When he arrived at the US Open last August, Steve Johnson was coming off the best stretch of tennis of his five-year career. He had won his first ATP tournament, in Nottingham. He had cracked the Top 20. He had taken a turn as the highest-ranked American male. And, in what he called a “dream come true,” he had brought home a bronze medal, with Jack Sock, in men’s doubles from the Rio Olympics. Johnson, by all appearances, was entering his prime, and it was taking him to heights he had never expected.
In his opener at Flushing Meadows last year, Johnson achieved another career milestone, coming back from two sets down for the first time to beat Russia’s Evgeny Donskoy. The match had begun in the early evening in the Grandstand, and by the time Johnson lost the second set, there were precious few home fans left to support him. But that hardly mattered. Johnson could still hear the most important voice coming from his player’s box.
It was the voice of his father, Steve Sr., a voice that had been synonymous with tennis for Johnson since he was 2 years old and his dad, a Southern California teaching pro, had introduced him to the sport by having him bat balloons and beach balls around.
“I’m happy on a tennis court just messing around with my dad,” Johnson, a self-described “simple guy,” told me last year. He didn’t need much else.
For the last four months, though, Johnson has had to play without hearing that voice in his corner. Less than a month after Johnson won his first ATP tournament on home soil, in Houston this April, Steve Sr. unexpectedly passed away in his sleep at 58. Since then, Johnson has continued to play the game that his father loved so much. But rather than offering a temporary escape from his grief, it has kept him face-to-face with it.
“Just the pain, you know, just trying to get through it,” Johnson said at the French Open, two weeks after his father’s death. He had been joined in Paris by his mother, Michelle, and his sister, Alison; the family had planned the trip to celebrate Alison’s college graduation. “It makes it easier and harder all at the same time to see them,” Johnson said.
Johnson has plugged away through the pain. A grinder at heart, he has kept to his schedule, playing in Stuttgart, Queen’s Club, Eastbourne, Wimbledon, Washington, D.C, Montreal, Cincinnati and Winston-Salem. He won two matches in Paris, and two more at Wimbledon, and, despite going 0-3 at the first three summer hard-court events he'd entered, he has kept his ranking in the Top 40.
Johnson had always been a mellow, even-keel California kid; now he can be seized by volatile emotions at any moment. When he won at the French, he cried; when he lost at Wimbledon, he did the same. When he sat down for interviews after his matches, he cried again.
“I just knew [my father] was looking down on me on that last point and gave me the strength to finish it off,” Johnson said through tears after a victory in Paris.
By the time Johnson reached the Citi Open in Washington in July, he understood that he wasn’t going to be getting off this emotional roller coaster any time soon.
“Maybe if he was a doctor, or something else, my escape would be tennis,” Johnson told the Washington Post. “He was 58. I mean, he should be right here. He should be in the stands. I should be able to look up [during the US Open] and see him there.”
When anyone talks about Steve Sr., they end up saying something like this: “He made you feel like you were the most important person in the room.” Tennis coaches are salesmen; their job is to sell their players on themselves. Steve Sr. mastered that art, and, probably more than anything he said about technique or tactics, it was what turned his son into a Top 20 pro.
As he has navigated the ups and downs of his career – he had his share before 2017 – Johnson’s belief, in his game and his ability to bounce back from slumps and tough losses, has remained rock-solid. Some of that belief had to originate with Steve Sr., and it will almost certainly stay with Johnson in his father’s absence.
Johnson never seems happier than when he has a chance to leave the spotlight behind and head home to Redondo Beach, Calif. In 2017, though, the spotlight has grown in intensity; his story has touched people all over the world. For tennis fans, that story has been a reminder that this is a family game at heart. Like Johnson, millions of us were introduced to the sport by our parents, and we’ve bonded over it with them throughout our lives.
As he gets ready to return to the US Open, Johnson’s life isn’t about tennis; it’s about family. Many who will be watching him there understand how hard it is to separate the two.
