Two years ago, an unknown ingenue from Great Britain, Emma Raducanu, roared out of nowhere, clinically dissecting her competition all the way from qualifiers to the US Open title.
Are we witnessing the emergence of another Emma on a mission?
Emma Navarro, born right here in New York City, is no longer an unknown, though her ascendancy has been as eminently surprising as it has been meteoric. Enough to surprise even Navarro herself.
Ranked No. 149 in early 2023, the American has rocketed up to a career-high No. 12. The 23-year-old NCAA singles champion from the University of Virginia won her first two matches ever in Flushing this week, surrendering just four games total (winning both in brutally efficient fashion, 59 and 63 minutes each). Navarro's 42 wins are surpassed on tour only by No. 1 Iga Swiatek this year.
Though the American represents a new name for many fans, her 2024 resume is astonishing for someone so new to the tour. In January, Navarro won her first WTA title in Hobart; upset world No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka at Indian Wells in March; knocked off No. 14 Madison Keys to reach the Round of 16 at the French Open; and shocked the former major winners Naomi Osaka and No. 2 Coco Gauff at Wimbledon this summer, en route to the quarterfinals. In Toronto, the hard-court warmup before the Open, Navarro advanced to her first WTA 1000 semifinal.
Before this year Navarro had won only a single match at a major.
Navarro’s star is definitely on the rise, with a clear trajectory toward the top of the women’s game. She’s gotten to these heights playing a lot of tennis. In fact, the US Open is her fifth tournament in five weeks. At Indian Wells, she said, “I love the grind. I love to go the distance and just test myself.”
“I love to just kind of stay in match mode,” she continued. “I think it's tiring in one sense to always be in that mode where I have to play a match tomorrow, but in the other sense I think constantly putting yourself in the arena, it allows for a lot of growth. Every match is a learning experience.
“The more I can be in the arena, the more I can learn. I'm always trying to get in there and get uncomfortable and, yeah, just improve myself,” she asserted.
But Navarro is not in a panic to reach the top. The American, who was reared in Charleston, S.C., after her family moved from New York shortly after 9/11, professes to care little about rankings. When asked at Indian Wells about her rapid rankings rise, Navarro said, “That’s cool that I did that, but what’s next? A ranking is just a number. I still don’t really care about my ranking. I just want to keep getting better.”
Yet, after her first-round win at the Open this week, Navarro admitted that “No. 12, it's knocking on the door of the Top 10. It's pretty insane to think about. When I zoom out, it does feel pretty crazy. Then I zoom back in, and the stuff that I'm working on, it's the same stuff or similar stuff that I was working on a year ago, just maybe at a higher level.”
Demure in appearance, the 5-foot-7, lean American gives away plenty of size to most of her opponents. But Navarro’s textbook groundstrokes pack a punch. She can lace winners off either wing, and she cocks her forehand in a way that every ball that comes off her racquet looks to be an offensive blow. Navarro scampers quickly around the court and can surprise opponents by converting defense to offense in the blink of an eye.
The daughter of Ben Navarro, the billionaire founder and CEO of Sherman Financial Group, the 13th-seeded Navarro is all business on the court. In an interview with Tennis Channel earlier this year, Emma Navarro called her father "the smartest guy” she knows and credited him for forming her attitude as an athlete. "He's taught me a bunch about the perspective I want to take into things, especially on-court stuff," she said.
On court, Navarro is preternaturally cool. “That’s just how I am on and off the court,” she said earlier this year. “There’s some emotions going on that I don’t necessarily show, but I’m definitely feeling all the feels. I just like to keep it to myself."
Earlier this summer at the Olympics in Paris, though, Navarro was unable to keep her feelings to herself. The American got into a bit of a contretemps in a losing effort to Qinwen Zheng of China. The players shared a tense handshake and exchange of words at the net; Navarro later told reporters that she’d been frustrated by Zheng’s stalling tactics.
“I just told her I didn’t respect her as a competitor,” Navarro said after the match. “I think she goes about things in a pretty cut-throat way. It makes for a locker room that doesn’t have a lot of camaraderie, so it’s tough to face an opponent like that, who I really don’t respect. But kudos to her. She played some good tennis there at the end. She played better than me, so congrats to her.”
Navarro has moved beyond the incident and is no longer interested in discussing it publicly.
While she was born in Manhattan, after moving to Charleston, Navarro attended Ashley Hall, an all-girls’ prep school, and learned to play tennis on the green clay that is a Southeastern anomaly. “It's cool to [win] in the city that I was born in and in the country that I live in, and I feel just really proud to come from,” Navarro said of her first-round win this week.
For fans who find Navarro deadly determined on court, it would behoove them to look up a video of the young American at the opening ceremony of the Billie Jean King Cup earlier this year. As a new member of the team, alongside Maddie Keys, Taylor Townsend and others, Navarro was made to perform a “rookie rap,” which she said she wrote in the car on the way to the presentation. While the New York City native is unlikely to fill in for Jay-Z on “Empire State of Mind,” her tennis-related rap is amusing and charmingly goofy, a sign that Navarro doesn’t take everything so seriously.
Her tennis, though? That’s another matter.
