In October last year, Ash Barty walked up onto a makeshift stage on the MCG turf and presented the AFL premiership cup to the captain and coach of Richmond Football Club, the team she has supported all her life. Tennis seemed a world away. Nine months on, having successfully returned to the Tour after Covid-19 heavily disrupted the 2020 season and saw her miss several tournaments – including the defence of her French Open title – the world No 1 stands on the brink of a second grand slam title. Just the Czech player, Karolina Pliskova, stands between her and a slice of Australian tennis history – only Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong Cawley, twice, have won the women’s singles title at Wimbledon in the Open era. Yet, officially the world’s best women’s tennis player since June 2019, Barty still flies, oddly, a touch under the radar. For a woman who is a down-to-earth achiever and as far as possible from the sporting stereotypes of tattoos, tantrums and navel gazing, it is very much where she is happy to be. Barty, a Ngarigo woman and deeply proud of her Indigenous heritage, is the first Australian woman to contest a Wimbledon final since 1980 when her idol, the outrageously talented Goolagong Cawley thumped Chris Evert. She has worked hard on her game and her profile. No one has a bad word to say about the 5ft 5in scrapper, a player who moves her opponents around the court much in the way Martina Hingis did as she swept the tennis board in the late 1990s. Barty’s backstory is as routine yet complex as it gets. From a loving family just outside Brisbane, she has been coached by the same coach, Craig Tyzzer, for years and has a longterm boyfriend, the golfer Garry Kissick. Loyalty matters. Remarkably she played her first Wimbledon final eight years ago, losing the women’s doubles in tandem with Casey Dellacqua when she was just 17. Unsurprisingly, they are best friends still. Not unexpectedly perhaps, such an early thrust took its toll and after the 2014 US Open doubles final (again with Dellacqua) she zipped shut her tennis bag and set off to play cricket, turning out for the Brisbane Heat in the Women’s Big Bash League. She is also a formidable golfer. The two-year break worked wonders and Barty returned to steadily climb the tennis rankings. She is grounded and meticulous in everything she does. “Ash knows tennis is what she does, it is not who she is,” Ben Crowe, her mindset coach who helped restore the fortunes of the Australian cricket team, has said. But it is the humility that shines through. In November 2019, Barty rang this journalist from China for a pre-Australian summer chat. “Hi, it’s Ash Barty,” she began as if we spoke regularly, airs and graces absent, her economy of play mirrored in her economy of speech. Calling from China, the line dropped out a couple of times but she rang back. “I’ll call you back if it goes again,” she said, keen to keep on giving. It is a snapshot only, but enough. Understandably the plaudits have been flowing for a while. “You don’t want to put too much pressure on her because she is a tennis player, but I think she can transcend our sport,” former Australian Davis Cup captain John Fitzgerald said. Tennis great John Newcombe is an admirer too. Is Barty Australia’s favourite sports person, he was asked at the 2019 Newcombe medal awards? “She would be close to it,” he said before a prescient add-on in relation to Barty’s agenda. “One of her goals should not be to finish world No 1. Ash’s team should target something like Wimbledon.” Right now though she is the future of Australian tennis. Compatriot Nick Kyrgios – another fan – will grab the headlines in the first week of a major but Barty has the business end increasingly cornered. Her public persona could not be more different to the intense and voluble Kyrgios, incidentally also a thoroughly decent person. Take her post match media conferences, where Barty’s thoughts shortly after a win or loss – the result seemingly matters not – are sculpted and precise. She is flawless in her delivery, eye contact direct and unwavering. Asked about the magnanimity of her last eight-loss, as tournament favourite, to Karolína Muchová at this year’s Australian Open, she was not for turning. “The sun will rise again tomorrow” and “every match is as important as the next” are among her everyday platitudes. It is a clever outlook. This is an athlete confident enough not to budge. In sync she has taken inclusivity to a new level by regularly referring to herself in the plural. “We sit down like we always do at the end of a match, after a tournament, and sit down and look at what’s next,” she said after her loss to Danielle Collins in Adelaide this February. It is a standard delivery. She is already wealthy beyond comprehension for the winner of just one major title to-date, the 2019 French Open, with around US$18 million in prize money already banked. The strategy to sit out the worst of Covid by staying in Australia in 2020 cut her off from adding more major titles but a winning run this year which included snaffling the Miami Open, has brought her back on track. The bandage around her left thigh that hampered her 2021 Australian Open has gone and the recurring hip injury that saw her drop out of last month’s French Open seems to have healed. If physically she appears assured, then the mental strength of the 2020 Young Australian of the Year is a given. She will not wilt on Saturday. Even her opponents are fans. “I like Ash, it’s really not about how she plays,” says dual Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitová. “She is always there, she’s a great person.” Australia’s Federation Cup captain Alicia Molik gives some context. “When Ash goes back to Brisbane she is happy to practice with [lower ranked] girls. That knocks on very quickly, you get that confidence and sense of belonging from playing people at at a higher level.” There is another ingredient to pull in the wider public, says Molik. “Australians love fighters. Australians like to feel they know the person. Ash is the girl next door, she is approachable.” Almost everything will change if Barty wins on Saturday; Wimbledon is the acme of tennis now as ever. But back at her home training court and behind closed doors? No you suspect, not a jot.