Headed into the Wimbledon final, she's already won

Amanda Anisimova hit the pause button on her career. Now she plays for a championship.

Amanda Anisimova

Christopher O’Connell is the 77th-ranked men’s singles player in the world. His record this year is 7-14. He has won nearly $500,000, almost a fifth of that because he qualified for the French Open. He did not qualify for Wimbledon. That’s six months, seven wins, and a tightrope walk every time you face a Grand Slam event, where the money and the reputation live. He’s known tougher times, because seven years ago he left the tour to clean boats with his brother Ben, back in Sydney.

“It was terrible money,” he said earlier this year, “and everyone thought I was crazy because I could make so much more, teaching. But I just didn’t want to step onto a tennis court.”

But he got over his back problems, and he dealt with pneumonia, and he won a couple of Challenger events, tennis’s equivalent to Triple-A,, and that allowed him to get to No. 77. That’s nothing to dismiss. How many people do you know who are 77th best in the world at anything? But each step above that is slick, with no railing. You lose a first-round match and you’re gone for the week.

Tennis is like that. Unrelenting on the body, tough on the passports and the garment bags, devilish on the mind. It starts turning the screws when the players are not yet 10 years old. Parents are hovering. Line calls are up to the players. Those who survive, and become pros, are subjected to a year-round, six-continent apprenticeship that inevitably takes its pound of ligament and tendon.

It’s also a solo flight, when it comes down to it, because the coaches and the buddies and the families are in the stands, glaring down at the gladiators. That’s why players at Wimbledon have finally rolled up the curtain. They’re admitting they’ve cried for help, and, yeah, admitting they’ve cried.

Amanda Anisimova, 23, plays Iga Swiatek for the women’s championship on Saturday at Wimbledon. That would have made perfect sense five years ago, when Anisimova was the top junior. In March of 2023, Anisimova was playing Leylah Fernandez at Indian Wells and threw away three break points in the second set and then lost a tiebreak 7-0, squaring the match. She gathered her things and walked away. Later she posted that she had been ill and needed a break. At the end, she added, “Keep your negativity to yourself.” She lost in the first round in Madrid in May. She would not return for eight months. She said her workplace had become “unbearable.”

She lost her father Konstantin, who was her coach and moved the family from Russia to New Jersey to give his two daughters better tennis competition. She’d had trouble keeping coaches since. She was also the target of some truly hateful body-shaming on the Internet. A few losses, framed against the expectations, and it wasn’t hard for Anisimova to wish she were elsewhere.

Andrey Rublev, a longtime top 10 player, skipped the Olympics last year. He had spent much of the year berating officials in an unusual way. “I was fine in life but in tennis I was burning myself up inside,” he said.

Alexander Zverev, who was within a win or two of becoming No. 1 in the world last year, lost in the first round to Arthur Rinderknech at Wimbledon. “I’ve never felt so empty,” he confessed. “I feel quite alone in life, which is a feeling that’s not very nice.”

Zverev said he might take up therapy for the first time. Madison Keys used it to win her first Slam this year, in Australia. “It was like this light-bulb moment,” she said, “where I started thinking I could be nervous and also play good tennis, like both those things could live together. It was really hard because I didn’t really want to be the person that felt like I was really struggling. Very uncomfortable. I never really like to be uncomfortable. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have won.”

It’s also troubling to realize that no matter what you do, there is a concrete ceiling in this sport, reinforced by bulletproof glass and granite. It’s all match play. Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal won 69 Slams over 22 years. When they sequentially left the stage, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz almost immediately planted their flags. The women’s game is more fluid, but winning doesn’t necessarily quiet the mind. Ash Barty was No. 1 for 121 weeks and won three different Slams, but she retired at 26. She had already taken one sabbatical to play cricket. Once she won Wimbledon, she said, she had realized her dreams. “I am spent,” she said.

Federer gave the commencement speech at Dartmouth last year. He pointed out that he had won 80 percent of his matches in his unsurpassed career. “But I only won 54 percent of the points,” he said. He was trying to tell the grads to take every day seriously, but he was really reminding his victims that no matter how close they felt they were getting, their dreams were impossible.

Anisimova was 17 when she made the semifinals of the French Open. Three years later she got to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon and beat Coco Gauff on the way. But she wasn’t drawn back to the court during her hiatus. She bowled and spent time on the water and got involved in painting. She has taken that with her on her comeback, which has included a loss to Jessica Pegula in the finals at Toronto, and then a victory in Qatar, both of them point-heavy WTA 1000 events.

On Thursday she beat Aryna Sabalenka, ranked No. 1 in the world. She said it might inspire her next painting, maybe “something in green and white.” This time it was the regal Sabalenka who had trouble hanging on, criticizing Anisimova for celebrating a point too early (“it was more of a grunt,” Anisimova said) and showing her disapproval when Anisimova didn’t apologize for a shot that hit the netcord and bounced over. As anyone who has watched any TV tennis in the past 15 years knows, John McEnroe says it’s silly to apologize for that.

McEnroe sent other players to therapy during his raging career. But a mellowed-out Mac might not have won as much. The irony is that a player like Anisimova has put everything on the line, including her temporary sanity, to play in a match like Saturday’s, and your hope for her is that neither a win nor a loss will change her life. Your hope for all of them is that tennis will someday hand out its trophies without demanding souls as ransom.