A rising American tennis star meets her foil in a French Open duel of control
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PARIS — Iva Jović, the 18-year-old American rising star, was on her way to the locker room at Roland Garros the other day when she saw a familiar tennis face heading to the same destination.
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He seemed like he needed to be somewhere, and he did, because the week before a Grand Slam, Novak Djokovic always needs to be somewhere. But Serbia’s 24-time Grand Slam champion, who has become something of a mentor to Jović, wanted a word with the player from Torrance, Ca., whose parents are Serbian too.
He wanted to know how she had been faring since their initial tutorials in January in Australia. He wanted to know how her second French Open prep had been going, and then he couldn’t help himself.
“He was just like, ‘Hey, great job. How are you liking the clay? You know, something I feel like you should try is doing this, to mess with the girls a little bit,’” Jović said during an interview at the French Open. Wise beyond her years, she declined to elaborate on what the mess should entail.
“It was quite specific on the tactical end, so I’m not going to share that,” she said. “I want to kind of sit with him a little longer and ask him questions myself, so I think that’ll be something I try to do later in the week.”
That would be a good plan for Jović, for Emma Navarro, her opponent in Thursday’s second round, and for basically anyone who wants to win the French Open one day — especially in the kinds of temperatures Roland Garros has seen this week.
They are both figuring out exactly who they are as players, while trying to layer in the all-court skills that all the top contenders on the WTA Tour have these days.
Jović is already a master of controlled aggression despite being so young; Navarro, seven years her senior, has been trying to become that kind of player for a while. The process, plus ongoing health issues, caused Navarro to take some lumps as last season wore on. During an interview in Rome a year ago, she said she was in the middle of a tennis makeover, with a rough two-year horizon, aimed at making her less defensive and traditional.
She wanted to be someone who could dictate matches, break sidelines with angled ground strokes, come in and finish points at the net and also feather drop-shots. She was a work in progress. If she had to take one step back to move two steps forward, that was fine.
But then the tournament exits, often earlier than they had been the previous season, started to pile up just as Navarro’s status as a known quantity started to rise. She’d signed deals with Fila; with Red Bull; with Mejuri, the jewelry manufacturer. When she lost, people noticed.
This year, after opening-match losses at the Australian Open and two WTA 1000 events, Navarro decided she needed to take a break to truly manage an unspecified health issue that had been building through roughly the last year and a half.
“The biggest thing for me while I was home, my top priority, was just feeling as healthy as I could,” Navarro said during a news conference after her first-round win over Janice Tjen of Indonesia.
“Then, secondly, just kind of fostering some different parts of my life that I’m not able to on the tour. You know, getting to see my family and my friends and just kind of feeling like a regular person.”
After a few years on something like a hamster wheel, Navarro stuffed her rackets in the closet for a couple weeks, then slowly began to make her way back to the practice court and the gym — but only when she felt like it. After a long stretch of following a regimented playbook of what she thought she was supposed to be doing, she decided to take a more pragmatic approach.
“Doing what I feel is best for me on a given day in terms of how much I practice, how much I’m in the gym, what I do outside of practice,” she said. “If I feel like an hour on court is enough for me that day, then do that. If I feel like I want to play 3 hours, then do that.”
She has also adjusted her off-days when she’s on the road. She’s no longer treating her time in foreign city like a student on a term abroad, exploring restaurants and museums and city culture in her downtime. Those habits helped run her into the ground, she said.
Not yet match-sharp, Navarro lost early at the Italian Open to start her comeback, and again at a lower-tier tournament in Paris the following week. But then she went to the Strasbourg International, the WTA 500 that runs into the French Open, and ran the table. Navarro beat Jovic, the world No. 17, in the round of 16 before taking down Victoria Mboko, the world No. 9, to win the title.
The front-foot focus was there. But there was also more of the old Navarro: The steadiness from the baseline, the solid defense, and the impeccably strategic pulling of the trigger on high-percentage chances.
Two of her five matches went three sets and she survived, something that became a bit of a trademark for a player who once scrawled “Me❤️3sets” on a camera lens.
“I kind of just kept plugging and kept moving along and doing all the things that I feel like give me the best chance to win,” she said in the news conference. “It ended up working out.”
Whether it can work out in two consecutive matches against Jović is another question. The California teenager has shot up the rankings in the past year, something that has only recently stopped surprising her. Finally, she has come to accept something people around her and her opponents knew a long time ago. She belongs.
“At this point I think I would be selling myself short if I thought of it any other way,” she said.
In so many other ways, she is just starting out.
She has been working with Tom Gutteridge, who still runs 12-under camps at the U.S. Tennis Association headquarters in Orlando, Fla, since she was 14. During an interview in January, Gutteridge said Jović was roughly 40 percent of the player she could be.
“The mentality is just to never, never hold back, just continue to be aggressive,” said Gutteridge.
“Keep the pressure on their opponents, never hold back, especially under pressure, and that was probably the most amazing thing that he could have given to her, and also the ability to just fight for every point.”
Jović’s version of aggressiveness is additive. She can smack a winner to end a point, but she most often ratchets up her opponent’s discomfort just a little on shot after shot, opening the court with increasingly, but safely aggressive, cuts. She establishes her supremacy with the suffocation that Djokovic has made his trademark, moving an opponent hopelessly out of position or compelling them to make an error.
Jović and Gutteridge have spent their time in the recent months trying to give Jović even more options, working on her ability to change rhythm and pace. It’s especially useful for a player who takes the ball as early as she does.
“We wanted to add different ways of winning points, and being able to use the full court for her advantage rather than just maybe through the baseline,” Gutteridge said. “Creating more width. Using more of the sides, the drop shots, things like that.”
Jovic has bought in.
“I always played aggressive, but now there’s really no time to pick your shot and wait, like, ‘Oh, I like this one’,” she said.
“If you hit a good serve, you need to be going for it immediately because, if not, they’re going to pick you off right away. It’s just a little bit more urgency I think you have to have at this level.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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