Transcript: Madison Keys def. Caroline Dolehide, 6-3, 7-6(4)
Madison Keys def. Caroline Dolehide, 6-3, 7-6(4)
Round of 32
MODERATOR: I bet you were happy to get that one done in straight sets. Your thoughts on the match.
MADISON KEYS: I think I played pretty well, kind of up until the end, and then I think I got a little bit passive and I think Caroline really raised her level, but overall really happy to get through that in straight sets.
MODERATOR: All right. Questions.
Have you gotten better at that over the years? When you get in a moment, you’re trying to close things out, it gets frustrating, are you better at staying cooler in those moments?
MADISON KEYS: I hope so. I think that it’s obviously hard when you kind of feel like you’re at the finish line and then it slips away, but I think I did a pretty good job today at kind of reshifting my focus and getting back into that set and then really just doing a good job getting a quick lead in the tiebreaker and just trying to move through the rest of that set quickly.
Madison, you seem to have a connection with the fans over the years here. What makes this place special and why do you perform so well here?
MADISON KEYS: I’ve been playing this tournament for many, many years, and I’ve always loved coming back. And I just have always really felt kind of at home here. So I just really appreciate coming out and playing. And I think that I’ve always just tried to give my all, and some years that’s great and I’ve won the tournament and then other years it’s kind of ended in some heartbreakers. But I think everyone is just very — you know, they’re just very happy and proud of any players who are out there giving their all, and they’ll fully support you no matter what.
I think early years covering you, I sort of remember you talking about clay like it was the countdown to grass, waiting for it to be over. And you’ve had some good results on clay since then, here and Rome and Paris and stuff. I’m wondering how different your attitude and relationship with the surface is now, a decade after whenever you first started competing on it as a professional?
MADISON KEYS: Last year I decided I was a clay specialist, and I’m just going to try to run with that this year and see how it goes. I think that after many, many years, I’ve kind of accepted that my game is pretty good on clay, and I feel like I move fairly well on it. And I think it’s finally just — I’ve stopped fighting it and just going to go with it and say that I love clay.
Congratulations, practicing on clay and then playing your first match back on clay, what’s the difference? It’s a match environment, and is there anything in your previous matches on clay that you can use, especially today?
MADISON KEYS: I think more than that, the harder thing is when you play someone who’s already played a match on the clay and it’s your first match, I think sometimes it’s more just kind of getting your footing 100 percent right, getting used to kind of knowing that your feet aren’t going to be 100 percent solid underneath you and then really just kind of — you never know when you’re going to get a weird bounce and you just kind of have to run with it. So I think there’s a lot of improvising that you have to do on clay, and especially in a match situation, sometimes those kind of points seem to always happen in really important times. So you just have to be ready for them, and also just kind of roll with the punches a little bit.
Just because I think you’ve had a little time to process it, I wanted to ask your reaction to the match at Indian Wells, your loss there in the semis, and how — it was obviously on a huge winning streak and to have it end that way, how do you look back on that? How do you process that result?
MADISON KEYS: I kind of just don’t think about it anymore. It’s kind of dead to me. It’s best to just leave it there.
Was it just like so extreme it was easy to move on in a certain way?
MADISON KEYS: I mean, no. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost like that in front of a massive crowd like that. (Laughs). But, no, it’s not — it’s not something that you’re not having a great time out there. But I think that it was kind of an emotional roller coaster for me kind of through that week, and it was honestly already a lot more of an emotion roller coaster and toll than I thought it was going to be after the Australian Open, and just kind of taking that time at home I think was really important. But getting back on court for the first time was also something that I don’t think I was 100 percent prepared for. So I think I, honestly, I kind of just ran out of steam, and when you’re playing someone like Aryna, you can’t not play well. And so it was just kind of one of those things where you just leave it, you kind of pretend it never happened.
Your husband had some success on clay himself. I imagine he’s a pretty good advisor when it comes to the surface.
MADISON KEYS: Yeah. He obviously won — he won junior Roland-Garros, and he would say that it was his favorite surface to play on. So he has lots of tidbits. We have pretty different games, which has been kind of the balancing act of he’ll tell me stuff sometimes, and then we have to kind of have a conversation about how we don’t play the same. But I think it’s a good balance, and I think he does a good job at helping me figure out how to take my game and not change it too much just because of a surface change.
You got married here. You’ve been here, coming back for decades now. Any real estate investments you’re looking at here in the area?
MADISON KEYS: It’s my favorite thing when I’m here to just sit on Zillow and look at all the old homes. So I definitely, if Bjorn said tomorrow that he wants to move to Charleston, I have a whole list of houses that we could move into. So it’s definitely something that I’m always scrolling; and who knows, maybe one day we’ll end up here.
MODERATOR: Thanks, everybody.
End of Interview
