The great fascination of Johanna Konta’s career lay in the contrast between her considered and thoughtful approach to the game and the wildly unpredictable outcomes her methods yielded.
Konta was a creature of routine, her relentlessly positive mindset – stay in the moment, enjoy the journey, don’t fixate on results – as carefully measured as her service ritual (four high bounces, two small ones). But consistent habits did not always equate to consistent returns – and that was often where things got interesting, because you never quite knew what might be around the next corner.
Take the French Open, where Konta advanced beyond the first round just once in her career – yet made the last four when she did. Or Wimbledon, where she lost in the opening round four times in a row, reached the second round once, and then became the first woman in 40 years to advance to the semi-finals (she lost in round two the following year). Konta, who announced her retirement earlier this month at the age of 30, can lay claim to the odd distinction of having completed a double grand slam of opening-round losses, while also reaching three major semi-finals. Go figure.
The capricious nature of Konta’s performances on the game’s grandest stages made for compelling theatre. Her matches were by turns exhilarating, exasperating, tantalising and tortuous – often within the space of the same rally. Forget the opponent, the surface or the occasion, no match involving Konta was ever a foregone conclusion. On her day, she could beat anyone in the world, as Serena Williams discovered three years ago in San Jose, where Konta consigned the American to the heaviest defeat of her career, a 6-1, 6-0 opening-round mauling. Yet her brilliance was often accompanied by an unwelcome postscript. In the quarter-finals, Konta blew a 5-2 lead against Elise Mertens, falling to a straight-sets defeat that, not for the first time, left one wondering what might have been.
Was Konta’s story one of talent maximised, or opportunities missed? A little of both, perhaps. To focus solely on her boom-or-bust record in the majors would be misrepresentative, for Konta did not rise to a career-high of No 4 in the world without performing consistently amid the daily grind of the WTA Tour. Even this year, when persistent tendonitis in her right knee began to undermine her performances, she claimed the fourth and final title of her career, winning in Nottingham before an untimely bout of Covid put her out of Wimbledon and the Olympics. For the most part, in terms of her ranking, Konta won the matches she should have won; she just didn’t always win the matches she could have won. An impressive career lacked the crowning glory of the major title that was undoubtedly within her reach.
Yet, as she embarks on a new chapter alongside the film-maker Jackson Wade, her long-time partner and now her husband, Konta will not be losing any sleep over what might have been. “I’m a firm believer that things happen the way they do for a reason,” she said in the days following her retirement. “Not saying that I wish certain things didn’t turn out differently. Obviously, I wish certain things happened differently. But I wouldn’t change anything, because there’s a reason why my life has turned out the way it has. It has made me into the person that I am today.”
Konta’s rise to the upper echelons of the game at the relatively advanced age of 24 was born of a determination not to live and die by results. Having previously fixated on outcomes, her focus shifted to what she termed “process”, a word that became her personal mantra. To the uninitiated, it sounded like something out of the David Brent Guide to Self-Management Strategies. It actually amounted to nothing more complicated than an athlete once hooked on results modulating her approach so that she could enjoy the sport to which she had devoted her life.
As Konta put it during her breakthrough run to the Australian Open semi-finals in 2016: “I think if you live and die with your wins and losses, it’s an incredibly tough lifestyle to live. I think really separating myself from that gave me a lot of enjoyment and perspective.”
Perspective and perseverance
The key word there is “perspective”, for Konta’s emphasis on the work at hand rather than the reward it might yield was also a defence mechanism, a way of insulating herself mentally and emotionally from the vicissitudes of her profession. The strategy, developed alongside Juan Coto, the mind coach whose influence on Konta’s career endured well beyond his sudden death in 2016, worked well enough to carry her to three major semi-finals on three different surfaces, a formidable achievement for which she has not really received the recognition she deserves. Lest we forget, each slam start starts with 128 players; to be among the last four standing, to survive to that point when locker rooms empty and pressure and expectations soar, requires levels of physical, mental and emotional stamina that few possess.
It takes talent, too. Konta has spoken of herself “a poster child for those players and those people who just base their career on resilience and on hard work”, yet acknowledgement of her industry and fortitude should not obscure an appreciation of her technical and athletic virtues. The basic foundations of her game – flat, technically sound groundstrokes delivered with pace and accuracy; a serve notable for its power and reliability; excellent lateral movement – were always solid. But the key to Konta’s maturation as a player, and to her improved ability to compete on multiple surfaces, lay in the fresh dimensions she added to her game over time. Always aggressive off the ground, she learned to leaven the mix with changes of spin, pace and ball trajectory. The sliced backhand became more of an ally, as did the drop shot. Variations of placement and spin made her service a more potent weapon, while she also became more comfortable moving forward.
An influential figure in many of these improvements was Dimitri Zavialoff, the French coach who oversaw the rise of Stan Wawrinka. With the input of Zavialoff, who encouraged her to expand her competitive arsenal and think on her feet in the heat of battle, Konta reached the last four at Roland Garros and the quarter-finals of Wimbledon and the US Open. In truth, though, Konta’s evolution as a player owed at least as much to her own perseverance, intelligence, and willingness to learn as it did to the succession of coaches she employed. In a sense, she was perhaps too sharp for her own good. Always a thinker, Konta played with a level of discipline and self-awareness that, from the outside looking in, sometimes seemed to inhibit her ability to express her talent. There were times when you longed for her to cut loose, to play with greater abandon, to let her game flow. On the flip side, you can’t have it both ways. It was Konta’s self-discipline that underpinned her success; without it, her talent may never have reached fruition in the first place.
Even so, the great champions have a knack of finding their best tennis when it counts most, and in that respect Konta fell short on the three occasions a grand slam final beckoned. Experience is often the decisive factor in such moments, and so it proved in 2016, when she faced Angelique Kerber for a place in the Australian Open final. Early in the second set, a break point offered Konta the chance to recover from an error-strewn start; Kerber, ranked sixth and contesting her third major semi-final, calmly stepped up to the line and threw down an ace. It was a similar story at Wimbledon the following year, where five-time champion Venus Williams produced a backhand winner and a 106mph second serve to save break points at a critical juncture in the first set.
In both instances, there was merit in Konta’s view that she had played the best match she could and was simply beaten by the better player on the day. Forewarned is forearmed, and Kerber and Williams undoubtedly benefited from their superior knowledge of the grand slam course and distance. Konta’s loss to the unseeded teenager Marketa Vondrousova in the 2019 French Open semi-finals, where she led 5-3 in both sets before falling to a 7-5, 7-6 defeat, was of a different hue. This time it was Konta who held the advantage of experience. Throughout the fortnight, she had produced tennis of devastating power and quality. The forehand drive volley she missed on the first of three set points will linger long in the memory.
What if?
While Konta never became a slam champion, it is hard to argue that she lacked the required ingredients. That being the case, it is tempting to wonder how her career might have evolved had she discovered the winning formula, had she found greater freedom of mind and expression at those pivotal moments that elevate an outstanding career to an extraordinary one. With a major title under her belt, would Konta have stuck to her process-driven mantra, or would she have allowed herself to draw from the well of self-belief that comes with such a breakthrough?
We shall never know, of course, but tennis is a game played in the mind, and in that respect the effect of a major win could well have been transformative. As it is, four WTA titles – the biggest of which came at the Miami Open in 2018 – and more than $10m in prize money represent a respectable return for a player who did not break the top 100 until she was 23. Neither should her domestic contribution be overlooked. Born in Sydney to Hungarian parents before moving to Britain at the age of 14, Konta became a standard bearer for women’s tennis in her adopted homeland, blazing a trail to the game’s top table that Emma Raducanu followed all the way to the US Open title.
She watched Raducanu’s victory “in awe”.
“She seems like someone who is very poised and aware of why she is doing what she is doing,” said Konta. “She is incredibly bright and I think she applies that to her tennis as well.”
She could have been describing herself.