Up to Eleven

If you recall that immortal studio tour scene in the rockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, you'll remember that the hilarious scene was driven by dimwit guitarist Nigel Tufnel's inability to explain why the volume control on his Marshall amp went from a no. 1 setting to eleven - rather than the standard 10. Maria Sharapova might understand a dimension of this issue better than most, because her greatest asset - her determination - has a down side that sometimes kicks into play:  Her emotional dial sometimes goes to 11, and instead of making her more focused and dangerous, it causes her to force the action in an awkward, almost negative way that we might call over-effort.

You can always tell when this happens, because suddenly, everything seems out of sync. Oh, she shrieks with as much gusto as ever; she throws her full weight into her strokes; she presses the attack with full enthusiasm. But everything is a little off: the ball flies slower than her racket speed suggests it ought, the climactic scream is an almost imperceptible beat too early, too late, or too loud (which, in Sharapova's case, is saying a lot), her body gets wrenched into an odd configuration, and you can see how much she wants to win when she contorts herself, as if she had hinges instead of joints, as she clenches her fist and cries, "Come on."

It was like that today, at the end of Sharapova's match with resurgent Dinara Safina. With a 7-6, 5-2 lead it looked as if Safina was struggling with Lindsay Davenport Disease (LDD), a relatively rare condition that, like shingles, can strike at unexpected times, and which appears to be linked to acute self-consciousness on a major occasion. LDD is often associated with being paired against an overtly aggressive, self-confident opponent.

But in an unexpected reversal, Safina fought the disease and finally channeled "focused" Lindsay instead of "WTF?" Lindsay, brushed off a match point, and went on to win the set in a tiebreaker, and the match, 6-2 in the third. She smoothly dialed her game from 7 to 10 over that period, while Sharapova fluctuated between no. 8 and 9, producing too much unwanted feedback.

Sharapova lost control of the match in the sixth game of the third set, thanks partly to back-to-back points that vividly demonstrated why Sharapova is less effective on clay than any other surface. At 15-all, she cracked a terrific first serve to the forehand; Safina barely got her racket on the ball, lofting it skyward. But instead of playing the overhead or choosing the open court, Sharapova cranked the dial past 10 and tried to destroy the ball with a roundhouse forehand that she drove right into the net.

Sharapova inched the dial slightly higher, hitting another great serve - another ball with the kind of velocity that, on a hard court, would have produced a clean ace or feeble frame return. But Safina dug that one out, too, and after a brief rally she hit a clean forehand winner. Safina faltered on her first break point. driving a routine backhand service return long. It was a good time for Sharapova to re-group, perhaps dial back to a very smooth, musical 10; instead she moved the dial even higher; she made a fist, bunched up, and screamed, "You choker!"

I'll leave it to others to figure out to whom she was referring.

On the next break point, Sharapova smacked a winner down-the-line, but there was so little room left on the dial that it was too late. She couldn't resist the final, slight twist. The dial would go no further. Eleven! She screamed, "Kick her [f-bomb, followed by rhymes with "lass"]."

Neither of those reactions troubled me one bit; they were delivered while the French crowd, which was predictably anti-Sharapova, was making too much noise for the umpire or Safina to hear. Full-out competition often isn't pretty, even when a pretty girl is practicing it. In fact, one of Sharapova's distinctions is that she still plays with the kind of vengeance you might expect from a hideous creature seeking vengeance on the world.

So there was Sharapova, at no. 11 when a 9 or 10 might have served her better. Unfortunately, Sharapova's dial only moves in one direction, and once she hits 11 she's stuck there. At deuce she over-swung on a backhand off the service return and netted the ball. A Safina error restored deuce, but another pair of ghastly forehand errors - oh, if only the dial went the other way! - ended it.

I had to ask about this in the press conference that soon followed, but I wanted to do it subtly - perhaps at no. 9 on my own dial. Here's our exchange:

Q.  You can be very tough on yourself, especially in tight situations.  Is there a downside to that?

The reply seemed both honest and sort of convoluted, so I followed up: What's the price you pay when you actually push that hard?

Call me crazy, but I'll take her in that mood over any other. Unlike the spectators who literally booed Sharapova of the court on this sunny afternoon, I felt for Sharapova - nice as it was to see Safina beaming and aglow in her own presser, her eyes disappearing into two tiny black holes because of her enormous grin. Incidentally, I bumped into Safina's mom (and she's the spitting image) and dad shortly after the match, and they told me they had already texted Safina's brother Marat, who's also said to play a little tennis now and then. He wasted no time replying to his kid sister.

And what would it mean if the Safin's became the first brother and sister combination to win majors?

Safina said, "Once we do this we can put really the racket on the wall and say we did everything we could."

The accomplishment would still leave Safina two majors behind Sharapova, but there are certain advantages when you can consistently dial it up to 10 - despite the pitfalls of having an 11.