Towards the end of May 2016 Ashleigh Barty signed up for the first qualifying round of the Eastbourne Trophy. The tournament was part of the ITF Women’s Circuit, the tier below the main WTA Tour, and the prize fund was just $50,000.
It was early in the grass court season. So early in fact that the red clay of Roland Garros was still dusting the soles of the game’s leading lights. Barty was unranked. She hadn’t played a competitive singles match in almost two years. This was a professional tennis experience so far off Broadway it was barely on a map.
Almost exactly three years later Barty is once again on British grass, this time feted as the best player in women’s tennis.
The Queenslander is just the 27th player to ascend to the pinnacle of her profession since the WTA began to document the feat in 1975, and just the second Australian, 43 years after Evonne Goolagong Cawley. Few have arrived at the destination by such a circuitous route.
A junior prodigy, Barty was the girls’ singles champion at Wimbledon by 15. That was supposed to be a springboard into the sporting elite but despite showing immense promise and reaching three grand slam doubles finals something hadn’t yet clicked into place.
Instead of grinding herself down on the circuit Barty bravely stepped away from the game aged only 18 with no guarantee of returning. Shortly afterwards she pursued a career in cricket. This chapter of Barty’s story has been retold so often it risks suffering the reductive effects of semantic satiation, but it deserves contemplation; what she did and has done subsequently is extraordinary.
In hindsight the hiatus may prove the defining moment in Barty’s career and perhaps even become a case study for young athletes who specialise at an early age and risk falling out of love with their talent. Barty’s coach Craig Tyzzer certainly thinks so. “It was the best thing she ever did,” he said.
When Barty returned to action in Eastbourne she won six matches in a row, enough to return to the WTA rankings in 623rd place. Five more victories arrived the following week in Nottingham, halving her ranking, and providing the foundation for a return to the main tour in 2017.
Even at that tender stage of the comeback there was optimism about what the future might hold. Barty 2.0 was stronger and more relaxed, and that fed into more assertive and creative tennis, a style that three years later remains distinctive. “I play a bit of a different game style to a lot of other girls and we’re trying to just keep that uniqueness and really work on a few of those things,” Barty said shortly after her return, teasing the addition of “a few dimensions that we didn’t have or didn’t use as much the first time around.”
At 166cm Barty is among the shorter players on the WTA Tour and she needs those added dimensions to compete: the trademark backhand slice, the soft hands at the net honed in doubles play, and the vision and court craft to unhurriedly manipulate points with the forethought of a chess grandmaster. That’s not to suggest Barty is powerless, far from it (especially on serve), but to celebrate that hers is a multidimensional game of which force is one option, not the default. To face Barty on form is to face death by a thousand cuts.
Just 14 months after batting at six (and scoring three) for Brisbane Heat against Adelaide Strikers, Barty broke her WTA Tour duck, lifting the Malaysian Open trophy. That was the first of three final appearances in 2017, followed by three more in 2018, culminating in victory at the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai, her biggest title to date and confirmation she was an established top-20 player on an upward trajectory.
But nobody could have foreseen the leaps taken this year. On the early season hard courts Barty ground out the best win ratio on tour, pocketing the premier mandatory Miami Open en route. She suffered just two defeats on clay before her landmark French Open triumph. Then without breaking stride she made the difficult transition to grass look effortless, winning five from five in Birmingham. To put that into context, the only other female players to win the singles title at Roland Garros and their next event on British grass have been Serena Williams, Steffi Graf, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Margaret Court.
In amongst all that she’s proven unbeatable in six Fed Cup rubbers, guiding Australia near single-handedly to their first decider in 26 years.
The numbers are spectacular, but so are the performances. No match came closer to lifting the roof from Rod Laver Arena at this year’s Australian Open than Barty’s come-from-behind takedown of Maria Sharapova. To win in Miami she had to beat three of the current top five players in the world. She won yesterday knowing the No 1 ranking was on the line.
And through it all she has remained herself: charming to a fault. A bashful smile is never far from her face and praise for her support team and tour colleagues is fulsome and, like everything about her, authentic. In an era where sporting stars can quickly become overexposed demigods Barty is comfortingly relatable and knockabout, and tennis is all the better for it.
The challenge now is to prove this recent success is no fluke. Since Serena Williams ended her record-equalling 186-week stint as world No 1 in September 2016 the top ranking has changed hands 12 times between eight different players.
Not that Barty is overly fussed about that at the moment. “It’s just been the most incredible journey for myself and my team,” she said, clutching the Maud Watson trophy. “We started from scratch three-and-a-half years ago without a ranking and now to be where we are is not only for me, but a massive, massive achievement for them.”
