Rising star Stephens looks like she might be making a racket for quite a while to come
TENNIS:Who is Sloane Stephens? According to those swept up in the young American’s three-set victory over a wounded Serena Williams to advance to the semi-finals of the Australian Open, she is the smiling, golden girl of tennis now, the future, a saviour for a game crying out for new blood – nowhere more loudly than in her own country.
It is a load and a half for a young player who has yet to win a single tournament in her senior career, who turns 20 in March and who suspects there will be many hard yards to play in the years to come, but has not been remotely exposed to the full rigours of her calling.
Even allowing for the vagaries of this perplexing game, however, her win was special, and so is she. She strikes the ball flat, hard and without fear. She has tennis smarts, picking the right moments, mostly, to gamble – as when, in the third set, she sensed Williams hanging back, hobbling with a bad back, so she undercut a delicious drop shot that spun almost sideways after skimming the net. She trusts that the net will not impede her most ambitious shots – soft or crunched with massive over-spin – and, if minor disaster looms, she believes it will be temporary. It is the upside of being a teenager in a world of gnarled elders.
In the immediate aftermath, she took a call from home. “I don’t know how I feel,” she said. “It’s still strange. I talked to my grandparents after. My grandma was just like, ‘Oh, good job’. They want to talk about my coach more than they want to talk about the actual match. I listened to them and they calmed me down a little bit.”
She will not be held back by false modesty, though. Asked if she had even dreamt of beating Williams, she said with calm beyond her years: “Last night I was thinking about it and I was like . . . someone asked me, like, ‘Do you think you can win?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I think so’ – but I wasn’t like too clear about it. Then this morning when I got up, I was like, ‘Look, dude, like, you can do this’. Like, go out and play and do your best.”
She did, and how. There was not a trace of self-consciousness in her tennis. It was as if we were not even there with her. There was a court, a net and an opponent. She just let one shot follow another.
Beating Williams was, without doubt, a major shock – to Serena, to those watching, to the bookmakers who, at one point in running, had the kid at 1-750 – but not to Stephens. It was informative that she rated beating Laura Robson in straight sets in a way harder than beating Williams in three – because the latter was unexpected. There was no pressure.
Speed of foot
Stephens has good genes. She is the daughter of the late John Stephens, who was once a running back in the NFL. Not many on the circuit match her for speed of foot – or hand. She has steel-strong wrists that whip running forehands with lethal power, and send down serves of some heftiness. There will be days when none of this clicks, but they will probably be fewer than the good days, of which Wednesday was the best yet.
