Ashleigh Barty retired from tennis at 25. She shares the highlights of her career, how it felt, lessons she learned along the way, and why she was ready to drop the racquet while the going was still going great.
Originally published in The Book Cafe on Medium on August 23, 2023.
Ash Barty is a sportswoman who had the amazing fortune of being able to fulfill all her professional tennis dreams. In the process, she gained the kind of wisdom that so very few of us possess at 26. She’s also an engaging and fun writer. By the end of the memoir, when Ash frames the act of ending a career as a circle coming complete, I was moved to tears.
The rawness of Ash’s memoir drew me in emotionally. Unlike other sportswriters who use ghostwriters, she penned her book herself — and her voice comes through wonderfully. Hearing her talk about the lessons she learned in training and competitions, you get the sense that she has already lived a lifetime. That is to be expected: she picked up a racket at five and she was still at it at twenty-five. She traveled for ten years or so on the WTA tour (2011–2014, 2016–2022), playing fierce matches, where she had to be both an athlete sure on her feet and a strategist smart and cunning in her choice of shots. She won everything she wanted on the tour and then at 26 she decided to put all that tennis mastery aside and, to use one of her metaphors, start from base camp again to climb the mountain of the rest of her life — relying on the wisdom she has absorbed scaling so many other tall mountains in the past.
Know Yourself and Enjoy Your Work
The Ash Barty of this memoir is a woman who knows herself and who is not afraid to take her life story by the reins. She’s a strong and determined woman who during the 2022 Australian Open final against Danielle Collins also channeled the eagerness, enthusiasm, happiness, and love she felt as a little girl playing tennis. And she came back from 5–1 in that final to win the tournament, her third Grand Slam and the final one of her career.
With that win, she had won, by the age of 25, everything she ever wanted in her tennis career. And then, grateful for having been able to fulfill her dreams as a tennis player, she stopped. It takes guts in life to stop a thing that’s going great, but Ash Barty did that, and given the loving and dedicated person she is, with a bit of continued good fortune, she’s bound to make her life even more grand that her tennis career.
Talent, Hard Work, and Authenticity
I’ve been watching tennis for the past ten years, ever since our own Simona Halep rose in the WTA rankings and started winning tournaments, and I’ve always enjoyed seeing Barty play. I don’t have a background playing tennis as a hobby but I’ve played several sports as a kid in school and can tell when a player is unusually gifted. Barty was one of those players, with amazing coordination and agility and a variety of shots and strategies that provided wonderful enjoyment to me as a tennis fan.
Watching tennis I also got to see a little how players expressed themselves on the court and in press conferences. I’ve always liked Ash for her authenticity. When she was in a state of flow, she was all focused and in her own world. When she was smiling, she was really embracing the arena. And when she spoke, she invigorated her speech with her sensibility. Some other players use the same old remarks every time, and that can sound a bit flat after a while. Then again, there’s the question of emotion and the whole issue of how players spread their energy into every little thing required of them aside from training and playing their matches.
For Barty, an introvert who also struggled with depression at one time, the demands on her time and energy on the tour felt quite heavy at times. She opens up in her memoir about some of these difficulties. When she won the Junior Championships at Wimbledon at 15, she missed the winners’ ball. Her team and family tried to convince her to attend but she was done. Part of it had to do with being away from home for too long, and then winning a junior Grand Slam title was too much for her at the time as well. When she won Wimbledon as an adult, she dealt better with the whole affair but she was still unsure how to act around royalty. Then there were all those “pressers” she had to do after each match. She talks in her book about how, at the suggestion of her mindset coach Ben Crowe (“Crowey”), she inserted a movie line in her comments at each press conference. Finally, as a player she had to be ever mindful of her team, whose emotions and many hopes and dreams were intimately connected with hers.
Now, as I was writing my lines above about Ashleigh’s reactions at Wimbledon, both as a junior and as an adult winner, I realized they don’t do justice to her complex character and the arc of her growth through tennis. She’s been through far more in her professional tennis career than six weeks away from home, and she’s certainly quite able to communicate effectively and build both personal and professional relationships. The thing is, Ash is a no-frills woman.
She’s also a hard-working, fun-loving introverted sportswoman who, while not one for fancy social protocols, is not a withdrawn person either. For one, she’s been actively campaigning for opportunities for Australian First Nations tennis players — one of her grandmothers came from the Ngarigo people. And then, of course, throughout the WTA tour she didn’t live in a bubble either, as the players engage as practice partners and otherwise spend time together. Many players become friends on the tour, and Ash had her share of beautiful friendships.
Ash Barty’s Accomplishments in Tennis
When I say Ash Barty is hard-working, that is a severe understatement. Not one to shy from training and achieving great physical fitness, Ash has used all the tools her body and mind offered her as well as the expertise of the wise people she smartly surrounded herself with.
She won 15 singles titles and 12 doubles titles. She won all three Grand Slam finals in which she participated, no easy feat (2019: The French Open, vs. Markéta Vondroušová; 2021: Wimbledon, vs. Karolína Plíšková; and 2022: The Australian Open, vs. Danielle Collins). She won a Grand Slam in doubles with CoCo Vandeweghe (an accomplishment that, surprisingly, she overlooked in her memoir).
She won the 2019 WTA Finals, and was world №1 for more than two consecutive years — all that while also taking a break from 2014 to 2016 to be with her family and play cricket, and then building up points again from an unranked position. She even won an Olympic medal, a bronze in mixed doubles at Tokyo 2020 with fellow Australian John Peers.
Barty’s victory at the Australian Open brought great joy to her country. She was the first woman to win a Grand Slam singles title on home soil in 44 years, after Christine O’Neil in 1978. And she is only the second Australian to reach a world №1 ranking in tennis, following in Evonne Goolagong Cawley’s footsteps 43 years later.
Barty is also the first Australian woman to win the singles title at Wimbledon since Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1980. She writes about how she honored the older Australian champion that year at Wimbledon by wearing an outfit modeled on the latter’s at the 1971 Wimbledon Championships, to mark the fiftieth anniversary.
And at the 2019 French Open she won the title 46 years after Australian Margaret Court in 1973.
Grit, Fun, and Teamwork
There’s a whole dynamic she set in motion once she returned to tennis in 2016. She beautifully describes this, and it all reads like Ash Barty taking charge of her own tennis life even though she was nineteen at the time. She returned to the tour with Craig Tyzzer (“Tyzz”) as a coach and then other amazing people joined her team. Which is not to say that her first coach wasn’t great. The scenes where he builds her emotional and mental strength as a child are wonderful.
She doesn’t dwell on her injuries, even though she’s had some, including one that cost her the 2021 French Open and almost put her out of Wimbledon. But with her determination and resilience, and with the help of her team, she won that year’s Wimbledon.
Mindset Coach Ben Crowe
While all the members of her team are impressive, the one that most spoke to me was Crowey. He taught her how to look deep into herself and then build herself up mentally on the court with mantras that affirmed her qualities. He taught her about intrinsic motivation and how to separate her person from her persona as a tennis player, and how to see her life story not as her life but as a story she writes herself. I took this last bit from a YouTube interview with Ben Crowe, but it’s a lesson that reverberates through Ash’s memoir.
A Raw Memoir in Ashleigh’s Own Words
What I most liked about the memoir, besides the lessons and Ash’s own descriptions of her thoughts and emotions, was that it was a raw account, opening up Ash’s soul almost surgically and yet so gracefully. This was the voice of a young woman who gets her emotional and mental strength from her family and close ones, likes challenges, likes a strong and agile body, likes sports, won’t shy away from beers with family, friends, and coworkers, and generally, as she repeats throughout the book, likes to have fun in a childlike way. Of course, this is only a manner of speaking, because the unrelenting weeks of the WTA tour are a lot of work and strain for anyone. But Ash is one of those rare souls who were there for the beauty of the play and the endorphins after a match of body and mind on the court.
She mentions these endorphins at the end of her book, and I imagine she will, indeed, miss them, as she suspects. But she says she’ll be content to be involved in sports as a fan from now on, and for the rest, she’ll just take care of her charitable trust, The Ash Barty Foundation, while also looking for other new ways to spend her time.
A New Beginning
It appears she was quick to do just that, as in July this year she gave birth to a baby boy, Hayden.
There’s much more to unpack from Ash Barty’s My Dream Time: A Memoir of Tennis & Teamwork. I enjoyed reading about her start in tennis at five and the ruses of her first coach. I appreciated her interest in her First Nations heritage, and her close relationship with Casey Dellacqua, with whom she played four Grand Slam finals in doubles in all the major tournaments. I discovered the importance of golf in her family and in her relationship with Garry, her current husband, who plays golf professionally. And then I learned a lot about professionals in tennis and human connections in Barty’s accounts of her team members and how she made sure she resonated with them before bringing them into her professional and personal life.
It’s also impressive to read, how after a while she approached most of her matches like a true warrior, all while staying quite humble.
A Great Athlete and Person, and a Great Team
As a tennis player, Barty showed both sheer grit and great enjoyment in her work. I loved that about her when I saw her on the court: major talent, strengthened by hard work and an ability to play around with the opponent in a way that disarmed the latter. But reading this book I learned two other major things about her trajectory through life and sports so far. The first: surround yourself with great professionals who tailor their expertise and wisdom based on your requirements. And the second: know that no matter what you do and how far you go in your profession, your worth as a person does not come from your “job.”
This is why, after the amazing arc of her career, at the end of the book we come to appreciate that Ash is a good sport (pun intended) who doesn’t put on airs or gets consumed by ambitions, and who, in the end, sweet introvert that she is, likes getting together with her close ones for a BBQ and a beer.
She also likes to clean and tidy up at home in peace and quiet. She lives now in a beautiful home with a gym, swimming pool, and large garden — another one of her dreams. She moved there right after the 2022 Australian Open, ready to give other stories a chance to blossom in her life.
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To a happier, healthier life,
🙂 Mira
HappierHealthier.Blog 