New York: Sloane Stephens was planning to spend Saturday night in New York celebrating with Madison Keys, hours after beating her friend to a first Grand Slam title, a BBC report said.
The 24-year-old American, ranked 83rd until Monday, thrashed 15th seed Keys 6-3, 6-0 in just 61 minutes to complete a scarcely believable return from injury.
Asked if she would be buying the drinks, Stephens confirmed: “Yes, a lot of them apparently. We are having a little celebration and she is coming.”
If you told someone this story, they’d be, like, ‘That’s insane’.
Just 69 days after returning from an 11-month injury lay-off, and six weeks since her ranking dropped to 957, Stephens became only the fifth unseeded woman to win a Grand Slam singles title in the Open era.
And she later revealed it was boredom as much as nerves that threatened to upset her equilibrium during the 48 hours between semi-final and final at Flushing Meadows.
“I was literally in my room twiddling my thumbs,’ she said. “I was looking at car reviews last night on Auto Trader, like literally. That’s how bored I was. I didn’t have anything to do.”
Stephens admitted that the nerves finally took hold as she stepped out onto Arthur Ashe Stadium – but a little over an hour later her eyes were bulging as a cheque for $3.7m (£2.8m) was handed to her and she was announced as a Grand Slam champion.
She said: “There are no words to describe how I got here, because if you told someone this story they’d be, like, ‘that’s insane’.”
It is four years since Stephens first grabbed worldwide headlines when she beat compatriot Serena Williams in the Australian Open quarter-finals.
The likes of NBA stars Shaquille O’Neal and Dirk Nowitzki, and singer John Legend, congratulated her on social media, and a star had seemingly been born.
In the event, progress was harder going until 2016 when she won three titles, cementing her place in the top 30 and apparently on the up.
A right foot stress fracture halted that momentum, forcing her to withdraw from the US Open last August, and she would not return until Wimbledon.
Surgery followed in January and for the next 16 weeks Stephens was on crutches and unable to put any pressure on her foot. Just a month before Wimbledon, she was still wearing a protective boot.
Finally, Stephens stepped back on court in July – and first-round defeats at Wimbledon and in Washington were entirely predictable. Her ranking plummeted to 957.
What followed was, in her own words on Saturday night, “insane”.
The victory over Keys was her 15th in 17 matches, the kind of form shown by someone vying to be number one rather than avoid slipping outside the top 1,000.
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