!91590942by Bobby Chintapalli, TW Special Correspondent
Before this year’s tennis season ends, before Venus Williams takes guitar lessons, before Dinara Safina eats a second piece of chocolate cake, before Jelena Jankovic hits the beach in some cute bikini, there’s Doha. With the year’s eight top women tennis players heading to the desert for the season-ending championships (SEC), which will be held from October 27 to November 1, it’s time to look back and do the numbers - as well as look ahead and make some guesses.
LOOKING BACK
It’s all about the Ws. Not the kind with swanky lobby bars in midtown Manhattan and downtown Chicago but the kind in Paris and London – or, heck, Portoroz and Tashkent – that move tennis players one round, one batch of ranking points, one event closer to their goals. Wins – that’s what it’s about for a tennis player.
The match-win percentages may surprise some of you, while for others it will only confirm what you believe: When it came to winning tennis matches this year, nobody did it better, nobody did it quite as good as Serena; clearly she’s the best. The real No. 2 - and a really close one at that - is Dinara Safina. Conspicuously at the bottom are Venus Williams and Jelena Jankovic.
Serena Williams – 78.9%
Dinara Safina – 78.6%
Victoria Azarenka – 77.2%
Elena Dementieva – 77.1%
Caroline Wozniacki – 75.6%
Svetlana Kuznetsova – 75.0%
Venus Williams – 73.5%
Jelena Jankovic – 72.4%
You have to figure that the only thing better than match wins is how players are rewarded for them – prize money. How else can a girl splurge on, say, Pilates equipment (but how much more “core work” do you really need, Elena?) or Christian Louboutin stilettos (and you wonder why you need injury timeouts, Jelena?). And here too, Serena comes out on top - this time by a much larger margin. Let’s have some fun with this and calculate how much prize money each woman averaged in each match she played. On average, Miss S. Williams earned more than $70,000 per match. That’s more than triple the amount earned by the two players at the bottom of this list. Will this redefine the concept of "equal prize money"? Here are the details:
Serena Williams – $70,780
Svetlana Kuznetsova – $55,015
Dinara Safina – $50,019
Venus Williams – $33,893
Victoria Azarenka – $28,557
Elena Dementieva – $24,002
Caroline Wozniacki – $23,523
Jelena Jankovic – $20,127
!91236515 The most interesting figure that may surprise some is "number of singles titles won." Five players won three titles each, and a sixth, Jankovic, may be on her way in Moscow this week. The other two (hint: they’re related) won only two. In Serena’s case (yes, Serena, we are looking at your titles, as that provocative t-shirt asked), they both happen to be – surprise, surprise – Grand Slam triumphs. Regardless, when it comes to the Sisters W, do numbers matter? You don’t have to read the fine print to realize that any logical link between past and future performance for these two can't really be established. So much for the fine art of handicapping.
LOOKING AHEAD
The SECs are fun because players don’t start by playing Mynameis Somethingpova of Uzbekistan, and progress through series of more difficult and higher-ranked players. They start with the best and play them all week. That calls for a different mental approach and it churns up some interesting and unexpected results - especially in a round-robin format. Plus, it’s the end of the year – some players are in form, while others are, well, infirm. That skews the form chart even more dramatically.
Recent form suggests that the woman in best trim is Svetlana Kuznetsova, who won the Premier tournament in Beijing earlier this month. But the hottest hands at the last Grand Slam of the year belonged to Caroline Wozniacki, a finalist, and Serena, a semifinalist (and an especially YouTube-worthy one at that). And Serena’s already the bookmaker's favorite to win the next major, the 2010 Australian Open.
The infirm category includes just about everyone, from Caroline Wozniacki (thigh?) to Jelena Jankovic (wrist?) to Victoria Azarenka (shoulder?) and Venus Williams (knee?).
LOOKING ELSEWHERE
Of course, few of these limping woman warriors have a need for walkers or rocking chairs. One of the players, Baby Caroline, is still a teenager. This may be why, in terms of total matches played this year, Caroline Wozniacki is the new Jelena Jankovic; she played at least 25 percent more matches than all the others.
Speaking of the others, they’re twentysomethings, but several are close to thirtysomething, which is geriatric by tennis standards. Maybe that’s why the WTA website calls this year’s group “relatively mature.” (That’s a phrase to save for later use, isn’t it?) You have to love these women…if only for making the rest of us feel a bit younger.
If you were so inclined, you could group the players into three age categories:
The golden girls (28-29) – Venus, Serena, Elena
The green kangaroos (23-24) – Jelena, Svetlana, Dinara
The young ‘uns (19-20) – Victoria, Caroline
Will the golden girls use their experience and “relatively mature” tennis skills to show who’s boss? Will the green kangaroos step out of the long shadows cast by the Williams sisters, and step up in the manner of the hard-charging, grunting, Stella McCartney-modeling young ‘uns? We'll find out soon enough and hopefully see some good tennis in the process.