People had been telling Madison Keys she had the game to win majors since she was a kid. "Probably 11, 12," she said on Saturday. "It obviously was meant to be confidence-building and all of that." One look at the sheer power in her game, and it's easy to see what made them think that way.
Keys's arrival in the 2015 Australian Open semifinals, at age 19, only solidified that prophecy. Over the following decade, she sometimes flitted close to that major title—one final, four semis—but never finished the job. Some of those losses on the way were dispiriting and nervy despite good leads. Other younger players appeared on the tour and accomplished what she was supposedly fated to do. "So I think it kind of almost felt like it went from being something positive to something that was almost, like, a little bit of a panic of, 'Why hasn't it happened yet? Why haven't I been able to do it?'" Keys said. "If I don't do it, am I considered a failure?"
Keys said she went to therapy—specifically not sports therapy that focuses on routines and on-court mentality, but therapy to figure out how she thought about herself. "I honestly think that had I not done that, then I wouldn't be sitting here," she said, referring to the press conference for the 2025 Australian Open champion, with the trophy sitting in front of her. It'd be difficult to imagine a more satisfying conclusion to a long-deferred pursuit than her 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 triumph over the two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka on Saturday. Everything about this tournament—Keys's offseason decisions, the opponents she defeated, her style of play in the closing minutes—suggested a player who'd achieved hard-won clarity and self-possession.
This was Keys's 46th appearance at a major; in the modern era, only two women (Flavia Pennetta and Marion Bartoli) had ever appeared in more before earning their first major titles. She hadn't been considered a favorite to win any of those, including this tournament, where she was the No. 19 seed. Generally she was viewed as a deadly floater in the draw, a player on the periphery who could upset anyone in a given match but lacked the consistency to defeat seven of them in a row. As if the bracket gods wanted to prove a point, she embarked on one of the gnarliest ever paths to a title: She had to defeat four top-10 seeds in Melbourne, including the two best players in the world in the last two rounds.
In the semifinal against No. 2 seed Iga Swiatek, Keys played what was, to my eye, easily the best match of her career to that point. She engineered an escape against one of tour's steeliest closers, despite getting broken late in the deciding set, facing a Swiatek match point at 5-6, and trailing for much of the tiebreak. What makes Keys dangerous is her ability to tear open defenses without warning, by placing hard and flat shots deep in the court. In tense moments, this game plan felt brittle. Those balls would start to sail long, or she might clam up and play more conservatively, hoping to draw out an error. Against Swiatek, Keys found an ideal balance of control and power, adhering to her true style even through the nerves. She said on court after that she didn't even realize she'd been down a match point; she "blacked out."
To do all that again in the final, against the two-time champ, was yet another ask. No. 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka, angling for a threepeat, had won 20 straight matches in Melbourne, dropping just two sets in that span. She had become the tour's top practitioner of the power-oriented game that Keys herself was trying to play. Sabalenka had won four of their five previous matchups, and their last meeting at a major was a particularly painful one for Keys: the 2023 U.S. Open semifinal, where Keys won the first set 6–0, served for the match in the second set, and even led by a break in the third set, but still lost. Going into their final, Keys said that she had begun to view Sabalenka as a model for her own success: "The one thing I really wanted to try to be better at was not playing more passive in big points and really, honestly, just trying to emulate the way she trusts her game and the way she goes after it."
One thing that has helped Keys harness her power under pressure is an offseason equipment change. Her coach and husband Bjorn Fratangelo, a former top-100 player who had made a mid-career racquet swap himself, had been urging her to make some tweaks. In the 2024 season, they found a little more control in her game and relieved her wrist pain by switching from gut strings to poly strings, and they changed to a more "open" stringing pattern. She swapped another piece of equipment for this year: Wilson had been her racquet sponsor since she was a kid, and the contract concluded at the end of 2024. Keys switched to a Yonex frame and found that it made the balls land in the court.
Tennis players are understandably quite wary about changing their gear; so much of their sport is finding the feel for a particular swing and then deepening that muscle memory over the course of decades. Even when they're supposedly using "new" racquets, they're typically using their old racquets with a paint job so that their sponsor can peddle the newest models. But Fratangelo thought his wife was due for a change for the last phase of her career. Keys's agent Max Eisenbud was less convinced, but told tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg that he too began to take it seriously when his player brought her new racquet to a warmup tournament in Adelaide earlier in January and won the title. For all the conservatism around gear, there's a counterargument: Keys went pro in 2009, on her 14th birthday. After 16 years of one approach, why not roll the dice?
"Obviously, I'm at the later point of my career. It just kind of felt like, why not, however many more years I have, be willing to adapt and be a little bit more open to change?" Keys said after her semifinal win. "Doing that is a little bit freeing, because I think for a really long time I felt like I was so close doing it a certain way. I kind of just kept falling short. But in my head it was, 'If I just keep doing it that way, maybe it will happen.'"
Fratangelo said his wife fell for the Yonex frame within 10 minutes of using it. Keys, not much of a gearhead by her own admission, said she struggles to articulate what she loves about the new racquet, but the word "trust" crops up a lot in her comments. She said that it has helped her on days when she isn't feeling the ball too well, as it gives her the "ability to kind of manipulate things with my racquet and my hands and kind of have a little bit more safety." That's critical because over the course of seven matches at a major, there are bound to be some off days where it's harder to find rhythm. Keys weathered five three-set matches in this run, including the final against Sabalenka.
Keys began that title fight in blistering form, playing even better than she had in the semifinal, breaking Sabalenka's serve twice and almost managing it a third time. Then Keys grew somewhat more tentative in the second set. She relied on an unthreatening backhand slice in scenarios where she could've committed to full power, and her movement turned a bit sluggish. Sabalenka, exploiting that with her drop shot, leveled the match. My overall mood while watching Keys in these last two rounds was one of disbelief, and that only intensified in that deciding third set. For a long time I'd watched her struggle in these scenarios, and I kept expecting every third ball to fly long. Instead, at every juncture, she just buckled down and found an otherworldly winner, as if that were the plain and obvious choice.
While serving at 5-5, 30-30 in the third set, Keys faced down a perilous moment. Sabalenka smashed a return back at her feet, but Keys barely moved, stayed strong in her legs and put an open-stance forehand just as hard down the line—unforgettably good, reflecting total confidence in her shot selection. Keys held serve from there and then broke serve in the very next game for the title. It was one of the best endings to a major final in recent memory. There was no nervy, tense-armed play on either side of the court—just two of the tour's biggest hitters swinging freely and battling for initiative. This time, Keys managed to reshuffle the hierarchy. After she hit her final ball, a sharp-angled inside-out forehand winner, and hugged her opponent, the TV broadcast couldn't decide whether to show Keys weeping with joy or Sabalenka smashing her racquet on the bench.
In a new touch at this year's Australian Open, a player's staff can sit in courtside sections, allowing them to talk to their players more easily during a match. Throughout the tournament, Keys clearly took comfort in her husband-slash-coach's presence and words of encouragement. Everyone in the player's box was crying by the end of this run. Lots of her colleagues have been just as happy. It's one of those rare instances where one player's success seemed to serve as a feel-good moment for the entire tour, because, like a fable, it proved something more broadly resonant about human resilience and adaptation.
I particularly liked Keys's words on learning how to play under pressure, from her post-championship press conference, which I'll quote in full:
I think for a long time in my head, I had this idea that people were able to kind of just ignore their nerves or doubts or anything like that and just kind of tunnel vision play tennis.
In the past, if I ever had nerves come up or something, I typically would not play as well. So it started getting to the point where when nerves came up, I was thinking, Oh, no, now I'm going to play badly. It would almost kind of start this internal panic.
For whatever reason, it was kind of just like this light-bulb moment where I started really buying into: I can be nervous and I can still play good tennis. Like, those things can live together.
So I stopped fighting, trying to push away the feelings and pretending that they're not there, and just accepting them and really telling myself that they're fine and they're totally normal to be there, and I can still play tennis.
I think doing that day in and day out, and just kind of accepting that it's going to be uncomfortable, you're going to be nervous, there's going to be thousands of people watching you, but you can still do it, and then starting to actually be able to do that just kind of started to give me more confidence.
Those adjustments earned Keys her first major title after 16 years of trying. Nobody's ever too old to change.
