It doesn’t take much for my eyes to well up during the early stages of a slam—especially when the year-opener in Melbourne is concerned. Yes—I’m holding the Australian Open accountable as the tear-jerking slam. It’s in January; a month that foists panoramic self-improvement upon us like a swarm of optimized bees. Players have mental distance from the bygone year, and arrive at Melbourne Park with dreams buoyant and hope newly hatched. Will this be their proverbial year?
Here are five moments that earned my tears so far in week one, in ascending order, from pale dribble through to burst water pipe.
5. ESPN charging $30 for full AO access, without warning
✊ Admittedly no tears, just me acquiescing with an Arthur fist
ESPN stands for Especially Nasty, because how dare they jump from $12 to $30 with nary an AI-authored email? Very gunpoint robbery sorta stuff, given tennis fans aren’t about to just watch something else. “For $30 a month, I want to cherrypick my commentators,” Caitlin told me. We agreed on Mary Carillo, and not the McEnroe’s.
4. Michael Zheng’s five-set victory over Sebastian Korda
💧💧 Eyes got damp, but did not runneth over
Backing the underdog is not radical. We’ve rooted for figures as far-flung as 14th century dirtbag, Robin Hood, and nasty gal Erin Brokovich; we want to see an unlikely take down a sure thing. A certain amount of shadenfreude might be involved. Seeing a frequent winner unravel and underperform can stoke, well, stoked feelings that are concerned with the phenomenon of “inequality aversion,” which is, as it sounds, the human proclivity for fairness.
Or sometimes, you wish the favorite nothing but a perfect rib-eye and a forehead kiss—but still, the underdog has you by the tits. Such was the case with Michael Zheng, the 21-year-old qualifier and student of New York’s Columbia University. This past Saturday, he shot out in front of Sebastian Korda—whose career high is 15 in the world; and whose father’s career I’m admittedly more familiar with—to take the opening two sets. Zheng’s level then took a dip, and he lost sets three and four, before reviving his early form in the fifth to take the match. It was not only his first five-set win, it was his first-ever time playing a five-set match.
In the third, when Korda locked in, played loose and missed less, Zheng was zen. Where most inexperienced players would be writhing very visibly with something invisible, struggling to reconcile body with mind, shooting petulant glances (or worse) toward the box, Zheng was as neutral as a pair of blue jeans. Later in the press room, his easy disposition met the microphone.
With a smile he revealed he’ll be seeing through his studies instead of going immediately pro. Unless “I beat Carlos Alcaraz,” he conceded with a smile.
3. Talia Gibson’s easy outing of Anna Blinkova
💧💧 Eyes got damp, but again—nope!—did not runneth over
It is negative-seven Celsius in New York. A case has been built for a blizzard this weekend. As I take ice-pick to laptop so that I may write this very dispatch, I ache for an Australian summer. Watching my fellow blokes and birds trot out some unexpected results on home soil stirs in me a yearning for a meat pie with tomato sauce. (I wonder if any players are big into the pie stand??)
Talia Gibson is 21 years-old, and ranked 119th in the world. Mysteriously redacted from the WTA website is her height of 6’ 4”; a metric that seems wildly incorrect given her teammate, Jess Birrell is but 5’ 7” and the delta here isn’t so vast. I was frankly ravished by Gibson’s performance against the much more established Anna Blinkova. Her decisiveness and solidity off the ground—two or three games’ worth of lapsed concentration aside—recalled my injured princess, Qinwen Zheng, so sturdy was her game. In her presser, she cited Rybakina and Sabalenka as two players she was inspired by, which tracks—though Gibson towers over both women by a matter of four inches according to her made-up height.
2. Dane Sweeny’s win over a retiring Gael Monfils
💧💧💧 Tears that caressed my chin, and were tasted
Could it be that I am a patriotic person after all? !ord knows Australia models itself in the image of everything that’s wrong with America. In any case!!! I give you back-to-back Aussies, ending with Dane Sweeny.
The 24-year-old looks like every boy I went to high school with, which is to say: very Australian. At 5' 7”, he is materially shorter* than Talia Gibson (maybe) and the entertainer known as Gael Monfils (certainly) who he pushed past in round one, after almost four hours and as many sets. Sweeny isn’t the biggest hitter or server, but he ran like hell and made good decisions in big moments. There were flashes of Monfils doing Monfils things, but his movement betrayed him often, and Sweeny’s cunning was too staunch. Sweeny later spoke of his self-administered pep talk in reverse (“It’s fine to lose to Gael Monfils,” he told himself ahead of the match) and for the world 182, perhaps it worked.
As soon as Sweeny smacked the line forehand that won him the match, flung his hat and racquet yonder, and fell onto his back, my eyes started leaking. Eventually, a tear or two would pervade my mouth, so I am calling these chin-length tears. I look forward to crying like Justin Timberlake when our prince Monfils leaves tennis for real later in the year :(
1. Oleksandra Oliynykova’s temperament & courage
💧💧💧💧💧
You’ve all seen Oleksandra Oliynykova’s (real) neck tattoo and (temporary) face tattoos by now. Her game, while not without solid groundstrokes and excellent hustle, does have troll-y qualities. Namely, those looooping, baseline-skimming balls whose bounces threaten to thwack the kookaburras in the nearby botanic gardens. They were almost enough to rouse erstwhile champ Madison Keys into a first set loss. (She admitted in the presser she hadn’t been moonballed like that since “under 12s,” before wisely layering in some praise for her opponent.)
But so it goes: Oliynykova instated a quick 4-1 lead in the first, before Keys steadied the ship, heralding a six-each scoreline. In the tiebreak, the Ukrainian jumped to a 4-0 lead, before Keys clamored her way back to trail 4-6. For most of the set it felt as if Keys was askew—that is, until she staged an intervention with herself. “SO YOU’RE A CHAMPION? WELL ACT LIKE IT,” is how I imagine it went down in her mind palace. It worked, and she rattled off four consecutive winners to take the set, and the one that followed (6-1). Once the second, lopsided set was through, Keys let out a roar and Oliynykova bounded toward the net, grinning, looking curiously chuffed for a loser. She gave Keys an XL hug, teeth on show, and my composure was done for. This being her first main draw appearance at a slam, Keys had to nudge her to shake hands with the ump first—that gesture alone emptied my eyes. I had seen miscellanea about Oliynykova’s life as a Ukrainian over the past couple years. I barely cried at my own wedding.
Oliynykova earned my tears during her match, and my awe and respect after it.
If you’re not caught up, her story continues here at her post-match press briefing. While it’s illegal in slam terms to discuss a political agenda, she expanded offsite in an interview with French newspaper L’Équipe. Her father serves on the frontlines of the Ukrainian army, and their family is raising money for defensive weapons here.
*Was Sweeny more yoked in 2022, though?! I didn’t clock this gun show the other night.
