MELBOURNE, Australia — It's a bitterly cold December afternoon in the lobby of a hotel near Central Park in midtown Manhattan.
A 23-year-old woman looked up from a club chair near the elevator. She is wearing a baseball cap and playing with her cell phone a little.
“Hey,” she says.
Please look again. Oh yeah, that's Emma Navarro. She is a US Open semifinalist and a top-10 female player after just one season of top-level tournaments. She attended a packed house for photo ops, press gatherings, and appearances at New York Knicks NBA basketball games alongside tennis players you've all heard of, including Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton, and Jessica Pegula. Just relaxing before the night.
It might be fun. Then again, it's pretty cool to sit in this comfy chair and anonymously watch the hustle and bustle of her hometown. There are many reasons why Navarro, who will face Ons Jabour in the third round of the Australian Open on Saturday, pursued tennis. Being famous was not one of them.
“Quite the opposite,” she said recently after defeating China's Wang Xiyu in the second round in Melbourne. They continued to play three sets for the second year in a row, with the outcome unknown until the final point.
On Saturday, she played at a packed Margaret Court Arena against Ons Jabar, a three-time Grand Slam finalist and a darling of the sport who is on his way back from months spent with injury. He showed his true potential again. After winning 20 of the first 24 points and jumping out to a 5-0 lead in the first set, he scrambled to victory in the third set, holding off three break points on serve at 1-2. .
After the match, she credited her third-set prowess to her parents, who took her and her siblings on bike rides for six hours when they were children. She then scribbled “me heart 3 set” into the TV camera. She should. She had a record of 19-6 in long-distance matches last season. On her way out of the court, she was directly signing autographs to the fans glued to the stands. The match took place in the light and darkness of Melbourne's lunchtime, but Navarro still hasn't fully adapted to being on the stage day after day.
“It's something I work hard at and I feel comfortable being in the spotlight. It's the opposite of my nature. It feels unnatural,” she said.
This kind of thing sometimes happens in tennis. Not everything develops in sync. Not everyone who can shoot forehands and backhands on a wire all afternoon is an alpha-dog extrovert whose life unfolds in a series of Instagram posts and TikTok videos.
And so it was with Navarro, whose tennis career until last summer was an exploration of gradualism. At the age of 18, even after an impressive junior career that included a French Open singles final and doubles championship, she still wasn't sure if she wanted to be a professional tennis player. There she attended the University of Virginia for two years, where she won the NCAA National Collegiate Level Women's Singles Championship.
When she turned pro, she could have easily earned a wild card entry considering her father Ben is active in the tennis industry and owns the ATP and WTA 1000 level Cincinnati Open. chose not to pursue it. She steadily progressed through second-tier tournaments on the ITF and WTA 125 circuits.
even deeper
Win or lose, Emma Navarro wants to hit one more pitch.
Navarro remained outside the top 100 until April 2023. She finished the year ranked 32nd in the world, the magic number for a Grand Slam seed, and won her first WTA Tour tournament in Hobart, Tasmania, the day before the tournament opened. 2024 Australian Open.
Since then, she has stepped into the spotlight. She had consecutive wins over Coco Gauff, first at Wimbledon and then at the US Open, with her friend now the defending champion. She broke into the top 10 for the first time. And that's when things started to get a little hectic.
Emma Navarro is trying to figure out how to survive in the tennis spotlight. (Daniel Pocket/Getty Images)
Requests for interviews and appearances flooded in. Her commercial portfolio includes Fila, Yonex, Red Bull, Dove, Fanatics, De Bethune and, as of Friday, luxury jewelry brand Mejuri, which took her for a custom photo shoot in Charleston, South Carolina, in December. Contains a contract. . Mr. Navarro is the company's first athlete ambassador.
For Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka and Gauff, Iga Swiatek and Zheng Qinwen, such events are just another day that ends with a “Y.” For Navarro, it's been, in her own words, an “adjustment.”
The adjustment also has a tennis guise, which may go some way to explaining Navarro's first two matches here this month. Both eventually became tennis escape rooms, first at Rod Laver Arena and then at the site's second stadium, Margaret Court Arena.
She was down with service breaks in the third set in both matches. Peyton Stearns, another former NCAA champion, had a match point in the second set tiebreaker but was unable to take it. Stearns served for the match in the third, but could not get it over the line.
In both cases, Navarro appeared in the first game of the day, returning her to ESPN's American prime-time slot (a slot where Gauff often appears). As big as the fame and exposure that winning and marketing contracts bring. Courtroom duties and prime time bring a not-so-subtle message of expectation.
In both games, the normally steady Navarro wore down one opponent after another, jetting the ball from the middle of the baseline, where he had been roped back for most of last year. So she found a way, stringing together her best shots of the afternoon on a few crucial points and doubling her lead.
Against Jabour, after winning the first set 5-0, Jabour's deft play lifted him to the brink of taking home the biggest prize in the sport. She went back to 5-4. Still, Navarro took the set.
For almost all of her tennis career, Navarro has been a girl and a woman who shows up to a tournament and gets excited knowing she's playing on court 35 at the back of the facility.
“Please take me into the forest,” she said.
That doesn't happen anymore.
“For 20 years, we were working on something primarily behind closed doors, and all of a sudden it became a form of entertainment for people,” she said. “People pay to see you in action. It's definitely an adjustment.”
Navarro's coach, Peter Ayers, has worked with her for the past eight years. He said the way to get Navarro used to a new version of herself during the offseason was to stick to the formula that got her here.
“It's always been a very methodical approach,” Ayers said in an interview in Melbourne. “We want her to recover without neglecting her livelihood. It's always a balance.”
For Navarro, who will never be one of the giants on the WTA Tour, that means trying to play bigger and more aggressively within her strengths. She's not going to start firing lasers, as some of her colleagues have pointed out.
“I'm very nervous about just chasing speed,” Ayers said.
There are other methods as well.
Ayers is a baseball player. One of his favorite pitchers was Greg Maddux, the ace of the 1990s Atlanta Braves. Maddux was never a difficult thrower, but no one could put the ball on the edge of the strike zone like him. “There's a lot she can do to be more accurate,” Ayers said.
The same goes for her strokes.
Navarro doesn't have to try to beat someone like Aryna Sabalenka or beat Swiatek on spin. But if her feet end up a step or two closer to the baseline, or even inside the baseline, it can cause significant damage.
Like Navarro, Ayers knows that having a single digit next to your name on the ranking ladder can make a difference in your life. It's been a while since Navarro stalked someone like she did to Gauff at dusk in southwest London six months ago. People are no longer afraid of losing to her, Ayers said. Once that fear is gone, your opponents are free to play without worrying about the outcome.
“You’re getting everyone’s best shot,” he said. “The idea is that it makes you better.”
Emma Navarro has found herself on the back foot in her two previous Australian Open matches. (Daniel Pocket/Getty Images)
Navarro has always been something of a problem solver, understanding his opponents, how he wants to spend his time and how he wants to be as a tennis player. In a sense, what she's doing now is figuring out another problem – how to exist as a new version of herself who has been better than all but a few players in the women's game for the past six months. The question is whether to proceed.
“Single digits is a bit concerning,” she says. “It's way beyond my expectations for myself.”
However, some new facts have recently come to light, and it is hoped that they will start to yield some results soon. There is a way to be a woman sitting in a club chair in a hotel lobby watching the world go by anonymously while playing some kind of tennis.
“My tennis can be alpha, I can let it be and I can be me,” she said. “If you're not yourself, you're probably not going to play your best tennis.”
(Top photo: Ng Hang-guan/AP)
