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By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]If you took a random teenager who’d watched too many movies and asked them what they’d do if they ever made it big in the Big Apple, maybe they’d say something like, “Go to a fancy dress-up party with Rihanna and get rich on Wall Street.” Little did they know, they could have done all that if they simply got it together and won the US Open. Last Saturday, Emma Raducanu defeated Leylah Fernandez, 6–4, 6–3, in a thrilling and briefly bloody championship match. On Tuesday, she attended the Met Gala while decked out in Chanel, a possibility that could not have been on her mind when she entered qualifying rounds, aiming to make enough money to replace the earbuds she lost right before her first match. The next morning she visited the New York Stock Exchange, which had always been on her NYC “bucket list,” an interest deepened by her A-level studies and cultivated by parents who work in finance in London. (Raducanu, an excellent student, received something the Brits call an “A*” in maths and an A in economics.) She appeared on Good Morning America and CNBC, and she posed in front of her own face on a billboard in Times Square. A Slam is a frighteningly efficient machine for turning an anonymous teenager into an international icon.