Just five months ago, Paula Badosa was ready to quit tennis. Retire at age 26.
Hampered by a renewed stress fracture in her lower back, the powerful, athletic player withdrew from Indian Wells in March. Doctors informed the Spanish star that it would be extremely complicated to continue playing, period. Badosa’s ranking plummeted from a high of No. 2 in the world in 2022, when she exploded on the scene, to 68.
Who among us hasn’t thought, or at least fantasized, about quitting their job and making a mid-career change? For most of us, though, an abrupt change isn’t mandated by a career-threatening injury.
Badosa entertained what she might do if tennis were no longer a part of her life. She couldn’t really come up with anything.
So she forged on, deciding to embark on a course of cortisone injections—something Andre Agassi was forced to undergo on a daily basis in the twilight of his career. Badosa watched the spring clay-court season from the comfy confines of her couch.
“I was feeling pain every day I was waking up. So for me, it didn't make sense. Also—I said it the other day—for me, with all due respect, tennis doesn't make sense if I'm not on the top. You know, I want to play big stages. I want to play the last rounds of every tournament. I want to be one of the best players in the world.”
“I was in a very bad place. I was looking for medical, physical, even psychological solutions. I think that everyone around me thought, 'She’s gone mad.’ “
And this was on the heels of last year, when Badosa first suffered a stress fracture in her back and was forced to give up on the second half of her 2023 season after retiring in the second round at Wimbledon.
She returned to the tour in Adelaide in January and made slow progress until the stress fracture again sidelined the Spaniard.
Despite wondering if her career was over, Badosa made a rather miraculous recovery. Just four months after Indian Wells, she returned to Wimbledon and shocked herself by reaching the Round of 16. Choking back tears, she addressed the Centre Court crowd: “I know it’s not my first time in the second week of a [Grand Slam], but I think this one is the most special because a few months ago I didn’t know if I could be able to play tennis anymore.”
This summer Badosa won her first WTA tournament, in Washington, D.C., in more than two years. And the Spaniard announced her return with a vengeance these past 10 days in New York, blasting through four rounds and reaching her first quarterfinal in Flushing.
However, playing for the first time in Arthur Ashe on Tuesday afternoon, that upward trajectory was stopped—for now—by the American Emma Navarro, who packs a punch. A resurgent Badosa was no match for the ascendant Navarro.
But even in loss, Badosa demonstrated her capacity for resilience. She battled back from being completely dominated in the first set. The Spaniard suddenly turned up the heat and began to connect on hard, deep strokes—pummeling the ball into the corners off both wings. Badosa imposed her bigger game on the American in set two, racing to a 5-1 lead.
Yet Navarro then reeled off six straight games, as Badosa’s error-strewn ways of the first set returned. The ups and downs of this quarterfinal match were not dissimilar from the highs and lows of Badosa’s last two years on tour.
"[For] me, what makes sense and what makes me happy every day is to be where I am right now—in the last stages of every tournament.”
“It had been a long time since I’d made the quarters [at a Slam]. The nerves are just different,” admitted Badosa in Spanish after the match. “It’s still not ‘normal’ for me to be in this position at a major.”
“I need to be here more times,” she continued. “Hopefully one day I will get there and manage things beautifully. I will work toward that.”
The Spaniard has demonstrated that she can absorb a punch and should feel some satisfaction for returning to playing top-level tennis. "[That] is when I feel motivated and excited every day,” Badosa said. “If not, for me being in the ranking I [had] two months ago, [it] didn't make any sense, and I struggle a lot mentally being in that position. So for me, what makes sense—and what makes me happy every day—is to be where I am right now: in the last stages of every tournament.”
Badosa really only had doubts about her body’s ability to bounce back. “I always knew that if my back responded well and my injury responded well, that I had the talent and I knew I could get back to the top. I just needed, like, my physical part to respond, and I think the mental and the tennis was there.”
“I had faith in myself, I had this belief that I could come back. I knew it was going to be a process that I had to trust, that I had to be patient, but I remember saying to my coach, 'Look, I'm going to give myself this year, and let's see if this can work out,'" she added.
“Well, it's working, so I cannot complain.”
And the game of tennis isn’t complaining about having Badosa back where she belongs.
