NEW YORK — Women’s tennis has seen its fair share of teenagers and prodigies ascend quickly to the top of the game, but Arthur Ashe Stadium …
NEW YORK — Women’s tennis has seen its fair share of teenagers and prodigies ascend quickly to the top of the game, but Arthur Ashe Stadium will be the stage Saturday for something that’s never happened before in the history of the sport. While it’s rare that a Grand Slam final will feature two teenagers, it’s not even close to unprecedented. What makes this one unique is that the two teenagers left standing at the end — 19-year old Leylah Fernandez and 18-year old Emma Raducanu — were both complete afterthoughts when the U.S. Open began two weeks ago, so far down the rankings that it would’ve never occurred to any other player in the field that they might be the eventual champion. To have one such player in a final is extremely rare. To have two is an asteroid strike. Hopefully the tennis world, always far too hungry to anoint the next big superstar, can just sit back and enjoy what’s going to happen here Saturday without the temptation to treat it as anything more. “It’s great for tennis. It’s obviously great stories,” said Belinda Bencic, the recent Olympic gold medalist who lost to Raducanu in the quarterfinals. “I just really hope that everyone will protect them and will hope the best for them and not try to, you know, put so much pressure and so much hype around them so it just gets too much. I just hope everyone will stay (calm) and will really hope the best for them so they can just develop in peace also a little bit.” It’s quite possible Fernandez and Raducanu, either of whom will be the youngest Grand Slam champion since Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon in 2004, will go on from New York and reproduce the tennis they played here many more times as they mature. But right now, the distance between what they’ve accomplished over six tennis matches here and a career as impactful as Sharapova’s would be more appropriately measured in light years than miles. It’s worth remembering that when Sharapova broke through at age 17, it was a huge shock to the sport — not just because she beat Serena Williams in the final but because to that point in her career she had accomplished so little.
