Let’s back up and start with a tentative big-picture question:
Is the roadmap working?
In past summers, the word most frequently heard during the women’s summer season was one of the more depressing in tennis: “withdrawal.” Injuries and pullouts devastated the North American hard-court season and made the WTA look like a poor cousin to its male counterpart, the ATP, in the U.S. Open Series. This summer, while we may not have been given a blockbuster final or a Serena-Safina showdown for No. 1, we have at least seen the world's best women play tennis. The roadmap was designed to work in two ways: By lightening players’ workloads and narrowing the focus of fans by emphasizing a few significant events. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see how the first part of that equation has worked—will everyone still be ready to go in November?—but for the moment the WTA seems to have succeeded in defining more clearly which events should matter to players and spectators. The last two of those events, Cincinnati and Toronto, neither of which were mandatory tournaments, still featured draws that could fairly be called “loaded.”
The upshot in Canada was, as I said, not a classic final by any measure. But it did involve two very recognizable names, Maria Sharapova and Elena Dementieva, a vast improvement, from a marquee-maker's perspective, over 2009 runner-up Dominika Cibulkova. And while the 6-4, 6-3 score might tell you that Dementieva’s win wasn’t all that that close, it was nevertheless a deceptively absorbing match, especially for those of us who like our tennis hard earned rather than effortless.
Unusually, the more absorbing play came from the loser’s end. Sharapova, unseeded and thus forced to play one more match than her opponent, had trudged through a long week. By the time the first game was over on Sunday and she had double-faulted three times to be broken at love, she appeared to be a wounded warrior. She glanced irritably at her coach, she rotated her injured shoulder and grimaced, she fought against the wind that whipped across the court all afternoon. But while it wasn’t reflected in the score, she very nearly won.
Whatever the result, Sharapova was the player on top of the baseline dictating play. She was the one trying drop shots and fighting to find her range in the breeze without caving in and playing safe—an unthinkable idea for her. At the end of the first set, Sharapova’s coach, Michael Joyce, told her to stop trying to hit forcing shots when she was backed up; her arm was too tired for that, and she should just put some “air” under her shots and wait for a shorter ball. This was logical, sensitive advice, but Sharapova wasn’t having any of it: She curled her lip and said, outraged, “You mean push it?” She made it sound like an act of treasonable cowardice. Joyce finally managed to motivate her with a neat little turn of reverse psychology. “What do you want to do out here? You want to just get of here, or do you want to fight?” As he turned to walk away, he finished with, “You do whatever you want.”
Sharapova fought, of course. She forced Dementieva to work for 2 hours and through many multiple deuce games to finally beat her for just the third time in their 11 meetings. But while Sharapova made it much more interesting by throwing the kitchen sink at her opponent—she even tried rushing the net behind her returns late in the second set—her serve remains an issue. Just when you thought she had banished the double fault, it crept back in at crucial moments. More important for the long term is the fact that Sharapova has always been lifted above the mass of women players by her ability to hold serve—she was one of the few who could routinely go through two sets against a quality opponent without being broken. That’s not true at the moment, and no amount of fighting spirit or kitchen-sink tactical variety is going to make up for that.
As for Dementieva, she has made a quiet case to be a co-favorite, along with Serena Williams, at the U.S. Open–I don’t think you can put the world No. 1, Safina, up there with them at the moment. Dementieva beat Serena in the semis in Toronto, and she’s playing a game right now that reminds me, in its smooth practicality, of Andy Murray’s—they’re both experts at making their opponents uncomfortable. On Sunday she was content to hunch over, send the ball back safely near the middle of the court, and track down Sharapova’s riskier shots. But what looked like a simple strategy had its intelligent wrinkles. She directed floating backhand slices at Sharapova’s forehand, forcing her to generate her own pace while hitting with extra topspin, two things she doesn’t like to do. And when she did go on defense, Dementieva did it, like Murray, in a highly organized way. She recovered quickly, with no wasted motion, toward the center, and she put her stab returns in difficult spots for Sharapova to handle.
Like Maria, though, so much comes down to the serve with Elena. Through most of yesterday’s match, she was able to get it where she wanted. But when it came time to serve out the match, she reverted to, as Cliff Drysdale put it, “the old sidewinder,” her famously shaky low-toss slice second serve. But it was enough. When Dementieva finally won, she dropped to her knees, not something you see very often after a 6-4, 6-3 victory. As I said, this was a tough win rather than a beautiful one, and she earned that celebration. Has she also earned the pole position at the Open? Is she really ready, after all these years, to win her first major? You can look at it a couple of ways. The last two times this tournament was held in Toronto, it was won by the eventual U.S. Open champion. In 2005, that was Kim Clijsters, who made her own Slam breakthrough in Flushing. In 2007, it was Justine Henin. We know Dementieva is no Justine Henin, but if Clijsters can win one, I have to think the Russian can too.
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