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by Pete Bodo
It was 3-2 in the tiebreaker, mini-break to Francesca Schiavone, when she felt the surge of energy flooding her entire being. It was that primal gift that sometimes goes by the name "killer instinct," but in polite company is more likely to be called "focus," or an "adrenaline rush."
But it was coming on strong, and of it Schiavone would later say, "I was feeling it more and more and more. I couldn't really stop it."
Samantha Stosur, across the net, also was powerless to stop it. On the very next point, Schiavone attacked, treading that fine line between the bold and reckless, and she won the point with a volley. "I really felt that that was my moment," she would say. And on the next point she powdered a forehand winner. "That was my moment and I took it."
Again she attacked, and hit a crosscourt volley winner after a brief rally to reach match point, 6-2, with Stosur to serve again. "I took it, and I didn't lose the chance. I didn't care about nothing. I want to take that [ball] and play my tennis. It was the moment."
Stosur served to the backhand; both women took big cuts at the ball and the thought flashed electric in Schiavone's mind: Go inside [attack the serve, move into the court; it was the litany she'd repeated to herself since she'd woken up this morning] . . . Put on her as much pressure as you can.
She lashed out at the ball, as she had so often throughout the sunny afternoon. Again, her aim was true. The ball kicked up the dust, but found the seam that effectively handcuffed Stosur, who was camped in her backhand corner, looking to hit that powerful inside-out forehand.
Stosur drove the ball long, and suddenly it was over. All that energy had finally escaped, almost like helium, and Schiavone fell to the court like a puppet. She was the French Open champion by virtue of the masterful 6-4, 7-6 (2) win.
Granted, Stosur is no Serena Williams or Justine Henin. But here, she was better than either of them. She proved it by beating both former champions in back-to-back, bitterly contested three-set matches. It was, most people reckoned, Stosur's time. The icons had been shattered. All that remained was a soulful, raven-haired Italian woman who was likely in way over her head.
After all, Stosur had risen to No. 7 in the world rankings with consistent play over the past year (18 months ago, she was ranked No. 52 in the world). Her kick serve was the talk of tennis geeks everywhere, and her newfound firmness of hand and mind was a hot topic for every armchair psychologist who ever wondered how he'd look in a pair of those Rafael Nadal clamdiggers, or one of those outfits that made Venus Williams look like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke.
Stosur was the ascending star, Schiavone the comet streaking across the tennis firmament, destined to burn out before our very eyes, putting the conventional tail on the familiar story. I didn't speak to a single person here at the Stade Roland Garros before the match who thought Schiavone would win.
Many, many players had been in her shoes over the years at Grand Slam events, but only one of them (Iva Majoli) had so shocked expectations. What did Schiavone do differently from all those other unusual suspects? "I prepared for the final mentally and tactically very good. I was so concentrate on my serve. I try to don't look nowhere, but just to feel my play and try to be aggressive as much as I could."
Well, there's still a big difference between arriving in the right frame of mind and executing at the necessary, high level—between getting and staying in the hunt and weathering those three or four key moments when you can get blindsided by a ghastly mental hiccup, a distraction, or a misfire, lasting all of a millisecond, of your neurological system. A fancy way of saying that Schiavone played the match of a lifetime when it mattered most:
"Inside, yes. I really always dreamed this tournament [result]. It's strange to say, but when I call my daddy, he say to me: 'I remember that you always dream this one.' Every morning that you wake up, you work to do something like this. So maybe it was far away in reality, but here [she pointed to her heart] it was never that far."
Well, those were inspirational words and tender sentiments. But the mortar and bricks of this triumph were the serves and returns, forehands and volleys. Let's take them one at a time:
!101641953 The serve: This was theoretically Stosur's department, but two things happened. Schiavone served as well (exactly as well, 64 percent), but more effectively, repeatedly finding lines at moments of potential peril. More important, she neutralized Stosur's serve, obedient to her mantra, go inside.
You won't find this in the presser, but Schiavone told me later that when someone invests as heavily in the big serve as Stosur, and you have the gumption to take it early and hit a forcing return, you can catch her unprepared and somewhat flat-footed. It was the kind of subtle tactical nugget for which a coach gets the big money, but in this case it will stay in Schiavone's pocket. One of the many unusual aspects of her modus operandi is that the closest thing she has to a coach, Corrado Barazzutti, her Fed Cup captain, a man who, in his former life as an ATP tour pro, was known as Il soldatino—the "little soldier."
In any event, Schiavone won the battle of the serve on two fronts: She managed to make of her serve enough of a weapon to remain on the offensive, and Stosur's less of one, than anyone would have dared predict.
The ground game: Schiavone's go-inside strategy enabled her to take charge of numerous rallies that Stosur might otherwise have turned her own way. If the rally was three strokes or fewer, Stosur was in command; if it went beyond three swings from either lady, Schiavone called the tune. Before I lost track near the end of the first set, Stosur's record in short rallies was 23-11, but Schiavone led 11-3 in the longer ones.
Beyond that, Schiavone did not overly exert herself looking for Stosur's backhand. And she made good use of her own to keep Stosur on the defensive and change the pace, a ploy that can trouble Stosur, whose game has a studied, brittle quality. She's far more comfortable exchanging big statements than probing questions. In that sense, the matchup was less favorable to Stosur than most pundits realized. For on this day, Schiavone asked plenty of questions and Stosur found it vexing to answer them with authority.
The volley: My Italian colleague Ubaldo Scanagatta says that in 17 years of watching and thinking about such things, he can't remember a single instance when a woman in the final (other than Schiavone today) didn't make a single volleying error. Well, the stats sheet doesn't track volley errors, and my own notes are unreliable. But the fact that someone will be sitting up tonight to fact check this tells you all you need to know about Schiavone's use of the volley today. She had seven volley winners, to two by Stosur, and the latter didn't have a single passing-shot winner (Schiavone had four).
You have to feel for Stosur, because even Schiavone admitted that she had played lights-out tennis. Asked how she would describe what she did today, she replied: "Um, to go over. Oltre? Over the limits. Si, over the limits and be really everything that you can be in one hour, 20 minutes." One hour, 38 minutes, to be precise.
Still, Stosur had her chances. She led 4-1 (a lead that can look insurmountable, despite being built on a single break of serve), and at that point should have ratcheted up her game. But she insisted on coloring inside the lines, while Schiavone again had the courage to go outside them, showing the kind of athletic courage that the occasion and circumstances demanded.
Schiavone played a fine game and leaped out to a 40-0 lead on Stosur's serve at 4-1 and broke back at 15, snapping the string of games in which Stosur was most dangerous. Stosur returned to playing inside herself in the self-injurious way, in marked contrast to Schiavone, who again began to let it rip. Schiavone took her chances, and struck a perfect balance between restraint and abandon the rest of the way.
I asked Stosur, in her presser, if she alternated between feeling a little tight and loose, and she said: "I actually felt quite good the whole time. Probably not as free as other matches, but overall, quite pleased with the way I handled it. I mean, it was a big occasion, and you never really know how you're gonna react. But I tried to prepare myself as best I could, and actually felt quite good out there the whole time. She was putting a lot of pressure on me and really forcing what was happening, so maybe that was kind of why I didn't look the same as maybe other matches."
That was a fair assessement, for it was Schiavone's day. She went where every first-time finalist hopes to go—and beyond. But her attempt to articulate what it all meant to her, a kid who had dreamed like a million other kids have about one day winning a Grand Slam singles title, was put in touchingly simple terms:
"This is mean that everybody have the chance to be who really you want to be, and to do everything in your life. This is what's happen to me."
Schiavone, you might say, won this one for everyone.