MIAMI — Sloane Stephens was trying to get ready. Busy choosing an outfit to wear for her day-after-U.S-Open-championship photo shoot in New York last September, Stephens barely heard the knock at her hotel room door.
Assuming the intruder was room service, Stephens cheerily called out, “Come iiiin.” When she realized, instead, that her visitor was the star point guard for the Houston Rockets, Stephens, a newly-minted Grand Slam champion, simply blurted out, “You’re Chris Paul.”
It turned out that Paul’s mother, Robin Jones, had followed Stephens’s unlikely run to the title and become a Stephens fan. Paul, a nine-time N.