MELBOURNE, Australia — Madison Keys is in the building.
With women’s tennis on the verge of an epic showdown between its top two players with the Australian Open title on the line, Keys, the 29-year-old American, crashed the party. She stormed back against Iga Swiatek to win their semifinal 5-7, 6-1, 7-6 (10-8).
Down 7-8 in the tiebreak, Keys crushed two serves, one of them an ace and one Swiatek couldn’t return, to grab the only match point she needed. She banged a return and then watched a Swiatek forehand sail long.
She clutched her fists and screamed and let the biggest smile in years stretch across her cheeks. Dumbfounded, she trotted to the net to shake hands and then bent to her knees.
“I’m in the final,” she said on the court when it was over. “It just became who can get that final point and who can be a little bit better than the other one. I’m glad it was me.”
Years ago, people in tennis talked about Keys playing these sorts of finals every year. She thought she would, too. She was one of those prodigies that comes along every few years, winning tour matches in her early teens, her game big and bold and seemingly destined for greatness.
It hasn’t gone that way. Saturday night she will play in her first Grand Slam final since her 2017 U.S. Open meeting with Sloane Stephens. Keys lost that day, but she sensed her time would come. Then it didn’t, and it haunted her, especially when she began to battle the inevitable wear and tear that accompanies having played a decade or more of professional tennis by your mid-20s.
In the last year or so, she began to accept that her dream of winning a Grand Slam final, or even having the chance to play for another one, might not come again. She was going to have to be OK with that possibility, especially with Swiatek standing in her way Thursday night at Rod Laver Arena.
Swiatek was aiming to play for a Grand Slam title somewhere other than the red clay of Roland Garros in Paris for the first time in more than two years, but she could not overcome an hour of uncharacteristically error-strewn tennis and a sustained surge from Keys that peaked throughout the match and then went stratospheric when it mattered most.
Swiatek, the five-time Grand Slam champion and once-and-perhaps-future world No. 1, had little of the relentless efficiency of her other five wins during the fortnight. A match that always felt like it would be Swiatek’s to lose became that, after she went through a dip that lasted for the entire second set. It was marked by rushed forehands and tentative backhands, especially down the line, that couldn’t find the court or make their way over the net.
In the end, it was Keys’ grit that made the difference. Serving at 4-4 in the third set, Keys fought back from 0-40 and fended off four break points, any one of which would have given Swiatek the chance to serve out the match. When Swiatek did break and served for the match at 6-5, Keys found a clutch forehand winner into the postage stamp and a return deep to Swiatek’s shoelaces to turn the game and earn a double fault that sent the match into a 10-point tiebreak.
Still, when it was over Swiatek had lost just 31 games across six matches at the year’s first Grand Slam, mostly displaying a level of dominance that has always been missing from her game in the sport’s biggest events other than the French Open. Her groundstrokes have the spin and margin that disappeared in her defeats in 2024, and those qualities almost took her to the final when she earned the break at 5-5 in the third with a controlled but aggressive returning display. Some new tools, including a greater willingness to volley and come forward, had her on the verge in the tiebreak. She came out of a match against a redlining power player, on a hard court with a closed roof, feeling disappointed about being one good first serve away from victory. That wasn’t on the cards all that long ago.
Iga Swiatek translated her almost-unerring dominance to hard courts for the first time in a couple of years during the Australian Open. (Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP via Getty Images)
But in Keys, 29, she faced a dangerous and talented, free-swinger who has been on this stage before, both in Australia and at the U.S. Open, where she was a finalist in 2017. Keys was always going to play aggressively and take the match to Swiatek. The question was whether she could execute over the course of a three-set match or whether the errors that come with the territory of her cracking groundstrokes would seep in.
GO DEEPER
Madison Keys will win or lose, her way
Turns out she didn’t really care, because that wasn’t the point.
Two years ago, in her last Grand Slam semifinal at the 2023 U.S. Open, she walked off the court filled with regret for playing tentatively when the match was on the line. Thursday night into Friday morning, when she let Swiatek inch ahead she settled herself enough to find huge winners when they really mattered. The first time she held a lead in the match tiebreak was at 9-8.
So where did this come from?
Sitting on a bench at Melbourne Park Wednesday afternoon, Keys thought out loud in a glass-half-full sort of way about the advantage of playing a version of Swiatek that looked as good as it gets, at least somewhere besides Roland Garros.
Her mind went back to that dream of winning a Grand Slam, and how it was never far from her thoughts.
“All of a sudden you’re in the semis and it’s like, ‘OK, if I get past this match it’s the finals and then you’re playing for something,’” she said. “I’ve gotten to this point because I’ve done a really good job at only being focused on the match directly in front of me and worrying about that.”
She paused for a moment, and floated through the idea of playing Swiatek. Just like that, the concept of consequences, one of the old banana peels that had tripped her up in the past, went away.
In her news conference, she said that she had no idea what the score was at the critical moments.
She thought of only one thing: “Just try to get the next point.”
Then she won the 211th point of the night and the 18th of the tiebreak, and the chair umpire told her that she didn’t have to win another one.
Saturday, she has to try and win a bunch more, against the world No. 1 and two-time defending champion, with the chance to win a first Grand Slam title.
(Top photo: David Gray / AFP via Getty Images)