If you talk about Caroline Garcia for more than a few minutes, the conversation will eventually come around to the moment when you, and the rest of the tennis world, first heard her name. At the 2011 French Open, as a 17-year-old wild card, Garcia took a seemingly insurmountable lead over Maria Sharapova in their second-round match. Watching from the locker room, a highly impressed Andy Murray tweeted that Garcia was going to be No. 1 in the world someday.
It sounds like a stunning statement now, of course, especially since it came from a guy who isn’t famous for making them. At that moment, though, it was easy to see what Murray meant. For the space of an hour, as the young and casually swaggering Frenchwoman whipped forehands past a hapless Sharapova, Garcia looked poised to become the next big thing, and her game the next evolutionary advance in baseline shot-making.
Too bad a career lasts longer than an hour. Waking up to what she was about to do, Garcia stopped swaggering, stopped hitting forehand winners, and ended up losing to Sharapova 6-0 in the third set. For the next six years, she didn’t do much to make Murray look like a genius in the talent-scouting game, either. Garcia wasn’t big enough, powerful enough, fast enough, consistent enough, or nerveless enough to make a run to the Top 10, let alone No. 1, even a remote possibility. Just reaching the fourth round of a major, which she did for the first time at Roland Garros this year, was tough enough.
And yet, despite all of that, there was steady progress. Since 2011, Garcia’s year-end ranking has moved from 146 to 138 to 75 to 38 to 35 to 23. Instead of being an instinctively brilliant shot-maker, Garcia has turned out to be a solid and polished all-around performer. She doesn’t play with much of the memorable flair of so many of her fellow Frenchmen and women, and she he doesn’t have any spectacular or unstoppable weapons. But neither, at this stage, does Garcia have any glaring weaknesses. The funks of error-filled play that torpedoed her in the past have mostly been purged from her game.
The results, finally, show it. Garcia has had a career year in 2017. She reached the round of 16 for the first time at Roland Garros and Wimbledon, has made five semifinals on three surfaces, and this weekend she won the biggest tournament of her career, at the Premier 5 event in Wuhan, which had a star-studded draw. Along the way, Garcia upset Angelique Kerber and Dominika Cibulkova, and in the final she came back from a set down to beat Ashleigh Barty, 6-7 (3), 7-6 (4), 6-2.
What has made the difference? The roots of Garcia’s 2017 success may go back to her controversy-generating decision to split with doubles partner Kiki Mladenovic and concentrate on singles. Garcia and Mladenovic had won the French Open doubles title the previous year, and the divorce caused a rift between Garcia and her French Fed Cup teammates. But it has produced results for her.