Bianca Andreescu insists she can win a grand slam title again, and do it better this time

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Twelve people have walked on the moon. Fifty-nine women have won Grand Slams in the Open era.

There’s a world in which you could argue one of those things is harder than the other, and it’s not the extra-planetary one. But as far as I know, no one asked Neil Armstrong when he planned to visit the moon again. Once was impressive enough.

Bianca Andresscu is one of the 59 and the only Canadian. People never stop asking her when she plans to head back into orbit.

It’s the subtext, and sometimes just the text, in every interview she does. How are you feeling? Are you back to your best? When do you think that will be? Is it frustrating?

I’ve sat through a few of these gentle inquisitions in the past few years. Andreescu is always game, but never has a great answer. Would you?

Imagine showing up at your job and having your colleagues corner you in the break room and say, ‘Remember the big audit in ‘17? Remember how you pulled four all-nighters and finished it yourself? Man, do you think you’ll ever be that good again?’ And then did that again every week for years.

Does it get annoying?

“Yeah,” Andreescu said. “It can get in my head a little bit because I start to think, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ Like, why haven’t I won another Grand Slam? It’s been four years, you know.”

Andreescu answers her own questions. She’s been injured on and off. Other people want to win, too. There’s not much to physically separate the 50th-ranked player in the world and the first.

“When I was 19, I was very hungry and very motivated. I always wanted to achieve this goal. And I did it,” Andreescu said. “I’m not saying I’m not hungry or motivated now, but I’m different and the tour is different. You see first rounds like [Elina] Svitolina against [Victoria] Azarenka [which happened at this week’s DC Open in Washington]. That shouldn’t be a first round. That should be a final.”

There is also something intrinsic about tennis here.

Derek Jeter didn’t spend the last half of his Yankee career being asked when he would win another World Series. Not because people didn’t want to know, but because the question is foolish on its face. No matter how good, a team player has limited influence on any outcome.

In tennis, you’re out there alone. If things go wrong, that’s on you. A golfer can say to themselves, ‘I didn’t lose. I just didn’t win.’ A tennis player doesn’t have that buffer. She not only loses, she is beaten. Fairly often, she won’t just be beaten, she’ll have her doors blown off. It’s the only major sport that ritualizes individual public humiliation. Then you head to the next city and do it again.

You’re never home (Andreescu recently returned to Toronto for the first time in eight months). The season never really stops. When you get on a roll – good or bad – it’s hard to pull out of.

Meanwhile, fans have come to believe there is a small cohort of winners, and that everyone else are losers.

Rhyme off the best there ever were – King, Navratilova, Evert, Graf, Williams. Those are the winners in women’s tennis. Everyone else – even the ones who won multiple Slams – are somehow less than.

Same rule applies on the men’s side – a handful of titans and a few hundred interchangeable shlubs.

All you can say for certain is that with tennis players, some are great, just the way with frogs, some are poisonous. It does not follow that you should flee every time you see a frog or assume that winning only matters in huge bunches.

I think about that whenever someone’s going in on a player about why they haven’t won this or that. It’s a wonder to me no one ever yells back, ‘How many Slams have you won?’

In those moments, does this start to feel like a job?

“One million per cent,” Andreescu said. “There are days I just want to stay in bed. But it’s not consistent. If that becomes a consistent feeling, then you know something’s not going well. I had that consistently in 2021 and that’s why I took my mental-health break. Since then, I have a bad day here or there, but not regular.”

Now ranked 44th in the world, Andreescu is an unseeded wild card at this year’s National Bank Open. So she gets the roughest ride through the draw, as well as having to do twice as much media as everyone else.

Homecomings – a good thing or a bad thing?

“It’s all about how you look at it,” Andreescu said.

Well, we all know what that means.

So far, the theme of Andreescu’s 2023 season is ‘almost there.’ She was most recently almost there at Wimbledon, where she lost a real backbreaker to eventual finalist Ons Jabeur. It’s been a while since Andreescu had a deep run in any consequential tournament, but she is also fit enough to play regularly for the first time in an age.

Like any player who’s done it once, she believes she can do it again and better this time.

“When I do win another Grand Slam, I’m going to be way more prepared. Once that happens, yeah, things are going to keep going my way and I’m going to stay at the top. That’s how I feel.”

It occurs to both of us that this short interview has already drifted back to where it promised not to go – me asking her how she’s feeling, and her reassuring me that she’ll become good again.

At 23, Andreescu could conceivably play at the highest level for another decade and never get back to where she was as a teenager. But the flip side of that frustration is that should she never win another thing, she is still the greatest Canadian tennis player ever. She’s the only one of us to walk on the moon.