On a fickle morning in Miami—the kind where patches of sunshine give way to intervals of torrential rain—Learner Tien has taken shelter deep inside Hard Rock Stadium, the obliging home of the Dolphins, a Formula 1 Grand Prix, and, at the moment, the Miami Open. Tien, wearing tennis shorts and an oversized white T-shirt that threatens to dwarf his modest frame, is eating an omelet from the players cafeteria, but someone seems to have forgotten his spinach. Not to worry—the 20-year-old tennis prodigy and first-generation American from the mellow foothills of Orange County, California, isn’t the type to make a fuss. Tien eats his breakfast ravenously and without complaint.
A few hours later, out on the practice courts, Iva Jovic—another child of immigrants hailing from Southern California—is taking advantage of a break in the rain to prepare for her opening round match at the second half (after Indian Wells) of the so-called Sunshine Double swing of the pro tour. Jovic, at just 18, has been making moves inside the WTA’s top 20 after a deep run at the Australian Open, where she became the youngest American to reach the quarterfinals since Venus Williams in 1998. In a sport whose wunderkinder are often obsessively prepared and trained, sometimes reluctantly, from adolescence, Jovic counts as something of an outlier: The relaxed and well-adjusted daughter of a Serbian father and a Croatian mother didn’t commit to tennis in earnest until the age of 13, when the pandemic simply made it more practical than team sports like soccer.
“I didn’t do anything special,” her mother, Jelena, deadpans as we watch Jovic, in a pastel Y-3 two-piece, play a practice set against Victoria Mboko, the 19-year-old
rising star from Canada. Indeed, Jovic’s pure ball-striking abilities—Andy Roddick has said she has “power you can’t teach”—are indicative of her innate gifts for timing, precision, and hand-eye coordination. When the rain starts up again, I duck under the bleachers with Jelena and her husband, Bojan, thinking Jovic might join us for a post-practice debrief. “Well—I’m sure Iva will want to keep going,” says Bojan, who moved from Belgrade to the States in 2003.
Our current moment has been an especially prosperous one for American tennis, with four men and five women in the world’s top 20—and Jovic and Tien are the youngest players to crack this elite group. Spend any time around the tennis commentariat, and you’ll hear both of them cited frequently as among the sport’s most promising upstarts. At Indian Wells in March, where Tien made a run to the quarterfinals before losing to Jannik Sinner, the world number one admitted to being impressed by how quickly Tien has established himself over just a single season on the circuit. At the Australian Open a month earlier, world number three Alexander Zverev (who’s among the five top-10 players Tien has beaten) made note of Tien’s enormous potential, questioning why the mainstream hadn’t yet caught on. “People talk a lot about other players his age, but much less about him,” Zverev said, “when in reality, he’s the one performing at a higher level.”
Tien, though, maintains a healthy distance from the hype machine. “It’s incredible to hear,” he says of the praise and high expectations that have come his way. “But, in my mind, potential doesn’t really mean anything until you fulfill it.” In his first season on tour, Tien tells me, ambition too often came at the expense of his well-being. “I was in Rome, I was in Geneva, I was in Madrid, playing all these incredible tournaments in these great cities,” he says, “and I wasn’t really able to enjoy it, because the losses just felt like life or death to me.” He’s since made a conscious decision to try to take the pressures of the tour in stride—though he admits that most of those cities remain unexplored. “I just feel like if I’m not playing tennis,” he continues, “I’m wasting part of my life—but I’m going to try to go out and see more of the world.”
