Our current moment has been an especially prosperous one for American tennis, with four men and five women in the world\u2019s top 20\u2014and Jovic and Tien are the youngest players to crack this elite group. Spend any time around the tennis commentariat, and you\u2019ll hear both of them cited frequently as among the sport\u2019s most promising upstarts. At Indian Wells in March, where Tien made a run to the quarterfinals before losing to Jannik Sinner, the world number one admitted to being impressed by how quickly Tien has established himself over just a single season on the circuit. At the Australian Open a month earlier, world number three Alexander Zverev (who\u2019s among the five top-10 players Tien has beaten) made note of Tien\u2019s enormous potential, questioning why the mainstream hadn\u2019t yet caught on. \u201cPeople talk a lot about other players his age, but much less about him,\u201d Zverev said, \u201cwhen in reality, he\u2019s the one performing at a higher level.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tien, though, maintains a healthy distance from the hype machine. \u201cIt\u2019s incredible to hear,\u201d he says of the praise and high expectations that have come his way. \u201cBut, in my mind, potential doesn\u2019t really mean anything until you fulfill it.\u201d In his first season on tour, Tien tells me, ambition too often came at the expense of his well-being. \u201cI was in Rome, I was in Geneva, I was in Madrid, playing all these incredible tournaments in these great cities,\u201d he says, \u201cand I wasn\u2019t really able to enjoy it, because the losses just felt like life or death to me.\u201d He\u2019s since made a conscious decision to try to take the pressures of the tour in stride\u2014though he admits that most of those cities remain unexplored. \u201cI just feel like if I\u2019m not playing tennis,\u201d he continues, \u201cI\u2019m wasting part of my life\u2014but I\u2019m going to try to go out and see more of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jovic, the youngest player in the WTA\u2019s top 100, has caught the attention of no less than Novak Djokovic, the player she grew up idolizing. \u201cIt was a family thing,\u201d she tells me, pointing out that her parents, like Djokovic, grew up in the fog of war-torn Serbia. \u201cWe\u2019d all sit down and root for him, watch all his matches.\u201d Bojan and Jelena, both pharmacists, were tight-lipped about the precarious conditions that led them to immigrate to the United States. \u201cBut going into my teens,\u201d Jovic says, \u201cI would ask more questions. Where did you guys come from? How was it? And they just spoke in normal terms, like, \u2018Yeah, we were at home, maybe a bomb\u2019s going to fall, maybe it\u2019s not.\u2019\u2005\u201d Jovic pauses, glancing over at her parents mingling in the hotel lobby with her agents. \u201cThey didn\u2019t have a lot, but they worked really hard,\u201d she adds. \u201cSo I think that perspective makes me more inclined to not waste this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Djokovic, to whom Jovic was introduced at Wimbledon last summer, has emerged as a sort of big brother figure, offering suggestions for navigating the demands of the circuit and encouraging her to journal, meditate, and develop her mind in parallel with her tennis. \u201cThey text,\u201d says Bojan, smiling. Later, when I ask Jovic about their friendship, her cheeks go red. \u201cFriendship, that\u2019s a crazy word,\u201d she says, wary of overstating her connection to the 24-time Grand Slam champion. \u201cBut I reach out to him if I need some advice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jovic, it has to be said, appears uniquely unburdened by both her success and by the pressures of pro tennis. She pays little mind to social media harassment; she dreams of buying a speedboat and one day going to law school; and, now that she\u2019s become a genuine threat to win big titles, she speaks with refreshing candor about the occasionally cutthroat nature of the sport\u2019s top ranks. \u201cThere is one hundred percent a hierarchy in tennis,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you walk into the locker room the first couple times, a lot of people won\u2019t speak to you\u2014Who is she? What is she doing here? The first six months were not easy for me.\u201d As she\u2019s established herself, though, locker-room dynamics seem to have softened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our current moment has been an especially prosperous one for American tennis, with four men and five women…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-726808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}