Comeback-girl Sevastova savours her moment under the sun
NEW YORK - On a summer day in Latvia in 2014, Anastasija Sevastova and Ronald Schmidt, her new boyfriend and fellow tennis coach, were visiting her windswept home city, Liepaja.
They went to the beach, where Sevastova, only 24 but already retired as a tour-level player, had something important to share.
“She got very serious,” Schmidt said Wednesday. “And she told me she wanted to try tennis again, to compete and see how far she could get.”
Four years later, the answer is the semifinals of the US Open, where Sevastova will face Serena Williams under the lights and the microscope in a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Williams’ now-familiar story is an irresistible against-greatodds tale of a father’s and a family’s quest to dominate a sport in which they had no initial foothold.
But Sevastova has quite a career arc of her own, and it is not just about her phenomenal comeback after nearly two years away from the tour.
“Anastasija’s story is kind of crazy, too,” Schmidt said.
Latviahasrisentoprominence in tennis in the last decade with Ernests Gulbis breaking into the ATP top 10 of the men’s tour; Jelena Ostapenko winning the women’s singles title at the 2017 French Open and Sevastova breaking into the top 20 and repeatedly going deep at the U.S. Open.
But the small Baltic nation was still a tennis backwater when Sevastova learned the game on red clay in Liepaja, a city now best known as the hometown of New York Knicks star Kristaps Porzingis.
No one in Sevastova’s family played tennis seriously.
“I was hopeless, hopeless, twice hopeless,” said her mother, Diana Golovanova, who raised Sevastova as a single parent.
Unlike Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, Golovanova - a secondary-school English teacher - had no interest in creating a champion.
“No, never, I’m not the one who insists on anything,” she said in an interview in Liepaja earlier this year. “I’m just a crying type of mom. I was not like ‘Come on! You’ve <em>got </ em>to make it,’ like Sharapova’s father or Jelena Dokic’s.”
But Sevastova’s grandmother was interested in channeling Sevastova’s energy into sports. With her natural athleticism, she could have gravitated to basketball or soccer. But it was tennis because her grandmother had some friends who played and because the only club of significance in Liepaja was near Sevastova’s home, tucked into the dunes near the Baltic Sea.
“Pure chance,” Golovanova said. “Some kids go to art school. It was tennis, because it was summer, close to the water and close to our house. So you just enroll your kid.”
The colder months would prove more complicated. There were no indoor tennis-dedicated facilities in Liepaja - only school gymnasiums with slick wooden floors, where the multicolored lines used for various sports intersect like a Mondrian painting.