MELBOURNE, Australia (AFP) — Being told you will be a future world No. 1 at the age of 14 is an extremely tough burden for any young athlete to carry — just ask Madison Keys.
In a sport where success is measured in major trophies, it took the American another 15 years after winning her first WTA Tour match as a young teenager to become a Grand Slam champion.
She reached her first Slam semifinal in 2015 at Melbourne while still only 19.
Her first major final came two years later in New York, where nerves and fear engulfed her as she froze to be routed 6-3, 6-0 by Sloane Stephens.
On Saturday, she finally broke out of her mental shackles by beating Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 in an instant classic on Rod Laver Arena.
To do it, Keys had to overcome the demons eating away at her for years, constantly nagging that she was a failure. But how?
“Lots of therapy,” she candidly admitted.
Keys always had the complete game from a young age: a great serve, quick feet, punishing groundstrokes and comfortable at the net.
But she could not rid herself of the anguish-inducing thought that she was letting down everyone around her by not winning one of tennis’s greatest prizes.
“Everything kind of happens for a reason,” Keys said.
“For me, specifically, I kind of had to go through some tough things.”
“It just kind of forced me to look at myself in the mirror a little bit and try to work on the internal pressure that I was putting on myself.”
Her Slam defeats —- one final, five semi-finals and four quarter-finals —- hit her hard, and it took years to convince herself she was not a failure, that her life in tennis had not been wasted.
“I felt like from a pretty young age, I felt like if I never won a Grand Slam, then I wouldn’t have lived up to what people thought I should have been,” Keys said.
“That was a pretty heavy burden to kind of carry around.”
Last year, she curtailed her season early and married her coach Bjorn Fratangelo in November on what she called “the best day of my life.”
Crucially, she was ecstatically happy and at last at peace.
“I finally got to the point where I was proud of myself and proud of my career, with or without winning a Grand Slam,” Keys said.
Keys returned to the circuit after Christmas with a bang.
She won the Adelaide International before Melbourne and is on a 12-match unbeaten streak, during which she beat five top-10 players, including the top two, and won eight matches in three sets.
She will be world No. 7 in the new rankings on Monday, tying her 2016 career-high achieved when she was just 20.
On 17 February, she will celebrate her 30th birthday with husband Bjorn, the Australian Open ticked off and a contented mind.
“I finally got to the point where I was okay if it didn’t happen,” she said.
“I didn’t need it to feel like I had a good career or that I deserved to be talked about as a great tennis player.”
Her new outlook equipped her to “go for it” and break the Sabalenka serve for victory, just as the Saturday’s final seemed to be heading for the nerve-shredding lottery of a final-set tiebreak.
“In the past, if I ever had nerves come up, I typically would not play as well. I started really buying into it. I can be nervous and I can still play good tennis. Those things can live together,” she said.
Just as in beating No. 2 Iga Swiatek in the semifinal, her new fearlessness paid off.
“I just kind of said to myself: Okay, no matter what, there’s a match tiebreak, you’re still in this, just,” Keys said. “I mean, just go for it.”
She then prevailed by doing something that wouldn’t have happened in all those previous years.
“I just fully trusted myself.”