Sole

MELBOURNE, Australia — A bitterly cold December afternoon in midtown Manhattan, in the lobby of a hotel near Central Park.

A 23-year-old woman looks up from a club chair near an elevator. She wears a baseball cap and plays with her phone a little.

“Hey,” she said.

Take another look. Oh, it’s true, it’s Emma Navarro: US Open semi-finalist and a top-10 player after just one full season of high-level tournaments. She’s relaxing before a busy evening of photo ops, press groups and an appearance at the New York Knicks NBA basketball game with a few other tennis players you may have heard of – Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton And Jessica Pegula.

This could be fun. Then again, hanging out in this comfortable chair, watching the hustle and bustle of your hometown go by anonymously, is pretty cool too. There are several reasons why Navarro, who plays Ons Jabeur in the third round of Australian Open Saturday, continuation of tennis. Being a famous person wasn’t one of them.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” she said the other day, after a second-round victory in Melbourne against China’s Wang Xiyu, her second straight three-set battle whose outcome was uncertain until period.

She was at it again on Saturday, when she opened a packed Margaret Court Arena against Ons Jabeur, a three-time Grand Slam finalist and darling of the sport returning from a torrid few months with injury. After winning 20 of the first 24 points and taking a 5-0 lead in the first set, she had to struggle in the third to win, saving three break points on serve at 1-2.

In the end, she thanked her parents for taking her and her siblings on six-hour bike rides when they were kids for her third-set prowess. Then she scribbled “me, heart, 3 sets” on the television camera. She should. She went 19-6 in games that went the distance last season. As she left the field, she went straight to signing autographs for the fans hanging above the stands. The match was played in the shadows and light of Melbourne’s lunchtime and Navarro is still not completely used to being in the spotlight day in and day out.

“It’s something I work very hard to deal with and feel comfortable being in the spotlight. It’s the opposite of my nature. It doesn’t feel natural,” she said.

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This sometimes happens in tennis. Not everything develops in sync. Not everyone who can shoot forehands and backhands on a wire seemingly all afternoon is an extroverted alpha dog, letting their lives unfold in a series of Instagram posts and TikTok videos.

The same goes for Navarro, whose tennis life had been a gradual exploration until the summer of last year. At 18, after a tremendous junior career – including a singles final and a doubles title at the French Open – she still wasn’t sure she wanted to become a professional tennis player. So she went to the University of Virginia for two years, where she won the NCAA national championship in women’s singles at the collegiate level.

When she turned professional, she chose not to pursue wild-card entries that might have been easily achievable, given that her father, Ben, is active in the tennis business and owns the Cincinnati Open-level ATP and WTA 1000. She has managed to make her way into second-tier tournaments on the ITF and WTA 125 circuits.

Navarro was outside the top 100 as recently as April 2023. She finished that year at No. 32 in the world, the magic number for a Grand Slam seed, and won her first WTA Tour tournament at Hobart, Tasmania, the day before the tournament begins. Australian Open 2024.

Then she made her way into the spotlight. She notched back-to-back wins against Coco Gaufffirst at Wimbledon then at US Open, where Gauffnow friend, was the reigning champion. She entered the top 10 for the first time. And that’s when things started to get a little busy.

A flood of requests for interviews and appearances. A commercial portfolio that now includes deals with Fila, Yonex, Red Bull, Dove, Fanatics, De Bethune and, as of Friday, Mejuri, the high-end jewelry brand that invited her to a custom photo shoot in Charleston, South Carolina, in December. . Navarro is the company’s first athlete ambassador.

For Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka and Gauff, Iga Swiatek and Zheng Qinwen, something like this is just another day ending with a “Y.” For Navarro, it is, in his own words, an “adjustment.”

The fit also has a tennis feel, which might explain Navarro’s first two matches here this month to some extent. Both eventually became tennis escape rooms, first at Rod Laver Arena and then at the venue’s second stadium, Margaret Court Arena.

She lost a break of serve in the third set of both matches. Peyton Stearns, another former NCAA champion, had a match point against her in the second set tiebreak that she couldn’t take. Stearns then served for the match in the third, but couldn’t cross the line.

In both cases, Navarro was in the first game of the day, which put her in prime time in the United States on ESPN – a slot in which Gauff often plays. Like the fame and visibility that winning contracts and marketing bring, big court subpoenas and prime time bring a not-so-subtle message of expectation.

In both matches, the usually steady Navarro sprayed balls from the middle of the baseline that she had collected for much of last year, wearing down opponent after opponent. Then she found the way, stringing together her best shots of the afternoon in the handful of decisive points that made the difference twice.

Against Jabeur, she cruised through the first set at 5-0 before Jabeur began playing with the finesse that brought her to the brink of the sport’s biggest prizes. She came back to 5-4. Navarro still won the set.

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For most of her tennis life, Navarro was the girl and then the woman who was thrilled when she showed up at a tournament and learned she was playing on Court 35 at the back of the complex.

“Like, put me in the forest,” she said.

This doesn’t happen anymore.

“You spend 20 years working on something, mostly behind closed doors, and all of a sudden you become a form of entertainment for people,” she said. “People pay to come see you do what you do. It’s definitely an adjustment.

Navarro’s coach, Peter Ayers, has worked with her for eight years. He said his way of getting Navarro used to being a new version of herself during the offseason was to stick to the formula that got her here.

“It’s always been a very methodical approach,” Ayers said in an interview in Melbourne. “We want her to get better without neglecting her bread and butter. It’s always a question of balance.

For Navarro, who will never be one of the giants of the WTA Tour, that means trying to play bigger and more aggressively based on her strengths. She’s not about to start shooting lasers, like some of her peers can do while pointing.

“I’m very wary of just chasing speed,” Ayers said.

There are other ways.

Ayers is a baseball guy. One of his favorite pitchers was Greg Maddux, the ace for the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s. Maddux was far from the most powerful pitcher, but no one could place balls at the edge of the strike zone as well although he. “She can do a lot by being more precise,” Ayers said.

Same with his punches.

Navarro doesn’t need to try to outplay players like Aryna Sabalenka or outplay Swiatek. But she can do a lot of damage if her feet get a step or two closer to the baseline, or even within it, more often.

Ayers, like Navarro, knows that life is different when there’s a single number next to your name on the ranking scale. It’s been a while since Navarro surprised anyone, as she did on Gauff at dusk in southwest London six months ago. People are no longer afraid of losing to her, Ayers said; when this fear disappears, opponents can play freely without worrying about the consequences.

“You get the best out of everyone,” he said. “The idea is that it makes you better.”

Navarro has always been a problem solver, from finding an opponent to how she wants to spend her time and who she wants to be as a tennis player. In a sense, what she’s doing now is solving another problem: how to exist as this new version of herself, the version that has been better than all but a handful of players in women’s soccer over the last six months.

“The single-digit number appeals to me a little bit,” she said. “It’s so outside of my personal expectations.”

There have been some revelations recently, however, which will hopefully start to bear fruit soon. There is a way to play a certain type of tennis while still being that woman sitting on a club chair in a hotel lobby, watching the world go by anonymously.

“My tennis can be alpha and I’ll let it do its job and I can just be myself,” she said. “If I don’t feel good, I probably won’t play my best tennis.”

(Top photo: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)