Posted on 07/06/2004 2:51:48 PM PDT by beyond the sea
AS I watched Maria Sharapova sink to her knees and cover her face with her hands as she became the third-youngest winner of the womens title at Wimbledon, I thought back to my own game with Masha, as she is known to family and friends. It was April 1998 and I had flown to Bradenton, Florida, from New York to do a feature about the Bollettieri tennis academy for Harpers & Queen magazine. Masha was only 10 at the time, but the courts were already buzzing about the willowy girl from Siberia with the crushing ground strokes and the winsome smile.
At the age of 9 she had become the first child athlete to sign a million-dollar contract with IMG, the Chicago-based International Management Group. Prince had already signed her up to use their rackets. Oakley supplied her with sunglasses. When she needed new tennis gear, she told me, all she had to do was call Nike. If she goes on developing as she is at the moment, Bollettieri said as we watched her hit on a practice court, she could become the next great female player. A new Hingis or Navratilova.
Off the court she was like any other ten-year-old. She liked the Spice Girls; had a hamster called Mel; grumbled about long car trips and training too hard. She was a delightful child: bright, funny, with an effervescent personality and a bubbly sense of humour. Even then she brimmed with self-confidence. When I asked her whose game she admired most, she said with a grin: Mine.
On the court she reminded me of the margay, a small wild cat, like a miniature leopard, that lives in the jungles of Central America. Her emerald-green eyes had the look of a creature who you knew would never quite belong to anyone but herself. She was still only peanut-sized, as her father, Yuri, called her, with long, skinny legs and arms, corn-blonde hair, braces on her teeth and a dusting of freckles on her nose. But when she went to strike the ball, her little cat-face would bunch into a snarl, her body would coil itself like a spring behind her racket, she would hurl herself at the ball and, with an ear-splitting banshee scream that sent shivers down your spine, unleash a laser-guided ground stroke.
No girl in the history of tennis had hit a tennis ball as hard as Maria Sharapova. As Bollettieri, who has masterminded the careers of plenty of hard-hitters, including Monica Seles and Mary Pierce, eloquently put it: She beats the f****** crap out of the ball. But it wasnt the sheer force of her ground strokes the same strokes that rocked Serena Williams, the Mike Tyson of womens tennis, back on her heels on Saturday that already set Masha apart from the other child wonders clawing their way towards wealth and fame at Bollettieris academy. It was that she had a tennis brain.
Maria possesses all the ingredients to become a superstar, Mike DePalmer, one of the head coaches at the academy, told me. She knows the tennis court. She possesses an innate skill. She has a terrific work ethic. She is very coachable. She is like a sponge.
Like all the greats, she has a radar-like ability to anticipate exactly where her opponents ball will land the moment it leaves the strings of their racket and to be there when it does. The player to whom she was being compared most was Chris Evert. When Evert first saw Masha hit she said: Im glad I am not playing now.
The first time I saw Sharapova play she was going toe-to-toe with the No 1 12-year-old from South Korea. The No 1 12-year-old boy, that is. He was a muscle-bound kid, about half as big again as Masha and 50lb heavier. People crowded along the sidelines to watch and halfway through the set she produced a three-shot sequence that had them murmuring in awe.
The Korean boy hit a strong forehand down the line. Many kids might not have even made the return. But Masha was there when the ball landed, stepped into it and, with her trademark scream, lashed a backhand drive down the line. Her next shot was an exquisite little backhand drop shot. Then, as the boy scooped the ball over the net at her feet, Maria shifted her grip and hit a looping, top-spin backhand lob that went sailing over his head and landed in the back of the court.
She hit the same shot in the second set of her match on Saturday. For a ten-year-old to hit a sequence of shots with that much variety, and that much intelligence, was simply remarkable.
I was thinking about those shots the next day, when I walked out on to the court with Masha to play a set against her. We must have looked a funny pair. I was 46. She was 10. As we crossed the court, I said I hoped she was going to be off-form that day. She closed her eyes, threw back her head and let out a gurgling peal of laughter. Yuri stumped along tensely beside us, a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He had agreed only reluctantly to my suggestion that we make a dialogue with rackets and balls part of my story.
I felt confident that, at the very least, I was not going to make a complete ass of myself. The trouble was, I was in a lose-lose situation. If I beat her, big deal. Shes 10! If I lose, even if she is going to be the next Martina Navratilova, my tennis buddies would never let me live it down. As soon as we started warming up, I realised what I had was up against.
However often, and however hard, I hit the ball at Masha, it always came back. More worrying, she was soon pounding the ball harder than me. To put that into perspective, I am a 6ft tall man who weighs 190lb; Masha was 4ft 7in and weighed 70lb. As a backhand went screeching past me, I thought to myself that at least she hasnt started screaming yet.
I won the toss and chose to serve. I had decided to hit two second serves. Masha was, after all, still only a small child. She was also worth a million bucks. What if I hit her by mistake? Yuri would probably kill me. Luckily, my first service game went well and I went up 1-0. In the second game I won a couple of cheap points with two sliced backhand drop shots that took Masha by surprise. I should have broken her serve, but at 40-30 down, Maria showed her mettle, scrambling for a series of balls until she forced me into two errors. We were level at 1-1. I narrowly won my next service game to go 2-1. Then I broke Mashas serve. So far so good. I was 3-1 up.
One of the few advantages I had over Masha was that I played old-fashioned, pre-carbon fibre racket tennis. No top-spin; no western grip; no crunching the ball at neck height, as the kids do these days. Instead: lots of nasty slice on the backhand; a flat forehand that stayed low; rushes to the net. On the sidelines, I could see Yuri getting beady. This was the first profile anyone had written on Masha and it wouldnt look good if the writer beat the prodigy.
We had spent the previous evening drinking beers late into the night in a bar in downtown Bradenton. Yuri was 37 at the time with high, Slavic cheekbones and intense blue-grey eyes. He had been a good club player himself, though his favourite sport had been helicopter skiing in the Caucasus. Now he was living out the American Dream.
Torn between a fierce ambition to see his daughter fulfil her extraordinary potential and an anguished wish to protect her from the corporate ambitions swirling around her, he was a volcano of combustible emotion. His conversation was shot through with horror stories, like the one about the ex-KGB man who had threatened him and his daughter, or the Russian prodigy, a teenage boy, who had also come to the academy but had had a nervous breakdown and ended up throwing himself under a train in Poland.
Its a dirty, dirty beezness, he said in his thick Russian accent. I respect her tennis. That she can play like that. But the beezness? I dont trust anyone. He took a slug of his beer. Theres such dark energy, he said, cryptically.
In the two days I spent with Yuri and Masha (there was no sign of the mother that Masha famously tried to call from Centre Court), Yuri had gone out of his way to show me that, like so many other prodigies, her childhood was not being sacrificed on the altar of adult ambition. He took me to see her gym class in downtown Bradenton. He introduced me to a teacher who was helping Masha with her English (she still spoke with a pronounced Russian accent). She was a normal ten-year-old, he insisted, living a normal childhood.
In truth, there was nothing normal about Mashas life. But Yuri insisted that the ambition driving Masha was not something imposed from the outside by him or the academy, or IMG. It came from her. Eighty per cent is not money, he said, with passion. Not coaches. Not me. Its her. She has something inside her. A confidence. Like a champion. He paused.
You cannot teach that! I remembered those words as Masha sent a crushing backhand drive down the line in my next service game to take the score to 2-3. In the next game she showed a degree of maturity exceptional for a child. She had come to the net. I threw up a lob. Running back, she let it bounce, watched where I moved, picked her spot and slammed it away. We were tied at 3-3.
I just hung on to my next service game to go 4-3 up, but the longer the game went on, the more I felt my chances ebbing away. The big difference between us was that Masha didnt make unforced errors, so the only points I got were when I managed to hit a ball hard enough, and wide enough, that she could not reach it. The trouble was, she was making me hit an awful lot of balls and by the time we got to 4-4 my face was as red as a tomato, my T-shirt was soaked in sweat and I was struggling for breath. Masha was hopping around the court like a rabbit.
Somehow I narrowly held on to win my next service game to go up 5-4. By now, I had banished any qualms I might have had about beating the Russian wunderkind. So what if she is 10? Tennis is war, Bollettieri says. And I wanted to win. Unfortunately, so did Masha and by now she was getting into the zone. She aced me to take the score to 5-5. Aced by a ten-year-old! As the ball shot past me, I imagined my own 11-year-old son sniggering.
On my next service game I hit two double faults. Then Maria twice passed me with ease. Suddenly it was 6-5 to her and she was serving for the match. I muttered Bollettieris mantra: challenge the ball. Attack, attack, attack. Glaring down the court, I waited for Masha to serve. The serve came to my forehand. I returned it out wide. Masha whopped a backhand down the line. I hit a forehand. It landed in the net. Moments later I was 40-15 down with my back well and truly against the wall.
Somehow I managed to win the next two points to go to deuce, but, at advantage, Maria served a tricky little ball down the middle. I pushed it over the net into the middle of the court. Wrapping her racket almost around her neck, with her trademark scream, she slammed an inside-out forehand past me on the backhand side. Its all over. Game, set and match, Miss Sharapova: 7-5.
# Simon Worrall, a British-born writer based in the United States, has written for magazines all over the world, including The Times, The Sunday Times, Esquire, Condé Nast Traveller, The New Yorker and National Geographic. His first book, The Poet and the Murderer, was published in 2002 by HarperCollins and was recently the subject of a BBC documentary. He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, Kate Pennebaker, and his son, Nicholas.
"As Bollettieri, who has masterminded the careers of plenty of hard-hitters, including Monica Seles and Mary Pierce, eloquently put it: She beats the f****** crap out of the ball. But it wasnt the sheer force of her ground strokes the same strokes that rocked Serena Williams, the Mike Tyson of womens tennis, back on her heels on Saturday that already set Masha apart from the other child wonders clawing their way towards wealth and fame at Bollettieris academy. It was that she had a tennis brain."
A tennis brain........ says it all.
ping
Yeh, she does! She was smokin' the ball when she was 10!
I just came back from lunch with a buddy I used to play doubles with.
He was a professional baseball player with the Angles organization who became a Chiropractor after he served his country in the military. He had some thoughts that I had to agree with.
He said that Sharpova for the most part does everything right, meaning she has real strokes that are hit the right way in addition to her physical ability.
She will probably be around and not rip apart as the Williams sisters have because her technique is good.
We both love the Williams sisters by the way, but we both watched them from the time they were 7 and both were expecting all these injuries and inabilities to stay on tour regularly early on.
Exactly, she sets up well for shots, she gets ready, she prepares, and if you notice in the article which I hope you read and enjoyed, the writer notes of Maria that she has a special "radar" that allows her to know where shots are going to go as the opponent is hitting. That is so very important in order to avoid injuries. There are no surprises to Maria.
By the way, it's funny that your friend loves tennis, played professional baseball for some time, and did service in the military. That is an exact description of me - local tourney tennis (and golf), a little professional baseball, and the Army Security Agency (Morse Code).
But back to Maria, I try to stay even minded about young greats, and I know I judge talent very well, this girl is the best I've ever seen. The combination of her great long, tough, athletic body and her incredible mind - great resolve, great strategic thinking, and NO FEAR makes her a near shoe-in as the best ever, IMO. Of couse the injury thing is always there for everybody.
I pray she avoids them. I think the world needs Maria right about now. Her story is one of a kind. The world needs Maria.
I know that radar well. It means she can read the opponents choices early and can therefore go to the spot without as much effort as you would if you couldn't read shots.
She doesn't have to wait until after the fact, but can almost pre-plan her path ahead of time.
I do that and it is a good thing to possess in sports. You still can't read or predict the miss-hits though! LOL
Thanks for the chat, enough of her until she does something wonderful again.
Take care.
Right on.
Talk to you at the U.S. Open!
I won some open tournaments, but never professionally.
As an amateur I had beaten some people who turned pro.
I beat one in doubles who later went on to become the number one in the world in doubles for a time.
I started late with tennis at 13 having taken it up as exercise for asthma.
I had a neck broken by a drunk driver at 19 and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in my knee in an accident at a tennis club at 20.
Needless to say, I got hit hard on the physical side while young, so no pro career for me. I also had no family into tennis to train me nor a family with $10,000 a year to have me trained.
I've never stopped playing, it's a great game for life and the people are very nice for the most part.
So with my life experiences, I can watch players and conduct a study on bio-mechanics of their game and get more out of watching an athlete than most common fans could.
Sharapova has a great game, good bio-mechanics and flows in her game. She was born with size which can give her a long career and natural ability to perform with minimum injury.
She also has seemed to pick up how to play without overdoing it with her body. The Williams sisters FAIL in this area of tennis.
All the ladies are fun to watch though.
Despite that, the women compared to the men are usually boring to watch, but these ladies make it watchable.
I was born in Brooklyn NY, so when you say US Open, I think HUMIDITY in the HEAT! People don't realize what a disgusting time of year New York is going through when they play that.
I might activate my HDTV projector by then.
We are talking a 8' by 12' picture in high resolution of at least some of the US Open.
I am looking forward to that.
Speaking of heat, did you notice that Maria did not have one bit of perspiration anywhere on her face or elsewhere anytime during her matches. I have never seen anyone so completely dry playing such a physical game in the summertime. It was quite amazing.
If you look closely, she has very tiny "peach fuzz type" hair on her face and arms and it was perfectly dry (you should see this real well on your high resolution).
See you at the Open.
OK, this I may have to look up, because I do know they towel off between points. I do that as well on hot days.
If she can't perspire normally, that might not be a great thing.
She was perspiring in several pictures on this site. I saw no massive amounts of it though.
This site is a source of TONS of nice pictures of her, don't know if it is her site, a family members or some great fan, but it was very complete.
http://www.mariaworld.net/
I think this will be a favorite of yours.
I've been there....... but I'll be glad to go again! It is great!
I've been there....... but I'll be glad to go again! It is great!
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