THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019| 15
Sports
If you have been considering active vi-
sualization, this seems a fine time to
start.
The technique certainly has worked
wonders for Bianca Andreescu, a 19-
year-old Canadian tennis player, who for
years has been closing her eyes and en-
visioning herself winning the United
States Open against Serena Williams.
On Saturday afternoon, with her eyes
wide open and her shots so often bold
and true, Andreescu went out and did
just that.
“For it to become a reality is so crazy,”
Andreescu said, breaking down in tears
in her post-match news conference. “I
guess these visualizations, really, really
work.”
Her remarkable 6-3, 7-5 victory, which
capped her first appearance in the U.S.
Open, thwarted the 37-year-old
Williams’s latest attempt to match Mar-
garet Court’s record of 24 major singles
titles. Much more significant to An-
dreescu’s compatriots was the fact that
her victory gave Canada its first Grand
Slam singles title since the tournament
began in 1877.
Shortly after Andreescu’s victory,
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent her
a congratulatory message with the
hashtag #shethenorth.
“So many Canadian athletes have
paved the way for me when I was
young,” said Andreescu, born in the To-
ronto suburb of Mississauga. “Hope-
fully I can be that person to them.”
It was the latest Grand Slam setback
for Williams, who is beyond question the
greatest player of this era. But against
Andreescu, she made too many un-
forced errors (33 in all), double-faulted
on break points three times to lose her
serve, and put only 44 percent of her
first serves in play. That was by far her
lowest percentage at this Open.
“I love Bianca; I think she’s a great
girl, but I think this is the worst match I
played all tournament,” Williams said.
“It’s hard to know you could do better.”
Williams, who was also complimen-
tary of Andreescu’s game and mentality,
has shown remarkable drive and resil-
ience in her comeback to the tour after
giving birth to a daughter, Olympia, in
September 2017.
She is back in the top 10, back in con-
tention for tennis’s biggest prizes. But
for a proud champion who has had long
stretches of dominance and has won 23
major singles titles, only one result is
cause for genuine celebration.
The bottom line for now: Williams has
yet to win a tournament since her come-
back and is 0-4 in major finals without
managing to win a set in any of them.
She alluded to her struggles at the
award ceremony as she thanked her
team for being supportive in “the ups
and downs and downs and downs and
downs and downs and downs.”
“Hopefully,” she added, “we’ll have
some ups soon.”
Andreescu has had no shortage of ups
and downs in her short career. Her rise
has been astonishingly swift. She lost in
the first round of qualifying at the U.S.Open the last two years and was ranked
outside the top 150 when the season be-
gan.
But she has long believed that tennis
greatness awaited her. After winning
the prestigious Orange Bowl junior title
for the second time in 2015 at age 15, she
wrote herself a mock check as if she
were champion of the U.S. Open and
then updated it each year, with the new
prize money total.
“Every year,” she said.
But she has been prone to injury, in-
cluding back problems, and she said
earlier this season that she had weak-
nesses in her core that needed to be ad-
dressed. After deciding last year with
her new coach, Sylvain Bruneau, to fo-
cus more on using the full range of her
shotmaking and tactics, she broke
through in earnest this March by win-ning a prestigious hardcourt tourna-
ment, the BNP Paribas Open, in Indian
Wells, Calif.
But she then was forced to miss
nearly all the clay-court season and
miss all the grass-court season with a
torn rotator cuff. Since returning to the
tour last month, she has resumed domi-
nating her elders.
Andreescu is 8-0 against top 10 play-
ers this year and has not lost a com-
pleted match since March 1. She has pre-
vailed twice against Williams in the last
month: winning the Rogers Cup in To-
ronto when Williams retired with a back
problem in the final after just four
games and defeating Williams on Satur-
day in the biggest stadium in tennis.
The sellout crowd pulled hard for
Williams and occasionally applauded
Andreescu’s errors and missed serves,prompting the British chair umpire Ali-
son Hughes to turn “Please” into a
mantra as she tried to keep the crowd
under control.
Andreescu could so easily have
cracked. She started out superbly, strik-
ing the ball cleanly even though she ad-
mitted feeling intimidated by Williams.
“Of course,” she said. “Before the match
I was super nervous.”
And yet she danced and sang to her-
self, headphones in place, in the tunnel
leading to the court and then matched
Williams’s power and intensity from the
start, returning aggressively and break-
ing her in the opening game as Williams
double-faulted twice in a row.
Andreescu came up with well-placed
serves and groundstroke winners on
key points in her own service games and
gradually built a 6-3, 5-1 lead and served
for the match.
“The game plan right from the start
was to make her work for every ball, to
get as many returns in the court as pos-
sible,” Andreescu said. “I think she was
intimidated by it.”
But Williams fought back in that
game, saving a championship point with
a forehand return winner and then
breaking Andreescu’s serve to get back
to 5-2. With the crowd a factor again,
Williams reeled off the next three games
to get to 5-5 before Andreescu steadied
herself to hold to 6-5.
She then broke Williams’s serve for
the sixth time in the match, closing out
the victory with a forehand return win-
ner of her own.
“I know you guys wanted Serena to
win, so I’m so sorry,” Andreescu said to
the crowd after the match. “Obviously it
was expected for Serena to fight back.
She’s done that so many times in the
past. That’s why she’s a true champion
on and off the court, but I just tried my
best to block everything out.”
Andreescu, the self-assured daughter
of Romanian immigrants, won the U.S.
Open in only her fourth Grand Slam
tournament.
“Bianca played an unbelievable
match,” Williams said in her post-match
remarks to the crowd and to Andreescu,
who was standing calmly beside her.
“Congratulations. So proud and happy
for you. I wish I could have played bet-
ter. If anyone could win the tournament,outside of Venus, I’m happy it’s Bianca.”
After giving birth in September 2017
and enduring potentially fatal health
complications that year, Williams re-
turned to competition in 2018. She has
had undeniable success since her come-
back, reaching four more Grand Slam
singles finals, but she has lost all four to
much younger opponents and has yet to
win a title at any level during that span.
Andreescu’s victory was a flashback
to 20 years ago when Williams won her
first major singles title as a teenager,
sweeping through a brutal draw at age
17 to win the U.S. Open in Ashe Stadium.
But the outcome was also a flashback,
in some ways but hardly every way, to
last year when Naomi Osaka, a 20-year-
old playing in her first major final, de-
feated Williams to win a tumultuous U.S.
Open marred by Williams’s clash with
chair umpire Carlos Ramos.Happily, there were no boos in this
award ceremony, no tears of dismay
from Andreescu. But like Osaka in 2018,
Andreescu won the first title of her ca-
reer in Indian Wells, and then went on to
win her first major title at the U.S. Open
against Williams.
Andreescu, seeded No. 15 at Flushing
Meadows, will break into the top 10 in
the rankings at No. 5 on Monday.
Williams, the oldest women’s Grand
Slam singles finalist in the Open era, will
be No. 10 and will turn 38 later this
month.
But the number that matters most re-
mains 24, and it remains quite a barrier.
“She needs, on her own, nobody else,
to just ask herself: ‘What do you want
from the next year and a half, two years
of your life?’ ” said Billie Jean King, the
former champion who has mentored
Williams. “If she still wants to stay in
this and still wants to go for the record,
then there are certain things she needs
to do. But if she wants to, she can still do
it.”Teenager denies Williams a 24th Slam
BY CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
“I wish I could have played
better. If anyone could win the
tournament, outside of Venus,
I’m happy it’s Bianca.”Bianca Andreescu was ranked outside the top 150 when the season began and missed a few months with a torn rotator cuff.CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMESDavid Waldstein contributed reporting.In a move expected to significantly in-
crease opportunities for developing
American tennis players, Oracle, the
computer technology company, intends
to create and fund a large circuit of
lower-tier professional tournaments in
the United States.
The circuit, which will be called the
Oracle Pro Series and begin in full next
year, will comprise approximately 25
new women’s tournaments and 25 new
men’s tournaments.
Most will be staged as combined
events, many of them on college cam-
puses. Prize money is expected to range
from $25,000 to $108,000 per tourna-
ment. All of the tournaments will pro-
vide ATP or WTA ranking points, which
are critical to players attempting to
make the leap to the main tours.
There have been major concerns and
conflicts in the last year over how to or-
ganize tennis’s minor leagues. The In-
ternational Tennis Federation intro-
duced a revamped tour this year that
was intended to streamline the system,
reduce the total pool of lower-tier pro-
fessional players and make it more
straightforward for the best juniors to
make the transition to the professional
game.
But amid widespread protest from
players and coaches, the I.T.F. had to
backtrack to restore playing opportuni-
ties.
The concern about the route to the
professional ranks was part of the inspi-
ration for the new Oracle series, said
Jim Courier, a former No. 1 whose com-
pany InsideOut Sports & Entertainment
will manage the series for Oracle.
“This is intended above all to help the
pathway for players in the United
States,” Courier said in an interview at
the United States Open. “In Europe,
they have tournaments every week all
over the continent at various levels for
men and women. There are pockets in
the American schedule where that is not
the case. This is intended to fill those in.”
Seven of the new combined events
will be held later this year in California,
Texas and Florida.
Four will take place on university
campuses, including Baylor in Waco,
Tex., where Mark Hurd, Oracle’s chief
executive, played tennis on a schol-
arship in the 1970s. The rest of the series
events, at locations to be determined,
will begin in 2020, and Courier said that
Oracle had made a three-year commit-ment to back the new series.
College players were among those
who complained most about the I.T.F.
tour changes, and the new Oracle events
could also alleviate some of the financial
demands on players based in the United
States. (The tournaments will also be
open to international players.)
“It’s a big challenge for players not in
the big leagues to break even,” Courier
said. “We’re trying to be sensitive about
putting back-to-back tournaments in
similar locations. The idea is not to make
players crisscross the country.”
Courier compared the new circuit to
the system in Italy, which added many
lower-level tournaments in recent
years. “It allows players to play at low
cost at home, and you’ve seen a big
surge in young Italian men’s players,”
Courier said.The United States Tennis Association
already operates a significant number
of minor-league men’s and women’s pro-
fessional events: 113 in 2019, according
to Stacey Allaster, the U.S.T.A.’s chief ex-
ecutive for professional tennis.
If the Oracle Pro Series functions as
planned, it will increase the total to ap-
proximately 160 such events. Allaster
said that Oracle and InsideOut Sports
had consulted regularly with the
U.S.T.A. to avoid creating conflicts with
existing events. “It’s a win-win for our
American players, especially those
players in that ranking band of 200 to
500,” Allaster said.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire
founder, owns the BNP Paribas Open in
Indian Wells, Calif., a men’s and wom-
en’s event that is one of the most presti-
gious combined professional tourna-
ments outside the four Grand Slam
events.
Oracle created a Challenger Series
about two years ago, four combined
men’s and women’s tournaments that
give the top two American finishers in
the series a wild card into the BNP
Paribas Open.
Courier’s company also operates a
circuit of senior professional events
known as the Invesco Series QQQ,
which includes former stars like Pete
Sampras and Andy Roddick. Courier
said some of the senior events would be
staged in conjunction with the new Ora-
cle tournaments, in an effort to add star
power. Entry for spectators will be free.
“It’s a chance to promote the sport,”
Courier said. “There are some very good
tennis players who are not yet known
names.
“But these are the kinds of tourna-
ments that people like Coco Gauff and
Caty McNally have been playing very
recently, and that everyone comes
through at some point in their career,”
Courier added, referring to the Ameri-
can teenagers who recently won
matches at the U.S. Open.
Noah Rubin, an American player
ranked No. 195, has explored the chal-
lenges of succeeding in professional ten-
nis in his series, “Behind the Racquet”
on Instagram. He said he thought the
new Oracle circuit could be beneficial.
“In a country as large as the U.S.A.,
you always wonder why there aren’t
more tournaments, and this seems to be
a push in the right direction,” he said in a
telephone interview on Tuesday. “But I
always have a little bit of the cynic’s
view. If you want to be putting that much
money into tennis, I feel you should be
using it in other ways as well.”
Rubin said the game might be better
served by improving conditions, promo-
tion and prize money at existing events.
“Quality over quantity,” he said.
“There is a benefit to having quantity as
well, I understand that, but at the same
time I’m playing a lot of these tourna-
ments, and it doesn’t feel we are getting
the respect we deserve."New path to the top ranksTechnology company plans
a circuit of lower-tier
professional tournaments
BY CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
Noah Rubin, ranked No. 195, has been outspoken about the difficulties of playing in
tennis’s lower-tier tours. He suggested solutions beyond the new circuit.
LAURENCE GRIFFITHS/GETTY IMAGESMany of the tournaments will
take place on college campuses.