Whitney Osuigwe and the Rest of Tennis’s Next Generation at the U.S. Open

September 6, 2017

The fifteen-year-old Whitney Osuigwe might be described as the very best of pro tennis’s very youngest emerging stars.

Photograph by Lev Radin / Pacific Press / Getty

The U.S. Open is nearing its dramatic climaxes, the semifinals and the finals, and its narrative threads are becoming clearer. One of them—to me, maybe the most memorable, even if it doesn’t figure in the making of a champion—has been the emergence of a cohort of teen-age players: youngsters with big, vibrant games and engaging on-court personalities. Naomi Osaka, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, used her mini-Serena serve and developing adroitness to easily upset last year’s women’s champion, Angelique Kerber. Another nineteen-year-old, Andrey Rublev, defeated a couple of top-twenty players on his way to a quarter-final match against Rafael Nadal, becoming the youngest men’s player to get that far since Andy Roddick, in 2001. And then there was Denis Shapovalov, with his oversized black cap turned backward, his balletic one-handed backhand, and his fiery charm. From the qualifying matches he needed to win to reach the Open until his agonizing loss, on Sunday, to Spain’s Pablo Carreño Busta—7–6 (2), 7–6 (4), 7–6 (3)—the Canadian lefty phenom rallied fans with boyishly daring tennis.

Osaka and Shapovalov are now out, and Rublev may join them soon. But there are still plenty of young players battling this week in Flushing Meadows: the best eighteen-and-under players in the world are in town for the U.S. Open Junior Championships, and you can easily find a courtside seat on the outer courts of the grounds and get a first glimpse of the future. One of the things you’ll notice is that these kids hit every bit as hard as the seasoned pros over on the show courts. You’ll observe, too, that the unforced errors come in bunches and the mood swings out of nowhere—these are teen-agers, after all. It will also become clear soon enough that a lot of the juniors are American, and, thanks to the opportunities afforded by Title IX and the example of the Williams sisters, no small number of the most athletic girls in the country are playing tennis. The United States currently has four girls ranked in the junior top ten.

For now, Whitney Osuigwe just might be the very best of the very youngest. This summer, she’s won the French Open juniors championship and, playing doubles, a juniors’ runner-up trophy at Wimbledon. She entered the U.S. Open juniors as the girls’ top seed. She is ranked No. 2 in the world, just a handful of points behind another American, Claire Liu. Liu, whom Osuigwe defeated to win the final at the French Open, decided to skip the juniors this time and enter the Open’s main draw; she lost in the first round. Liu is seventeen. Osuigwe is just fifteen. When I asked her, the other day, whom she idolized growing up, she told me Victoria Azarenka. “The way she fights,” she said. “And her hair.” Azarenka is twenty-eight years old.

For Osuigwe (oh-see-gway), as for so many tennis wunderkinder today, tennis is the family business. Her father, Desmond, grew up in Nigeria, played briefly on the A.T.P. men’s tour, and, since the late nineties, has been a teaching pro at the IMG Academy, in Brandenton, Florida, which was, essentially, the first tennis boarding school, founded by Nick Bollettieri. IMG has served as a training ground for Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Kei Nishikori, and many other leading pros. Whitney was on court with a racquet, often in a Cinderella costume, by the time she was three, and competing by the age of eight, with her father as her coach. “I knew I wanted to be a tennis player probably since I was able to walk,” she told me. Her father, seated with her at an umbrella-shaded table on the patio of the Open’s media center, smiled softly. “We try to balance our professional relationship, she and I, and our family relationship,” he said. His words hung in the air for a moment. Then Whitney said, “It’s definitely tough sometimes. You know, separating the two. But he knows me the best.” Osuigwe is a high-school junior. She had been attending classes at a local school but recently started taking courses online; there are no plans for college. She turned pro earlier this year.

Osuigwe arrived at the Open two weeks ago, to play in the qualifiers, but lost her first match. She played her first juniors match on Monday. The top seeds got to play their openers on the smaller show courts. There were only a few hundred spectators on hand on the sun-splashed grandstand as Osuigwe faced off against the sixteen-year-old Margaryta Bilokin, a Ukrainian who goes to high school in Connecticut. Osuigwe is five feet six and lithe—Bilokin appeared to loom over her as they met at the net before play began. But Osuigwe hit with considerably more power on her serves—one reached 110 m.p.h.—and on her whip-snap forehand. She quickly won the first set. Then things got patchy. She was broken in the next set’s first game. Her forehands were suddenly sailing long, her double faults were mounting, and her body language was projecting exasperation and unease.

This year, in the qualifying rounds and the junior tournaments, Open officials are experimenting with allowing players to consult their coaches midmatch, between games, when they are playing at the end of the court, where there coaches are seated. Osuigwe took advantage. She sat on the rail and listened to her father and Erik Kortland, a U.S.T.A. junior-development coach. Once back in the match, she went more and more to her slower, spinning kick-serve, placing it on Bilokin’s backhand, where the high bounce was hard for Bilokin to handle. Osuigwe won the match, 6–1, 6–4. Afterward, her father, Desmond, told me, “One of the things about growing up at IMG is that she got to play against boys as well as girls. The boys, they have kick serves.” Whitney said, “I think I just had some first-round jitters out there. But I am a confident player and can adjust my game.”

Being a junior prodigy is no guarantee of professional success. Young teens get injured, burn out. You would recognize the names of a number of U.S. Open girls’ champions over the past twenty years—Azarenka won in 2005—but others . . . Osuigwe understands that, too. “I look at the bigger picture, I see the ups and downs,” she said. “This is what I want to do with my life.”