She was once just another little girl with a big forehand
July 12, 2004/>
The Sun-Herald
Simon Worrall recounts the day he played against a skinny 10-year-old with a big smile and even bigger groundstrokes who grew up to be a tennis superstar.
As I watched Maria Sharapova sink to her knees and cover her face with her hands as she became the third-youngest winner of the women's title at Wimbledon, I thought back to my own game with "Masha", as she is known to family and friends. It was April 1998 and I had flown to Bradenton, Florida, from New York to do a feature about the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Masha was only 10 at the time, but the courts were already buzzing about the willowy girl from Siberia with the crushing ground strokes and the winsome smile.
At the age of nine she had become the first child athlete to sign a million-dollar contract with IMG, the Chicago-based International Management Group that also represents models Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. Prince had already signed her up to use its racquets. Oakley supplied her with sunglasses. When she needed new tennis gear, she told me, all she had to do was call Nike. "If she goes on developing as she is at the moment," Bollettieri said as we watched her hit on a practice court, "she could become the next great female player. A new Hingis or Navratilova."
Sharapova's Wimbledon victory all but confirmed Bollettieri's prediction and the sponsors aren't wasting any time. Adding to her already solid portfolio, it has been estimated the teenager could earn up to $100 million in sponsorship in the next year. Hers is the ultimate rags to riches saga built on immense family sacrifice and determination. Sharapova arrived in the United States with her father from the Black Sea town of Sochi. The family had fled there from western Siberia after the Chernobyl disaster. Sharapova was seven and seeking a place at Bollittieri's academy. They had $700.
When we met three years later, Masha was like any other 10-year-old. She liked the Spice Girls; had a hamster called Mel; grumbled about long car trips and training too hard. She was a delightful child: bright, funny, with an effervescent personality and a bubbly sense of humour. Even then she brimmed with self-confidence. When I asked her whose game she admired most, she said with a grin: "Mine."
On the court she reminded me of the margay, a small wild cat, like a miniature leopard, that lives in the jungles of Central America. Her emerald-green eyes had the look of a creature who you knew would never quite belong to anyone but herself. She was still only "peanut-sized", as her father, Yuri, called her, with long, skinny legs and arms, corn-blonde hair, braces on her teeth and a dusting of freckles on her nose. But when she went to strike the ball, her little cat face would bunch into a snarl, her body would coil itself like a spring behind her racquet, she would hurl herself at the ball and, with an ear-splitting banshee scream that sent shivers down your spine, unleash a laser-guided groundstroke.
No girl in the history of tennis had hit a tennis ball as hard as Maria Sharapova.
As Bollettieri, who has masterminded the careers of plenty of hard-hitters, including Monica Seles and Mary Pierce, eloquently put it: "She beats the f---ing crap out of the ball." But it wasn't the sheer force of her ground strokes - the same strokes that rocked Serena Williams, the Mike Tyson of women's tennis, at Wimbledon last weekend - that already set Masha apart from the other child wonders clawing their way towards wealth and fame at Bollettieri's academy. It was that she had a tennis brain.
"Maria possesses all the ingredients to become a superstar," Mike DePalmer, one of the head coaches at the academy, told me. "She knows the tennis court. She possesses an innate skill. She has a terrific work ethic. She is very coachable. She is like a sponge."
Like all the greats, she has a radar-like ability to anticipate exactly where her opponent's ball will land the moment it leaves the strings of their racquet and to be there when it does. The player to whom she was being compared most was Chris Evert. When Evert first saw Masha hit she said: "I'm glad I am not playing now."
THE FIRST time I saw Sharapova play she was going toe-to-toe with the No. 1 12-year-old from South Korea. The No. 1 12-year-old boy, that is. He was a muscle-bound kid, about half as big again as Masha and 20 kilograms heavier. People crowded the sidelines to watch and halfway through the set she produced a three-shot sequence that had them murmuring in awe.
The Korean boy hit a strong forehand down the line. Many kids might not have even made the return. But Masha was there when the ball landed, stepped into it and, with her trademark scream, lashed a backhand drive down the line. Her next shot was an exquisite little backhand drop shot. Then, as the boy scooped the ball over the net at her feet, Sharapova shifted her grip and hit a looping, top-spin backhand lob that went sailing over his head and landed in the back of the court.
She hit the same shot in the second set of her match on Saturday. For a 10-year-old to hit a sequence of shots with that much variety, and that much intelligence, was simply remarkable. I was thinking about those shots the next day, when I walked out on to the court with Masha to play a set against her. We must have looked a funny pair. I was 46. She was 10. As we crossed the court, I said I hoped she was going to be off form that day. She closed her eyes, threw back her head and let out a gurgling peal of laughter. Yuri stumped along tensely beside us, a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He had agreed only reluctantly to my suggestion that we make a dialogue with racquets and balls part of my story.
I felt confident that, at the very least, I was not going to make a complete ass of myself. The trouble was, I was in a lose-lose situation. If I beat her, big deal. She's 10! If I lose, even if she is going to be the next Martina Navratilova, my tennis buddies would never let me live it down. As soon as we started warming up, I realised what I was up against. However often and however hard I hit the ball at Masha, it always came back.
She was soon pounding the ball harder than me. To put that into perspective, I am a 182 centimetre-tall man who weighs 86 kilograms; Masha was 138 centimetres and weighed 32 kilograms. As a backhand went screeching past me, I thought to myself that at least she hasn't started screaming yet.
I won the toss and chose to serve. I had decided to hit two second serves. Masha was, after all, still only a small child. She was also worth a million bucks. What if I hit her by mistake? Yuri would probably kill me. Luckily, my first service game went well and I went up 1-0. In the second game I won a couple of cheap points with two sliced backhand drop shots that took Masha by surprise. I should have broken her serve, but at 40-30 down, Sharapova showed her mettle, scrambling for a series of balls until she forced me into two errors. We were level at 1-1. I narrowly won my next service game to go 2-1. Then I broke her serve. So far so good. I was 3-1 up.
On the sidelines, I could see Yuri getting beady. This was the first profile anyone had written on Masha and it wouldn't look good if the writer beat the prodigy. We had spent the previous evening drinking beers late into the night in a bar in downtown Bradenton. Yuri was 37 at the time with high, Slavic cheekbones and intense blue-grey eyes. He had been a good club player himself, though his favourite sport had been helicopter skiing in the Caucasus. Now he was living out the American Dream.
Torn between a fierce ambition to see his daughter fulfil her extraordinary potential and an anguished wish to protect her from the corporate ambitions swirling around her, he was a volcano of combustible emotion. His conversation was shot through with horror stories, like the one about the ex-KGB man who had threatened him and his daughter, or the Russian prodigy, a teenage boy, who had also come to the academy but had had a nervous breakdown and ended up throwing himself under a train in Poland. "It's a dirty, dirty beezness," he said in his thick Russian accent. "I respect her tennis. That she can play like that. But the beezness? I don't trust anyone." He took a slug of his beer. "There's such dark energy," he said, cryptically.
In the two days I spent with Yuri and Masha (there was no sign of the mother that Masha famously tried to call from Centre Court last weekend), Yuri had gone out of his way to show me that, like so many other prodigies, her childhood was not being sacrificed on the altar of adult ambition. He took me to see her gym class in downtown Bradenton. He introduced me to a teacher who was helping Masha with her English (she still spoke with a pronounced Russian accent). She was a normal 10-year-old, he insisted, living a normal childhood.
In truth, there was nothing "normal" about Masha's life. But Yuri insisted that the ambition driving Masha was not something imposed from the outside by him or the academy, or IMG. It came from her. "Eighty per cent is not money," he said, with passion. "Not coaches. Not me. It's her. She has something inside her. A confidence. Like a champion." He paused. "You cannot teach that!" I remembered those words as Masha sent a crushing backhand drive down the line in my next service game to take the score to 2-3. In the next game she showed a degree of maturity exceptional for a child. She had come to the net. I threw up a lob. Running back, she let it bounce, watched where I moved, picked her spot and slammed it away. We were tied at 3-3.
I just hung on to my next service game to go 4-3 up, but the longer the game went on, the more I felt my chances ebbing away. The big difference between us was that Masha didn't make unforced errors, so the only points I got were when I managed to hit a ball hard enough, and wide enough, that she could not reach it. The trouble was, she was making me hit an awful lot of balls and by the time we got to 4-4 my face was as red as a tomato, my T-shirt was soaked in sweat and I was struggling for breath. Masha was hopping around the court like a rabbit.
Somehow I narrowly held on to win my next service game to go up 5-4. By now, I had banished any qualms I might have had about beating the Russian wunderkind. So what if she is 10? Tennis is war, Bollettieri says. And I wanted to win. Unfortunately, so did Masha and by now she was getting into the zone. She aced me to take the score to 5-5. Aced by a 10-year-old! As the ball shot past me, I imagined my own 11-year-old son sniggering.
On my next service game I hit two double faults. Then Sharapova twice passed me with ease. Suddenly it was 6-5 to her and she was serving for the match. I muttered Bollettieri's mantra: challenge the ball. Attack, attack, attack. Glaring down the court, I waited for Masha to serve. The serve came to my forehand. I returned it out wide. Masha whopped a backhand down the line. I hit a forehand. It landed in the net. Moments later I was 40-15 down with my back well and truly against the wall. Somehow I managed to win the next two points to go to deuce, but, at advantage, Sharapova served a tricky little ball down the middle. I pushed it over the net into the middle of the court. Wrapping her racquet almost around her neck, with her trademark scream, she slammed an inside-out forehand past me on the backhand side.
It was all over. Game, set and match, Miss Sharapova: 7-5.
