The future of the WTA. It’s been lost in the fog for a few years now. We shine the light ahead and find no horizon in sight. The women’s game is getting older, we’ve heard. There’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe it’s healthier. But it robs the sport of one sort of excitement, that of getting a first look at a fresh new face whom you know is going to come into your life and maybe change it in some way, a player you’ll love and hate and hate and love in various ways for the next 10 years. Yes, the world No. 1, Caroline Wozniacki, is just 20, but at the moment she remains a future by default, an alternate future, a queen by abdication, rather than someone who has taken the sport into her hands, like a Seles or Graf or the Martinas or the Williamses or a dozen others over the years.
Last night, after sitting in a small press conference with Grigor Dimitrov for half an hour or so, my friend Tom Tebbutt, formerly of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and I agreed that those are the moments you always remember, when you can say you saw a potential future star before the world was aware of his existence. Tom mentioned seeing Djokovic and Murray here, in the same room, very early on. I talked about a drive around Key Biscayne with a 17-year-old, blond-highlight-sporting Roger Federer in 1999. The same was even truer when I used to write about music. The only thing that mattered to anyone was finding the latest indie band. By the time they got to their third album, no one cared if it was any good or not. We were on to the next group.
With those thoughts in mind, I walked out to Court 18 in Melbourne Park’s forgotten back lot this morning at 11:00. First up there was Bojana Jovanovski, a 19-year-old from Serbia. Now you may be thinking it’s a bit of a stretch to think that Jovanovski, or anyone, will be the next Federer or Serena. And it is. Chances are I'd be looking at the next, I don't know, Anastasia Rodionova. But it was fun to imagine big things anyway as I sat down to see her play. Possibility beats reality almost every time.
The reason I was out there was that Jovanovski, like Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic a native of Belgrade, just had what you might call a breakout run in Sydney. After qualifying, she beat three quality pros, Kaia Kanepi, Aravane Rezai, and Flavia Penetta, all in straight sets, to reach the semis. There she lost a tight two-setter to eventual champion Li Na. By the time I got to Court 10, though, it seemed like the run was over and the future was on hold again. Jovanovski was down to 5-1 to Kai-Chen Chang, currently ranked No. 84 in the world.
I must be good luck, because after I arrived Jovanovski won 11 of the next 12 games and the match. Her comeback was a struggle at first. She fought through numerous deuce games in the first set as she slowly found her range. Now we know one thing about Jovanovski: She’s tough. This wasn’t a luck out situation, like the one Gael Monfils stumbled into yesterday. Jovanovski earned her comeback.
Everything appears to be earned for her. Unlike Ivanovic or Henin, there’s nothing effortless or elegant about the way she hits the ball. She slugs flat shots off both sides, with a slightly original twist on the grunt. She sounds like she’s saying “bad” to the ball as she bashes it away for whatever transgression it has committed. In this way Jovanovski reminds me less of Ivanovic and Jankovic and more of Monica Seles—the thick reddish hair also helps the comparison.
Jovanovski is tall (nearly 5-foot-10) and looks older than her age. Like so many tennis players these days, she comes from pro athlete stock. Her father and coach, Zoran, is a former football player. She loves the baseline the way you would expect, and uses the swing volley whenever she can when she finds herself at the net. Her serve isn’t a weapon, and the second delivery is plain weak. She launches herself into her backhand in a way that will be familiar to any WTA fan of the last 10 years. It’s her most reliable shot, though not her favorite. That would be her forehand, which is an interesting stroke. She uses a Western grip, but she hits the ball flat whenever she can. I may find this interesting because that’s how I hit my forehand, and most people who see it find it strange. It is strange; I’ve been told it requires loose wrists. One advantage of it is that you can take a shoulder high ball and, rather than having to hit it even higher with topspin, take it on the rise and knock it flat. Jovanovski did that to great effect down the line during the time I was watching.
There’s no shortage of fighters in the WTA these days. The women go to war more tenaciously than the men. Is Jovanovski something more? Is she more than a garden-variety basher? If her performance through the second set today is any indication, the answer should be yes. At first she struggled with her low forehand, a common problem for players with Western grips. But as the match wore on she showed a knack for running to her right, taking pace off the ball, and flipping a neat little short angle forehand that inevitably caught her opponent going the other way. And when she was pushed backward, she was thoughtful enough to go to the moonball now and then.
You never know about the long-term future, and in a way it’s not worth worrying about. I liked watching Jovanovski today—the familiar forehand, the “bad” grunt, the fight out of the abyss—and that should be enough. The immediate future for her is an interesting one: She plays No. 2 seed Vera Zvonareva next. She’ll learn a lot there.
Favorite moment for today: Serving at 6-5, Jovanovski lost two points in a row. At that moment, a group of kids stood up and walked out, right in her line of sight. I thought she was going to throw her hands up in outrage, the way so many other pros would. But she kept on with her motion, as if no one were there. If she can keep that kind of composure, she’ll have a future.