Last week, at the Australian Open, Amanda Anisimova sailed through much of her second-round match, against Kateřina Siniaková, displaying her superior power and accuracy. Few players hit the ball as hard and flat, or with as much precision, as Anisimova does, and no one has a sweeter or more vicious backhand. To watch her line up, wind up, and sweep her racquet along the arc created by her powerful rotation—her legs perfectly weighted, her spacing properly calculated, her contact point pure—is to realize the full potential of the shot. She won the first set easily, 6–1, and was up a service break in the second; then her control of the match started to slip away. Siniaková, the No. 1 doubles player in the world, started to muck things up, and Anisimova’s serve began to stray. Two endless exchanges of deuces ended in Siniaková’s favor. Anisimova pressed. After a backhand flew long, her hands flew to her hips in frustration. Anisimova won the third consecutive deuce game, but double-faulted twice. The players were on serve, an even 4–4, but tennis is as much a psychological game as a physical one, and Siniaková had the advantage. Anisimova appeared to be on the edge of breaking down.
She exchanged a word with the people in her box. Then, noticeably calmer, she quickly closed out the win. Afterward, she was asked about the stretch of back-and-forth games. “That’s what I love about the sport is those really intense moments,” she said. “I really enjoy it,” she added. Perhaps there was a bit of revisionism, or masochism, in her answer. But I was inclined to believe her. What was the worst that could have happened, after all? She might lose a tennis match?
Anisimova knows what it’s like to lose tennis matches. She knows what it’s like to be humiliated on the court—on the biggest stage, with the most people watching. Wimbledon, Centre Court, a princess sitting next to Billie Jean King in the royal box, champagne in the stands and flowers everywhere adorning the grounds. It’s the stuff of dreams—and, last July, as Anisimova walked into the sunshine to greet this scene and an applauding crowd, she was riding the residual rush from her performance in the Wimbledon semifinals, having beaten Aryna Sabalenka, the No. 1 player in the world, by exhibiting the kind of brave, powerful tennis that had been expected of her for so long. Her path to the final was all the more inspiring because two years earlier she’d taken an eight-month break from the sport and then suffered a series of injuries upon her return; the previous year, she hadn’t even made it into the main draw of Wimbledon, and had lost in the third round of qualifying. But, rather than a dream, her trip to the final was a nightmare: a 6–0, 6–0 drubbing, by Iga Świątek, in less than an hour. Anisimova sobbed through the trophy presentation.
But that deep disappointment lasted only a moment, apparently—thirty minutes later, she was on the phone with a friend, laughing about the absurdity of the situation. And several weeks after that, when she had to face Świątek again, in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, she did something almost unimaginable: the night before, she watched the replay of the Wimbledon final. No one told her to do it, but she needed to figure out what she had done wrong, she explained later, and she needed to be able to move past it. She wouldn’t let that loss define her.
Anisimova’s life has revolved around tennis almost from birth. Her parents moved from Moscow to New Jersey and then to Miami in order to cultivate the tennis careers of their daughters—first, Maria, who went on to play in college, and then Amanda, who entered her first pro tournament at fourteen. A few days after her sixteenth birthday, she beat Coco Gauff, then thirteen, to win the 2017 U.S. Open girls’ title; the following year, she beat two of the top twenty-five players at Indian Wells. In 2019, she upset Sabalenka, the eleventh seed, at the Australian Open, and made the semifinals of the French Open. By the time the U.S. Open arrived, she was being talked about as the next big thing. ESPN ran an article titled “Inside Amanda Anisimova’s Plan to Become Tennis’s Next Superstar,” which depicted her as savvy and determined. But the “plan” seemed less her own than a vision of those around her. In the piece, her agent discussed his strategy for making her a star like Maria Sharapova, whom he also represented—but more relatable. (She was encouraged to post pictures of her breakfast to social media.) Both her coach and physiotherapist described her, with excitement, as a “project.”
It was tough to blame them. I watched her play in Miami that year, and seeing her technique and power up close, I was as transfixed by her potential as everyone else. I made plans to write about her on the eve of the U.S. Open, and was in a taxi on the way to the tournament when I got a call saying that the interview had to be cancelled, because her father had died suddenly.
