Nadia Petrova finally got the monkey off her back Sunday, winning her maiden pro title at Linz, in her sixth year on the tour.
A lot of pundits will find a way to have a little fun with this (Bob Larson has already jumped all over the gimme, declaring that Petrova was suffering from “Anna Kournikova disease”), and the fact that Patty Schnyder was injured—and still managed to force five breaks of serve in the first six games of the second set—amply demonstrated that even under favorable circumstances, Petrova’s rallying cry is “This match is mine to lose!”
Routine choking is a pretty familiar if woeful feature of the WTA and ATP Tours. There are scads of players out there who find ways to lose matches they either should win, or, worse yet, find themselves in a position to win.
And while we rarely see industrial-grade, “I can’t stand to watch, I must watch” meltdowns comparable to, oh, Jana Novotna’s 1993 collapse against Steffi Graf, choking on the big stage is frequent enough to be constitute a legitimate variant on the routine choke—call it Championship Choking. It's kind of like flying Air Gag, but going first class instead of tourist; buying the fully-loaded minivan (four DVD screens!) instead of the boring stripper.
Of course, it’s kind of weird to be one of the last two or four players left standing when the smoke has cleared from a draw and then end up being labeled a choker. So what does that make your run-of-the-mill second-round loser, a model of competitive virtue?
Anyway, Championship Choking usually suggests one or both of two shortcomings: a lack of confidence against top players (which is often accompanied by an inverse, surfeit of confidence in matches against opponents to whom the choker feels superior), or a tendency to choke that grows more pronounced as the player advances through the draw (call it counter-confidence: the opposite of becoming increasingly emboldened by wins).
Among blue-chip players, Kim Clijsters, Amelie Mauresmo and Lindsay Davenport have serious Championship Choker tendencies; on the men’s side, Ivan Lendl, pre-1984, wrote the book on Championship Choking, but Juan Carlos Ferrero contributed a few chapters in more recent times, as has Yevgeny Kafelnikov.
There is an easy litmus test for determining who out there is a CC: Just ask yourself, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much faith do I have that so-and-so will rise to this occasion and win?"
Anybody who scores below a 6 must be considered part of the big, red-faced, excuse-making, “who me?” family of chokers.
Personally, I was very glad to see Nadia get over the choking hump, even though it took the hand of God to help her over.
She’s a player I’ve known and followed ever since her outstanding but no less checkered junior career (I witnessed that 6-0 third-set loss to Elena Dementieva in the Orange Bowl, and I can tell you, it was pretty ugly).
Curiously, though, despite being linked in CC infamy with Kournikova, Nadia is about as different from Anna as two human beings can get. She’s an introspective, level-headed young woman whose biggest problem may her own capacity for nuanced thinking and emotional complexity—qualities that are not the first ones that pop to mind when you’re trying to define the word "Champion."
Yet Petrova’s resume is a telling and inspirational one, with J-O-C-K—rather than sensitive spiritual soul—stamped all over it. Her parents were Soviet-era Olympic-level competitors who sought economic opportunity by hiring out as coaches in Egypt. Nadia’s father, Victor Petrov, was a hammer thrower; Nadejda Illina was a bronze medal winner at the Montreal Olympic Games in the 400-meter relay (the irony is acute; Petrova hits a beautiful ball, with clean, compact strokes, but her greatest weakness is relatively poor movement).
A dearth of coaches and solid training sites in the Middle East persuaded the Petrovas to allow their barely teen-aged daughter to accept sponsorship from Andrei Glinski, a Polish entrepreneur who then whisked Petrova away to his home and financed her training and coaching. She truly was a teen-aged vagabond—a girl without a country, dealing with high expectations and the pressures they create at an age when her counterparts in the U.S. had few concerns beyond their algebra homework, or deciding what to wear for the homecoming football game.
No matter how you arrange the pieces, nothing in Petrova's hardcore athletic background and history suggests that she should be a choker. But that's the beauty of the breed. Remember, every choker is a potential champ, as Ivan Lendl—and Martina Navratilova—demonstrated. A choker is just a wayward competitor—tennis's version of Jonathan Edwards's famous Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God—seeking redemption. Some find it (just ask Lendl, or that other prodigious former choker, Navratilova), others don't.
My own theory on this is that choking hits Petrova in the worst possible way—the physiology of choking plays right into her most glaring shortcoming. The money quote is in this report:
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Of course, that’s what choking does to everyone. And note that Petrova’s been a terrific doubles player (11 titles), a distinction that in this case just underscores her plight, for some of the biggest of chokers have always been some of the very best and calmest of performers—when they have a doubles partner to provide them with support, bear a portion of the pressure, or somehow force them to rise above themselves.
Funny game, that tennis . . .