Sunday’s Stanford final, between Marion Bartoli and Venus Williams, was a family affair in more than one sense. On the surface, it was a clash between two women with highly unorthodox and highly successful tennis fathers. On another level, it was a fight between two branches of the genetic family tree of women’s tennis.
Both originated with Monica Seles and the emphasis on two-handed slugging and preemptive rallying that she brought to the WTA in the late 80s. A decade later, Venus took those concepts and, literally, ran with them. No woman since has caught up with the evolutionary leap that she and her sister subsequently made, because no woman has combined hitting and running the way they have. That includes France's Marion Bartoli. But she and her father, Dr. Walter Bartoli, were resourceful: They took the Seles template and twisted—mutated—it in a very personal and idiosyncratic direction. They kept the two-handed strokes and the first-strike mentality, then took her racquet and added two inches at the top, to give her more reach, and shaved the handle down to a tour-low 4 inches, to help increase her racquet-head speed. Throw in a rigidly orchestrated service motion and a lot of between-point hopping around and you have one very distinctive version of how the sport can be played in the post-Seles era. While the WTA awaits the woman who can match what the Williamses do, no one is expecting, or even hoping, that any young girl will copy the style that Bartoli and her father have invented. Her genetic branch ends with her.
Which is too bad in a way, because when she’s got all of her many working parts in order, Bartoli is a kick to watch. The practice swings and boxing-style shuffles between points, the super-sized racquet, the hovering, mad-scientist presence of her father, the stories of her doing lunges off park benches an hour before a match: All of that distracts you from her greatest talent, the simple ability to time the ball. Bartoli’s swings are nothing more than double-handed swipes through the hitting zone—they make Seles’ backhand look like Gabriela Sabatini’s—but they’re hit so cleanly and so far out in front of her that she can create sharp angles without sacrificing any acceleration.
Bartoli’s game, from her pancake-flat strokes to her dedication to off-beat training to her extra-long racquet, is an elaborate and surprisingly successful effort to hide her biggest weaknesses, her size, movement and stamina. To beat good players, she must dictate from the middle of the court—if she’s running and reaching, she’s in trouble. From the first game yesterday, she was able to stand near the center hash mark and fire her shots to the corners. I waited for Williams to find a way to reverse this dynamic, but she remained a step behind from the beginning of most points. This was particularly true on Venus’ serve, which the Frenchwoman was anticipating and punishing. When Williams tried to take control with a penetrating shot, she missed; she was under the kind of pressure that only a player like Bartoli, who takes everything on the rise, can create. She won the first set easily, should have won the second routinely, yet still kept her grip on the rallies through the third. And she didn’t back into the win. Serving for the match at 5-4, 0-30, Bartoli turned the momentum back in her favor with one of her patented hard-angle backhands that even Venus couldn’t catch up to, then finished it with two service winners for her second tournament win of 2009.
Afterward, Bartoli, with charming and disarming honesty, said that she had been extremely nervous trying to finish Venus off, and that the once-a-set on-court visits from her father had helped her calm down. Dr. Walter was able to chat with her because of the WTA’s much-maligned coaching rule, which allows a player to consult with someone on a changeover one time per set. Would Marion have held it together without Dr. Walter's words? We’ll never know. Is this too much of a crutch in what we like to call an individual sport? Not in my opinion. If you’ve ever had a coach talk to you on a sideline, you know that the gap between hearing and doing, between knowing what you should think and actually thinking it, between planning and execution, remains a wide one for any player. Hitting two winning serves at 5-4, 30-30 in the third set of a final against Venus Williams qualifies as an individual accomplishment to me. I wouldn’t have been any more impressed if she’d done it without any sanctioned encouragement.
I wrote an article recently for Tennis Magazine where I lamented the cookie-cutter, bash-and-shriek quality of women’s tennis today. In part it’s a style that’s been developed to try to keep up with the new levels of pace and speed that the Williamses brought to the sport. You need to know how to bang the ball now before you can try to do anything more artistic with it. Bartoli is an extreme case of a player trying to manufacture a style that works in that environment, that allows someone without anything like the Williams sisters’ athleticism to hang around the Top 20. In doing so, she has differentiated herself from the rest of the women—for better and for worse, Bartoli is unique; her game has a personality, even if it’s an eccentric's. Where the Williamses advanced the sport with their legs, Bartoli has survived with her hands. Yesterday her branch of the family tree made a rare triumph. Was it survival of the fittest? Uh, not quite. Let’s call it survival of the maddest.