By: Caroline Yao

almost two years with a chronic foot condition and a knee injury. Now, she’s finally returned.

After two weeks of intense quarantine, Brady reached the Australian Open final. Her next line of games showcased her extraordinary talent and hauled her up the rankings.

But as time passed, her foot illness grew more and more urgent. Combined with a knee injury, to Brady, just looking at her left foot could her to wish she could “just chop it off.” So, she stopped playing for a while, which turned out to be two years. She returned to play just last week, though with her WTA ranking stripped.

Brady, 28, returned for an International Tennis Federation satellite tournament in Grandby, Quebec. In the first round, she won, but the joy was short-lived, as she was eliminated in her next match. Japanese player Himeno Sakatsume, ranked 223rd, humiliated her in the remaining match.

Though her second match was a loss, Brady plans to play again in the Women’s Tennis Association tour next week in Washington D.C. She had forgotten what it was like on the court.

“It was unbelievable, just being out there,” she said in an interview. “Just engaging and just having a crowd there, and people enjoying good tennis. I definitely missed this. I didn’t think I would be as comfortable as I was. I’m happy I was able to show people that I’m still here.”

Brady knew her comeback might not turn out to be successful, and was initially preparing to return to play in the French Open this May. She’d booked a flight and a hotel room but then suffered another injury, this time bone bruise in her right foot. This stymied all her plans.

This month, Brady sensed an opportunity. She refrained from watching too much tennis on TV in her absence but is very well informed about Marketa Vondrousova, the first low-ranked woman to win a Wimbledon singles title. To her, in the women’s game, it seems like anybody can win nowadays. The current moment is full of big opportunities.

But Brady went through her share of tough times to get here. In 2015, she left U.C.L.A. after her sophomore year to turn fully professional. In 2019, when she moved her training base to Germany and started working with coach Michael Geserer, she won a tournament.

After Brady returned from a five-month pandemic break in 2020, she won her opening tournament in Lexington, KY. But then, in the 2021 Australian Open final, Brady lost to Naomi Osaka. She withdrew to her hotel, tired and emotionally depleted. She then did nothing but watch TV for the next few days.

She followed the plan she had created with Gerserer and in the February, 2021 tournament in Doha, Qatar, but she felt hollow. “I just didn’t want to be there,” Brady said. “I love competing, but I just didn’t want to compete. Mentally, I was absolutely fried.”

Then, in March, as she made preparations for the Miami Open, she woke up in the middle of the night with a “sharp, stabbing pain” in the sole of her left foot. She was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis, but pushed it aside. As the Italian Open rolled along, she woke up after a match and described the pain in her foot as so intense that she couldn’t walk. She went to the French Open and won the first and second matches, but in debilitating pain, so much so that she cried in the first round. The third round was a loss.

Not long later, she and Geserer parted ways because she thought he was pushing her over the edge. Brady commented that there was no conflict or drama, but that everything at that time started to seem like too much for her.

For the next several months, as she played different tournaments, Brady suffered through surgeries, injections, sudden explosions of pain, and new injuries. She’d go back and forth between relief and disappointment.

“Some mornings I would wake up, and I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m healed, like, it’s gone!’” she said. “And then I’d go on court, and I’d be like, ‘Damn, it’s not.’” Anytime Brady felt pain, she’d think the old injuries were back. Her medical bills were adding up as well, and though she earned over four million dollars in prize money, she says she didn’t want to spend it all.

But Brady didn’t give up., Instead, she asked, “When can I start doing my job?”. Now is finally the time.