Amelie, the Author

By Pete Bodo

Greetings, TWibe. As I write this, Rosangel is winging her way to Madrid to check out the penultimate Masters Series event of the year, and will be reporting for you from there - with her customary, high-quality photo gallery to follow. Meanwhile, how about that Gilles Simon! He saved four match-points in a very tough match with Igor Andreev, and you all know how much is at stake for Simon (qualification for the Tennis Masters Cup).

My own eyes will be focused on Zurich, and it tells you something that I was all fired-up when I hit the office at around 9 this morning and immediately went to check out the results. I was disappointed to see that none of the Big Dogettes played yesterday (or will play today, from what I can tell, although Patty Schnyder is on the rolls, and this is a big tournament for her).

And how about that Amelie Mauresmo, winning just three games against Victoria Azarenka in Zurich yesterday?

I've always been of two minds about Mauresmo - her gift is obvious, she's always been a practitioner of the "beautiful game", seeming to do her utmost to play up to some Platonic standard of tennis. This is nice to see, but not necessarily a "noble" approach, or even an elected one; players work with the God-given clay, and the most successful of them find the equivalent of a writer's "voice." The main battle for a tennis player is to make the most of his or her game, whether it's beautiful or ugly - to hit the kind of consistency that, say, a writer achieves when one of her books is as good as the next. The best writers more-or-less accomplish that; others are are uneven - even though their worst work still contains  familiar and redeeming virtues.

I'm not going off on Mauresmo here; we all know she's struggled for a long time now, and that some of her loss of form from that seminal 2006 is due to injury. But erraticism of the kind she's shown (well before 2006, as well as later) is interesting - perhaps more interesting than the nearly absolute consistency of a player who's always in the mix near the top, and making the most of her game even when she isn't winning majors (think Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport, Justine Henin, and even Kim Clijsters).

Let's go back to the writer analogy. It's been said that if a writer doesn't find his voice relatively early in his or her career (mid-to-late twenties), he simply doesn't have one. Yet many writers who never developed a unique voice succeed, sometimes wildly so, without finding that special thing we call "voice". Usually, they do it by writing formulaic books, relying less on voice than plot and genre. That's their version of "winning ugly" or, if you prefer, dialing down their expectations - and the risks they're willing to take  -  in order to develop consistency and find the area in which they perform best.

The trouble is, it usually takes more than voice to make a great book, and it's inattention to those other qualities, or the failure to execute them properly, that gets a writer  - or tennis player - into trouble. Objectively, Mauresmo is an enormously successful player, and probably headed for the International Tennis Hall of Fame even if she never wins another event. That's Greatness, but writ with a small "g", because her game has always stimulated hopes for more than she's accomplished, and she's played for entire months bearing no resemblance to the Grand Slam champion we know and so many love.

This suggests that she's just not as fully realized a player as some of her peers and rivals. It may seem unfair to have asked for more from Mauersmo; on the whole, she's more like the artist who says: "I paint (or write) for myself, first and foremost. . . Fair enough.  But there's a very clear standard of excellence out there for tennis players, called "results." Let's remember that before Roger Federer's breakthrough at Wimbledon in 2003, many fans and pundits were asking more of him, too. But Mauresmo has taken a place in the "heartbreaker" category, much like a Marat Safin, or even a Patty Schnyder (who isn't quite in the same league as those two, but you get my point).

A writer who has a voice, but no interest in or feel for pacing, character development, the value of plot, or other elements of good writing often wastes his voice (in some rare cases, voice can basically carry a book - but that's the difference between literature and tennis). In the same way, a tennis player who doesn't master the mental demands of the game (after all, doesn't every tennis match also have a complex and nuanced plot, revolving around break-points converted, or first serve percentages in the tiebreaker?), or certain fundamentals of technique, is also not going to perform at peak level, at least not consistently enough to do justice to her basic tools. In Mauresmo's case, those fundamentals have less to do with grip or height-of-backswing than with footwork and other elements of what I always think of as the intense "physical discipline" required to succeed at the highest level, as well as simple determination and mental strength.

The factors that prevent Mauresmo from producing her most beautiful tennis under the most stressful of conditions on even a semi-regular basis probably are rooted in those fundamentals. Having all the tools, skill-wise and stroke-wise, can work against a player if those virtues aren't locked into muscle memory and backed up with a strong mind. After all, discipline is boring, and never more-so than to a player with abundant natural gifts. But when you look at players who played a "beautiful" game with great success (The Mighty Fed is the gold standard, hands-down), you always find it built on a remarkably sturdy and decidedly un-beautiful foundation of physical discipline (I mean, who's going to go ga-ga over the foundation of a house, rather than the cathedral ceiling and fieldstone fireplace?).

A high degree of discipline enables you to hit the same shot, and the best shot, the same way, most of the time. You need that kind of mental toughness,  backed with sheer physical discipline, to keep your toss in the same place - the  right place -  whether you're serving a second ball to save a 4-5 break point, or to close out a 6-1 set. That's why the the double-fault is the first capital sin of tennis; unlike other unforced errors, the stroke is entirely in the player's hands. All she needs to do is demonstrate the physical discipline to hit the shot correctly.

The other big component here is mental - and that comes down to the simple love of, and appetite for, competition. We all love to talk about a "headcase", and we do it in a radically different way in tennis than in other sports, where the term is used mostly to describe players with eccentric or colorful personalities or habits.

In tennis, psychological fitness for the game is a far more conspicuous, looming issue than in any other popular pro sport, although it's always in play at some level (from the mental angle, I wouldn't want to be the relief pitcher called in to save a game with two men on and one-out in the bottom of the ninth). A player needs to come to grips with that in order to maximize her potential. Still, many players - and I think Mauresmo is one of them - have not just survived but, at times, flourished, by taking a different approach. When such players lose, they say things like, "I wasn't feeling it today," and it's an honest and accurate answer. The problem is that winning consistently calls for making your game less dependent on how you "feel" on a given day, and what your body is - or isn't - capable of doing. And that's where "wanting it" comes into play.

I've come to believe that you can learn to "want it." Let's face it, all these top pros are, at some level, uber-competitors. It's a matter of degree. Ivan Lend and Martina Narvatilova are just two examples of players who underwent a remarkable mental makeover, early enough to become ruthless, consistent, top-level champions. Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Justine Henin also developed their "mental game" in the formative stage of their careers - but after they were identified as players of enormous potential (meaning, after the pressure was on them) who weren't fully formed, mentally. Mauresmo probably neglected that aspect of her personality as a champion, and she's paid a price. That she's achieved so much without seeming to have focused on the relation between her game and her mind is a testament to her talent as well as a comment on her nature. Even among top tennis players, some people just aren't that comfortable with the demands and challenges of competition. They write for themselves.

The players Mauresmo reminds me most of are Mats Wilander and Hana Mandlikova. Wilander, because he also lost his appetite and went into a precipitous decline shortly after hitting his career peak. And Mandlikova,  who was a factor at the top of the game for longer (thus far) and more consistently than Mauresmo, because she was also surprisingly erratic. Mandlikova also had all the tools (an especially beguiling asset on the WTA tour, where so many women pursue relatively one-dimensional baseline games), but neglected to work on what might be called her desire, or attitude toward competition.

To finish with another analogy from writing, Mandlikova was like an author who gets on a roll a few pages of wonderful, compelling prose, and then loses it - goes all purple or cliche ridden and you end up wondering how the same person could have written both passages. In other words, voice - or talent - is never enough, not in the long run, although it will take you pretty far. Try to keep your comments here on-topic, and I'll be back with you tomorrow.