What makes a champion? When it comes to Canadian tennis star Bianca Andreescu, the greatness of her game starts with a strong mind.
It was August 11, a particularly stifling day in Toronto with intermittent cloud cover acting as the only escape from the sun’s 30-degree heat. The Aviva Centre had just reached capacity and 12,500 enthusiastic tennis fans were now on their feet, boisterously awaiting the start of the 2019 Rogers Cup women’s finals match. While the announcers were introducing Bianca Andreescu as the “first Canadian to make the finals event since 1969,” and her opponent Serena Williams as the “23-time Grand Slam winner” that had everyone else beat for major wins in the Open era, Andreescu was behind the scenes crying.
Her coach had been trying to pump her up with a little pep talk, but it ended up having the opposite effect, and Andreescu went into total breakdown mode. “I cried for a good five minutes…right before the match,” she recalls. “I was still wiping down my tears when I walked onto the court.”
And boy did her walk say it all. This was not powerhouse Bianca Andreescu. This was not the 5’7, brick for bones and metal for muscles tennis player that the world had come to know and love. This Bianca Andreescu walked without purpose. Head down, hands tightly gripping canvas athletic bags that hung over each shoulder and acted both as carriers of personal belongings but also as two lifeless and inanimate bodyguards. Andreescu doesn’t usually travel with bodyguards, as no tennis player does when they approach the court, but this time she might have benefitted from some because she looked fragile. Visibly unsettled.
“I cried for a good give minutes…right before the match. I was still wiping down my tears when I walked onto the court.”
— Bianca Andreescu
“It was everything,” she says in a recent interview, explaining what brought her to tears that day. It was the completely overwhelming feeling of pride going out to play in front of her home crowd. It was the insurmountable pressure of wanting to win, and the total stupefaction of facing her idol, one of the best players of all time who she had watched play her entire life.
Bounce. Bounce. Pause. Bounce. Bounce…smack! That was the sound of Williams’ first serve. Andreescu swiftly returned it, and Williams fired back with a long ball. Andreescu missed. Not a great start to the match, but it didn’t matter, because Andreescu ended up winning it anyways.
Williams retired due to back pains so it was a “default” win, but it was still a win, and Bianca Andreescu was crowned the champion of the 2019 Rogers Cup. Just to silence the naysayers, though, Andreescu defeated Williams again at the 2019 US Open tournament just a few weeks later, denying the superstar her 24th title and becoming the youngest Grand Slam champion since Maria Sharapova in 2006.
So how did she do it? How did she go from being overcome with tears that day in Toronto to defeating the force that is Serena Williams not once but twice within a matter of weeks? Physical strength, yes, but more importantly mental strength. And it’s something Andreescu’s relied on in the past to get her through particularly trying times on the tennis court.
“Use your mind, work on your mind.”
— Bianca Andreescu
Take her 2019 Indian Wells finals match against Angelique Kerber, for example. It was the third set of the match and Andreescu was trailing. “I really wanted to smash my racquet,” Andreescu admits, even getting a little teary-eyed recalling the frustrating experience a year later. But she didn’t. Instead, she used the mental machine that is her mind to exchange her anger for motivation and exhaustion for perseverance, and she returned to the court anew—exhibiting complete control of herself and her emotions.
It’s a mindset thing at the end of the day, she explains to The National’s Adrienne Arsenault, and it’s something she’s been carefully cultivating for many years. She’s worked with psychologists and was introduced to meditation (by her mom) at a very young age to learn how to work with her mind instead of against it in pivotal match moments. This is exactly what gets her through long, body-numbing tournaments, and also high stress situations like facing one of the world’s most threatening tennis players twice at only 19 years old.
“Use your mind. Work on your mind,” she says in another interview. She’s even used this strategy to prepare for court comebacks after periods of injury, where the priority isn’t smashing serves, but is instead rest and recovery. With specific reference to the time she spent off-court in 2020 rehabbing a knee injury and dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Andreescu mentions that even though she wasn’t physically playing tennis, she was still playing matches in her mind. “Mentally I was there [on the court]…I was visualizing. I was watching myself play tennis, I was watching everyone else play. I was studying my opponents as well.”
Will Andreescu’s strong mind be enough take home the 2023 Miami Open? She seems to think so. “I am fearless,” she says. “When I go on court…I really trust in my abilities and I know I can bounce back no matter what.“
Note: This was an 800-word profile assignment for a Storytelling and Narrative course.
Arisa Valyear 