MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – It’s a cold December afternoon in the lobby of a hotel near Central Park in downtown Manhattan.
A 23-year-old woman looked up from a club chair near the elevator. She’s wearing a baseball cap and playing with her phone.
“Hey,” she said.
Take another look. Oh, by the way, that’s Emma Navarro: U.S. Open semifinalist, top-10 female player after just one full season at the top level. After a night of photo shoots, media fests and appearances on the New York Knicks with a few other tennis players you’ve probably heard of – Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton and Jessica Pegula She relaxes before her team’s NBA basketball game.
This could be interesting. Then again, it was cool to sit in this comfy chair and watch the bustle of her hometown go by anonymously. There are many reasons why Navarro, who faces Ons Jabr in the third round of the Australian Open on Saturday, is pursuing tennis. Becoming a celebrity is not one of them.
“Quite the opposite,” she said the other day after beating China’s Wang Xiyu in the second round in Melbourne, her second straight three-set match in which the outcome hung in the balance until the last point.
She makes another appearance on Saturday, taking on Ons Jabeur in front of a sold-out Margaret Court Arena. , just recovering from several months of injury. After scoring 20 of 24 points in the first set to lead 5-0, she had to fight hard in the third set to claim victory, saving three break points on serve at 1-2.
After the match, she thanked her parents for taking her and her siblings on a six-hour bike ride when they were little and setting her up for her performance in the third set. Then she scrawled “My Heart Episode 3” on the TV camera. She should. She posted a 19-6 record in distance events last season. On her way off the court, she signed autographs directly for the fans in the stands. The game was played in the shadows of Melbourne’s lunchtime scene, with Navarro still not fully accustomed to being center stage day in and day out.
“It’s something I’ve worked very hard to manage and feel comfortable in the spotlight. It’s the opposite of who I am. It feels unnatural,” she said.
This happens sometimes in tennis matches. Not everything moves in sync. Not everyone who can hit a forehand and backhand on the wire seems to be an extroverted dog all afternoon, letting their life unfold in a series of Instagram posts and TikTok videos.
The same goes for Navarro, who until last summer had spent his tennis career exploring incrementalism. At 18, after a stellar junior career that included a singles final and doubles title at Roland Garros, 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 collegiate women’s singles championship.
When she turned pro, she chose not to pursue what would have been an easy wildcard spot because her father, Ben, is active in tennis and owns the ATP and WTA 1000-level Cincinnati Open. She has performed well at the second level of the ITF and WTA 125 circuits.
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Navarro did not enter the top 100 until April 2023. Nia Hobart won her first WTA Tour title at the 2024 Australian Open.
Then she worked her way into the spotlight. She beat Coco Gauff back-to-back, first at Wimbledon and then at the U.S. Open, with Gauff now a friend and the defending champion. She cracked the top ten for the first time. That’s when things started to get a little hectic.
Emma Navarro is figuring out how to live in the tennis spotlight. (Daniel Puckett/Getty Images)
Lots of requests for interviews and appearances. The business portfolio currently includes collaborations with Fila, Yonex, Red Bull, Dove, Fanatics, De Bethune and, as of Friday, high-end jewelry brand Mejuri, which shot her for a custom shoot in Charleston, South Carolina, in December photo. Navarro is the company’s first athlete ambassador.
For Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka and Gauff, Iga Swiatek and Chin-moon Cheng, it’s just another day that ends with a “Y.” For Navarro, it was, in her own words, “an adjustment.”
The adjustment also has tennis overtones, which may go some way to explaining Navarro’s first two matches here this month. Both eventually became tennis escape rooms, first at Rod Laver Arena and then at the site’s second stadium, Margaret Court Arena.
She dropped serve in the third set in both games. Another former NCAA champion, Peyton Stearns, faced her in a second-set tiebreaker, but she couldn’t get a match point. Stearns then served in the third but failed to cross the line.
In both games, Navarro played the first game of the day, returning her to prime time on ESPN in the U.S. — a time slot in which Goff regularly plays. Like exposure, big court assignments and prime time bring not-so-subtle messages of expectations.
In both games, the always-steady Navarro sprayed the ball from the middle of the baseline and spent much of last year pulling it back on the ropes, tiring one opponent after another. Then she found a way to combine the best shots of the afternoon into a handful of decisive points to double the lead.
Against Jabr, she took the first set 5-0 before Jabr began to develop a skill that brought her to the brink of the sport’s biggest prize. She chased the score to 5-4. Navarro still won the set.
For nearly her entire tennis career, Navarro has been that girl, then a woman, who was excited when she showed up to a tournament and learned she was playing on Court 35 behind the facility.
“Like, put me in the forest,” she said.
This doesn’t happen anymore.
“You spend 20 years working on something, mostly behind closed doors, and then all of a sudden you become a form of entertainment for people,” she said. “People pay to watch you do things. It’s definitely an adjustment.
Navarro’s coach, Peter Ayres, has been working with her for the past eight years. He said the way he’s getting Navarro acclimated to the new version in the offseason is by sticking to the formula that got her here.
“It’s always been a very methodical approach,” Ayers said in an interview in Melbourne. “We want her to get better without losing sight of the bread and butter. It’s always a balance.
For Navarro, she’ll never be one of the giants on the WTA Tour, which means playing bigger and more aggressively within her strengths. She doesn’t point, point, and start firing off lasers like some of her peers do.
“I’m very skeptical of just pursuing speed,” Ayers said.
There are other ways.
Ayers is a baseball player. One of his favorite pitchers was Greg Maddux, the Atlanta Braves ace in the 1990s. Maddux is far from the hardest pitcher to throw to, but no one can throw to the edge of the strike zone like he does. “There’s a lot she can do to be more precise,” Ayers said.
Same as her strokes.
Navarro doesn’t have to try to beat players like Aryna Sabalenka or out-spin Swiatek. But if her feet were a step or two closer to the baseline more often, or even within it, she could do a lot of damage.
Ayers, like Navarro, knows that life is different when there is a number next to your name on the ranking ladder. It’s been a while since Navarro sneaked up on Gough like he did six months ago at dusk in south-west London. Ayers said people no longer fear losing to her; when the fear is gone, opponents are free to play without fear of consequences.
“You’re going to get everyone’s best chance,” he said. “The idea is to make you better.”
Emma Navarro has found herself trailing in both Australian Open matches so far. (Daniel Puckett/Getty Images)
Navarro has always been a master of problem solving, whether it’s figuring out her opponent, how she wants to spend her time and who she wants to be as a tennis player. In a sense, what she’s doing now is solving another problem – how to exist as a new version of herself, one that’s been better than all but a handful of players in the women’s game over the past six months. .
“The single digits kind of moved me,” she said. “This is well beyond the scope of what I expected for myself.”
However, there have been some recent revelations that hopefully will start to pay some dividends soon. There is a way to play some kind of tennis while still being that woman sitting in a club chair in a hotel lobby, anonymously watching the world go by.
“My tennis can be alpha and I’ll let it work and I can be myself,” she said. “If I don’t feel like myself, I probably won’t be able to play my best tennis.”
(Top photo: Ng Hanguan/AP)
