Culture
Mirra Andreeva manages one teenage tennis miracle after another
Mirra Andreeva showed up to tennis in the middle of last season, like the new kid at school whose mother or father has just been transferred into the local branch office.
One day, no one had ever heard of her, the next, she’s all anyone is talking about: 16 years old, three days into the online version of her junior year in high school, complaining about the homework and taking over this Australian Open. She is pulling off a miracle every other day, then talking about it with equal parts sophistication, self-deprecation, humor and sarcasm in her third language (Russian and French are one and two) better than many people can in their first.
The other day, Andreeva blitzed Ons Jabeur, the three-time Grand Slam finalist and her female tennis idol, playing nearly flawless tennis on her way to a 6-0, 6-2 in Rod Laver Arena, the same court where she lost the junior final here last year. On Friday, Andreeva pulled off a different sort of miracle. She bounced back from losing the first set to Diane Parry 6-1 to draw even, then somehow climbed out of a 5-1 hole in the third set, saved two match points, and surged ahead 6-5, then failed to serve out the match but quickly recovered to blow Parry out in the deciding-set tiebreaker 10-5.
She grabbed her face, hiding an embarrassed sort of smile, then started fishing wristbands out of her bag and chucking them into the rapturous Aussie crowd that has fallen for all of her charms the past week.
An hour later, she was back down to earth, feet firmly planted on the ground, or as much as they could be given her rocket ride into the spotlight of the game she so loves.
Andreeva came back from the brink (Robert Prange/Getty Images)
“I’m OK with what’s happening,” Andreeva said with a wry smile to a handful of adults double and triple her age. “Maybe if I win a slam. I have to win three more matches and it’s really tough to win seven matches in a row.”
Andreeva is not like other teenage girls, or maybe she is, but just with a tennis flavor to the habits of youth.
At the end of each day, she turns out the lights in her room and has a conversation with herself about what has transpired.
She watches a lot of videos on her computer and phone, but it is often an old tennis match. She is very familiar with the greatest hits of Martina Hingis, the Swiss prodigy whose smooth and powerful baseline game is often compared to hers.
She ogles her heart-throb. It just happens to be a 36-year-old married man with four kids, a receding hairline and a metal hip — Andy Murray. After her win on Friday, he praised her mental strength on X, formerly Twitter, suggesting she owes her success to how hard she can be on herself, even if in the past that has not served her so well. More on that in a bit.
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To Andreeva, this was everything.
“Honestly, I didn’t really think that he would watch a match, then after he would tweet, he would comment something,” she said. “I will try to print it out somehow. I don’t know, I will put it in a frame. I will bring it everywhere with me. I will maybe put it on the wall so I can see it every day.”
On the court, Andreeva is a series of beguiling contradictions. She doesn’t appear fast but somehow always has her feet behind the ball. She is slight. She doesn’t appear to swing all that hard but can make the ball blast off her strings. In the most crucial moments on Friday, there was a calm about her as Parry descended into panic, though according to Andreeva, that’s not exactly what it felt like inside her brain.
She said she felt pretty confident after crushing Parry in the second set. She’d won five consecutive games, gotten multiple breaks of serve, and just needed to keep doing what she was doing.
Then she lost her own serve, missed her chances to get back on serve at 2-0 and before she knew it she was down 5-1. She looked at the scoreboard and noted the absurdity of a match that might end 6-1, 1-6, 6-1, so she made it her mission to win one game so at least the score of the final set would be 6-2.
Andreeva beat her hero, Ons Jabeur (Robert Prange/Getty Images)
Down match point at 5-2, she rushed the net and thought, “Am I crazy? I’m going to the net on match point?” But then Parry missed.
At 5-3, she felt her adrenaline rise and once more she really wanted to win. She then got two quick points on Parry’s serve but gave them back on missed returns. Her inner voice told her, “God, OK, that’s it.”
The next two “crazy points” were a blur of running and swinging. When she won them, she knew she had the mental advantage, that the energy was surging through her and draining from Parry. Even when she couldn’t serve out the match at 6-5, she still knew she had come so far back.
“It was like, ‘OK, six-all, I didn’t think that’s it’,” she said. “I already knew that I will win, but I just have to do everything for it.”
Andreeva’s connections with the Australian Open run deep. A tennis wonk, Andreeva likes to rewatch old matches in her downtime and the 2017 final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal is a favorite. Really, though, the ties began two years before her birth, when her mother, Raisa, got hooked on the sport watching Marat Safin win the men’s singles title in 2005. Within a few years, she was bringing Mirra’s older sister, Ericka, who is also now a professional, to lessons, with Mirra in tow.
This was in Krasnoyarsk, a city of one million people in Siberia, smack in the middle of the world’s largest country — not exactly tennis paradise. When the girls began to thrive on the court, Raisa moved them to Sochi on the Black Sea, a far warmer locale and the breeding ground of Maria Sharapova, and then to Cannes, France, where they enrolled in a tennis academy and are still based. An IMG recruiter found her when she was a scrappy, undersized 12-year-old and called headquarters.
She burst onto the scene at the Madrid Open last year when, still just 15 years old, she became one of the youngest players to beat a top-20 opponent, Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil. She then did it again in the next match, beating Magda Linette of Poland, who was double her age.
She won five matches at the French Open, including qualifiers, and two at Wimbledon, her first major competition on grass, before her teenage head emerged and doomed her losses — a swatted ball into the crowd in Paris, a maybe-thrown racket at Wimbledon that cost her a key point. She swore she dropped it and didn’t throw it.
At the U.S. Open, she ran into an in-form Coco Gauff in the second round and was comfortably beaten.
She has since parted ways with her coach, Jean-Rene Lisnard, the former pro from Monaco, and is using a temporary coach, Kirill Krioukov, a Russian who worked with Andreeva and her sister when they were younger.
She’s trying to balance the academic headaches of high school life without the social benefits, a dynamic that doesn’t always turn out so great. Growing up as a teen phenom is not for everyone.
For now, it’s not a problem, not while she’s taking ownership of Melbourne Park and is into the second week of a Grand Slam for the second time in seven months. This life suits her just fine.
“I like being here,” she said, talking not just about Australia. “I like to travel all over the world. I’m OK with what’s happening.”
(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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