How Power Has Transformed Women’s Tennis
Dewey Nicks for The New York Times
Serena Williams
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: August 25, 2010
ON THE DAY BEFORE Wimbledon started, when the club grounds had not yet opened to the public, Justine Henin, the diminutive Belgian tennis great, stepped onto practice court No. 3, then still an emerald patch of unspoiled grass. The sun had just come out after several cloudy days, and all around, players, their coaches and families, yammering in various languages, exchanged greetings like veteran bunkmates on the first day at summer camp. Not Henin. Having unretired last year as suddenly as she quit 16 months earlier — saying she had got all she wanted from the sport — she remained absorbed with her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, in their warm-up routine.
She began exchanging ground strokes, forehands and backhands, slowly then harder, with a hitting partner, one of the men that the top women hire to practice with, a tall, powerful young Briton, Scott Sears, who missed a few shots, apologized and began to sweat. Henin missed nothing, ever. Most eyes now turned toward her, drawn by the silence of the practice, which was interrupted only when Rodriguez, to whom Henin kept turning for assurance, issued a gentle “marche” every once in a while.
In Henin, the line between an expression of vulnerability and a devouring stare of slightly sour competitiveness can be fuzzy. Venus and Serena Williams, the game’s longtime dominant sisters, tend to look more abstracted, in a world closed onto themselves. Until they’re threatened. Then the array of weapons — the fist pumps, the drive to win, the sheer, overwhelming athleticism — emerge. Henin, “the sister of no mercy,” as she is called, is a more elegant player but no less unrelentingly obsessed with crushing her opponents.
Finished, she gathered up her belongings, leaving Sears in a pool of sweat, then walked off, head down so as not to catch anyone’s eye, trying to preserve, it seemed, like breath on glass, the focus she had on court. Even practicing, she made an argument for promoters who claim that women’s tennis has never been better off.
Women have certainly never hit harder and not just on account of improved equipment. They’re stronger, bigger, faster, better trained and pushed above all by the example of the Williams sisters. Serena, glorious and musclebound, and Venus, long-limbed and tall, have redefined the sport around power. Years ago, tennis writers used to call Martina Navratilova, listed at 5-foot-8 and lean, a giantess with popping veins because other women seemed weaklings by comparison. Now most tour players would dwarf her. In large part what makes Henin, at 5-foot-5, such an exception on the tour and such fun to watch is that she’s nearly always David against the rising tide of Goliaths.
“When I started, all the top players thought the Grand Slams began in the quarterfinals, because the early rounds were so easy and we only had to give 50 percent to get through them,” Kim Clijsters, Belgium’s other tennis superstar, told me when we sat down to talk one day at Wimbledon. “Now I have to be at least 85 to 90 percent at my best from the beginning of a tournament. Venus and Serena raised the bar for everyone. We all had to go back to the gym. Younger players saw that, and now they’re hitting harder and harder.”
This is a basic truth about the Williamses, held among professional watchers of the sport as well as players. Venus says it herself: “Serena and I did change the game, and it’s interesting to see people on court now trying to do all our moves. To be that person, the one who changed the game, wow, that’s too good to be true.”
Lately, it has been Serena, the top-ranked woman, who has dominated the field, but a foot injury forced her to withdraw from the United States Open, the last major tournament of the year. Pretenders have come and gone in recent years, capitalizing on the sisters’ irregular schedules, as well as on Henin’s absence, before succumbing to injury or nerves or simply retiring. When, for a while, both Henin and Clijsters, who quit in 2007 to have a baby, were gone, the game looked bereft of its only serious challengers.
Clijsters is now back, defending her United States Open title in New York beginning this week. That, so shortly after coming out of retirement, she could have won at all last year (Serena crashed out in their semifinal over a foot-fault call she profanely protested) signaled to some skeptics how thin on the ground are the women capable of actually winning majors. With Henin suffering a partial ligament fracture to her right elbow in a match against Clijsters at Wimbledon and now out of commission for the rest of the year, one of those few women is missing, again.
But back, too, from shoulder trouble, is Maria Sharapova, the Russian champion and tennis’s commercial gold mine, the quintessential baseline basher with razor-sharp ball-striking abilities. She won her last Grand Slam in 2008 and reached the final against Clijsters earlier this month in Cincinnati, where she injured her heel but looked as if she had nearly returned to form. At Wimbledon, after beating Anastasia Pivovarova, another towering Russian, 6-1, 6-0, in the first round, she could be seen marching back to the locker room, all business, cellphone clapped to one ear, her white satin bolero sparkling in the afternoon glare as the crowds, like filings drawn to a magnet, swiveled to watch her pass, whispering “Sharapova” in her wake as if she were an apparition.
At the same time, Caroline Wozniacki, a young Dane, has fought her way close to the top, joining Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka and veterans like Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and Samantha Stosur. The feel-good match of the year, at the French Open in June, pitted Stosur, 26, against Francesca Schiavone, 29, a wry, extroverted Italian, both favorites on tour with all-around games, rarities among the women these days, and both sharing the unusual condition of not being one or the other of the Williams sisters in a Grand Slam final. Schiavone wept after winning. Even Stosur conceded the contest was special.
Yet the very exceptional quality of that match — its variety and unpredictability — served to reinforce skeptics’ views that women’s tennis, based on grinding power, is for better and worse all about the greatness and influence of the Williams sisters.
Which is to say that it’s not common these days to find women with their range: with the defensive skills to neutralize the big serves, or an accomplished net game or a good second serve. Many women’s matches get bogged down with baseline exchanges — a criticism that might be leveled at the men’s matches except that, as Federer put it after losing to Andy Murray in the final of the Rogers Cup in Toronto earlier this month, the men, in general, are more evenly matched. They “don’t have the margins like maybe exist in women’s tennis,” whereby players like the Williamses “can just come out and maybe dominate an opponent every single time,” Federer said. “That doesn’t happen in the men’s game.”
It doesn’t. More than that, off court as well as on, and here the criticism becomes more intangible, the two best male players of the era, Federer and Rafael Nadal, have made a point of praising competitors and showing how much they love the sport and how devoted to it they are. Playing against each other, they’ve also mustered some of the most brilliant matches in tennis history. Contests between Venus and Serena, though improved in recent years, were for a long time understandable but notorious duds, anticlimaxes to major championships in which fans didn’t know whom to root for. Venus has been the player representative for the tour behind the scenes, but the sisters can sometimes give the impression, publicly, that they really aren’t all that interested in the game. At Wimbledon, they sent reporters back to earlier interviews rather than answer questions they didn’t want to answer, talking about soccer, outfits, meeting the queen, anything but tennis. And after Serena snapped at that foot-fault call, even insiders who sympathized said the incident conjured up a time when John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors made the men’s game seem nasty. If you couldn’t blame her, she still made it hard to take her side.
Does that matter? “When Chrissie and Martina were winning 36 majors,” Billie Jean King, the tennis legend, talking pure performance, not personality, recalled of the Chris Evert versus Martina Navratilova rivalry of the late ’70s and early ’80s, “everyone was complaining about only two good players, no depth. Now, that was supposedly the golden age, and there’s no depth and only the Williams sisters today? Give me a break. My lord, what I would give to hit one ball like them.”
It’s true, there is more depth now, meaning more women beyond the top 10 or 20 or even top 100 who can smack a given forehand or backhand harder than King ever dreamed of doing, although consistency is another question. Ana Ivanovic, who looked to be the next Maria Sharapova after she won the French Open in 2008 and rose to No. 1, is beautiful, charming and talkative. She was called the future of tennis until she slumped, her serve and forehand betrayed by nerves. This month in Cincinnati, she lost in a semifinal to Clijsters, withdrawing in tears after hurting her foot. She wrestled in the first round at Wimbledon with her service toss against Shahar Peer, from Israel. Tennis is a game; but it can be heartbreaking to watch sometimes. One set down, scrambling to stay alive in the second, Ivanovic slammed her racquet in frustration. She kept making mistakes, defeating herself. Her talent escaped her. Afterward, snatching up her belongings, she hurried through the crowd toward the locker room, struggling not to break down in public.
It’s a sign of both the game’s depth and inconsistency that Schiavone and Stosur, like Ivanovic, also lost first-round matches at Wimbledon. Playing Vera Dushevina, another tough, tall Russian right-hander, then ranked No. 56, Schiavone grabbed the first set but soon fell behind in the second, beseeching her coach in the stands, loudly complaining about herself in Italian, urging Dushevina’s lobs to sail out, gesticulating like a taxi driver stuck in traffic and grunting on some shots as if a chicken had lodged in her throat. It was hugely entertaining but sloppy tennis. At one point, Schiavone hit a miraculous backhand winner and spread her arms like Goya’s defiant hero in “The Third of May.” The crowd roared.
But to no avail. Across the grounds, Stosur, exhausted after Paris, was falling in straight sets against Kaia Kanepi, a 5-foot-11 Estonian who had to qualify to get into the tournament. Wimbledon had barely started, and the tour’s latest stars had both bitten the dust.
“I THINK IT’S sort of cyclical,” said Bud Collins, the legendary tennis commentator, when I asked him about the ups and downs of the women’s tour over the years. But, he added, “when they talk about depth today, I snicker.”
Depth means more talent, more players who can knock the bejesus out of a ball. But there’s a difference between more good tennis players and more great ones. Stacey Allaster, chairwoman and chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association, says that there are more great ones. One morning, she delivered the tour’s basic message. “Our underlying mission and values remain as strong as they were in 1973,” she said, “plus we have greater responsibility now in going to places like China and the Middle East, showing the world that women are strong and deserve to be treated equally.” Feminist missionary work aside, tour executives see global outreach as critical to the bottom line, especially as fewer top players are from the United States, traditionally the sport’s biggest market.
The top 100 women players now come from 33 countries, most of the best from Eastern Europe — countries like Russia, Serbia, Poland and the Czech Republic, nations hungry to nurture the sport. America’s problem, if there is one, may be a lack of urgency and the fierce competition from other sports. At Wimbledon, I found Nick Bollettieri, whose Florida academy has churned out droves of tour players over the years. He was watching an academy product, Michelle Larcher de Brito, a gifted Portuguese player with an ear-shattering grunt, giving Serena Williams a brief scare on Center Court, walloping backhands to the corners before Williams aced her way out of trouble.
“You hear all sorts of theories — it’s probably just a passing phase,” Bollettieri shrugged about the American situation, then finally decided for the theory that “the best American girls are not going into tennis.”
One positive result has been that tennis has developed a larger, increasingly global audience. Western media outlets took notice when Andy Murray reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and 10 million Britons tuned in on television. But when one of China’s top female players, Zheng Jie, played at Wimbledon last year, as Allaster pointed out to me, 100 million Chinese watched on CCTV.
So the tour is banking on China. For its part, China has only recently begun to bank on the tour. Li Na, who is 28 and her country’s leading player, with a perch now in the Top 10, in person conveys the polite world-weariness of someone who has grown up navigating a vast government bureaucracy. “My life has been like this,” she said, making a wave motion with one hand. “It is step by step in China.”
By this Li meant that only after she won a W.T.A. tournament, in 2004, the first Chinese woman to do so, did Chinese officials begin to take the sport seriously. “It had all been about Ping-Pong and diving. When I started, the Chinese tennis federation chose my coach and told me which tournaments I could play in, and nobody was really pushing me, so at one point I said, ‘Enough.’ But then I got back into it, and after the Olympics” — in Beijing in 2008, where she reached the semifinals, beating Venus Williams and Kuznetsova along the way — “I was finally given a choice: to stay with the federation and the national team and have everything paid for, or, like players from other countries, choose my own coach and tournaments.
“Change comes slowly there,” she said, “and developing top players in China will depend on Chinese players winning.” Of course winning depends on having already developed those players, the eternal paradox.
“I have no doubt that there will be a Chinese No. 1,” says David Shoemaker, president of the W.T.A., who oversees the association’s efforts in that country. “People say the Chinese don’t know how to develop players, that they’re too rigid, but they’re wrong,” he says. “Part of the beauty of the game is how unpredictable it has always been. What we’ve got today is in fact what everyone always said they wanted. There are eight different Grand Slam champions playing at Wimbledon, and a bunch more who have been No. 1.”
I found one of those players at Wimbledon, Jelena Jankovic, a former No. 1, now ranked third, from Serbia, a tough customer with a big smile and sunny profile. She was dressed in a pink warm-up suit, her jewelry jangling. “In the last couple of years, as women’s tennis has become more popular, some of the girls on tour have also been trying to look nicer, more feminine, and, face it, there are fans who like to look at girls in nice tennis dresses,” she told me. “It has become very competitive in this sense, but the level of tennis is very high. It all depends on how you want to develop your brand. Some players want to be known as great tennis players, others for something else. I smile a lot, I show my emotions, and maybe that’s what I’m known for.”
Then she confirmed what many people say about developing top players: “Coming from a poor country, I learned to work for my own sake to become somebody — to earn success through hard work.”
Success can mean millions in prize money and endorsements. When the women’s tour started in the early 1970s, the total annual prize money was $300,000. Today it’s $86 million, counting the Grand Slams, which (and this remains one of the most contested topics behind the scenes) pay men and women equally. Wimbledon and the French Open lagged behind until Venus Williams wrote an article for The Times of London a few years ago claiming she felt like a second-class citizen. Tournament officials got the message.
King, whose straight-set victory over Bobby Riggs in the so-called Battle of the Sexes in 1973 attracted some 50 million television viewers around the world and gave the tour its initial publicity boost, reflected the other day on how players back then “were activists, ours was totally a political movement, and today the tour is so much more important than most of the young players realize. They forget that a woman could not get a credit card on her own.”
King earned $1,800 for winning Wimbledon in the late 1960s, Navratilova, $18,000 in the ’70s. Now the winner takes home $1.6 million. In the tour’s early days, women had to barnstorm the globe to make a decent living, and the best players aimed to be ranked No. 1 when the season ended. Grand Slam trophies figured less in their calculations. Today stars construct their careers around the slams, picking and choosing among other tour events, which vie for their participation, creating a delicate and complicated ecosystem. The system demands a broad cast of supporting players, a bit like the expendable crew members on the old “Star Trek” series.
More of these supporting players struggle to make a living than the public probably imagines, considering all the money on tour. Shenay Perry, an American and a longtime player, now ranked No. 116, was laboring one afternoon at Wimbledon against Maria Kirilenko, a steady Russian with clean strokes, in a second-round match on Court 5, where the fans ebbed and flowed between games like rush-hour commuters. Julie Ditty, 30, a friend of Perry’s and fellow tour player who, with Renata Voracova, a Czech, had just lost in a first-round doubles match against the Williams sisters, watched from the bleachers, seated behind her father, Jack Ditty, a dermatologist from Kentucky. Powerfully built and a live wire, Jack volunteered that he played tennis in college and, like many tennis parents, he seemed at least as competitive and driven as the touring pros. “If you’re not in the top 100,” Jack told me, “you’re lucky to have any money at the end of any year.”
That’s because costs are high. At Grand Slams like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, top players may pay to take along a coach, a trainer, a practice partner and an assistant. A single slam can set a star back between $30,000 and $50,000, according to Carlos Fleming, an agent for I.M.G., the management firm with the largest stable of tennis players. A year on tour, Fleming estimated, can require an outlay of hundreds of thousands or more in travel expenses. For journeywomen, flying economy and sharing trainers and coaches, a Grand Slam can still cost $10,000, and annual costs can run as high as $150,000. Unlike players on a professional baseball team, whose contracts basically guarantee their salaries, pros on the tennis circuit must earn that money back by winning. And when their skills decline, so do their nest eggs, if they ever had them. Players end up playing to please themselves; it’s a privilege, or a lark, to be on tour if you’re not highly ranked, but rarely a gold mine.
“Julie could have made more doing other things,” Jack Ditty said as Perry succumbed to Kirilenko, “but this is what she wanted, and you can’t ask more as a parent. We’ve helped Julie with expenses over the years. To see your daughter ace Venus and Serena back to back at Wimbledon, well, you can’t ask for more,” he added, referring to the high point in his daughter’s doubles loss. “I filmed it. Now Julie will always have done that. If I hadn’t been here,” he took the trouble to emphasize, “nobody would know.”
ALLASTER LIKES TO call touring pros “independent contractors,” because they work for themselves. And this has consequences aside from having to earn a living with each game. Since 2001, the Williams sisters have boycotted the tournament at Indian Wells, in California, one of the tour’s biggest events. Venus withdrew from the semifinals that year, and Serena was roundly booed afterward. Richard Williams, their father, claimed that he heard racist slurs. Despite being cajoled, fined, penalized and begged, they haven’t returned. They’re young, rich, profoundly gifted African-American women who operate as they wish, in a tennis world that’s still overwhelmingly white, conformist and reluctant to acknowledge that race is even an issue. The Indian Wells boycott, a matter of principle or a show of power or both, underscores the tour’s impotence. “The business is ultimately not sustainable on the backs of two players,” Allaster acknowledged at one point, finessing what Bud Collins later put more bluntly. The W.T.A., he said, is dependent on the Williams sisters even as it’s hopeful that new champions will come along to supplant them.
So where are they? The top-ranked women today are, conspicuously, not getting any younger. Serena is about to turn 29; Venus is 30. The women’s tour used to turn out a steady stream of teen idols. But new strength training and equipment have made it harder for teenagers to compete against grown women, and the tour is now wary of encouraging them to try. In 1979, Tracy Austin won the U.S. Open at age 16, reached No. 1 the next year, but fell out of the Top 10 by 22. A shoulder injury in 1985 did in Andrea Jaeger, who reached No. 2, also while a teenager. During the late ’90s, Martina Hingis won five Grand Slams in her teens, then retired in 2003 at 22, returning to the tour three years later only to be expelled after testing positive for cocaine. And this summer, Jennifer Capriati, who reached the Top 10 at 14, in 1990, landed in a Florida hospital after an overdose of prescription drugs.
While there are young talents on tour, like Wozniacki and Melanie Oudin, the 18-year-old American right-hander, ranked No. 44, they’re few. The casualty list prompted W.T.A. officials some years ago (the Williams sisters, who began playing as teenagers in the mid-1990s, were already around) to impose restrictions on whether and how much teenagers could play. “I will listen to doctors more than to agents,” is how Allaster puts it. Most insiders endorse the policy.
Others, like Mary Joe Fernandez, a retired American player, now a television commentator, contend that by protecting the many, the tour may be holding back that rare precocious player — the next rival to the Williams sisters, perhaps — who, like Hingis and Capriati, may happen to peak as a teenager. “I understand the age rule, but I turned pro at 14 — I missed my prom and graduation because I played the French Open — and while not everybody is ready then, some are,” Fernandez says. “At the same time I don’t entirely buy the argument about power, since the same thing was said years ago, whether it was that Navratilova hit harder than anyone, or Monica Seles or Capriati or now Serena. The game needs young stars. And it may be that some women develop younger.”
This view is seconded by Tom Perrotta, editor at large at Tennis magazine. “Why does it matter if you start your career at 16 and end it at 25?” he asked. “Skeptics on the development side of the game will tell you that the women’s tour has become more monotonous, that there’s a missing generation. Some blame parents, some blame the academies turning out robot players, some the age rule. Maybe it’s just that the Williams sisters have set the bar too high or that all the money spoils players’ appetites for getting to the very top. I don’t know. But I do know that while you have a bigger pool of good players from more countries, having many more good players doesn’t substitute for having a few more icons.”
During Wimbledon’s last weekend, Yulia Putintseva, a short, pony-tailed blond teenager from Russia, played Kristyna Pliskova, a tall, blonder teenager from the Czech Republic, also pony-tailed, in the semifinals of the girls’ championship, where future Henins, Clijsterses and Williamses are supposed to emerge. Putintseva was the sort of player who threw herself into every serve, coiling, pouncing, grunting, too often double-faulting, avoiding the net as if it were the precipice of a cliff, bashing her racquet on the court in disgust.
Pliskova, a lanky, slightly gawky lefty, ambled and loped around the court, smacking heavy first serves and angled backhands. Rallies often dragged on from the baseline until someone committed an error, mostly Putintseva. Pliskova went up 4-0 in the first set. From the bleachers, Jan Bedan, Pliskova’s coach, kept one eye on the game, the other on his mobile telephone, typing in her statistics.
“She looks good,” I said to him.
“Easy first set, then complications,” Bedan replied.
“Always?” I asked.
“Always,” he said, still typing.
I left for a press conference and returned to find Pliskova up a set and, after a few serves, up 5-3 in the second set, on the verge of victory. Bedan remained absorbed in his telephone.
“It’s not like 20 years ago,” he offered, without looking up. “Everything is so fast now, you can’t play serve and volley. It’s impossible. Not even Federer can do it. It’s necessary to play from the baseline. Everyone is working harder, the competition is stronger, with more girls on the same level. So this is just where the game is.”
Contrary to his prediction, Pliskova won easily.
I tried Bedan’s explanation for the state of the women’s game on Geoff Macdonald, who coaches women’s tennis at Vanderbilt University. “The challenge is that an all-around game — learning not just to hit aggressive ground strokes but to serve and volley and have the whole package — takes longer to develop, and lots of people on tour calculate that it doesn’t pay to spend an extra three or four years grooming a player when she is already winning and maybe already being marketed by the tour.” But he added, “I’m sure someone will come along, the way Federer did on the men’s side, who’s faster, plays an all-around game, who knows how to play defensively and not just rip at every ball.”
Maybe she’s out there now, some 10-year-old girl preparing to raise the women’s game another notch and prove the skeptics wrong. Meanwhile there’s Serena to carry the sport on her broad shoulders. Only Zvonareva stood between her and the Wimbledon title everyone had expected her to win from the beginning. Heavy ground strokes nipping the lines kept the Russian in the fight for a while. At 3-3 in the first set, the crowd cheering, it looked as if it might be a contest. Then Williams found another gear, moving inside the baseline to receive even Zvonareva’s first serves, pushing the Russian onto her heels, wearing her down. Zvonareva played well. But she was totally outgunned.
“Come back!” one fan called out.
“All is forgiven,” joked another. Then someone yelled, “Come on, Serena,” and Bud Collins, in the seat next to mine, shook his head.
“Sadist,” he said.
At the end, Williams never even faced a break point. Zvonareva thanked her surgeon during the postmatch ceremony. Williams teased King, watching from the stands, because with the victory she passed King’s total of 12 Grand Slam singles titles.
People worrying about the game today will probably be the same ones, years from now, who boast about having seen Serena in her prime, along with Henin and Venus and Sharapova and Clijsters.
There’s nothing like it, they’ll say. Those were the days.
Lindsay Lohan, shown at a probation status hearing on July 6, 2010, has been released two months early from a residential rehab program, but must be tested twice a week for drugs and alcohol and attend behavioural therapy classes twice a week.
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