As Madison Keys strode across Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday afternoon, she led with her grin. It’s a toothy one, and an irrepressible one when she’s happy. At this moment she was very happy. A few seconds earlier, Keys—age just 19, rank just 35—had finished a post-match interview after the biggest win of her career, a 6-3 4-6, 6-4 comeback over Venus Williams that put her into her first Grand Slam semifinal.
Yet this modest Midwesterner could have been forgiven if her grin got a little smaller, and her eyes a little wider, at the next few words she heard.
“There goes the future of women’s tennis!” boomed the woman who had just interviewed Keys, former Aussie pro Rennae Stubbs.
As they say: No pressure.
For now, though, the future is just what it says it is. Keys is all about the present; over the last 10 days in Melbourne, her career has been turned upside-down. Or, I should say, right-side-up: After three years of stops and starts, of flying high one day and floundering the next, Keys has put together the best sustained run of her young life. It’s rare, in the age of 32 seeds, for a player outside of that group to go this deep at a major, and Keys has done it by knocking off two multi-Slam champs, Williams and Petra Kvitova, along the way. But for many of us who have been following this powerful athlete’s progress over the last five years, Keys’s success doesn’t come as a shock; it's right on time.
“I mean, it definitely feels amazing,” Keys said afterward, sounding all of her 19 years. “It’s one of those things where you want to feel this way all the time. I mean, I’ve had some good wins; I’ve had some bad losses. That’s my goal for the year, just being more consistent. Even playing badly, not being horrible.”
“Not being horrible”: That might sound like the ultimate in low expectations, but what Keys really means is that she wants to be more professional. With that in mind, this off-season she hired Lindsay Davenport and her husband, Jon Leach, as her co-coaches. The choice made sense: As a former No. 1, Davenport qualifies as a “super coach,” someone who has been there, and someone who can inspire. At the same time, Davenport’s down-to-earth personality would also seem to be a match for Keys’. As Serena Williams said, they're both "easygoing people."
“This off-season has been great, and it’s obviously working,” Keys said with a slight eye-roll, as if she couldn’t quite believe how well it has been working.