The common trait that unites the best women's tennis players isn't the quality of their forehands or their ability to dart across the baseline. It's their presence. This is true for the men as well, but the stars of the WTA tend to arrive on tour with it fully formed. The men, with the recent exception of Rafael Nadal, who was pumping his fists of fury in his mid-teens, develop it through their on-court accomplishments. Roger Federer didn't make his Centre Court debut in cream trousers and a handbag.
But from the first time we saw them, Steffi Graf was a furiously shy fighter, Monica Seles was a grittily single-minded grunter, Venus and Serena were willfully unique teens in beads, and Maria Sharapova was gazing at her strings, doing hair-flips before her serve, and screaming bloody murder when she hit the ball. If you can impose your presence on another player from the beginning of a match, you force them to react to you—it's called getting in their heads. With help from her highly animated and faintly manic father, Yuri, in the stands, as well as her own diva strut, few players have ever entered the court, and the sport, with such aggressive concentration and desire.
Sharapova gave a player no choice: You had to react to her. That was Maria Stage 1, a period highlighted by three Grand Slam titles. After nearly a year away and a serious shoulder injury, she successfully entered Stage II in Paris last month and continued it at Wimbledon. Yuri was nowhere to be seen during his daughter's match on Centre Court today—apparently he's exploring, as hard as it may be to get your mind around, his love of the great outdoors. But the presence is still with Maria. On a shiny day, she was the bright white center of Centre Court, her beanpole figure, fluctuating shriek levels, and deliberate way of moving around the court—no motion is purposeless with Sharapova—making her a fixture for all eyes. Her lean and much shorter opponent, Gisela Dulko, while she's the faster and smoother player, looked like she was playing in very tall shadows. Still, by the end of the first set, Dulko had the crowd won over. We like to say that Sharapova is "good for tennis," but it will be a while before she
takes her turn as a beloved champion among the game's fans. Her presence is a little off-putting for opponents and listeners alike.
While Sharapova has kept her aggressive posture intact, this match proved she's not completely comfortable using it yet. It's obvious to say, but she reminded me of someone who hasn't played in a while. She hit the ball well when she had time; she remembered her game when it was absolutely necessary, at 0-3 in the second set; she fired winners early in rallies but missed if they lasted longer than a few shots; she didn't react well to Dulko's serve; and she struggled with balls out of her strike zone. Early in the second set, Sharapova was forced to run forward and bend for two short balls. She netted them both.
"There was no real gray area today," Sharapova said in subdued, resigned tones in her press conference afterward. "I had so many easy balls, and I just made unforced errors on those. When I've had those situations before, those balls would be pieces of cake, and today they weren't."
Dulko, to her credit, served as well as I've seen her, and she held a tough, multi-deuce final game in her Centre Court debut, when the world was waiting for her to fold. She called the match "the win of my life" afterward.
Sharapova was wrong-footed regularly, hit some mystifying second serves that landed many feet from the box—though she said she felt "no pain" in her shoulder—and rushed dozens of forehands into the net. From a technical perspective, she seemed to be swinging late and close to her body; grass really does do different things to the ball. At the same time, Sharapova battled for every shot, point, and piece of turf, and she willed herself to hold at 0-3 in the second and keep some degree of pressure on Dulko. The Russian also played a fabulous drop shot to save one match point and put a backhand return on the outside edge of the line to save another. But she gave away the last one because she didn't get all the way down for a forehand and sent it long.
Getting into perfect position will never be Sharapova's strong suit. In many ways, based on her natural athletic gifts and racquet skills, she is a supreme overachiever. Are the days of overachieving over? Should she get Yuri on her Sony Ericsson phone right now?
"This is not an overnight process," Sharapova said. "It's gonna take time, as much as it needs. I'm ready for it."
In other words, the old fierce presence isn't going anywhere, even if the "pieces of cake" get harder to find. Even in the latter years of Stage I, Sharapova was a quick-strike, up-and-down Slam champion, an Agassi rather than a Sampras, a player who could fly through two weeks untouched (see the 2006 U.S. Open) or suffer helplessly as her game abandoned her (see the 2007 Australian Open final). Today she gave us a little of both. I'd expect more of both—championship runs and flat-on-her-face disasters—over the next few years.
As for Wimbledon, is the tournament poorer without Maria? Is she as good for the game as some of us began to think when she was gone? Like I said, in their youths, many tennis greats are resented by fans as interlopers, and then embraced by those same fans as they age. A new champion is like a new person in our lives—it takes time to judge them for what they are and not keep wishing they would change. We may never forgive Sharapova her grunt, but today, while it still sounded pretty awful inside Centre Court, I didn't notice it much. I expected it from her. Like a friend's annoying habit, I'm starting to tune it out. It will help Sharapova if she's upstaged by a new and bolder generation of deci-belles. It will also help if she establishes an identity separate from her father.
All that's for the future. Today, during one point early in the third set, a ball by Dulko floated lazily toward the baseline. Sharapova couldn't tell whether it was going to be in or out. She struggled frantically to get her feet and body in a place where she could hit a shot at shoulder level. Just as she got there, the ball touched down an inch behind the line and was called out. Sharapova had started her swing from an awkward, tip-toe stance, but she ended up slapping through air as the ball went past. As she swung, she made a face that was equal parts relieved, intense, and humorously exasperated at her less-than-graceful stab at getting into position. I wondered: Could Maria Sharapova's blind competitiveness ever come to seem . . . cute?
Steve Tignor, TENNIS' executive editor, is covering Wimbledon for the magazine and TENNIS.com.