‘I am definitely in a better space than the end of last year’
Konta reveals ‘mental and emotional’ distress Briton takes on world No6 Garcia tomorrow
For the first time, British No 1 Johanna Konta has given an insight into the “mental and emotional” turmoil that sent her 2017 season spinning into freefall at this stage last year.
Twelve months ago, Konta arrived in New York as the seventh seed, a recent Wimbledon semifinalist, and one of several players with a chance of leaving the city as world No1. Rather than a standard pre-tournament press conference, her hotel staged a “power breakfast” for her featuring printed menu cards and samples of hair gel.
But while Konta seemed her usual bright self, underneath the facade she was struggling. The experiences of a career-best year – which included the highs of winning the Miami Open and drawing a record TV audience for her Wimbledon victory over Simona Halep – had left her drained and short of her usual motivation.
The result was a first-round exit at the hands of the unheralded Aleksandra Krunic, and she would go on to draw blanks at her remaining three tournaments of the year.
“Last year was actually very difficult for me,” said Konta, who is not seeded at this US Open so will have to play world No6 Caroline Garcia in her first match tomorrow. “It’s not something that you can just put your finger on, it comes out in a lot of different ways, from just being irritable to not being able to handle adversity on the court – and there’s plenty of that.
“You’re constantly challenged on the court, so that when your tolerance goes it becomes very, very hard to compete, because it’s just overwhelming. You’re never guaranteed to have energy and enthusiasm every day – because it’s impossible to maintain that – but there’s still got to be an underlying purpose and happiness for what you do. And once that starts to get drained a bit, that’s when you start to think: ‘What am I actually doing, how am I meant to be doing this?’”
Konta’s form has been slow to recover this season, but she says that she is “definitely in a better mental and emotional space than I was at the end of last year”.
Over the past month, she has also recorded her best results since Wimbledon 2017, first handing Serena Williams the heaviest defeat of her career in San Jose (even if Williams later revealed that she had been distracted by news of the release from prison of her sister’s murderer) and then taking out former French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko in Montreal.
While Konta was forced to pull out of New Haven last week by a nasty flu bug, and still sounded bunged up at the weekend, she started hitting balls again on Friday and will go into tomorrow’s match as the world No46 and with little expectation on her shoulders. “I want to be part of the top-ranked girls,” she said, bullishly. “That’s what I work towards.”
Back home in England, one major project remains uncompleted: the construction of a house for Konta and her parents, for which she earmarked last year’s Miami prize-money of £937,000. A fortnight ago, it emerged that she had withdrawn a planning application to build a “luxury eco-home” on the edge of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, better known as Hundred Acre Wood from AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.
Did she have compunctions about the site? That does not seem to have been the issue, because the land is owned by a third party who will simply look for another buyer. But, as Konta explained: “I don’t want to live in a place where everybody and the cat knows where it is.”