Agnieszka Radwanska, now with 20 titles, continues to wow us with her one-of-a-kind game

You don’t have to look at the TV screen to know when Agnieszka Radwanska is playing. You just have to listen to the commentators. Eventually—and it sometimes takes no more than a minute or two—one of them will say “Wow!” or “Woah!” Or both of them will just break up laughing as they try to describe the shot or the point they’ve just witnessed.

Call it the Aga Effect: After a decade of uncanny, viral-ready shot-making, the 27-year-old has left her stamp on the sport like few other players of her generation. With her victory at the Premier Mandatory event in Beijing last week, that stamp now includes 20 career titles. That’s not too shabby, in this era of the power hitter, for a player who weighs just 123 pounds and struggles to crack 80 m.p.h. on her second serve.

How has Aga survived, and thrived, for so long? As bigger sluggers have come and gone, how has she finished in the Top 10 six years running? How has she played one of the busiest schedules in tennis and remained relatively injury free? While we’ve spent much of 2016 singing the praises of Serena Williams, Karolina Pliskova, Madison Keys, Garbiñe Muguruza and Simona Halep, how has Radwanska quietly won more matches than any of them? And in this age of the fist pump and the primal scream, how has Aga managed to stay competitive while appearing about as intense as someone who is on her way to buy groceries? (When she loses a point, she looks like some of us do when we realize we forgot to get the milk.)

The woman known appropriately as the Ninja answered all of these questions in her 6-4, 6-2 win over Johanna Konta in the Beijing final on Sunday. Radwanska had her full repertoire on display from the start. Here are a few of the highlights.

—In the opening game, she reached out to hit a stab service return, but she had to stretch so far that her face was turned the other way, toward the back wall, when she made contact. No problem: Her no-look return clipped the top of the tape, and Radwanska ended up winning the point.

—In the third game, Radwanska and Konta traded hard ground strokes down the middle. While Radwanska seems, at first glance, to play a risky game, she’s conservative when she needs to be. If she’s being pushed back at the baseline, she rarely does anything more than hit the ball with decent pace—she doesn’t push it—back down the middle. That is, until she does what she did here: Lower her racquet head at the last second and drop the ball a few inches over the net. Like all good drop-shot artists, Radwanska attacks the shot rather than let it come to her.

—By the fifth game, Konta had decided that her only option was to rush the net. Radwanska had the answer for that, as well. She didn’t try to hit perfect passing shots on the first ball; instead, she did what all the textbooks tell us and kept the first pass low, while waiting for a better chance at a winner on the second ball.

Still, there is something Radwanska does in these situations that the textbooks can’t teach: She has an uncanny—that word again—ability to hit a desperate defensive shot to a spot that somehow turns the tables on her opponent and puts her in an uncomfortable position.

—Finally, it’s not like Radwanska can’t hit hard or take control of a point. But she knows that she needs the element of surprise to make it work. Early in the second set, with Konta hanging on by a thread, Radwanska pulled the trigger, first on a running forehand and then on a backhand return at break point. Both times she put the ball a few inches from the baseline, and both times she shocked Konta with her sudden power surge. Those were the knockout blows.

Aga took her victory, which came at one of the tour’s biggest events, in her usual matter-of-fact manner.

“Every title means a lot,” she said in her customary rapid-fire English, “but especially here when you play against the best players in the world ... It’s top players from the first round, and I’ve been playing my best tennis all week, so of course I’m very happy to win this tournament again.”

In the past, this would be the moment when I would speculate about Radwanska’s chances of winning her first Grand Slam next year; it’s what I did at the end of 2015, after she won the year-end championships in Singapore. Now that Aga is 27, though, it seems a little beside the point. It’s her unique playing style, and what she’s been able to do with it, that counts.

And while I’d like to see her cut back on the week-to-week grind and try to peak for the majors, that seems like wishful thinking as well. Radwanska celebrated her title in Beijing by getting on a flight for Tianjin, where she’s the No. 1 seed; it will be her fourth tournament in Asia in as many weeks. In that, she reminds me of another undersized player and relentless scheduler, Nikolay Davydenko. The Russian was never able to see himself as a Grand Slam champion, and thus never made that his focus. While Radwanska has been to a Wimbledon final, she also seems satisfied to see the game as a yearlong job, rather than a quarterly quest for Slam glory.

If that’s fine with her, it’s fine with me. Radwanska is just as much fun to watch in Beijing, Tokyo and Wuhan as she is on Centre Court. And even if she never makes it into the Grand Slam record books or the Hall of Fame, tennis fans will remember the way she played, and trade stories of her shot-making skills long after she retires. They’ll probably do it with a chuckle, too.