The Silent Struggle

A couple of colleagues and I had a little time with Ana Ivanovic today, and I happened to see her alone just as Rafael Nadal was starting to roll in his match against Novak Djokovic, before the formal interview began. I asked if she had seen the story we collaborated on recently for Play magazine.

"Yes," she said, enthusiastically, adding. "I put it up on my website, did you see it?"

I confessed I hadn't yet, and we chit-chatted a bit about the mechanics of her serve, which was less of a Gift than a millstone at times during her win over Jelena Jankovic yesterday. It's hard to get an accurate impression of Ivanovic from the television, although it may be more realistic - and in keeping with our times - to say it's hard to know the "real" Ana in person. That's a pretty sick idea, I know. But the reality is that nearly everyone knows her from the box or the web, so she invariably gets boxed in and caught up in a web of perception that becomes - like it or not - the dominant reality.

In person, Ana doesn't really suggest the anodyne, formidably pretty and proper girl that she may appear to be on court. For one thing, she's much taller, and more slender, than she appears on the box. And when she's not focused on her tennis, she's giggly - not vacuous or airhead giggly, but shy, tall girl giggly. She's a master of the self-conscious laugh that really means: Oh God, somebody is talking to me, I'd better not let on that I'm feeling a little self-conscious and insecure here! I say this because I sense that some people think Ivanovic is cultivating an image, or artfully concealing her inner (rhymes with) vitch. I don't think that's fair or accurate. Face-to-face, she's nowhere near as self-controlled and poised as she appears on the court.

Overhead where we sat, Nadal was whacking monster forehands at Djokovic. But we were torn away and ushered into a small room for the official interview. Nadal remained on her mind tough, because at one point, ESPN's Bonnie Ford asked if she sought to cultivate Nadal-like intensity, upon which she grew really animated, saying:

"Oh God, especially on clay! I just watched a few games and the heaviness of his ball, it's something. When I'm on court now, I try to imitate that." Perhaps she felt she was confessing a guilty pleasure, because she colored and laughed. "But it's unbelievable how he puts so much pressure on an opponent. They must think, "What I got to do, hit three lines to win a point?" We can learn from that and put it in our tennis."

"Your forehand looked pretty good in that last game or two yesterday," I ventured.

"I tried to do his forehand," Ana said, suddenly carving out an air forehand that conveyed to idea. Then she broke down laughing, as if the very idea was preposterous. Turning serious again, she said, "Really, I tried it with my sparring partner, because when he hit that way I could feel how much heavier it is to hit back. I think I should think more about the spin than try to flatten out the shot."

While Ana was articulating her Rafa wannabe fantasies, I couldn't help but think back to the earlier press conference with Dinara Safina. At that event, Safina spend a good amount of time confessing to waging a struggle not often acknowledged but common to players of her class.I cherry-picked the presser for these three quotes; that Safina went back to the subject so frequently itself is telling:

"So I started to deal with my emotions and I accept some things if they're not going my way. So I say, Okay, it's not going my way. I have to find something else. So maybe the years before I would say, Oh, I'm so unlucky. I cannot do this. So I would start to not even look for the answers. But now I'm trying every time, Okay, this is not working, but I'm going to find other solutions to still win a match when I'm not playing my best. "

Then: "Now, like even it was set of 5 2, maybe before it would be third set I would still fight. But like I could say all the match were in their hands. Then I would say I would just not play anymore, like would not fight for that. But now I'm like, Okay, I'm still going to hang in there and still maybe give extra ball, extra shot, or maybe do something else.So I start to always kind of search for something in the match.

And this: "As I said, I just have to go there and focus on myself, to play my game. It's going to be, again, the one who first start to dominate the point. Because she likes to be aggressive, and I want also to be aggressive. So just the one who is going to be more aggressive and who take the incentive in the point is going to win.

Finally: "It just comes from the mind. If in your mind kind of you want to be aggressive, you start already move much aggressive. You start to look like at the ball more, because you know you have to take your chances. It's just the way you take it, I think"

The common theme here is neither the challenge of remaining positive, nor the importance of playing aggessively. It's the inner battle to do those things - an inner battle that is frequently a determining factor in tennis, as we saw in Ivanovic's semifinal yesterday. Having to fight that battle on court is a distraction, and it drains emotions and energy that might be better spent on something else Winning that battle for good - meaning that one day you wake up and realize you no longer have to have that grinding inner dialogue with yourself - is critical to becoming a Grand Slam champ instead of journeyman or even an unpredictable, inconsistent contender (Sveta, Marat, are you out there?).

One reason the best players win so often is because that struggle is long over; the smoke on the battlefield has cleared and dead and wounded former selves have all been carted off. The best players are free to focus on things, petty details, considerations and awarenesses, that are nowhere near as significant, but happen to be the luxuries with which the great competitors can fill their medicine chests. Isn't it striking, how freely and imperturbably the best players compete? Wouldn't it be great to have trained your mind so well that a Grand Slam final is, at least in the terms we're contemplating here, really just another match, decided by how you match up with an opponent, and how well you play?

Ivanovic conceded that she was in a unique, pressure-filled situation yesterday. In fact, he coach Sven Groeneveld's major pre-match task, according to Ana, was making sure that nobody who would come into contact with her before the final leaked the news that a victory would earn her the number no. 1 ranking. If, like me, you were thinking, "No way she didn't know about that," you were, like me, wrong. She laughed as she expressed her sympathy for Sven having such an unenviable task.

"No, no, no," she insisted, "I really did not know. "They (Sven and her entourage) just didn't want me to have one more big thing on my mind in the match. They worked hard to make sure I would not be told."

I don't always put much stock in the "experience" factor; in and of itself, it's neither a good nor bad thing. Safina has a lot of experience, and the fact that until recently, not all of it has been good is still fresh in her mind. Some of those goblins might demand to be revisited, should things not go well for her. Ivanovic had a profound test yesterday and, despite a shaky start, she won the battle to stay positive, to remain aggressive. I don't know if it was her last, triumphant engagement on that front, butthe story of her last 12 months is largely the tale of how she's been prevailing in the clash that weighed so heavily on her final opponent's mind today.

It's funny, but wasn't it just yesterday that the story line in tennis was how refreshing it was to see the trio of emerging Serbian stars, pulling together to draw attention to, and bring honor upon, their recently stressed nation? It seems so different today, with Djokovic transcending his roots to become an internationally acclaimed star, living the life in Monte Carlo and chewing alternately on Roger Federer's or Rafael Nadal's behind? And the way Serbian girls rocketed to the top swiftly swept aside any notion that they were a Serbian tag-team, and forced upon them the honor of rivalry, which is essentially always a position of conflict (until you just get so old and weary that, like Chris and Martina, you stop even pretending that you have it in for each other).

I flew this idea by Ana, while we were talking about the way Jankovic mimicked her fist pump yesterday, milking it for laughs. She seemed to understand, and said, "Yes, I saw that, I just kind of turned and saw it out of the corner of my eye." She went to say, "Last year, all of us made huge step for Serbia, it was big boom. this year we came back as completely different players, trying to win titles."

She didn't have to fill in the rest of the sentence; Jankovic had done it, in an otherwise banal moment  in her press conference yesterday. She was asked the simple question: How do you think the final will go?  She replied:

"I don't know. I lost in the semifinal, and for me this tournament is over, and I'm thinking about my rest. I'm not thinking about the final."

I thought it a telling remark, what happened to Serbia? But new realities are in play, these two girls belong to the world now and the world, not just Serbia, belongs to them.  Ana Ivanovic is fully prepared and ready to win her first Grand Slam title. One more battle to go, and if Dinara has to fight hers in the mind, Ivanovic will prevail in the one decided in the material world, on clay.