MELBOURNE, Australia — A seriously 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, diddling around a bit on her phone.

“Hey,” she says.

Take another look. Oh, right, that’s Emma Navarro: U.S. Open semifinalist and a top-10 women’s player after just one full season of top-tier tournaments. She’s chilling ahead of a packed evening of photo ops, press gaggles, 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 might be fun. Then again, hanging out in this comfy chair, anonymously watching the bustle of her native city pass by is pretty cool too. There are many reasons why Navarro, who plays Ons Jabeur in the third round of the Australian Open 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 consecutive three-set battle with the outcome up in the air until the final point.

“It’s something that I work really hard at managing and feeling comfortable with being in the spotlight. It’s the opposite of my nature. It feels unnatural.”

This happens in tennis sometimes. Not everything develops in sync. Not everyone who can fire forehands and backhand on a wire seemingly all afternoon is an alpha-dog extrovert, letting 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 up until the summer of last year. At 18, after a terrific 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 nationwide college-level women’s singles championship.

When she did turn pro, she opted not to pursue wild-card entries that might have been easily attainable, given that her father, Ben, is active in the tennis business and owns the ATP and WTA 1000-level Cincinnati Open. She was fine climbing her way 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 seeding, 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 spotlight. She notched consecutive wins over Coco Gauff, first at Wimbledon and then the U.S. Open, where Gauff, now a friend, was the defending champion. She rose into the top 10 for the first time. And that’s when things started to get a little busy.

A flood of interview and appearance 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 jewellery brand that put her in a bespoke photo shoot in Charleston, S.C., 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, something like that is just another day ending with a “Y”. For Navarro, it is, in her own words, “an adjustment”.

The adjustment has a tennis guise too, which might go some distance toward explaining Navarro’s first two matches here this month. Both ended up being tennis escape rooms, first on Rod Laver Arena and then on the site’s second 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 take. 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 in the prime-time slot back in the States on ESPN — a slot that Gauff often plays in. Like the fame and exposure that winning and marketing deals carry, big court assignments and prime-time hours bring a not-so-subtle message of expectation.

In both matches, the usually steady Navarro sprayed balls from the middle of the baseline that she had roped back for much of last year, wearing down opponent after opponent. Then she found a way, stringing together her best shots of the afternoon in the handful of deciding points that made the difference twice over.

For nearly her entire tennis life, Navarro had been the girl and then the woman who was thrilled when she showed up at a tournament and learned she was playing on Court 35 in the back of the facility.

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

That’s not happening anymore.

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

Navarro’s coach, Peter Ayers, has been working with her the past eight years. He said his way of getting Navarro used to being a new version of herself during the off-season 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 WTA tour’s giants, that means trying to play bigger and more aggressively within the parameters of her strengths. She is not about to start firing lasers, like some of her peers can do point in, point out.

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

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 with being more precise,” Ayers said.

Same with her strokes.

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

Ayers, like Navarro, knows that life is different when there is a single digit next to your name on the rankings ladder. It’s been a while since Navarro sneaked up on anyone, as she did on Gauff at dusk in southwest London six months ago. People aren’t afraid of losing to her anymore, Ayers said; when that fear goes away, opponents can play free without worrying about the consequences.

“You’re getting everyone’s best shot,”  he said. “The idea is that makes you better.”

Navarro has always been something of 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 sense, what she’s doing now, is figuring out another 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 past six months.

“The single-digit gets me a little bit,” she said. “It’s just so far outside my realm of expectations for myself.”

There’s been some revelations lately, though, that will hopefully begin to pay some dividends soon. There’s a way to play a certain kind of tennis and still be that woman sitting on a club chair in a hotel lobby, anonymously watching the world go by.

“My tennis can be alpha and I’ll let that do its job and I can just be me,” she said. “If I’m not feeling like myself, I’m probably not going to be playing my best tennis.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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