Less than a set and two games to lose, Brady could easily have packed everything. Looking across the net at Osaka, a player who impressed Brady in his youth when they played junior tournaments in Florida, the underdog could have been forgiven for leaving.
If there’s one thing the tennis world knows now that it didn’t know six months ago, it’s that Brady isn’t leaving. This may have seemed more likely when she went to UCLA, or when she collapsed after an early race for the fourth round here and at the U.S. Open in 2017.
But she got a new coach, Michael Geserer, in early 2019, someone she had never met before, and went to work.
“Every time she goes on the court, she leaves everything on the court,” said Geserer.
So this is what she did near the end. She broke Osaka to 4-1, looked at Geserer first and made sure he got the message: He’s still here. After the move, she rose to the base line, ready to fight, and she did, before falling 6-4, 6-3.
On the WTA Tour, Brady is known as one of the most hardworking. The fact that she survived everyone but one other player, after spending 15 days in a hotel room, only happened because she was working on a fitness base that she had been building since the beginning of November, when she started her preparations. for this tournament, much earlier than most players.
“I belong at this level,” said Brady when asked what she had learned from that experience. “Winning a Grand Slam is entirely possible for me. It is at your fingertips. “There is work to be done to improve your skills, she said, so that when you get to those great moments, you don’t feel pressured to play perfectly, but just enough to win.
Osaka said that after her battle at the US Open, she told her team that Brady “would be a problem”.