Kvitova back to the top after knife attack; Osaka eyes back to back

MELBOURNE, Australia – Petra Kvitova has shed her tears. The tears, for a long time private, were in a very public arena this week.

A violent home invasion that caused serious knife wounds to her left hand was a punctuation point in her career, as she sees it. There’s the before – two Wimbledon titles – and her “second career” – which so far is highlighted by her run to Saturday’s Australian Open final.

What she is focused on now is winning her first Grand Slam title since Wimbledon in 2014. To get there, she’ll have to beat 21-year-old Naomi Osaka, the US Open champion who is on a 13-match winning streak in the majors.

“To be honest, I’m still not really believing that I’m in the final,” Kvitova said. “It’s kind of weird, to be honest, as well, that I didn’t know even if I was going to play tennis again.”

Kvitova was 21 when she made her Grand Slam breakthrough at Wimbledon in 2011 and was a star on the rise, much like Osaka is now.

Unlike Osaka, she lost in the first round in her next Grand Slam. There were ups – including a second Wimbledon title – and downs in tennis until that horrible ordeal in December 2016 that could have derailed her career, or worse.

For a while she was confident being alone, she remembered, until one day she left the locker room at a tennis club in Prague and told her support crew “yeah, it was a good one today that I really felt OK.”

Her doctor didn’t tell her at the time of concerns about the scarring on her surgically repaired left hand that could hinder her return to top-level tennis. In retrospect, Kvitova said it’s good she didn’t know.

“It wasn’t only physically but mentally was very tough. It took me really a while to believe,” she said. “It was lot of, lot of work ... a lot of recovery, treatment. You know, it was  – I think that’s kind of the sport life help me a lot with that. I just set up the mind that I really wanted to come back, and I just did everything.”