by Pete Bodo
Vera Zvonareva and Francesca Schiavone, two highly-seeded favorites with something to prove at Wimbledon, were subjected to Day 1 frights but managed to win their matches by symmetrical 6-3 in-the-third scores.
Although she's seeded significantly lower than No. 2 Zvonareva, the sixth-seeded Schiavone has something Zvonareva desperately wants—a Grand Slam title. You can tell just how badly Zvonareva is aching by the overly rational and utterly anodyne way the two-time major finalist of 2010 (Wimbledon and U.S. Open) talks about her quest, churning out the cliches as if she were cranking pepper out of a grinder.
Zvonareva tells us that she's "focused on the future." She's "staying positive." She's "working on her game" and "trying to get better." All of which may be true—nay, certainly is true. But wouldn't you just love for her blurt out that if she falls short again, she's going to slit Serena Williams' throat while she sleeps, or hire a thug to hijack Maria Sharapova's courtesy car so she gets defaulted for arriving late for her match? Zvonareva is so temperate and so eager to avoid feeling pressure—or to admit to feeling pressure—that I could easily be convinced that she' ll never win a major.
Still. . . we all know that first-round matches at majors are a tricky assignment for those from whom much is expected; didn't men's defending champ Rafael Nadal also paint his way into a few corners in the first set of his match with America's Journeyman, Michael Russell? Zvonareva doesn't have Rafa's gaudy record, but she was given a comparable opponent in not-quite-21 Alison Riske, an American player who's slowly worked her way into direct acceptance territory, but about whom Wimbledon appears to know absolutely nothing. She's a good little player, 4-2 in ITF circuit singles finals, and who's going to forget that she led Peters Township High School to the Pennsylvania the state championship (and won the state singles title to boot)?
The match had the most familiar plot of all; Riske made way too many errors in the first set and got blown out without winning a game. She regained her composure and stormed back to win the second set when Zvonareva made too many errors. Zvonareva's experience became an enormous factor late in the third set. I suppose you could say that Vera managed to focus on the future (the second round), stayed positive, worked on her game, and tried—with success—to get better.
The other match was considerably more nuanced. It's hard to explain just why Schiavone's record at Wimbledon is littered with first- and second-round losses (her best result was a quarterfinal in 2009). Oh sure, that topspin (and the big cut that produces it) aren't as valuable on grass as they are on clay. Still, Nadal seems to manage pretty well with comparable tools. More important, Schiavone has a nasty sliced backhand and she's not just comfortable volleying; she consciously tries to set herself up to end points with the short punch.The contrast between their sensibilities as well as their technique was obvious the moment Schiavone stepped out to play former prodigy Jelena Dokic.
Dokic, now 28, repatriated to the nation (Australia) she once blew off after it gave her safe haven and helped her develop her game, is working on what must be her fourth or fifth comeback. She appears to be one of those people who keeps living the same life, over and over, making slight adjustments and changes while never quite hitting on the combination that once enabled her to catch lightning in a bottle.
Remember, this is the girl who was the best junior in the world in 1998 and a year later qualified for Wimbledon at age 16 (and ranked No. 129), where she upset world No. 1 Martina Hingis (who had crushed Dokic just months earlier in the Australian Open) in the first round, 6-2, 6-0. Dokic climbed as high as No. 4 in the world before a host of problems, only some of which were of her own making, ultimately led her to flame out.
Since then, she's been up-and-down, inside the Top 100 one year, out of it the next. The list of top players she's beaten one time or another is a veritable who's who of the WTA in the past decade and a half—more or less everyone from Jennifer Capriati to Caroline Wozniacki, with one outstanding exception, Serena Williams.
Schiavone had good reason to tread carefully in her first round with this volatile, unpredictable player. She hugs the baseline and tries to deliver punishing, laser-like groundstrokes that gradually push opponents off the court until Dokic can apply the coup de grace. That Schiavone allows opponents to do that to her on grass is one of the reasons she's had so much trouble at Wimbledon. Another is that Schiavone just doesn't appear to have sufficient time to set herself up for her shots on grass, never mind orchestrate the nature of a point.
Still, Schiavone relied on her significant resources and versatility to sqeak out the first set. It was a good thing, too, because Dokic then caught fire and shed 10 years of bad karma to race through the second, 6-1. The women left the court for a rain delay at 1-1 in the third set.
The ESPN commentator on the match was Chris Evert, who could be described as the Open era prototype for Dokic. This seemed only fitting for a variety of reasons, not least because nobody knows better than Evert the degree to which tennis is a mental game. And if her commentary in the past hasn't always seemed to have the bells and whistles of a lively intellect, she's a woman who can still smell fear (as she once did in her opponents, one of the reasons she was always so careful not to show any herself), and trepidation was certainly in the air as the Dokic-Schiavone match progressed.
Evert's two great weapons as a player were her stroking consistency and her courage. Her outstanding liabilities were a powder-puff serve, a deficit of power, and relatively poor mobility (but outstanding anticipation). Evert had no business taking the measure of her lifetime rival Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon (she won two of their nine meetings there); in fact, she and no business taking matches from the likes of Hana Mandlikova, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, or Virginia Wade, either. But she almost always found a way. She failed to make at least the semifinals just once in 18 attempts. The fact that she won "only" three titles in a weird way confirms just how tough an assignment Wimbledon was for her, and how beautifully she handled it.
One reason Dokic is still Dokic and never did become another Chris Evert is because she did a few things in this match that Evert never would have allowed herself. The women battled to 4-3 on serve in the third, at which point Dokic played a terrible game, tossing in two double-faults—the second on a break point that put Schiavone in position to serve out the match. Evert observed, "Right now, Schiavone is just taking advantage of Dokic's errors. I think they both want this match so much."
Schiavone had a devil of a time serving out the match; Dokic held four break points before Schiavone reached her first match point—before which point Evert remarked, "She (Dokic) is at the point where she really needs to improve her concentration. She played four great points from the deuce court to get the ad, and then she just played weak points when she had the chance to break."
Evert doesn't drop many zingers or memorable one-liners. But she knows why matches are won and lost, and how much of it has nothing to do with forehands or backhands. After Schiavone won it on her second match point, Evert said of the tactics Schiavone employed: "She needs to think through her strategy and use her tools better."
Perhaps she was just flashing back to the way Navratilova once made a habit of thundering to the net behind those tricky, low, sliced backhand approaches. They certainly were tactics that could make a defensive player like Evert wake up at night in a cold sweat. I think Evert was saying that Schiavone needs to commit more fully to the slice-and-volley game, and it might be a good idea for Schiavone to take the advice to heart.
As for Dokic, she'll probably continue to re-live her life, one day at a time.