Source: NY Times<\/p>\n
Two Americans from the same tennis center learned the hard way that tennis careers usually resemble the zig-zag contours of a heart monitor. MIAMI \u2014 A good day for the Florida transplants. A really good day for a Washington, D.C.-area tennis center.<\/p>\n\n
And an even better day for a couple of players who have learned the hard way that tennis careers usually resemble the zig-zag contours of a heart-rate monitor, rather than a smooth, rising arc. Such are the fates of Frances Tiafoe and Hailey Baptiste, who grew up four years apart on the hard courts of the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md. and make Florida their training base and second homes now. Baptiste, who now trains in Orlando, and Tiafoe, who lives in Boca Raton, have a bond that runs especially deep. Tiafoe has been a kind of big brother to her. His actual brother, Franklin, was Baptiste\u2019s coach for a time last year.<\/p>\n\n
They are always paying attention to what the other one is doing. Sometimes courtside \u2014 and even when they probably shouldn\u2019t. \u201cI was looking at the scores when they would show up on the board during my match,\u201d Baptiste, 24, said in her news conference after making her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal with a 6-3, 6-4 Miami Open win over Jelena Ostapenko, a former Grand Slam champion and one of the biggest hitters on the tour. <\/p>\n\n
Baptiste was trying to win four consecutive main-draw matches for the first time in her career, but she knew Tiafoe was in a tight one against the defending champion, Jakub Men\u0161\u00edk, the big-serving 20-year-old Czech, who had climbed back from a one-set deficit to send their match into a deciding tiebreak. \n\n\u201cI was literally getting nauseous because it was so close,\u201d Baptiste said of watching the end of Tiafoe\u2019s 7-6(4), 4-6, 7-6(11) dogfight in the locker room. \n\nTiafoe had three match points from 6-3 in that tiebreak, and lost them all. On the third, a baby started wailing so loudly that their screams came over the thud-thud of the ball back and forth. Tiafoe then saved two match points before winning the match on his seventh try, when Men\u0161\u00edk sent one last ball off the court. <\/p>\n\n
Moments before, Tiafoe was bent over with exhaustion, trying to summon the energy to hit a serve after busting his lungs on a series of baseline battles in the tiebreak. Now he was screaming with joy. Men\u0161\u00edk came over onto his side of the court and wrapped his arms around him. <\/p>\n\n\n
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Source: NY Times Two Americans from the same tennis center learned the hard way that tennis careers usually<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,166,152],"tags":[171],"class_list":["post-4667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-highlights","category-news","category-tournaments","tag-tournaments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4667"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5226,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667\/revisions\/5226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegameinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}