“I can’t even put into words how happy I am for her,” gushed Townsend about her good friend after her own Melbourne crowning moment.The friends who sing together, win together. In the aftermath of her own milestone Australian Open victory, Taylor Townsend couldn’t stop talking about Madison Keys.After she and Katerina Siniakova outlasted Hsieh Su-wei and Jelena Ostapenko in a three-set women’s doubles final on Sunday, Townsend confessed that she was “almost in tears” after Keys closed out Aryna Sabalenka the previous night. The Atlanta native went on to detail her and Keys’ long history as peers and friends, noting that she even spent nights at Keys, her Billie Jean King Cup teammate, and Bjorn Fratangelo’s Lake Nona, Fla. home when she was training at the USTA National Campus in Orlando.”I was spending every weekend at Madison’s house. I was spending the night at her house multiple times,” Townsend said, even joking: “She introduced me to country music and took me through a country phase.””I can’t even put into words how happy I am for her,” the left-hander continued. “You know, the first is always so great, and it’s like kind of a relief. She’s been close before, and I can attest to that feeling in doubles … Getting over the hump is getting over the hump no matter what.”Read more: Townsend and Siniakova win second women’s doubles major togetherA post shared by Tennis (@tennischannel)After the 2021 birth of Townsend’s son, Adyn, she played doubles with Keys in the first Grand Slam of her comeback at Roland Garros the next year, and reached the semifinals. But it was Townsend who played a supportive role to Keys at a more recent Grand Slam last summer, when the latter injured herself in a Wimbledon match against Jasmine Paolini.”When she hurt herself and had to pull out, and I saw her in the locker room, and I just hugged her. She cried on my shoulder, and I’m, like, It’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK,’” Townsend said. “It’s times in those moments where you don’t know what’s going to happen, and she thought she tore a hamstring, and it was just a lot of uncertainty. So for me, like, as a friend, I’m just so genuinely happy because you see people overcome certain things, and you see people go through things.”To know that they put their head down and just work, and just you hope for the best. I just can’t even put into words how happy I am, and it inspired me. I look at Madison and all the things that she’s been through.”A post shared by Australian Open (@australianopen)Keys and Townsend’s friendship extends beyond the court, too as the latter attended Keys’ November wedding. But after coming full circle in her own career, winning a pro title in Melbourne 13 years after she triumphed in juniors as a 15-year-old, Townsend said she was most thrilled to be beside Keys in the sport’s history books.”When she played Sloane in 2017, it was two women of color in the finals that weren’t Venus and Serena. Even her being a woman of color winning here, and me as well, I just think that it’s so inspiring,” Townsend said.”To be able to have little girls and boys looking at us, this is history in the making. I think something so special.”
