Emma Navarro keeps her eye on the ball at the Australian Open as the tennis spotlight shines brighter

MELBOURNE, Australia – A bitterly cold December afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, in the lobby of a hotel off Central Park.

A 23-year-old woman looks up from a club chair near an elevator. She’s wearing a baseball cap and fiddling around on her phone.

“Hello,” she says.

Take another look. Oh, right, it’s Emma Navarro: US Open semifinalist and a top-10 women’s player after just one full season of top-tier tournaments. She’s enjoying herself ahead of a packed night of photo ops, press junkets and an appearance at the New York Knicks NBA basketball game with a few other tennis players you might have heard of — Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton and Jessica Pegula.

It could be fun. Then again, it’s pretty cool to hang out in this comfy chair, anonymously watching the hustle and bustle of her hometown pass by. There are many reasons why Navarro, who plays Ons Jabeur in the third round of the Australian Open on Saturday, pursued tennis. Being a famous person was not one of them.

“The exact opposite,” she said the other day, after a second-round win in Melbourne over Wang Xiyu of China, her second straight three-set match with the outcome up in the air until the final point.

She was at it again on Saturday when she opened a packed Margaret Court Arena against Ons Jabeur, a three-time Grand Slam finalist and darling of the sport returning from a torrid few months with injury. After winning 20 of the first 24 points and racing to a 5-0 lead in the first set, she had to scramble in the third to prevail and save three break points as she served for 1-2.

When it was over, she credited her parents for taking her and her siblings on six-hour bike rides when they were kids for her prowess in the third set. Then she wrote “me heart 3 sets” on the television camera. She should. She went 19-6 in games that went the distance last season. On her way off the pitch, she was directly signing autographs for fans hanging over the stands. The match was played in the light and shadow of lunchtime in Melbourne and Navarro is not yet fully adjusted to being at center stage, day after day after day.

“It’s something that I work very hard to manage and feel comfortable being in the spotlight. It is the opposite of my nature. It feels unnatural,” she said.

---

It happens sometimes in tennis. Not everything develops synchronously. Not everyone who can shoot forehands and backhands on a cord seemingly all afternoon is an alpha dog extrovert who lets their life unfold in a series of Instagram posts and TikTok videos.

And so it is with Navarro, whose tennis life had been an exploration in incrementalism until last summer. At 18, after a stellar junior career – including a singles final and doubles title at the French Open – she still wasn’t sure she wanted to be a professional tennis player. So she went to the University of Virginia for two years, where she won the NCAA national championship in women’s singles at the college level.

When she turned professional, she chose not to pursue wildcard entries, which could have been easily achieved, since her father, Ben, is active in the tennis business and owns the ATP and WTA 1000-level Cincinnati Open. She did well climbing through second tier tournaments on the ITF and WTA 125 circuits.

Navarro was outside the top 100 as recently as April 2023. She finished that year as world no. 32, the magic number for a Grand Slam seed, and won her first WTA Tour tournament in Hobart, Tasmania, the day before the start of the 2024 Australian Open.

Then she played her way into the limelight. She achieved consecutive victories over Coco Gauff, first at Wimbledon and then the US Open, where Gauff, now a friend, was the defending champion. She entered the top 10 for the first time. And that’s when it started to get a little busy.

A flood of interview and performance requests. A commercial portfolio that now includes deals with Fila, Yonex, Red Bull, Dove, Fanatics, De Bethune and, as of Friday, Mejuri, the high-end jewelry brand that set her up for a custom photo shoot in Charleston, SC, in December. Navarro is the company’s first athlete ambassador.

For Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka and Gauff, Iga Swiatek and Zheng Qinwen, such a thing is just another day that ends with a “Y”. For Navarro, it is, in her own words, “an adjustment.”

The adjustment also features a tennis outfit, which could go some way toward explaining Navarro’s first two games this month. Both ended up being tennis escape rooms, first at Rod Laver Arena and then at the site’s other stadium, Margaret Court Arena.

She was down a break of serve in the third set in both matches. Peyton Stearns, another former NCAA champion, had a match point against her in a second-set tiebreak that she couldn’t handle. Stearns then served for the match in the third but couldn’t get over the line.

In both cases, Navarro was in the first match of the day, putting her back in prime time in the US on ESPN – a slot that Gauff often plays in. Like the fame and exposure that winning and marketing deals bring, big court cases and primetime hours carry a not-so-subtle message of expectation.

In both games, the usually steady Navarro sprayed balls from the center of the baseline that she had returned for most of last year, wearing down opponent after opponent. Then she found a way to combine her best shots of the afternoon into the handful of decisive points that made the difference twice.

Against Jabeur, she raced through the first set to 5-0 before Jabeur began to play with the finesse that carried her to the brink of the biggest prizes in the sport. She came back to 5-4. Navarro still took the set.

---

For most of her tennis life, Navarro had been the girl and then the woman who was excited when she showed up to a tournament and found herself playing on court 35 in the back of the facility.

“Like, put me in the woods,” she said.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

“You spend whatever 20 years working on something, mainly behind closed doors, and then suddenly you’re a form of entertainment for people,” she said. “People pay to come and see you do what you do. It’s definitely an adjustment.”

Navarro’s trainer, Peter Ayers, has worked with her for the past eight years. He said his way of getting Navarro used to being a new version of herself in the offseason was to stick with the formula that got her here.

“It’s always been a very methodical approach,” Ayers said during an interview in Melbourne. “We want her to get better without neglecting her bread and butter. It’s always a balance.”

For Navarro, who will never be one of the giants of the WTA Tour, that means trying to play bigger and more aggressively within her strengths. She’s not about to start firing lasers that some of her peers can point to, point out.

“I’m very leery of just chasing speed,” Ayers said.

There are other ways.

Ayers is a baseball guy. One of his favorite pitchers was Greg Maddux, the Atlanta Braves ace of the 1990s. Maddux was far from the hardest thrower, but no one could place balls on the edge of the strike zone as well as he could. “There’s a lot she can do to be more accurate,” Ayers said.

Same with her streaks.

Navarro doesn’t have to try to out-hit players like Aryna Sabalenka or out-spin Swiatek. But she can do a lot of damage if her feet are more often than not a step or two closer to the baseline, or even inside it.

Ayers, like Navarro, knows that life is different when there is a single digit next to your name on the leaderboard. It’s been a while since Navarro snuck up on someone like she did on Gauff at dusk in southwest London six months ago. People aren’t afraid to lose to her anymore, Ayers said; when that fear disappears, opponents can play freely without worrying about the consequences.

“You get everyone’s best chance,” he said. “The idea is that it makes you better.”

Navarro has always been a problem solver, whether it’s figuring out an opponent, how she wants to spend her time and who she wants to be as a tennis player. In a way, what she’s doing now is figuring out a different problem — how to exist as this new version of herself, the version that has been better than all but a handful of players in the women’s game for the last six months.

“The single digits kind of get me,” she said. “It’s just so far outside of my expectations for myself.”

However, there have been some recent revelations that will hopefully start to pay off soon. There is a way to play a certain kind of tennis and still be the woman who sits on a club chair in a hotel lobby and anonymously watches the world go by.

“My tennis can be alpha and I let it do its job and I can just be me,” she said. “If I don’t feel like myself, I probably won’t play my best tennis.”

(Top photo: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)