JENNIFER BRADY FELT a pop in her left heel as she chased down a ball in her second-round match at the 2021 Cincinnati Open. But even with the searing pain, and her inability to finish the match against Jelena Ostapenko, she had no idea as she hobbled off the court that it would be the last time she would play a competitive match for nearly two years.
That pop ended up being a torn plantar fascia, and that, combined with a stress fracture in her right knee sustained shortly after, has led the 28-year-old Brady on a cruel journey, filled with treatment and surgery, stops and starts, uncertainty and doubt. Now, finally, she is back.
Once ranked as high as No. 13 in the world, Brady made her long awaited return to competition at an ITF W100 event in Granby, Canada last week after 698 days. Riddled with nerves starting the day before her first match back and unsure of what to expect from herself, Brady won her opener, 6-2, 6-3, against Kyoka Okamura. After the match, she wrote simply: "About. Damn. Time." on Instagram.
Brady lost her next match, but is now scheduled to play the full slate of US Open series events -- starting with next week's Mubadala Citi DC Open -- and, more than anything, is relieved to be back on tour where she knows she belongs.
"I'm just so happy to be back playing and competing," Brady told ESPN on Saturday. "I wish I could have gotten more matches in before with the big dogs again, but this will only help me just test my level and see where I'm at and then I can learn and improve and get back to the practice court and work on some things and then try to get ready for the next tournament.
"But, no matter what, this is what I want to be doing, otherwise I would've given up a while ago."
THERE IS NEVER a good time for a professional athlete to be injured, but it couldn't have come at a worse one for Brady. In 2020 and 2021, she was playing the best tennis of her career. She won her first WTA title at Lexington in August of 2020, then went on to reach her first major semifinal the following month at the US Open -- a highly memorable clash against eventual champion Naomi Osaka. A few months later in February, she made her first major final appearance at the Australian Open.
While she lost to Osaka again in that final, it only inspired bigger goals as she left Melbourne.
"I felt like I was starting to find my game and was so close to cracking the top 10, to do something big," Brady told ESPN in April. "Then that's when the s--- hit the fan, I guess you could say ... I guess, honestly, the last pain-free match that I'd played was in Australia."
Brady started to feel discomfort in her left foot around March 2021, but didn't think it was anything serious and continued to play. But it got progressively worse, and by the time the clay season rolled around, she was compensating for it and started to experience pain elsewhere as a result, including debilitating back spasms. She skipped the grass court season to give her body time to recover for the Tokyo Olympics and the summer hardcourt schedule.
The pain didn't go away completely, but she returned in time for Tokyo, where she was upset in the first round, and then next played in Cincinnati. It was there, in the match against Ostapenko, that she believes she tore the plantar fascia.
Because she was able to walk and put weight on the foot, the tournament's medical staff told her it couldn't be a tear and instead was acute inflammation. Accepting that diagnosis as fact, she resumed her training for the US Open just a few days later. During a practice session on site in New York, she went to hit a serve and felt a crack in her right knee. An MRI revealed a stress fracture, forcing her to withdraw from the tournament a day before her first-round match. She had been scheduled to play Emma Raducanu, the qualifier who went on to win the title.
Brady was disappointed to not be able to follow up on her breakthrough from the year before, but didn't think she would be sidelined for too long. By the end of October, however, the pain in her foot hadn't improved. An MRI showed the plantar fascia was partially torn. It was a devastating realization.
"It was a lot of time wasted," Brady said. "It had become chronic at that point because it was injured and didn't really heal properly. There was a lot of scar tissue."
With surgery not an option for a partial tear, Brady began wearing a boot to aid the recovery. She was still determined to play at the 2022 Australian Open. But when mid-December arrived and she still wasn't able to hit balls in practice, she knew a trip Down Under was out of the question. She withdrew from the tournament.
Brady remained at home while her friends and peers started the new season halfway around the world. She left her Orlando-area home for a temporary stint in Southern California -- not far from where she had once led UCLA to an NCAA title -- to get a change of scenery and do some guest commentary on the Tennis Channel. She appeared optimistic about her return while on television. "Things are looking good, hopefully I'll be back on court very, very soon," Brady told viewers in February 2022.
She believed it when she said it -- in fact she had targeted the following month for her comeback -- but soon discovered she had developed osteochondritis dissecans lesions in her knee and would need surgery. She was hopeful the procedure would at least help the lingering pain, but once she returned to practice, the pain in both her knee and foot were severe.
Brady was back to square one, seven months after that fateful day in Cincinnati.
"I wasn't getting anywhere," she said. "I was like, 'I'm still in the same boat. I've made zero progress. If anything, I've regressed.' I started just having anxiety and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, am I ever going to be able to recover or play again?' Just bad thoughts. I started freaking out and I was just not in a great place mentally."
Brady had hoped to be back in time for the 2022 US Open, but when it didn't happen, she decided to go as a spectator instead. She went to the Cincinnati Open as well. It changed everything.
"I needed to get out of Florida, see all of my friends and just remind myself of what life on tour is like," Brady said. "It was a total mental restart for me. Watching other matches reminded me of the good, and the bad, just the rollercoaster of emotions you feel. Winning, losing, feeling like s--- when you lose a match, wanting to break all your rackets, all of it. The adrenaline of it all. ... Being [on site] made me realize just how much I missed all of it."
While at the US Open, Brady met with Ola Malmqvist, the USTA's Director of Coaching, and Mark Kovacs, a renowned tennis performance physiologist. Together they devised a plan to get Brady back on court and found an expert to reevaluate her injuries.
Since then, Brady has been working almost every day with Malmqvist at the USTA's National Campus in Orlando, as well as with a full-time physio and other trainers. She had hoped to play the Australian Open at the start of the year, but realized her body was just not in match shape after such a long layoff.
"Jenny has followed every part of the plan that we laid out for her, but she's one of those people who loves tennis and she has always overdone things a bit," Malmqvist told ESPN in May. "We're trying to make sure we take everything step by step, don't push too much, and don't skip over anything. We have a saying that we've stolen: 'Hard work works but smart hard work works even harder.' That's really what we've been trying to follow."
WITH HER FOOT and knee feeling better, the team took great lengths to ensure she didn't end up injuring something else since resuming regular on-court training. In her first few days of practice, she would lie on her bed and the couch for hours at the end of the day, unable to move.
"I had to get reacclimated to the intensity and to all of the little muscles in my feet and ankles, and everywhere else," she said.
Brady increased her training at the end of March and first publicly shared that she was eyeing the French Open for her return in an interview with Rennae Stubbs. She didn't officially make the call to compete at Roland Garros until early May, wanting to ensure it was the right choice and wouldn't jeopardize all of her months of progress and hard work. Just having it as a possibility was the emotional boost she needed.
"There's finally light at the end of the tunnel," Brady said a week before confirming she would be playing. "Let me tell you, I'm getting out of this damn cave. I can't wait."
But, like so many of Brady's plans over the past two years, it didn't work out.
A few days before she was set to board her flight for Paris, Brady was, once again, running down a ball, albeit this time on a practice court, when she felt pain in her right foot. She immediately underwent scans and a medical evaluation. It was ultimately diagnosed as a bone bruise. Her doctors assured her it wasn't serious but told her it could develop into a fracture if she were to play on it. They advised her to not play tennis for a week and a half and rest in the meantime.
As the French Open got underway, Brady was 4,500 miles away from where she wanted to be, both literally and figuratively.
"It was tough because there was the buildup of finally being able to play and then it was just another Grand Slam going to waste," Brady said. "And then it was like, 'Oh gosh. Am I ever going to be able to come back?' Those thoughts started creeping back in."
But Brady refused to let that latest setback deter her for long. She continued her strength and conditioning training while resting her foot and then was back out on the practice court the following week, pain free. Without enough time to properly prepare for the grass season, she turned her focus to the hardcourts and plotted her return.
This time, the plan stuck. Using her protected ranking of No. 14, Brady was able to gain entry to Granby, as well as the tournaments in Washington D.C., Montreal, Cincinnati, and then the year's final major at the US Open. According to Brady, none of the tournaments offered her a wild card, and she is determined to make the best use of every event in order to improve her ranking every week and be able to receive direct entry for tournaments before maxing out the 12-tournament limit of her protected ranking. She's currently ranked No. 1055 after her second-round exit at Granby.
Brady doesn't have a full-time coach, and hasn't been actively searching for one, but she continues to work with Malmqvist. As he works with many players through the USTA, he was not with her on site in Granby, but they spoke multiple times by phone. However, his absence meant Brady was thrown right back into tour life on her own, with everything that entails. So after arriving in Granby -- a small town about an hour east of Montreal -- Brady found herself in her hotel room trying to navigate the dreaded scheduling system for the practice courts and waiting what felt like an eternity for the next day's schedule to come out.
It was annoying. It was tedious. It was exactly what she had wanted.
"I thought being back was going to be so different and then I realized so quickly, 'Oh my God. It's the same s---, just a different day. Same people. Same headaches. Nothing's changed,'" Brady said. "But I know I'm extremely lucky to be doing what I'm doing. Dealing with this stuff, constantly living out of a suitcase, at a place for a week or two and then on to the next one, but I don't mind it. I enjoy it.
"It's our life, it's the life of a professional tennis player."