AN ALL AMERICAN U.S. OPEN WOMEN’S SEMI-FINAL — THE FIRST IN 36 YEARS
Venus Williams (9) vs. Sloane Stephens. Coco Vandeweghe (20) vs. Madison Keys (15).
Wow!!
Four American women competing for the singles championship hardware in the 2017 U.S. Open.
The last time all four Women’s U.S. Open semi-finalists waved the Red, White and Blue was in 1981 when the quartet consisted of Tracy Austin, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and Barbara (Barbie) Potter.
In ’81 Evert, a six-time Open champion, lost to four-time titlist Navratilova in the semi-finals.
Austin, then all of 18, defeated Navratilova 1–6, 7–6 (7–4), 7–6 (7–1) to win the title for the second time.
In 1979 Austin defeated Evert in straight sets 6–4, 6–3 to notch her first U.S. Open singles championship at the tender age of 16, the youngest in history then and to this day to accomplish the feat.
Since the outer edge of that golden era, American women have won U.S. Open singles championships 15 times: Evert (’80; ‘82); Navratilova (’83; ’84; ’86; ‘87); Lindsay Davenport (‘98); Serena (’99; ’02; ’08; ’12; ’13; ’14) and Venus (’00; ‘01).
That is 15 times in 38 years.
Make it 16.
There will be no Hana Mandlikova (’85) or Steffi Graf (’88; ’89; ’93; ’95; ‘96).
No Gabriela Sabatini (’90) or Monica Seles (’91; ‘92).
No Arantxa Sanchez Vicario (’94) or Martina Hingis (‘97).
No Justine Henin (’03; ‘07), Svetlana Kuznetsova (‘04), Kim Clijsters (’05; ’09; ’10) or Maria Sharapova (‘06).
And no Samantha Stosur (‘11), Flavia Pennetta (’15) or last year’s winner Angelique Kerber (‘16).
An American woman will be crowned in 2017, the first U.S. Open final between Uncle Sam’s ladies since Serena beat her older sister in 2002.
It will also be the first all American U.S. Open final without a Williams sister in it since Martina triumphed over Chrissie in ‘84.
And neither Venus Williams nor Coco Vandeweghe will be that woman as of last night (09/07).
In a thrilling first semifinal, 24-year-old Sloane Stephens (who was ranked №957 entering the 2017 U.S. Open Series; moved up to №83 on the strength of her play in four-plus tournaments since her return from right foot surgery; and should climb to at least to №22 in the WTA rankings by Monday-09/11) defeated seven-time major winner Venus 6–1, 0–6, 7–5 with a mix of guts, grit and guile.
Oh yes and an uncanny ability to get to nearly every ball.
She will now play Madison Keys (who dispatched Vandeweghe 6–1, 6–2 in the evening’s late match) on Saturday, guaranteeing a first-time champion and ensuring that four different players will hold the four major titles for only the 12th time in the Open Era.
(The Grand Slam winners in 2017 pending Saturday’s outcome: Serena Williams — Australian Open; Jelena Ostapenko — French Open; and Garbine Muguruza — Wimbledon).
Said an overwhelmed Stephens post-match, “I have no words to describe what I’m feeling, what it took to get there. It’s just a journey. I have no words. When I started my comeback, if someone told me I’d make two Grand Slam semis and a final, I would probably have passed out. It required a lot of fight and a lot of grit. I just worked my tail off and ran down every ball.”
[Editor’s Note: Pretty spot-on and downright eloquent for somebody claiming to be at a loss for words.]
Stephens, the daughter of former New England Patriot and 1988 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year, the late John Stephens and Sybil Smith, an All-American collegiate swimmer at Boston University certainly has the genes and plenty of game.
She is one victory away from her first major championship, bidding to become the fourth lowest-ranked women’s player in history to notch one.
(Evonne Goolagong — 1977 Australian Open and Clijsters — 2009 U.S. Open were unranked; and Chris O’Neill was ranked №111 when she won the 1978 Australian Open).
Madison Keys, another first-time finalist, will have something to say about that.
Keys was dominant in her third win over Coco Vandeweghe in the last month, needing only 66 minutes (including a seven-minute break for attention to an upper right leg injury) to vanquish her opponent. She blasted 25 winners and made just nine unforced errors.
No less an authority than Chris Evert, whose family Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton counted the twenty-two-year-old Keys as a pupil from age 10 to 17 observed that with Mad, “I always thought it was a matter of when, not if…we saw the live arm, and it’s a God-given talent — you can’t teach it.”
Keys’ game is power and precision with an emphasis on the former.
The book on her among coaches has been that if an opponent can weather the fury generated by her power, then eventually she will stop painting the lines and hitting winners because her margin for error is so slim and her nerves can still be brittle.
Pat Cash, a Wimbledon champion in 1987 and now Vandeweghe’s coach observed that, “it was just a case for CoCo [sic] of hanging in there and waiting for Madison to cool off a little bit, but she never cooled off…it was just too much. Simple as that. Madison was unplayable. That’s Serena sort of standard of tennis she’s playing.”
Vandeweghe did her best of course, but Stephens presents a different set of challenges.
She is thought by many to be the fastest player on the WTA Tour, a premier defender who roams farther behind the baseline than most anyone else simply because she can.
And her style could prove frustrating for her pal Keys — that’s right, they are buddies — because she returns everything. She is a constantly moving backboard.
Stephens not so sheepishly admits that her goal is to “get my racquet on every ball.”
Conventional tennis wisdom suggests that in a match between a slugger and a retriever, the slugger will dictate the outcome.
Easy to imagine if Keys plays as she did in her blowout of Vandeweghe.
Not so if Sloane can expose her opponent’s fitness level and sometimes fragile psyche by returning enough balls and hitting enough winners to get into her head.
Keys and Stephens, two years apart, have known one another since their junior days and earlier this year when both were injured and recuperating, they commiserated via text and phone calls.
(Keys suffered wrist and arm problems).
Each will be making their debut in a Grand Slam title match and as such, felt free to reflect.
Said Keys, “I was actually just laughing and thinking, ‘Who would have thought in Australia that Sloane and I would be the finalists at the U.S. Open?’ Neither one of us were playing at the time, both just having surgeries. To be able to play her in both of our first finals is a really special moment, especially with everything that we have gone through this year…Being away from the game and just remembering why I love competing and all of that, I think it helped me tremendously.”
As for Sloane, being off the tour for a total of 11 months similarly afforded her the opportunity to reassess her lot and rekindle her desire. She realized how much she wanted to succeed in tennis.
“It was just kind of, like, eye-opening,” she remarked. “When I wasn’t playing, like, of course I loved my time off, but when I got back to playing tennis, it was, like, this is where I want to be. This is what I love doing.”
So whom do you like, the puncher or the counter-puncher?
The powerhouse or the energizer bunny?
Keys has the better, more explosive serve and the attack mentality. Stephens covers like nobody’s business and has no shortage of power when she chooses to summon it. She’s a fighter.
They each can occasionally be tricky which spices the play nicely.
Stephens won their only tour-level match, 6–4, 6–2, in the second round of the 2015 Miami Open on a blustery day when Sloane was ranked 45th and Mad 18th.
Throw it out.
Doesn’t matter.
This is now.
Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys deserve to be right where they are.
They do not carry the mantle for Americans, for women, for people of color or for the game of tennis.
They carry it proudly for themselves, and maybe — just maybe — for each other.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in September 2017.]
ADDENDUM: The unseeded Sloane Stephens won her first Grand Slam title, defeating (15) Madison Keys in the final, 6–3; 6–0 to win the Women’s Singles crown at the 2017 U.S. Open.
