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.”

Jovic, the youngest player in the WTA’s top 100, has caught the attention of no less than Novak Djokovic, the player she grew up idolizing. “It was a family thing,” she tells me, pointing out that her parents, like Djokovic, grew up in the fog of war-torn Serbia. “We’d all sit down and root for him, watch all his matches.” Bojan and Jelena, both pharmacists, were tight-lipped about the precarious conditions that led them to immigrate to the United States. “But going into my teens,” Jovic says, “I would ask more questions. Where did you guys come from? How was it? And they just spoke in normal terms, like, ‘Yeah, we were at home, maybe a bomb’s going to fall, maybe it’s not.’ ” Jovic pauses, glancing over at her parents mingling in the hotel lobby with her agents. “They didn’t have a lot, but they worked really hard,” she adds. “So I think that perspective makes me more inclined to not waste this opportunity.”

Djokovic, to whom Jovic was introduced at Wimbledon last summer, has emerged as a sort of big brother figure, offering suggestions for navigating the demands of the circuit and encouraging her to journal, meditate, and develop her mind in parallel with her tennis. “They text,” says Bojan, smiling. Later, when I ask Jovic about their friendship, her cheeks go red. “Friendship, that’s a crazy word,” she says, wary of overstating her connection to the 24-time Grand Slam champion. “But I reach out to him if I need some advice.”

Jovic, it has to be said, appears uniquely unburdened by both her success and by the pressures of pro tennis. She pays little mind to social media harassment; she dreams of buying a speedboat and one day going to law school; and, now that she’s become a genuine threat to win big titles, she speaks with refreshing candor about the occasionally cutthroat nature of the sport’s top ranks. “There is one hundred percent a hierarchy in tennis,” she says. “When you walk into the locker room the first couple times, a lot of people won’t speak to you—Who is she? What is she doing here? The first six months were not easy for me.” As she’s established herself, though, locker-room dynamics seem to have softened.

For both players, a certain self-possession has proven advantageous. Watch Tien play for just a few minutes—even deep in the fifth set of a Grand Slam match—and you’re bound to see him break out into a big boyish grin. “I don’t go too up, I don’t go too down,” he says. “And in tennis, there’s not a whole lot you can control when you’re playing against another guy.” It doesn’t hurt, of course, to have Michael Chang, one of the sport’s all-time great troubleshooters, in Tien’s corner. Chang was only 17 when he shocked then top-ranked Ivan Lendl at the 1989 French Open, announcing himself as the sport’s next big thing. Since becoming his full-time coach last summer, Chang has found that he and his protégé have a lot in common, from their Asian American heritage (Tien’s parents immigrated from Vietnam, Chang’s from Taiwan) and shared Christian faith to their abilities to compensate for physical limitations—Tien is listed at five eleven, while Chang is only five nine—with tactical prowess.

“I was never going to blow people off the court,” Chang tells me, “but I found ways to think through matches, and that’s something that Learner does very, very well.” Chang is quick to point out that Tien’s first name, inspired by his mother Huyen’s profession as a math teacher, is particularly apt, given how readily he absorbs vast streams of information. (Learner’s sister, Justice, 24, was named as an homage to their father, Khuong, who’s an attorney.) “He’s just a sponge,” adds Chang. “When you have that kind of hunger, it’s just different.”

Chalk it up to the intangible qualities that distinguish elite athletes from you and me—or, perhaps, to the Tien family doctrine. “Something my parents always told me is that you have to be good at something,” says Tien. “Pick something you really enjoy,” they said, “but you can’t just be mediocre.”

In this story: hair, Autumn Suna Rich; makeup, Mariana Pineda; manicurist, Sherwin Hora; tailor, Olga Meverden.

Produced by Studio Escamillo.