!Vz1by Bobby Chintapalli, Contributing Writer
‘Big babe tennis’ is about strong women who know how to smack a tennis ball harder than the rest. The Top 100 is loaded with them—Maria Sharapova, of course, but also Elena Dementieva, Nadia Petrova, Dinara Safina and, more recently, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Alisa Kleybanova. Yet it’s a Russian not on this list who has the best ranking of them all right now. Today, Vera Zvonareva took the No. 2 spot from a big babe you may have heard of, Serena Williams. Small babes can play, too.
It’s a career-high ranking for Zvonareva and a bit of a surprise for many of us, partly because we’ve been busy obsessing over another not-so-big babe’s rise to the top spot. So how did Zvonareva do it? I mean, she’s short and everything. (All right, she’s not short, but at just under 5’8” she’s shorter than 12 of the 17 Top 100 Russians.) She was ranked outside the Top 20 only a few months ago. Sure, she won an Olympic bronze medal and three Grand Slam doubles titles in past years, and reached two Grand Slam finals in a row this year. But No. 2 in the world…really?
You’re not immediately sure what Zvonareva did, but you know she did something right. It’s fitting, because that’s how she can make her opponents feel when she plays well. Ask Melanie Oudin. After her quarterfinal loss to Zvonareva in Charleston, Oudin seemed as discombobulated as the word sounds. “I did not hit a clean ball…and she really made me hit like that because she started changing everything up on me,” she said, more breathlessly than usual. “I started shanking. I would hit the tip of my racquet and all kinds of stuff.”
Zvonareva’s got skills beyond the ability to vary spin and pace and make Melanie Oudin shank a lot. Like the know-how to hit a backhand down the line or crosscourt without setting up all that differently. “It’s very hard to read the shot,” said Kim Clijsters after her fourth-round loss to Zvonareva at Wimbledon. “Especially when she goes down the line, it’s like a last-second.”
Now the results are paying off for her, literally. Zvonareva, who turned pro a decade ago, earned nearly 30 percent of her career prize money this year alone. That might have a little something to do with her win percentage: For her career it’s around 68 percent; for the year it’s around 73 percent. By comparison, this year’s win percentage for Francesca Schiavone, who herself had a year worth celebrating with a naked run down the Champs-Élysées, is 66 percent.
There have been bumps along the way, of course. Last February, Zvonareva reached a career-high No. 5, but an ankle injury tripped her up, causing her to miss the French Open and struggle for at least half the year. At the start of the year it wasn’t clear if she’d get that momentum back. She says she’s fully recovered now, and perhaps the memories of that injury and others before it have made her more excited to be out there practicing, which has made it easier for her to do all this winning.
There have also been some coaching changes. The much-Googled, oft-ogled Sergey Demekhin is her third coach in the past year. Things seem to be going well though. She said he’s gotten familiar enough with her game to give actionable advice and comfortable enough with her to know how to give it.
And, yes, there’s been some on-court wackiness. We’ve seen tears, like the ones partner Elena Vesnina spent a whole set of the Wimbledon doubles final wiping away. We’ve seen racquet-smashing and, for good measure, wicker-kicking. Yet the drama’s become a smaller part of the bigger Zvonareva picture. Commentators who begin and end with “emotional meltdowns” do her an injustice…and not enough homework. This year she’s shown that she’s more than the sum of the racquets she’s smashed and the tears she’s shed.
Off court, that’s easy to see. Zvonareva is composed, articulate and downright nerdy. (She’s working on a second degree, in International Economic Relations no less.) I’ve found those qualities also make her an excellent interviewee. She’s surprisingly open, attentive and voluble. (Sometimes she’ll go on longer than you expect, and just when you start wondering if she’s answering the right question, she’ll wrap it up with a reference to the question.) That’s been true even when she’s lost and acted up in the process, as she did in that one-sided Charleston final against an unbeatable Sam Stosur.
Zvonareva came to her post-match interview within 10 minutes of that match ending. A dozen or so of us sat in the small room, saying nothing at first, mindful perhaps of the score (and the wicker). Less comfortable with silence than I should be (according to my sisters anyway), I finally blurted out a question. As usual, Zvonareva spoke calmly and at length. Was this really the same woman we saw on court just 10 minutes ago? She certainly wasn’t Svetlana Kuznetsova glumly mumbling after her Cincinnati loss, or Yanina Wickmayer uttering monosyllabic responses after hers. I may not have agreed with some of Zvonareva’s answers, but I appreciated that she gave them her full attention.
The thing is, the way Zvonareva carries herself off court and the way she can sometimes melt down on court both owe more than a little to the same quality—her perfectionism. Zvonareva wants to do everything as well as she can, regardless of the results. A perfectionist “squeezed like a lemon” can stay on YouTube forever—or maybe become the No. 2 tennis player in the world.