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Bartoli’s stunning retirement, Sharapova and Connors split, & Federer’s racquet
August 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
What will happen to Bartoli when the attention dies down?
It has been an entirely unpredictable week in tennis, beginning with Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli’s shocking announcement of her retirement on Tuesday, Roger Federer’s decision around the same time that he ditched his prototype racquet and gone back to his old Wilson Pro Staff, the USTA’s grand announcement of a roof to be built over Arthur Ashe Stadium, and on Friday the revelation that Maria Sharapova had parted with coach Jimmy Connors after just one month (and only one match).
Bartoli said that she knew she was done after her opening round loss to Simona Halep in Cincinnati. She has put her body through the ringer over the past 13 years and just could not face another day of having to spend a half hour just getting herself to walk regularly. Here is a news story I wrote on her comments to a small group on us on Thursday morning.
The Frenchwoman says that there will be no comeback as she approaches everything in her life full on, and she isn’t washy washy about her decision. I, like many others who have covered her over the years, was very surprised at the decision, because I spoke to her on three occasions during the Rogers Cup in Toronto and she gave absolutely no indication that she was ready to retire. She did admit that she was exhausted, but she spoke with bright eyes and enthusiasm about an assault on this year’s US Open and given that she has been a very good hard court player, it was not out of the realm of possibility that she could make a charge to the semis, or even the final, or even win it if her draw broke right again.
But that doesn’t matter as she had lost her motivation and will to compete. She is only 28 years old, and she joins an all-star list of women players who has retired prematurely over the past decade: Anna Kournikova, Martina Hingis, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, Dinara Safina and Elena Dementieva. All of them had different reasons for doing so. Most cited injuries, other mentioned a bit of burnout. Three came back while the three Russians have stayed on the sidelines.
As Bartoli said, every player path is different and hers has been radically so. What will likely be forgotten post her wonderful Wimbledon run is what chaotic year she has leading up to London: her split with her father, hiring and firing coaches, reuniting with him, splitting again. She had some very tough moments this season, but those all seemingly were washed away when she was finally able to raise the big trophy at her cherished locale. But maybe she could not imagine continuing on the tennis treadmill without her dad around anymore? Do not dismiss that possibility as she had some very difficult and at times lonely periods without him this season.
But what did Bartoli see the future hold for her after that? She isn’t sure other than attending tournaments to watch her new set of friends (other French players on the Fed Cup team), going to some art galleries and maybe taking up ballet again. She has been the center of attention since she won Wimbledon. Even today she was exchanging tweets with other players. She will head to New York for the US Open and is sure to get some more attention there.
But what then after the lights go down, people stop calling her as much, the thrill of competition is no longer there and she has no tangible goals? That’s when the full weight of her decision will fall on her. The tennis world is hoping she makes an easy transition, but the thought here is that it won’t be anything close to that.
The Sharapova-Connors split
No one who has spent a fair amount of time around Sharapova and Connors were surprised that they split after just a month. In fact, folks close to both were surprised that they were going to try out a full time coaching pupil relationships to begin with. Neither is easy going, they are both Type-A personalities with a lot to say about everything and have very definitive ways of seeing how the sport should be played. The only tangible thing that Connors could have given to Sharapova was enough self-belief to really know she has enough game to beat Serena. He couldn’t help her with two areas of her game where she really needs help – her second serve and her volley. She thought that he could teach her his wise ways, but she is not that trusting of a person, or that patient, so the impression he made in the first couple of weeks of their partnership could not have been a good one.
The last time they worked together, for to weeks back in 2007, she had a couple of buffers around her in her traveling coach Michael Joyce and her dad Yuri. This time around it was one on one and I cannot imagine how she took to some of his very direct comments when – and this is very important to realize – he has rarely followed her career closely or women’s tennis at all so she probably didn’t think he was offering anything of real value in the context of her (not his) career.
So Sharapova pulled the rip cord quickly and now will head to the US Open without a full time coach, but likely with someone in tow, possibly one of her hitting partners, maybe even her dad or possibly one of her boyfriend, Grigor Dimitrov’s Swedish coaches. For more info, here is the news story I wrote on it this morning.
Federer and his racquet
Roger Federer is scheduled to play Rafael Nadal on Friday night in Cincinnati in a match where he will be a serious underdog in. Even getting a set in that match given how shaky he’s been over the past few months and how good Nadal has been in the past week and a half will give him a psychological boost. But his decision to test a prototype racket for more than a month and then bail on it in Cincy is not a good sign. Sure, his smaller head Wilson Pro Staff worked well for him for much of his career, but it hasn’t this year. However, if he was feeling uncomfortable with the prototype, he really had no choice if he was going to be comfortable in matches but to chuck it back into his racquet bag for the time being. But that does little more than put him back at square one. A win over Nadal would put him in US Open final four contention. A quick loss would mean he’s in danger of a first week exit.
The USTA has received a lot of flack (especially from some overseas reporters) about the lack of a roof on Arthur Ashe stadium. But on Thursday the organization announced plans for not only a roof on Ashe, but one of the new Armstrong stadium, and a new Grandstand court, and for an entire redesign of the site. It looks very impressive to me (see the Picture of the day on the home page) and eventually will put the USO ahead of the rest of the majors facility wise. Well done. Read here.
Happiness is no tennis at the dinner table
August 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
‘Li Na, Li Na, do this Li Na.’
FROM THE ROGER’S CUP IN TORONTO – Li Na and her husband Dennis don’t talk tennis at the dinner table. Or at least away from tennis sites. That’s likely why every time she talks about him she does so with a smile on her face. “Out of the tennis court we never talk about tennis, so that’s why we can keep a long marriage.”
LI had another reason to smile on Thursday after she edged Ana Ivanovic 3-6 6-1 7-6 (5) in a match that for little while appeared to be in the Serbian’s hands, but once again she could not find a way to best a top player and went down. She was up 5-2, served for the contest at 5-3, but then Li began to deliver hammer shots with her devastating backhand crosscourt and down the line, with slice and body serves and some deep and impossible to touch forehands. Ivanovic did not choke the match, but she could not seem to bring her ‘A’ game when it mattered most. At 5-5 in the tiebreaker, Li nailed a forehand crosscourt winner. On match point with the ball into her favored forehand side, Ivanovic flew one long.
Li’s coach of one year now, Carlos Rodriguez is not with her on tis trip, but they are communicating via email. He will be in Cincinnati with her next week. Having Rodriguez around has even helped her marriage and how Dennis deals with her on court when Carlos isn’t around.
“Every time [Carlos] was like say, Relax. I say, I already relaxed. He say, No, you should even more. I was like, Okay. But it’s very tough, because my husband also is my ex‑coach. Sometimes he also has some idea, but if he say something I didn’t want listening all the time. So now I think he got a little bit smart. If he want to do something he talk to Carlos, and then Carlos talk to me. I was like, Okay, I have to do that because Carlos say I have to do. Because if like two coaches say the different thing, it was a little bit of a fight because I didn’t know which one I listen. Now I think they do pretty good job. They make together first and then say, Li Na, you have to do this. Li Na, you have to do that. Same like here, because Carlos is not here, but my husband always say, Oh, Carlos say you should… So I was like, Okay.”
Li one of the WTA’s most endearing characters. She has a terrific sense of humor and enjoys a good laugh even at her own expense. She will have another tough contest in the next round when she faces Bank of the West Classic Classic champion Dominika Cibulkova who took down Roberta Vinci of Italy 6-3 7-6. Domi has her grove back and she will be more than pleased to play powerball with Li.
Two other women who can smack the ball moved ahead and will face off. Defending champ Petra Kvitova muscled up and took a 6-3, 6-3 victory over SoCal Open victor Sam Stosur, who looked a little fried. Kvitova knew that so she made sure to hang tough in long rallies. But she does not feel she can take that kind of risk against Sorana Cirstea who had perhaps had the best 18 hours periods of her life when she fought off two match points against Caro Wozniacki in a three hour match that ended at almost midnight and then came back on Thursday afternoon and took out Jelena Jankovic 6-3 6-4.
“I think I made a huge step forward today by backing up the win from yesterday, because I think this was one of the issues in the past,” Cirstea said. “I would have a good win but then I couldn’t really back it up.
Now I feel I’m more solid, and I’m taking every match the same and not focusing so much, ‘Oh, I just had a big win.’ I’m like, ‘Today is a new day, new match.’ I just have to do the same things I’m doing every single day. This kind of mentality, it’s helping me.”
Marion Bartoli retired down 7-6 1-0 to Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia and either has an abdominal injury or she just exhausted from Wimbledon. Read here.
Serena Williams smoked Kirsten Flipkens 6-0 6-3 and showed the Belgium just how hard it is to best two sisters in one event: Flipkens was the one who beat Venus Williams in round one.
Agnieszka Radwanska played the big points better than Sloane Stephens in a 6-1 7-6 win and said the young American just needs more experience.
Sara Errani is less than thrilled with Alize Cornet but beat her anyway France 7-5 7-6. Read about their ‘Vamos v Allez’ tiff here.
Venus’ long & winding road back to respectability
August 7, 2013 by
Venus still cannot crank up her serve.
FROM THE ROGERS CUP IN TORONTO – It is never easy to see a formerly great player decline. Roger Federer fans are experiencing that this year, and Pete Sampras fans experienced that at the beginning of this century. Those fans that love Martina Hingis got a whiff of that around 2003 and again in 2007 and even in her return in doubles in the past week or so, it’s pretty obvious to anyone who is watching her that she would be hard pressed to even crack the top 20 in singles if she chooses to go that route, even though a return to the top spot in doubles in quite possible.
The fans of Venus Williams are dealing with something altogether different though, as they are watching one of the most significant players of the Open Era struggle with an auto-immune disease and a series of injuries, this time a serious one to her back, which isn’t allowing her to play anywhere close to her prime. If one watched a tape of her stirring and ethereal victory over Lindsay Davenport in the 2005 Wimbledon final – perhaps the most well played women’s final in the past decade or even further — and then watched her go down to Kirsten Flipkens 0-6, 6-4, 6-2 in the first round of the Rogers Cup on Tuesday, a marked difference that is as glaring as her new partially red hair color. Her play in the last set and half of that loss was a good 70% below her 2005 level: she was wild and often weak off the ground, her return had little pop, she was a bit slow to the ball and once again, she could not crank up the serve that had struck fear into the heart of the rest of the tour when she first appeared on the WTA back in November of 1994.
Right now, Venus is shadow of her former great self and unless something radically changes in the next two weeks or so, it’s hard to see the 33-year-old even reaching the second week of the US Open. She hasn’t won the tournament since she went back to back in 2000-2001, but she remained very competitive there through 2010. In 2011, she began to be affected by Sjorden’s Syndrome and came out in public at the US Open and told the world of her troubles. Since then, she has had a couple of decent shorts spurts of play, but she has been unable to sustain that level, which is very understandable give that it has been hard enough for her just to find away to get her energy level up to live a decent day, then to practice, and then to play a handful of matches. But to able consistently sustain a top-10 level of play? No, she has not been there since last spring and yesterday it appeared like she might not even be able to pull off a top 50 level of play.
Perhaps she will in the future, but it is so hard to see a player –regardless of how great she once was — who has played only one good tournament this season (Charleston where she scored wins over Monica Puig, Varvara Lepchenko and Madison Keys before Serena belted her in the semis) rise up and start playing A-Level ball against when her back injury isn’t fully healed.
And it is not, because if it was she could have been able to go out on court against Flipkens and smoke serves, not go for 3/4s speed and have very little spin of any significance when she tried to slice or kick it.
“ I just really started serving a lot more in the last week, so I’m not really, 100% on the serve yet,” she said. “So it was better not to take too many risks and just do something I felt more comfortable with. This week I will definitely be practicing my serve a lot more and getting more confident in it. So definitely today my service games I didn’t feel like myself, because usually I step up to the line, I go for it a lot, but I didn’t really feel like I could do that today.”
Venus’ traveling coach/hitting partner David Witt told ESPN.com that her back is fine. He knows better than most, but if it really is fine, then why didn’t she just go all out on her serve, or decide to play doubles this week to get more matches in, or singles and doubles next week in Cincinnati, or singles in New Haven or singles and doubles at the US Open?
Because she feels that it is not and it’s very vulnerable.
“I have to be really easy on my back now,” she said. “I can’t force it. Doubles would be awesome, but it’s not an option right now. Hopefully I will just be able to obviously play at the Open.”
Venus is in a tricky position. She badly wants to be a contender again, and the most of the important of the season – Roland Garros through the US Open — will conclude in five weeks. If she can’t get on court, her season will essentially be a wash. She needs matches, but as we saw on Tuesday against Flipkens and in May in her losses to Laura Robson (Rome) and Ula Radwanska (Roland Garros), she also cannot win them at a 50% level. She realizes that she’s in a Catch -22.
“Coming back from injury, you have to build the confidence to just realize that you can come back and play without pain,” she said. “So I feel like I’m in that threshold of building confidence, and I really want to be able to play matches before the US Open. That’s a lot of what happened to me at the French, too. I played an intense and a really fun, exciting match, but I hadn’t played any matches. So it was like just a tough situation to be in. Do you play or you don’t play? So I feel like kind of in that situation now going into the US Open. Do you play or don’t play?”
She will play on, but until she feels confident enough to go for her shots and has enough court time to keep the yellow pill in the court, she won’t have the degree of success that she’d like too. She will be a sentimental favorite everywhere she goes (she received a lot of crowd support in Toronto) so that will make her feel good to a degree, but she’s a proud competitor and will not be able to easily accept losing to players whom she used to be able dust in matter of minutes.
That will be another one of her many tests mocking forward. She says her goal is to play the 2016 Rio Olympics – which is long three years away – and most of the tennis industry and her fan base hopes that she accomplishes that goal, but as of this week it looks like a reach – about as lengthy as one of her vintage 2005 stretch volleys that won her third Wimbledon crown.
Kleybanova’s return: she wants W’s
Speaking of warriors, former top 20 player Alisa Kleybanova took the court on Wednesday night against Canada’s beloved Genie Bouchard. It was Kleybanova’s first WTA level match since March of 2012, and only her second since she was diagnosed with cancer in the early summer of 2011. She began her comeback in May playing ITFs and then World Team Tennis, but that is not the same as a WTA level match against a promising up and comer who responded very well to playing at home.
Kleybanova’s ball striking was very decent, but not at her pre-cancer levels. That should not be expected. Like Venus, she needs matches, practice, and improved fitness — pretty much everything.
“I haven’t been getting tired recently at all. I have been playing and training every day,” she said.
“I’m back to normal, back to regular basics. Now it’s all about playing matches. It’s all about the competing thing an, all the points and playing the tournament, the atmosphere, handling the stress out there, getting used to it more because I have been out for a while. Now it’s everything a little bit new for me again. It takes time to get used to it.”
She is only 24, so age is not a factor in her comeback but clearly she went through a harrowing experience and although she feels healthy again, mentally it took her a lot of work just to be able to declare herself ready to give the sport a go again. She tried in March of 2012, but it was too soon and she grew disappointed. She didn’t give up, but it was not the right decision.
“I couldn’t deal with all the stress in my body and obviously felt I wasn’t ready yet, she said. “I took some time off. I was trying to get back on tour through [2012], but I always felt like I’m not there yet. So the middle of summer I decided just to take it easy and, you know, wait till the next year, because it’s very hard to every couple weeks set a goal and you feel like I’m not ready and move it again and then you’re not ready. So it’s just too much stress, trying to get ready for a certain event and then not participate. Basically it was pretty stressful mentally not to play for such a long time and like train and try to take time off because seeing I’m not ready. So it took me a lot of patience. I had to like really, you know, try to take it easy, not rush things. It was very, very difficult mentally, even more mental than physical.”
Here’s the thing about Kleybanova though: she’s just not happy to be back in court. Of course she’s happy that she has her health back, but results still matter to her. She was not thrilled that she was rarely chosen to play singles in World TeamTennis given that she was the most accomplished player on her team, but perhaps her coach saw that she wasn’t quite ready yet (she did lose to Hingis in singles in the WTT final) for prime time.
She might be in a few months time, but she does not appear to be just yet. She’s a smart person and terrific character who adds a lot of flavor to the tour. Let’s just hope she takes it easy on herself because at last of last night, grabbing some W’s seemed very important to her.
“I think no matter what I have been through, wins and losses are still important, because as an athlete I go on the court and with all my heart I want to win every match,” she said with tear welling up in her eyes.
So of course when you lose it’s very tough. So obviously you go out there to win. It’s always going to be tough. It’s never going to be like I go on the court, Okay, I lost, doesn’t matter. You always try to think like that, but it’s not always like that. But I know that right now I need to be even stronger than before, because to come back it’s going to take a while, it’s going to take maybe some not great matches as was today, but I need to go through this, I need to get this experience, and sometimes it’s not going to be very positive experience. I just have to get ready for that, because I know that my way won’t be easy and I need to go for it and believe that I can do it.”
Also of note
Stanford champ Dominica Cibulkova has done a nice job coming off her loss to Ana Ivanovic in Carlsbad, Beating Jana Cepalova in the first round and then taking out Angelique Kerber 6‑7 (0), 6‑2, 7‑5 in a marathon…Bouchard will get a much more severe test when she has to go up against defending champ Petra Kvitova on Wednesday night. BTW Kvitova says that she & her ‘friend’ Radek Stepanek will split fitness trainer Marek Vseticek’s time. They haven’t negotiated who gets him when tournaments are not combined…Caroline Wozniacki returns the same day and will play her friend Sorana Cirstea. ..Lauren Davis continues to be a tough out and bested Svetlana Kuznetsova both in qualifying and the first round, which earned her a match up against Marion Bartoli, who is also playing for the first time since Wimbledon. Here are a few of Bartoli’s most recent thoughts…Sania Mirza, who as gone gluten free, will play doubles with Zheng Jie through the US Open. Her former partner, Bethanie Mattek-Sands will not play doubles for the rest of the summer as she’s focusing on singles…Abigail Spears and Raquel-Kops-Jones, who defeated Hingis and Hantuchova last week in Carlsbad en route the title, also won Stanford the week prior, the first time the long time US duo has won back to back premiers. If I’m US Fed captain Mary Joe Fernandez, I’m going them a strong look for Fed Cup duty next season. Spears could play back-up singles if needed.
TR Retro Video: Marion Bartoli talks 2011 Wimbledon loss to Lisicki, why she asked parents to leave
July 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The TR Year-End Top 50s: The Women, Nos. 11-20
December 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Thus continues our review of the top 50 singles players on the ATP and WTA Tours. We resume with the women ranked Nos. 11 -20.
11. Marion Bartoli
It was another fairly productive year for France
