Madison Keys is in the Australian Open final on her way, win or lose

MELBOURNE, Australia — There was a moment Monday afternoon during Madison Keys’ Australian Open fourth-round match against No. 6 seed Elena Rybakina when her coach, Bjorn Fratangelo, realized this was not the time for happy talk.

Keys, seeded 19th here this year and a former two-time semi-finalist at Melbourne Park, had won the first set. But Rybakina, who like Keys is a precise winning machine when she plays the tennis she wants to play, had taken the second by seizing the initiative and playing on her front foot. Halfway to the finish, Keys had become a passive counterpuncher.

During the break between the second and third sets, Keys wandered close enough to the court for a chat and found her coach trying to light a fire under her.

“If you lose this game, when you play the way you play, we go home and that’s it; 30 hours, then we’ll be home,” he said. “You lose this match, how you’ve lost the second set? You’re going to be a little bummed about it for a while.”

Fratangelo, a 31-year-old retired pro, should know. He’s not just Keys’ coach. He is also her husband. In mid-2023, he was just her fiancé before taking on a role that he reluctantly and temporarily took on—or so he thought.

He swore it wouldn’t last. He didn’t like it, all that standing behind her on the practice field and gently trying to suggest how she should do something she’d been doing pretty much her whole life. It felt like a minefield and he was also trying to nurse himself and his own career back to life. (Fratangelo won the French Open junior title in 2011, beating Dominic Thiem in the final; he had peaked at No. 99 in the world rankings in 2016.)

But then Keys won Eastbourne and she was in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, where she lost to Aryna Sabalenka. She reached the US Open semifinals, lost again to Sabalenka, and finished the 2023 season just outside the top 10.

More than a year later, Fratangelo found himself in the new black seats on the edge of Margaret Court Arena for Keys’ match against Rybakina. He was back on court, this time on Rod Laver Arena, as Keys toppled Elina Svitolina to reach the semi-finals for the third time on Wednesday, before upsetting Iga Swiatek in an instant classic and saving a match point in the process.

She will play world no. 1 and double champion Aryna Sabalenka in the final on Saturday.

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Keys won the games, of course, not him. There is an unpleasant tendency in tennis to give credit to male coaching staffs for the success of their players. Fratangelo is aware of that.

“What I’ve tried to instill in her is that winning and losing are irrelevant,” he said, “but how you lose and how you win matter. ‘You don’t lose being passive because it’s not the one you are. Let a counterpuncher lose, because that’s what they do. You lose putting your foot on the gas pedal. It’s going to happen.”

Keys’ superpower hits one of the biggest balls in the sport, especially when her opponent thinks she’s in a position where she can’t do it.

Losing stinks, but losing on your opponent’s terms stinks worse. Fratangelo believes there is a way to win if you embrace the idea that you will lose the way you want to lose.

In an interview Wednesday after her win over Svitolina, Keys said other coaches and people around her had used some of the same words as Fratangelo. But then she would lose the way she wanted to lose and the support didn’t feel so unconditional anymore.

“The really amazing thing about Bjorn is that when he says it, he absolutely means it,” she said.

“‘OK, you went out, you tried to execute the game plan and you missed a couple too many. That’s fine. We go back, we work on it and that’s what it is.'” He really doesn’t care with whether I win or lose. Obviously, he wants me to win, but it’s really, ‘How did you play? Did you implement the things we worked on?'”

Both Keys and Fratangelo said it took something to get to that comfort zone. For years while dating, their roles in each other’s tennis lives were nothing more than cheerleading. They did not criticize each other’s games during dinner.

Then, in the early spring of 2023, Keys found herself without a coach. She spent the entire clay-court season on her own, and after the French Open, she asked Fratangelo for help.

OK, but just for a bit, he said.

They did two weeks together. It didn’t feel right – to him.

She asked him to come to England and coach her through the grass court season. Keys knew the lines could get a little blurry at times, but believed they would figure it out.

He said no. Too weird. Too complicated.

Fratangelo’s own coach told him that was the wrong answer. He changed his mind and the victory started. It still took some getting used to. Keys said he just wanted to be a cheerleader and supporter, rather than an adviser.

“It got to the point,” she said, “where I was like, ‘I’m asking you for help. If you see something, tell me what I’m doing wrong.'”

Like almost all human relationships, success in this depends on good communication. Sometimes, after a game or practice, he wants to talk about something he saw and she’s not ready to hear it. She tells him she needs an hour. Sometimes it’s urgent. He has to get it out. He tells her he needs 10 minutes.

At 30, Keys is a far cry from the child prodigy who started winning WTA Tour matches when she was 14. She made her first Australian Open semifinal 10 years ago. She reached the final of the US Open in 2017.

Then injuries and the weight of the impossible expectations that came with being a teenage star as the sport searched for its next Serena Williams took their toll. Her pursuit of the first Grand Slam title, which had once seemed easy to find, became frustrating. Tennis stopped being fun.

Keys said Wednesday that she is now beginning to appreciate her career, even if that major remains elusive.

“I really left everything out there,” she said.

Now she has some good company out there, someone to order takeout with on Wednesday night, ahead of her semi-final date with Swiatek, the tournament’s best player so far.

“The match I have tomorrow is going to be really tough, so I think it’s almost going to be a little bit easier not to get ahead of myself,” she said.

She’s not sure how long Fratangelo will last on the road with her full-time. He always hated the endless travel of the tennis life, although he said on Monday that he has loved the last 18 months because it is the first time in their relationship that they have been able to be together non-stop. Before, they were on separate tours and schedules and spent most of the year in different time zones.

Still, he is a homebody. They just finished renovating their home in Orlando, Florida. He likes to cook. They have a nice coffee station there. They both love to be bored and sit around the house.

However, Keys has tennis stuff to do at the moment and she wants his help to do it. She told him that if he found something else he was really passionate about, she would understand. However, there was a “but” attached to it.

“Unless you’re crazy about it,” she told him. “I would prefer that I see you and we actually spend time together. I also play really well so ideally I would have you around.”

For now, those corner seats on the Australian Open’s show courts seem like a pretty good place.

(Top photo: Mike Freyn / Imagn)