’19 Charleston Champ Keys: ‘The Pressure is Always There’

AMERICAN MAKING HER 13TH STRAIGHT APPEARANCE ON DANIEL ISLAND 

You might think that Madison Keys’ trophy run at the 2025 Australian Open, when at 29 she became the tournament’s oldest first-time women’s singles titlist in the Open Era, would serve as a dividing line of sorts for the tour veteran; a nice, neat way to categorize her professional tennis career.

BS (Before Slam): The much-hyped phenom who turned pro on her 14th birthday, who for years carried the burden that comes with being pegged as The Next Big Thing. AS (After Slam): The wise, seasoned veteran who, with one of the sport’s four most cherished prizes in hand, no longer lives and dies with every win and loss.

But Keys, making her 13th straight appearance at the Credit One Charleston Open, a tournament she won in 2019, isn’t quite ready to parcel out, to collate her career into convenient, easily digestible halves.

“I think I’m the same person,” she said of that ‘before’ and ‘after’ notion. “A dividing line would be really hard, considering that it was basically my entire life and then one year.”

Does Keys, coached by her husband, the former ATP Tour pro Bjorn Fratangelo, feel a little lighter on the court now that her Wikipedia page includes ‘Grand Slam Champion’, now that she’s shed some of those weighty expectations she had toted since Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine dubbed her smiling teenage self The Second Coming?

“I think it was kind of like the end of the chapter where I got to do the thing that I’ve dreamed of for my entire life.” — Madison Keys

“No,” she shot back without hesitation. “The pressure’s there — always. It’s always there. It’s gone for the 45 minutes that you actually get to soak it up, and then you go into press, and it’s like, ‘What’s next? You going to win the next one?’ It all comes back pretty quickly.”

If there’s any obvious post-Slam change to the Madison Keys we know today, it’s that she comes off as being more at peace with herself than ever. The wins are as sweet as ever; but the losses don’t seem to sting as much as they perhaps once did. Like she said after raising the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup, she didn’t need a major title to justify her existence as an elite athlete, but it sure felt good to get the proverbial monkey off her back. “It really started to kind of weigh on me more: ‘What if I never do it? If I don’t do it, am I considered a failure?’” she asked in Melbourne Park. Now she views success in a whole new way.

“I think a good way to go about measuring success is: Are you improving the way that you want to improve? I think if you have goals to implement something or work on something, maybe try to get to the net more, and you’re consistently able to do that in matches, that’s a level of success,” said the part-time podcaster. “That’s something that you have full control over. I think that’s really important in the sport because there’s a lot of things that you can’t control.”

Her trip Down Under earlier this year was unlike any in her 17-year tenure as a pro. For the first time, she was returning to Australia as the defending champion.

“I don’t think I went in with any sort of expectations, but it was definitely an incredible experience to be able to go back and have that opportunity,” said the 10-time tour-level titlist, who last year reached a career-high No. 5 in the PIF WTA Rankings. “I think it was kind of like the end of the chapter where I got to do the thing that I’ve dreamed of for my entire life. It was just a very, very cool experience.”

No dividing line, but a chapter closed.