By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist
There are a lot of remarkable things about the finest player in women’s tennis and the most distinct one of all is how unremarkable she actually is.
That’s not an insult to Ashleigh Barty, it's quite the opposite. The world No. 1, virtually unknown outside her sport, is a superstar who chooses not to be, for the most spectacular, awesome reason there is.
On Thursday, Barty defeated Angelique Kerber in the Wimbledon semifinals to put her one victory away from what would be her second career major. She plays with a level of consistent excellence no other player on tour has been able to match. Win or lose against Karolina Pliskova on Saturday, she’ll go streets ahead in the top spot on the world list.
If she does win, there will be an outpouring of celebration in Australia, a country that adores sports and lauds its champions. Yet don’t expect Barty’s life to change much, because, well, she doesn’t want it to.
Because that awesome reason I mentioned, the one that makes her perhaps the most down-to-earth athlete you’ll find anywhere, is quite simple. She just likes her life so much she sees no reason to change it, regardless of her 83 weeks enshrined as the best player on the planet.
When she has some spare time she goes to watch Australian football matches, sitting among the crowd in the regular seats, with a beer in hand, yelling support for her beloved Richmond Tigers.
She used to get invited to star-studded dinners and events all the time, until people grasped the fact that she virtually never accepted, preferring nights at home with a good book, her boyfriend Gary Kissick and their pet dogs.
With all the money at stake in tennis – Saturday’s winner will pocket $2.34 million - it is easy for so much to get lost in the quest for success. Priorities get twisted, realities become mangled into pits of paranoia and self-doubt.
A few years back, as she was just starting to emerge as a real contender, Barty began to feel the squeeze. Tennis wasn’t fun anymore, all the travel and the incessant schedule meant any hope of a normal teenage life was slipping away.
And so she took the extraordinary decision to walk away from it all, giving up the game for nearly two years to just live her life, making ends meet by playing semi-pro cricket and using her free time to do whatever she wanted – hanging out with friends, fishing, playing golf. By the time she realized she did love tennis after all and wanted to get back to it, her new, refreshed outlook propelled her to a spectacular run that has taken her all the way to the top.
"This is my dream," Barty said after her semifinal win. "I'm in an extremely fortunate position that I'm getting to do what I love, getting to do what I dreamt as a kid. So, I think I've just got a whole lot of gratitude for the fact that I get to come out here and do what I love."
It is kind of a shame that Barty isn’t more famous, only because she carries messages of positivity we could all benefit from. She is kind and considerate and loved among fellow players, even amid the cutthroat world of the tour.
The lack of fame is a reflection of a couple of things. The first is that the modern world confers most attention to the loudest personalities, which are sometimes also the most deserving but quite often not.
The second is that she simply doesn’t seem to have any interest in the spotlight and the high life, and doesn’t say anything demeaning or disrespectful. She has just over 100,000 Twitter followers, a reasonable number, but dwarfed by the following of the likes of Serena Williams (11.7 million) and Naomi Osaka (2.5 million on Instagram).
Ashleigh Barty, the world's No. 1-ranked women's tennis player, has just over 100,000 Twitter followers, a reasonable number, but dwarfed by the following of the likes of Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka.
"(She is) a pretty normal person doing extraordinary things," former pro Alicia Molik, captain of the Australian squad in the Billie Jean King Cup team event, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
In the interests of journalistic balance, I should probably try to find something about Barty that doesn’t paint her in such a glowing light, just to even things out a bit. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of ammunition there, and such a search would likely be a monumental waste of time.
There were a couple of surprising headlines this week centering around Barty and an "ugly" dispute, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a ruckus about how the quarterfinal scheduling appeared to unfairly disadvantage her opponent Ajla Tomljanovic, something Barty had no control over.
In Australia, there is some nostalgia this week, given that it was 50 years since Evonne Goolagong, like Barty a member of the country’s indigenous Aboriginal community, lifted the trophy on Wimbledon’s hallowed lawns.
Barty knows about the history, knows what it means to her country, but is also able to keep things in perspective. She will go into the final as a -225 favorite with FOX Bet and if she pulls it off she might become a bit more well-known … or not.
For an athlete who wants to play like a superstar, but not live like one, it doesn’t make much difference either way.
Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
